Saint Louis IX: statue in Saint Louis, Missouri (USA). Background: rose window of Notre-Dame (Paris)
Revolution and Counter-Revolution is founded on an historical and philosophical premise in complete harmony with the Magisterium of the Church: the necessity of not only single individuals to conform to the law of Christ, but also societies and states, over which the Redeemer exercises exclusive sovereignty. Fruit of this work of Christianization of social life is Catholic civilization.27 “Catholic civilization is to the Church as water is to the fountain or light to its source.”28 For the Brazilian thinker, the Christian peoples form an authentic family in the most genuine sense of the word. Just like the family, Christianity too is united by a community of life: the supernatural life that makes every believer an adoptive child of Christ. “The concept of Christendom is a projection, in the natural sphere, of the great supernatural reality that is the Mystical Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”29
In his encyclical Il fermo proposito of 11 June 1905, St Pius X had stressed that “the civilization of the world is Christian. The more completely Christian it is, the more true, more lasting and more productive of genuine fruit it is”,30 and in the letter Notre Charge Apostolique of 25 August 1910 he recalled:
“Civilization has not yet to be founded, nor has the new State to be built in the clouds. It existed and exists; it is Christian civilization; it is the Catholic City. The only question is that of re-establishing it and restoring it without delay on its natural and divine foundations against the continually repeated attacks of the wicked utopia of revolution and impiety: Omnia instaurare in Christo (Eph. 1:10).”31
In his turn, Leo XIII teaches that Christian civilization had its concrete historical expression, medieval Christendom.
“There was once a time when the philosophy of the Gospels governed the states. Then it was that the power and divine virtue of Christian wisdom had permeated the laws, institutions, and customs of the people; imbuing all ranks and relations of civil society. Then, too, the religion instituted by Jesus Christ, firmly established in befitting dignity, flourished everywhere thanks to the favour of princes and the legitimate protection of magistrates. Then the Priesthood and the Empire were happily united in concord and friendly interchange of good offices. So organized, civil society bore fruits beyond all expectation, whose remembrance is still, and always will be, in renown, registered as it is in innumerable documents that no artifice of the adversaries can destroy or obscure.”32
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira comments: “This luminous reality made from an order and divine perfection that is supernatural and heavenly rather than natural and earthly was called Christian Civilization, produced from Christian culture, which in its turn is the child of the Catholic Church.”33 Medieval Christendom was, then, the human society that in history achieved the Catholic ideal with the greatest perfection. If Maritain had written that “there is only one Catholic Church; there can be various Christian civilizations, various Christendoms”
,34 the Brazilian thinker affirms rather with force that “Christendom was not just any order, or merely one of many possible orders. It was the realization, in the circumstances inherent to the times and places, of the only authentic order among men, namely, Christian civilisation.”35
The origin of the term and of the concept of the “Middle Ages”36 is linked to a historiographical vision that was meant to describe a millennium of Western history like a long “night”, a dark parenthesis between the “light” of the pagan world and the “rebirth” of the modern era; the Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century will draw on this concept, already present in Petrarch37 and in Italian humanism. In this way, as Eugenio Garin observes, “the contrast between the dark ages and the enlightening rebirth will foment a controversy of four centuries, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, ideally linking Humanism and Enlightenment”.38
The “black legend” about the Middle Ages, re-launched by Marxist historiography, has definitively collapsed, and no serious historian would be prepared today to consider the Middle Ages as a parenthesis of obscure Barbarism.39 The term Middle Ages has lost every semantic aspect of a negative sign, to simply indicate that historical age when all society, in its institutions, in its laws, in its customs, allowed itself to be shaped by the Catholic Church. For this reason Benedict XV defines medieval Europe as a homogeneous civilization directed by the Church40 and Pius XII states that “it is right to recognize that the Middle Ages and its mentality had a note of authentic Catholicism: the indisputable certainty that religion and life form, together, an indissoluble whole”.41
All medieval society conformed harmoniously to the natural order laid down by God himself when he created the universe and to the supernatural order inaugurated with the Redemption and inspired by the Church. This was the great civilization that slowly but strongly emerged from the chaos of the Barbarian age under the influence of the natural and supernatural energies of the people that were baptized and ordered in Christ. Writes Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira:
“The conversion of the Western peoples was not a superficial phenomenon. The seed of supernatural life penetrated the inner most part of the soul, and the formerly rough, lascivious and superstitious barbarian tribes gradually formed themselves according to the likeness of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The supernatural society — the Church — thus spread its hierarchical structure throughout Europe. And from the mists of Scotland to the slopes of Vesuvius, dioceses, monasteries, cathedrals, conventual and parochial churches flourished, and, around them, the flocks of Christ. (…) From these vitalized human resources were born the kingdoms and the noble stirps, courteous customs and just laws, the guilds and chivalry, scholasticism and universities, the gothic style and the minstrels chant.”42
What were the causes of the decline of medieval civilization? In his encyclical Immortale Dei Leo XIII writes that “the harmful and lamentable rage for innovation which rose to a climax in the sixteenth century threw first of all into confusion the Christian religion, and next, by natural sequence, invaded the precincts of philosophy, whence it spread among all the classes of society”.43 The religious, intellectual, and the political and social fields are the three fields assailed by the dissolutive process that the Pope calls “new jurisprudence”. This is a declared “enemy” of the Church and of Christianity, which, in turn, is described by Pius XII in these terms:
“It is to be found everywhere and among everyone; it can be both violent and astute. In these last centuries, it has attempted to disintegrate the intellectual, moral, and social unity in the mysterious organism of Christ. It has sought nature without grace, reason without faith, freedom without authority, and, at times, authority without freedom. It is an ‘enemy’ that has become more and more apparent with an absence of scruples that still surprises: Christ yes; the Church no! Afterwards: God yes; Christ no! finally, the impious shout: God is dead; and, even, God never existed! And behold now the attempt to build the structure of the world on foundations which we do not hesitate to indicate as the main causes of the threat that hangs over humanity: economy without God, law without God, politics without God.”44
This enemy will be the specific object of Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira’s study. After demonstrating the nature and modality of action of the enemy, he will propose an efficacious reaction for destroying it and for restoring Christian civilization.
