The Dialogue of St Catherine of Siena

A hundred years ago truth seemed a simpler matter to our fathers. They stood on the threshold of the modern industrial world, to them a coming golden age tipped with the brightness of rising science. Exact knowledge and universal education were to make men happy and wise and .good. Kings and priests were gone, or, at least, the back of their despotism was broken; these incubi, the causes of all his misery, removed, man, a well-meaning creature, and more than capable of taking care of himself, would begin at last to live, and, in the normal exercise of his natural func tions, hitherto artificially strapped down by theological and political tyrants, would find true satisfaction and, conse quently, the perfect happiness of his being. But they counted without machine-looms or the law of heredity, of which they derided the theological expression in the doctrine of original sin.

The true value of the Revolution did not lie in the sup posed sagacity of its political wisdom, and even less in its social results, which we have with us to-day, but in the indomitable hope and faith which animated some of its .greatest illustrations. It is impossible to read the best French moralists of the Revolutionary period — say, Vauvenargues and Condorcet — without being struck by the deep spiritual earnestness which underlay much in them that was flimsy as argument, mistaken as fact, frothy and unreal as sentiment.

The Revolution stated the human problem in collective terms, forgetting that the only authority which can address men collectively must transcend them individually, that is, must represent the Divine. Mere multiplicity, as such, must return to unity under pain of disintegration. Now, the revealed symbols apart, the highest human manifesta tion is the individual raised to the quintessence of per sonality called genius, for he, only, has, in a supreme degree, will and intellect; and will and intellect move the world. The Phtlosophes, whether deists or atheists, by hypothesis, ruled the conception of the Divine out of relation to man, and therefore had no message for him as an indi vidual. He was considered, primarily, as a social item, and

formed, in juxtaposition to, not in fusion with, other such items, the modern State-fetish, that grotesque parody of an individual. The result of all this is, to-day, evident enough. Modern society, the creation of the Revolution, is…