The Evolution of the Papacy. Francis Ambrose Ridley 1949
To live is to change; to be perfect is to have changed often. – Cardinal Newman
Having concluded our brief survey of the evolution of the Papacy, it will now be opportune to conduct a brief investigation, to do, as it were, some historical stocktaking into the nature and more permanent characteristics of that truly extraordinary institution. For one need not be a good Catholic, nor even a believer in revealed, or any other kind of religion, to admit that the Papacy is a truly extraordinary institution.
In point of fact, the Atheistic or non-Christian historian occupies a much better and more effective position from which to pass accurate judgements on the Roman ecclesiastical empire than can ever be the case with Catholic historians, whose own belief in proportion to its intensity precludes them from objective, that is, from scientific judgements in respect of an institution which for them shines with no mortal light.
In the first place, it is evident from its entire history that the Papacy, whilst religious in form, belongs essentially to the sociological sphere. In this primary respect, the famous definition of old Thomas Hobbes cited at the head of this work – ‘The Papacy is the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof’ – remains still, three centuries later, the classical definition of the Roman See; unsurpassed and probably unsurpassable in its trenchant accuracy.
We have alluded above to the remarkable paradox that lies at the heart of the Papacy a religious institution in form, a political institution in substance. For Rome has always been that. A shrewd modern observer, himself an ex-Roman cleric, has aptly defined the normal mentality of the Vatican as that of ‘a great public department’. And so it seems always to have been. The Roman Church has indeed had its fanatics in plenty, but they have rarely found their way to the throne of the Fisherman. And those few who have done so have rarely made successful Popes.
In recent times the ‘saintly’ and honest but stupid and bigoted Pius X (1903 – 14), who remarked before his election that the ‘Holy Ghost would never make such a mistake as to make me Pope’, is a case in point.
The Papacy is thus essentially an institution that belongs to the sphere of sociology rather than to that of religion. Lord Macaulay, in his famous essay, showed not only his usual incomparable verve, but also for him a rather unusual insight into the deeper processes of history, when he compared the Papal dynasty, not with other religious institutions, but with the secular dynasties of Europe.
Indeed, with the doubtful exception of the Japanese God-Emperors, no secular dynasty has lasted longer than the Papacy; and the scope and influence on world politics exercised by the Mikados is in no respect comparable to that exercised by the Vatican.
The Papacy must accordingly be regarded primarily as a political institution. Like its actual predecessors, the Roman Cęsars, only far more so, it used religion as an effective cloak for its own secular ambitious, but its essence is not religious any more than was that of the Roman Empire which preceded it. The Cęsars also called themselves by the title ‘Pontifex Maximus’ ('High Priest’), which, it is diverting to recall, the Christian Roman Emperors refused to use on account of its Pagan associations, but which the Popes still continue to use!
As the eminent Protestant historian Adolf von Harnack tersely observed: ‘It is an Empire which this priestly Cęsar rules.’ And as and when considered as a sociological institution, it cannot be disputed that the Papacy, when objectively considered as such, stands in the very front rank amongst historical social forms. In European history, one could not name its superior – perhaps that microscopic social miracle, the Venetian Republic, comes nearest to being its equal in the secular history of Europe.
If, indeed, one would confirm the judgement of the Papacy as primarily a political rather than a religious institution, one has only to compare its brilliant feats in the sphere of world history with its mediocre religious results.
In this last sphere, its achievements have certainly been unimpressive. Roman mysticism has been non-existent, her religious literature puerile, her theology crude and unoriginal. Religious opportunism, ecclesiastical diplomacy, has been the specifically Roman contribution to religion. Anything deep, fresh or sincere has withered and died in the crooked atmosphere of the Vatican corridors.
In this last connection, the judgement of history on Rome as a specifically religious body may well be that cri de coeur of the great Pascal, the ill-fated opponent of the Jesuits, when Rome finally pronounced against him in favour of those wily opportunists: ‘What I say is condemned in Rome, but what I condemn is condemned in Heaven.’ The finer types of Catholic Christians – and it would be hopelessly prejudiced to deny the existence of such – have owed little enough to the astute politicians who have sat in St Peter’s chair.
