Page:Vactican as a World Power.djvu/361

 AND DE MAISTRE 347

tradition, were the objects of a new affection. As the men of this time looked about them, love looked through their eyes a love which refashioned, transfigured, reinterpreted all tilings according to the dictates of their yearning. And since the characteristics and con- ditions of the men and the peoples who sought fulfilment and peace in the past and in the spiritually strange were different, the fruits of Romanticism were not of one kind.

Even in the trend toward the Church, multiform reasons and ob- jectives appeared. In France there were published two profoundly influential books of European significance, Chateaubriand's Genius of Christianity, and Joseph de M aistre's Concerning the Pope. But they are manifestoes utterly different in nature and tendency. Almost all the Romantics of Germany and France are alike in this that they do not speak of living membership in the Church, but only of the Church as a means wherewith to realize the purposes they have in mind. In Germany Protestants were numbered among the prime-movers of lit- erary Romanticism; and their intention was everything else but to make propaganda for the existing Catholic system. Even so they prepared the way for a religious revival, and even for the Ultramon- tane movement. The Romantics of all the nations might well have made their own the basic statement of policy phrased thus by Novalis: "The intelligent observer views calmly and dispassionately these new revolutionary times. Does not the revolutionary seem to him like Sisyphus? Now he has attained the point of balance; and already the mighty burden rolls down again on the other side. That burden will never stay up unless an attraction toward Heaven keep it there. All your supports are too weak if your state preserves its tendency to re- vert to earth."

France, the land in which the idea of restoration originated, also gave the Papacy its strongest theoretical advocate. Chateaubriand drew a picture of an irenic Church dedicated to spiritual tasks. The young Lamennais beheld the infallible totality of human reason em- bodied in the Church, which in turn was embodied in the Pope, the unlimited sovereign and bearer of that infallible common intellect. Count de Maistre carried the exposition of the theocratic absolutism of the Papacy to its ultimate conclusion. But this teaching of the sens commnn, in which Catholicism and universal reason became

348