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The historic life of mankind began with the confusion of Babel (Gen. xi.); it will end in the perfect harmony of the New Jerusalem (Apoc. xxi.). Between these two extreme limits, described in the first and last books of Holy Scripture, takes place the evolution of universal history of which a symbolic representation is given us in the sacred book which may be regarded as transitional between the Old and New Testaments, the book of the prophet Daniel (Dan. ii. 31-36).
Since mankind on Earth is not, and was never meant to be, a world of pure spirits, it needs for the expression and development of the unity of its inner life an external social organism which must become more centralized as it grows in extent and diversity. Just as the life of the individual human soul manifests itself by means of the organized human body, so the collective soul of regenerate humanity, the invisible Church, requires a visible social organism as the symbol and instrument of its unity. From this point of view, the history of mankind presents itself as the gradual formation of a universal social entity or of the one Catholic Church in the broadest sense of the term. This work is inevitably divided into two main parts: (1) the outward unification of the nations of history, or the formation of the universal body of mankind by the efforts, more or less unconscious, of earthly powers under the invisible and indirect action of Providence, and (2) the vivifying of this body by the mighty breath of the God-Man and its further development by the combined action of divine grace and more or less conscious human forces. In other words, we have here, on the one hand, the formation of natural universal monarchy and, on the other, the formation and development of spiritual monarchy or the Universal Church on the basis and in the framework of the corresponding natural organism. The first part of this great work constitutes the essence of ancient or pagan history; the second part mainly determines modern or Christian history. The connecting link is the history of the people of Israel who, under the active guidance of the living God, prepared the setting, both organic and national, for the appearance of the God-Man, Who is both the spiritual principle of unity for the universal body and the absolute center of history.
While the chosen nation was preparing the natural body of the individual GodMan, the Gentile nations were evolving the social body of the collective God-Man, the Universal Church. And since this task allotted to paganism was achieved by purely human efforts guided only indirectly and invisibly by divine Providence, it was bound to proceed by a series of attempts and experiments. Previous to any effective universal monarchy we see the rise of various national monarchies claiming universality but incapable of achieving it.
After the Assyrio-Babylonian monarchy, the head of gold, denoting the purest and most concentrated despotism, comes the monarchy of the Medes and Persians represented by the breast and arms of silver which symbolize a less unmitigated, less concentrated, but on the other hand much more extensive despotism, embracing the whole scene of contemporary history from Greece on the one side to India on the other. Next comes the Macedonian monarchy of Alexander the Great, the brazen belly engulfing Hellas and the East. But despite the fruitfulness of Hellenism in the sphere of intellectual and aesthetic culture, it proved impotent in practical affairs and incapable of creating a political framework or a center of unity for the vast multitude of nations which it penetrated. In administration it took over without any essential alteration the absolutism of the national despots which it found in the East; and though it imposed the unity of its culture on the world which it conquered, it could not prevent that world from splitting into two great semi-Hellenized national States, the Helleno-Egyptian kingdom of the Ptolemies and the Helleno-Syrian kingdom of the Seleucids. These two kingdoms, at one moment engaged in bitter warfare, at another precariously allied by dynastic marriages, were well symbolized by the two feet of the colossus in which the iron of primitive despotism was mingled with the soft clay of a decadent culture.
Thus the pagan world, divided between two rival powers, with Alexandria and Antioch as their two political and intellectual centers, could not provide an adequate historic basis for Christian unity. But there was a stone — Capitoli immobile saxum — a little Italian town, whose origin was hidden among mysterious legends and prophetic portents, and whose real name even was unknown. This stone hurled forth by the providence of the God of history smote the feet of clay of the Greco-barbarian world of the East, overthrew and crushed to powder the impotent colossus, and became a great mountain. The pagan world was given a real center of unity. A truly international and universal monarchy was established, embracing both East and West. Not only was it far more extensive than the greatest of the national monarchies, not only did it include far more heterogeneous national and cultural elements, but it was, above all, powerfully centralized, and it transformed these varied elements into a positive, active whole. Instead of a monstrous image made up of heterogeneous parts, mankind became an organized and homogeneous body, the Roman Empire, with an individual living center in Cæsar Augustus, the trustee and representative of the united will of mankind.
But who was this Cæsar and how had he come to represent the living center of humanity? On what was his power based? Long and painful experience had convinced the nations of East and West that continual strife and division were a curse and that some center of unity was essential to the peace of the world. This vague but very real desire for peace and unity threw the pagan world at the feet of an adventurer who succeeded in replacing beliefs and principles by the weapons of his legions and own personal courage. Thus the unity of the Empire was based solely on force and chance. Though the first of the Cæsars seemed to deserve his fortune by his personal genius, and the second justified his to a certain extent by his calculated piety and wise moderation, the third was a monster and was succeeded by idiots and madmen. The universal State which should have been the social incarnation of Reason itself took shape in an absolutely irrational phenomenon, the absurdity of which was only heightened by the blasphemy of the Emperor’s apotheosis.
