Books
Walsh, Thomas & Woodlock, Thomas F. & Bigongiari, Dino
BOOKS Imperialistic Religion and the Religion of Democracy, by William Adams Brown. New York: Charles Scribne/s Sons. $2.25. DR. BROWN, viewing the extreme variety that characterizes the...
...But how account for seeming variety in these individual "revelations...
...Not only do the great religions differ from one another, but they differ within themselves...
...All three roads, moreover, traveled with sincerity, lead, he believes, to the "Father's April 14, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 639 House...
...From the trenches where people daily tested the value of the national idea by the unfailing experiment of death, he emerges advocating a kind of proletarian patriotism...
...and Messer Niccolo (sic) is no other personage than Machiavelli...
...Brown's three "types" are sympathetically sketched by him...
...Important results were to follow from Mussolini's exile...
...This fact of difference meets us wherever we turn...
...This difference he recognized as "fundamental" and as raising "a very searching question...
...the excesses of the socialists in 1919 completed the process of evolution to the point of nationalism pure and simple, which demands of all classes voluntary subjection to the state...
...The name we give to this inner response to the divine communication is intuition...
...that doctrines suitable to limit the power of the state toward the lone individual were not fitted to protect the state from the menace of the almighty syndicate...
...Had he followed it, he would have come to the fact so simply and completely stated by Mr...
...that genuine individualism proceeds from the higher spiritual reality of the nation ethically organized in the state...
...The emphasis of Buddha is predominantly on the individual...
...for a similar lack, the Laodicean popolari, in spite of their power, opportunities, and promises, accomplished next to nothing in behalf of the Catholic Church whose cause they had espoused...
...Brown must, to the Catholic reader, appear to have completely overlooked the main line of cleavage between religious forms, a cleavage which cuts deeper than does or can any other differentiating principle, and a cleavage beside which all others are of little or no importance...
...Brown's index there is but one reference to Our Lord's Divinity and it directs us to a passage wherein the doctrine is virtually dismissed as a dogma which has divided men to no good result...
...advocate does not translate avvocato...
...The democrat, too, finds in intuition the basis of his assurance...
...Only the religion of Jesus has room enough for democracy...
...It means lord of the sea and the person referred to is Admiral Thaon de Revel...
...The feebleness of the Italian political organization, which he so freely took advantage of in his early days, which had once led him to believe in the imminence of a new international era, now, after the almost fatal crisis of the war, forces him to an analysis of the situation which we see gradually maturing into his anti-liberalism...
...From journalistic experience on the Irish Republic, young Clarke soon passed over to the Evening Telegram, published in combination with James Gordon Bennett's...
...We follow the working of each of the possible alternatives," he says, "to ascertain which most completely accounts for the facts...
...It has the forward look...
...And in many cases these differences are so deep-seated and persistent as to prevent all personal intercourse...
...If religion be the allimportant thing religious people agree that it is, why should they differ so widely as to its nature...
...By individualism we agreed to understand a type of religion whose representatives despair of satisfaction through any existing institution, and find solace in immediate communion between the individual soul and God...
...3.50...
...Whose son is He...
...translated by Frederic Whyte...
...Acquisgrana is nothing more than Aix-la-Chapelle...
...We found that neither of these explanations alone can account for all the facts...
...Upon closer scrutiny, however, out of this biographical material arranged pictorially rather than logically or chronologically, we are able to extract documents which put Mussolini in his historical place and give us a fair measure of his stature...
...santone is not "a big saint," but corresponds exactly to the English santon...
...We see in him, then, nothing less, but also nothing more than the powerful embodiment of a new force generated in Italy at the beginning of the century by her long expected reaction to political absenteeism and public indifferences—the leader of that new generation which led Italy into the war and out of the social revolution...
...How do we know," he asks, "that in religion we have a real communion with God...
...Becoming implicated in some of the numerous plots of the day, he escaped from London to Paris and thence reached New York in 1868...
...Brown himself, referring to the absence of the Catholic Church at the conference of the World Alliance for International Friendship through the Churches, held at Copenhagen in 1922, accounts for it on the ground of "a deepseated difference of religious conviction...
...that liberty has no sense except as a correlative to discipline in the eternal alternation of innovating criticism and consequent stabilization, of temporary conformity and far-seeing agitation...
...It has faith and comradeship...
...What else is the meaning of the Pope's recent encyclical on the Kingdom of Christ and of the Eucharistic Congress to be held in Chicago this year...
...It should be doubly impossible so to ignore the question for it is presented to the religious world in the utmost sharpness of outline by the largest single body of those whom Dr...
...And he felt the ironical anomaly of Italian liberalism which, having performed its task against the external discipline of foreign rulers, against the discipline of an imposed religious tradition, against the discipline of the absolute monarchy, did not seem to find an innovating function for itself, discovered nowhere established power to check or modify, and was therefore forced into the absurd position of erecting itself into a conservative body...