For astute politicians the Popes have certainly been. That, at least, one must grant them; it stands out in the chequered record of the Papacy. Indeed it is, perhaps, the Papacy rather than the individual Popes whom one ought to characterise in that respect. For the Papacy has always been more remarkable than the individual Popes, only one of whom – Hildebrand, Gregory VII – ranks amongst the world’s great figures, and few of them have been individually brilliant or remarkable.
Indeed, routine mediocrity, perhaps as the result of the electoral compromises between stronger candidates, seems to be the usual qualification for election at Papal conclaves. Only when imminent crisis threatens to destroy the Church does a man of real ability, such as Leo XIII or the present Pope, manage to secure election.
Considered as it should be, from the sociological angle, the historical record of the Papacy has been brilliant and remarkable. Since the distant date of its foundation by itinerant preachers (who, as the Roman historian Suetonius tells us, roused the fury of the Jewish Ghetto in Rome, on ‘account of Christ’), the world has passed through many changes. In particular, three entirely distinct civilisations with radically different economic foundations and mental outlooks have waxed, flourished and waned during the 1900 years which separate ‘the days of Peter’ from those of our contemporary, Pius XII. In historical succession, the classical servile civilisation, the feudal order of medieval times, and our modern Capitalistic society have come and either gone or, at present, show every sign of going.
Rome has seen them all come and go, and has successively survived these avatars of human culture. Successively she has known how to entangle herself with them in their heyday and how to disentangle herself when their hour struck. Indeed, even in the course of our all too brief ‘outline of history’, we have had many opportunities to note the skill with which Rome knew how to make what we have termed ‘marriages of convenience’ with successive potential allies. And how shrewdly she used these allies from the days of Charlemagne to those of Hitler, to save her from the many perils, both ‘spiritual’ and secular, that have confronted the Vatican during the course of its long crisis-strewn career.
With regard to these opportune ‘marriages of convenience’ – in which the Vatican has been a polygamist of the first water! – we will only repeat that it is absolutely untrue to affirm that the Papacy has ever been unreservedly ‘pro’ anything except – pro-Catholic. For the successors of St Peter have always, despite the verbal disclaimers due to their ostensibly religious character, acted upon the assumption that the ‘end justifies the means’, and very queer means they have been on some occasions!
However, Rome’s allies exist for Rome’s purpose, and not for their own. She never identifies herself with any of them absolutely: again from Charlemagne to Hitler. In that sense, it is paradoxical but true to affirm that ‘Rome has no politics’. [1] For the ‘Holy’ Reich and the Fascist Reich have both gone, but the Vatican still survives in the ‘Century of the Common Man’.
How long, we may ask, can the Papacy continue to exist in the century of democracy, the ‘Century of the Common Man'? For ever since the Reformation ended her era of theocratic rule, Rome has been on the defensive, and today fights a rearguard action with contemporary history. In this conflict, the political arts which she has mastered and her vast experience serve her well.
But the current odds are against her survival. For the age of science has cut the roots of religion and to re-graft them effectively will not prove an easy task. Today, Rome’s best ally is the fear of change, intellectual and also social change. The international Catholic army now forming around the Vatican for its last stand has many motivating causes, but religion and religious zeal are not conspicuous, probably, among them in an age such as ours of headlong change and consequent threatened vested interests.
However, the final decision of history with regard to the Papacy still lies in the future, and the future cannot correct our proofs. Whatever the nature of Rome’s final exit from history, Macaulay’s judgement still stands; for nineteen centuries the world has witnessed the unfolding of an authentic political masterpiece.
So much so, in fact, that Catholics have described the Vatican as ‘God’s masterpiece’, and Protestants as the equally supernatural creation of the Devil. But the scientific historian will stick by and to history. He will pronounce the Papacy to be of all recorded institutions that which best embodies the human ‘will to power’, that which has known best how to erect a lasting dominion upon the credulity, the superstition, and the age-long fears of mankind.
1. Rome never identifies herself absolutely with any social system. The old chestnut, beloved of Communists in particular, that Rome is a ‘feudal’ institution, just is not true. The Roman Empire which lives on in its ecclesiastical ‘ghost’ was pre-feudal and, in most respects, the antithesis of Feudalism, which was local, whilst Rome is universal.