The Divine Word, individually united to human nature and desiring to unite socially with Himself the collective being of Man, could not take either the confusion of an anarchic mass of nations or the autocracy of a tyrant as the starting-point of this union. He could only unite human society with Himself by means of a power founded upon truth. In the social sphere we are not directly and primarily concerned with personal virtues and defects. We believe the imperial power of pagan Rome to have been evil and false, not merely because of the crimes and follies of a Tiberius or a Nero, but mainly because, whether represented by Caligula or Antonine, it was itself based on violence and crowned with falsehood. The actual Emperor, the momentary creature of the prætorians and the legionaries, only owed his power to crude, blind force; the ideal, deified Emperor was an impious fiction.
Against the false man-god of political monarchy the true God-Man set up the spiritual power of ecclesiastical monarchy founded on Truth and Love. Universal monarchy and international unity were to remain; the center of unity was to keep its place. But the central power itself, its character, its origin and its authority — all this was to be renewed.
The Romans themselves had a vague presentiment of this mysterious transformation. While the ordinary name of Rome was the Greek word for “Might,” and a poet of decadent Greece had hailed her new masters by that name: χαιρέ µοι, Ρώµα, θυγάτηρ Άρηος — yet the citizens of the Eternal City believed that they discovered the true meaning of her name by reading it backwards in Semitic fashion: AMOR; and the ancient legend revived by Virgil connected the Roman people and the dynasty of Cæsar in particular with the mother of Love and through her with the supreme God. But their Love was the servant of death and their supreme God was a parricide. The piety of the Romans, which is their chief claim to glory and the foundation of their greatness, was a true sentiment though rooted in a false principle, and it was just that change of principle that was necessary in order that the true Rome might be revealed based upon the true religion. The countless triads of parricidal gods must be replaced by the single divine Trinity, consubstantial and indivisible, and the universal society of mankind must be set up, not on the basis of an Empire of Might, but on that of a Church of Love. Was it a mere coincidence that, when Jesus Christ wished to announce the foundation of His true universal monarchy, not upon the servile submission of its subjects nor upon the autocracy of a human ruler, but upon the free surrender of men’s faith and love to God’s truth and grace, He chose for that pronouncement the moment of His arrival with His disciples at the outskirts of Cæsarea Philippi, the town which a slave of the Cæsars had dedicated to the genius of his master? Or again, was it a coincidence that Jesus chose the neighborhood of the Sea of Tiberias for the giving of the final sanction to that which He had founded, and that under the shadow of those monuments which spoke of the actual ruler of false Rome He consecrated the future ruler of true Rome in words which indicated both the mystical name of the Eternal City and the supreme principle of His new Kingdom: Simon Bar-Jona, lovest thou Me more than these?
But why must true Love, which knows no envy and whose unity implies no exclusiveness, be centered in a single individual and assume for its operation in society the form of monarchy in preference to all others? Since here it is not a question of the omnipotence of God, which might impose truth and justice upon men from without, but rather of the Divine love in which man shares by a free act of adherence, the direct action of the Godhead must be reduced to a minimum. It cannot be entirely suppressed since all men are false and no human entity, either individual or collective, left to its own resources, can maintain itself in constant and progressive relationship to the Godhead. But the fruitful Love of God united to the Divine Wisdom quae in superfluis non abundat, in order to assist human weakness while at the same time allowing human forces full play, chooses the path along which the unifying and life-giving action of supernatural truth and grace on the mass of mankind will encounter the fewest natural obstacles and will find a social framework externally conformable and adapted to the manifestation of true unity; and the path which facilitates union between the Divine and the human in the social order by forming a central unifying organ within humanity itself is the path of monarchy. Otherwise the creation afresh each time of a spontaneous unity on the chaotic basis of independent opinions and conflicting wills would require each time a new, direct and manifestly miraculous intervention of the Godhead, an activity ex nihilo forced upon men and depriving them of their moral freedom. As the Divine Word did not appear upon Earth in His heavenly splendor, but in the lowliness of human nature, as today in order to give Himself to the faithful He assumes the lowly appearance of material “species,” so it was not His will to rule human society directly by His divine power, but rather to employ as the normal instrument of His social activity a form of unity already in existence among men, namely, universal monarchy. Only it was necessary to regenerate, spiritualize and sanctify this social form by substituting the eternal principle of grace and truth for the mortal principle of violence and deception; to replace the head of an army, who in the spirit of falsehood declared himself to be a god, by the head of all the faithful who in the spirit of truth recognized and acknowledged in his Master the Son of the living God; to dethrone a raving despot who would fain have enslaved the human race and drained the blood of his victim, and to raise up in his stead the loving servant of a God Who shed His Blood for mankind.
In the borders of Cæsarea and on the shores of the Sea of Tiberias, Jesus dethroned Cæsar — not the Cæsar of the tribute-money nor the Christian Cæsar of the future, but the deified Cæsar, the sole absolute and independent sovereign of the universe, the supreme center of unity for the human race. He dethroned him because He had created a new and better center of unity, a new and better sovereign power based upon faith and love, truth and grace. And while dethroning the false and impious absolutism of the pagan Cæsars, Jesus confirmed and made eternal the universal monarchy of Rome by giving it its true theocratic basis. It was in a certain sense nothing more than a change of dynasty; the dynasty of Julius Cæsar, supreme pontiff and god, gave place to the dynasty of Simon Peter, supreme pontiff and servant of the servants of God.
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