...that faith which imposes sacrifices as a condition for victory...
...Now the "ontologism" to which Dr...
...He distinguishes three main types of men which he calls, respectively, the imperialistic, the individualistic, and the democratic...
...When in olden days of disputation one was compelled to begin one's argument with a "nego majorem" it was impossible to cloak in honeyed words the inevitable implication...
...We believe in God," he says, "because there are experiences in life at once so arresting and so significant that apart from God it is psychologically impossible for us to account for them...
...They differ in sentiment...
...He becomes convinced that there is not yet social unity in the world...
...How do we know that there is a God to speak...
...By democracy we understood a type of religion whose representatives are convinced that they serve God best when they discover His presence in other persons, and unite with them in the progressive realization of the ideal social order which it is God's purpose to establish on earth through the free cooperation of men...
...namely that, liberalism having for its problem the limit between individual freedom and the demands of other and higher realities, there arise periods in which discipline must prevail over liberty, and silent obedience is more valuable than the keenest criticism...
...Is he talking of a man like Mohammed or Buddha, or is he talking of God...
...It has something for the individual—for each the inspiration and assurance he most needs...
...In two respects the modern age differs radically from the middle-ages...
...Born in 1846, at Dunleavy, Joseph I. C. Clarke was early in life involved in the Irish revolutionary movements and eventually allied himself with the Fenian Brotherhood...
...The individualist knows that God has saved his soul because he has an inner peace which cannot be explained in any other way...
...They differ in belief...
...How different from the traditional, wise adolescent of Italy, mild and sceptical, cultivated and indifferent...
...But of all existing religions it has the best fighting chance to become so...
...How comes it that the adherents of the same religion are unwilling to meet at the same table or to worship in the same church ? We recalled some of the more important historic explanations...
...To the Catholic this is a simply impossible state of mind in which to approach the case...
...My Life and Memories, by Joseph I. C. Clarke...
...This is the summing up of the proofs as he sees them, and the proofs "spring not from reason, but deeper inconsequent depths...
...By imperialism we agreed to understand a type of religion whose representatives believe that they serve God most acceptably when they submit to the control of some existing institution, the supremacy of which in the world they identify with the triumph of God's will...
...The latter usually asked the right question, (even if the answer or answers given failed entirely to satisfy) also it was strict in the matter of terminology...
...Fully three-fourths of the Italian quotations are incorrect...
...Every church includes people who belong to each of our three types...
...There is something of the imperialist in each one of us, something of the individualist, something of the democrat...
...The democrat is for cooperative experiment...
...Brown is for Christianity because of all existing religions, "Christianity has most to give the democrat...
...In the answer that he gives to this, he himself seeks to identify his position with that of the ontologist, but his "ontologism" is strongly flavored with his "argument" from experience...
...That cleavage hangs upon a question than which no more fundamental question can be put to a human being—a question of fact, and that fact the most important fact in human history and human life—"What think ye of Christ...
...It is only in hours of crisis, when the choice must be made, that we learn to which competing rival our major allegiance is given...
...Brown answers this by an appeal to "experiment...
...We saw that these contrasted types cannot be completely identified with any existing form of historic religion.* Institutions are compromises between different points of view...
...Dr...
...Duke del Mare (for instance) is not a nobleman's name...
...Brown relies on what he calls "intuition," and says: "If I am to recognize God when He speaks it can only be because there is some capacity in me which fits me to do so...
...of what and of Whom is he talking...
...The translator seems to be baffled by the intricacies of the subject matter and the peculiarities of Italian idiom...
...Brown in this essay, without seeming to be a trifle discourteous...
...Here is his own summary of his thesis: "We began, it will be remembered, by calling attention to the problems of variation in religion...
...New York: Doddj Mead and Company...
...But the young Fascists of 1919-1922 asserted their faith in front of death and won because of their earnest devotion to a cause which they assumed to be more valuable than their lives...
...The translation is by no means a perfect one—at times too literal, at others completely at variance with the original...
...The imperialist believes that the visible church is the channel of God's revelation because there is something in him which this belief satisfies...
...These views pointed to a conclusion which the war and the subsequent crisis confirmed...
...That religion is most "socially desirable" which will "enlarge and enrich the life of those who embrace it without limiting the possibility of a similar enlargement and enrichment of life in other persons...
...This hot-headed young socialist goes to Switzerland and for his intemperate anti-nationalism is kicked about from one city to another...
...His attitude on the question of Irredentism makes this clear from the start...
...It seems to be an inside glimpse of what is commonplace in the man rather than a record of the complications of his public life or an appraisal of his political career...
...Brown confesses is clearly not that of Saint Anselm...
...We considered the explanation which finds the key to the differences of the historic religions in their contribution to the development of religion as a whole...
...There is faith in this man...