In summarizing the unshakeable nature of the antagonism between the Church and its mortal enemy, he writes:
“This terrible enemy has a name: it is called Revolution. Its profound cause is an explosion of pride and sensuality that has inspired, not one system, but, rather, a whole chain of ideological systems. Their wide acceptance gave rise to the three great revolutions in the history of the West: the Pseudo-Reformation, the French Revolution, and Communism.”45
Notes:
27. On Medieval Christianity and the idea of Christianity generally, : Bernard Landry, L’idée de chrétienté chez les scholastiques du XIII siècle, Paris 1929; Alois Dempf, Sacrum Imperium, Munich-Berlin, Oldenbourg, 1929; Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe – An introduction to the history of European unity, London, Sheed and Ward, 1932; Jean Rupp, L’idée de chrétienté dans la pensée Pontificale des origines à Innocent III, Paris, Les Presses Modernes, 1939; Luigi Prosdocimi, Cristianità medievale e unità giuridica europea, in Various authors Storia d’Italia. Dalla civiltà latina alla nostra Repubblica, (Novara, De Agostini, 1980), vol. IV, pp. 288-312 with ample bibliography. For a general view of Medieval civilization Cf. also Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith, with an introduction by Douglas Woodruff, London, Burn and Oates, 1962 (1920); Raffaello Morghen, Medioevo cristiano, Bari, Laterza, 1962; Giorgio Falco, La santa romana repubblica. Profilo storico del Medioevo, Milan-Naples, Ricciardi, 1968; Leopold Genicot, Le Moyen Age, 3rd edn., Tournai, Casterman, 1978.
28. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “O crime de Hitler”, O Legionário, no. 547, 31 January 1943; Cf. also Id., “Civilização cristã”, O Legionário, no. 546, 24 January 1943.
29. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “Cristandade”, O Legionário, no. 732, 18 August 1946.
30. St Pius X, Encyclical Il fermo proposito, in ASS, (1905), 37, p. 745.
31. St Pius X, Letter Notre Charge Apostolique, 25 August 1910, 612.
32. Leo XIII, Encyclical Immortale Dei, of 1 November 1885, in AAS, 1885, vol. XVIII, p. 169.
33. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “A cruzada do século XX”.
34. J. Maritain, Humanisme intégral, p. 442.
35. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, p. 41.
36. G. L. Burr, “How the Middle Ages got their Names”, American Historical Review, 1911-12, vol. 18, pp. 710 sgg.; Etienne Gilson, “Notes sur une frontière contestée”, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et litteraire du moyen age, 1958, vol. 25, p. 65; Ludovico Gatto, Viaggio intorno al concetto di Medioevo, Rome, Bulzoni, 1977; Pietro Zerbi, Il Medioevo nella storiografia degli ultimi vent’anni, Milan, Vita e Pensiero, 1985.
37. Francesco Petrarca was the first to mark a divide between the “antiqua”, Roman age and the “nova” age, following the Middle Ages: Cf. Epistolae de rebus familiaribus, VI, 2; XX, 8 etc. Wallace K. Ferguson, in Il Rinascimento nella critica storica (It. tr., Bologna, Il Mulino, 1968, pp. 20-3), considers him “the first to express that concept of ‘dark ages’ which was destined to dominate for centuries in the interpretation of the Middle Ages and to provide the dark background from which the light of the Renaissance would emerge” (p. 21); Cf. also Theodor E. Mommsen, Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages’, in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, edited by E. F. Rice Jr., (New York, Cornell University Press, 1959), pp. 226- 42; Eugenio Garin, Rinascite e rivoluzioni. Movimenti culturali dal XIV al XVIII secolo, (Bari ,Laterza, 1976), pp. 4-47.
38. E. Garin, Rinascite e rivoluzioni, p. 15.
39. Marco Tangheroni, “La ‘leggenda nera’ sul Medioevo”, Cristianità, no. 34-35, February-March 1978, p. 6-9; Régine Pernoud, The Glory of the Medieval World, London, D. Dobson, 1950; ID., Pour en finir avec le Moyen Age, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1977; Raymond Delatouche, La chrétienté médiévale, Paris, Téqui, 1989; Jacques Heers, Le Moyen Age, une imposture. Vérités et légendes, Paris, Perrin, 1993.
40. Benedict XV, Encyclical Pacem Dei munus of 23 May 1920, in AAS, 1920, vol. 12, p. 216.
41. “We — stated John Paul II in his turn — are still the heirs of long centuries during which a civilization was formed in Europe inspired by (…) During the Middle Ages, from a certain cohesion of the entire continent, Europe built a luminous civilization of which many testimonies remain” (Speech to the EEC in Brussels on 21 May 1985, Osservatore Romano, 22 May 1985).
42. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, A grande experiencia de 10 anos de luta.
43. Leo XIII, Encyclical Immortale Dei, in IP, La pace interna delle nazioni.
44. Pius XII, Speech Nel contemplare of 12 October 1952, in DR, vol. XIV, p. 359.
45. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, p. 3.