...The three types of religion are to be tested by results, and that which is the most "socially desirable" will justify itself...
...Many are the things he learns in the course of his pilgrimage—among them, for instance, the craft of mason, the German language, some economic science, but above all, and, without knowing it, he makes the important discovery of the nation...
...But first there is a fundamental question to be faced —why is a man "religious'* at all...
...A new love, far keener even if less rationalistic than his old humanitarianism, the realization of that invincible pressure which the natives of any country exert against the outsider, the sad and admirable struggle of the Italian emigrants pressed together by the scorn of others and by their own devotion, these spectacles sunk deep into his soul emotions and convictions which some day were to reveal to him the vitality of the nation as the highest actualization of the individual itself...
...Brown would call "Christians," and it stands today, as it has stood for nearly two thousand years, a challenge nailed by the Catholic Church to the very doors of the world for all who run to read...
...It is plain that he has done his best to understand each of the three "forms" of religion...
...Very significant is the description of the early life of this socialist youth of Romagna...
...yet who writes of the English without venom and in his last public address presented the Anglo-Irish deadlock with the impartiality of a scientific historian...
...THIS is the life story of an Irishman who, revolted at the wrongs done to his country and conspiring against the English, barely escaped with his life into exile...
...But when he advocates Italy's participation in the world war against the German and Austrian empires, he still believes he is serving the cause of the international proletariat whose progress was being blocked by the political iniquities of the Austrian rule...
...How shall one be sure of one's own revelations...
...In all the historic religions and through all the different stages in the development of each religion we discovered the presence of certain persistent parallel types which we called imperialism, individualism, and democracy...
...How do we recognize Him when he has spoken...
...He is confident that God is speaking to others as well as to himself because he has heard what they have to tell him about God and his own spirit answers to what they say...
...Brown in his book talks of "Christianity" and of "Christ...
...THIS biography appears at first sight to throw no light on the peculiar qualities and actions of Mussolini...
...Mohammed commits us to imperialistic religion...
...In Dr...
...5.00...
...It is not easy to imagine a thirteenth-century writer employing the term "Christianity" as it is commonly employed today...
...Birrell—"It is the Mass that matters...
...Thomas F. Woodlock...
...With that earnestness that had ever been a quality of the Romagnoli, and with that tense eagerness and abnegation that socialism stood for in the 'nineties, Mussolini first comes before us as the man who, above all, loves to fight for what he considers to be his principles...
...Brown deserves the fullest credit for the broad sympathy, the kindliness of intention, and the utter sincerity with which he has attacked his problem, but he has failed to ask the right question...
...Here he was on the right track...
...We tested the theory which contrasts a particular type of religion as true with all others as false...
...DlNO BlGONGIARI...
...The Life of Benito Mussolini, by Margherita G. Sarfatti...
...BROWN, viewing the extreme variety that characterizes the religions of the world as a social phenomenon which requires explanation, proposes to explain it, at least in part, by a threefold division of mankind according to mental temperament...
...Mussolini returns to Italy as a potential nationalist...
...He discovers, as many others did, that Italian liberalism which had been originally accepted because suitable to the development of the nation, had allowed itself to be exploited for the attack of the nation by the socialist parties...
...We may go further and say that no individual is perfectly consistent in his religious life...
...Through lack of faith in an idea—or in a myth— the Italian socialists had made such a poor showing in 1919...
...The fact is that Dr...
...It is not easy for a Catholic reader to sum up in a few sentences the thoughts suggested by Dr...
...Whether, by the "deeper inconsequent depths," he means what Pascal meant when he spoke of the reasons of the heart, is, at all events, possible...
...Between the man who believes that Christ was God—Deus verus de Deo Vero —and the man who believes that He was not, the religious difference is greater than that between the latter man and the African fetish worshipper...
...From which it is evident that Dr...
...They differ in organization...
...All truly religious people are convinced that they possess such a capacity...
...It is the one final and convincing proof of revelation...
...New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company...
...Brown is pragmatist rather than ontologist, and it is William James rather than Saint Anselm or Pascal with whom we are dealing...
...There is no attempt on the part of Signora Sarfatti to turn the biography of the hero into a history of contemporary Italy, even though at certain 640 THE COMMONWEAL April 14, 1926 moments it would seem to be inevitable to explain Mussolini's swerves as keen anticipations of impending political crises, and to parallel or contrast his growth with the evolution of political consciousness in Italy in the last twenty years...
...Christianity is not yet the religion of democracy...
...The note of subjectivity, however, becomes still more clear when it is a question of recognizing the voice of God speaking to man...
...It has something for all of us together—a fellowship of the spirit more inclusive than any other known to man...
...The translator's explanation of the word Fasci on page 239 is very amusing becausing it is the very one that Signora Sarfatti makes fun of on page 265...
Vol. 3 • April 1926 • No. 23