On the 22nd of June, four hundred years ago, Niccolo Machiavelli died at San Casciano, not far from Florence, where he had lived since his dismissal from the office of Secretary to the Florentine Republic in 1512. A typical representative of his times, although his life, habits and ideals were those of a pagan, he died a Christian death : all the neo-pagans of the Italian Renaissance did the same. It was the fashion.

A broken and disappointed man, discarded by the Medici, to whom in vain he had offered his services and experience, ready to sacrifice his political convictions if they could employ him, were it only in rolling a stone,’ suspected by his old political friends as one who fawned on princes and a traitor to the Republican cause, Machiavelli passed the last few years of his life cursing fate, fighting against poverty and chafing under this enforced idleness, which to a man of his undoubted capabilities, accustomed for many a year to transact diplomatic business with the most renowned princes of the epoch, must have been truly unbearable. It is with pity and sympathy, not unmingled with a sense of disgust, that one reads Machiavelli’s own account of how he used to pass his days in the semiexile of San Casciano. Rising at dawn, after passing a couple of hours in the woods of the estate he used to go and sit by a spring reading Dante, Petrarch, Tibullus and Ovid, meditating pleasantly on ‘their amorous transports and the history of their loves’ ; thence betaking himself to an inn by the roadside to gossip with passers-by and ‘note the varied tastes and diverse fancies of mankind. . . . Dinner over, I go back to the inn.

It is not often that a book excites such comment as did Spengler’s Decline of the West in postwar Germany. Only the first volume of this has been translated into English, as yet. It is an exposition of determinism involving the methodic rise and fall of cultures. And in spite of some exaggerations, and the arbitrariness of its thesis, it is of the greatest interest. Possibly its greatest value lies in this, that the author contrives to awaken in his reader an understanding of the diversity of civilizations. We are so accustomed to look from out our own culture without adjusting our prejudices, and to form judgments in a moment of time upon an almost eternal phenomenon. We take no account of the changes in culture, of the shifting perspectives, and alien outlook in countries which are spiritually as remote as another world. We condemn or praise with no real sympathy. In the hope of deepening understanding a few comparisons between civilizations are suggested in this article.

The natural opposite of Europe has been always the East. But Roman Europe was, and modem Europe is, confronted by an Orient feverish and decadent. Syria and Egypt then can be compared to India now. We can find parallels between the local cults of those countries that rose to sudden prominence as fashions at Rome and those that do the same to-day; or between the atmosphere of the Trismegistists and that of the followers of Shankara. Between that period and the present the true East and true West were separated by the vigorous world of Arab culture, alien alike to its eastern and its western neighbours.

Quite a number of books have been published lately containing, so the spiritualists declare, messages from another world. The reading of these books does not suggest that the ‘spirits or their messages are any livelier or more intelligent than they were nearly seventy years ago, when Charles Dickens came across them.

In The Haunted House, a Christmas story written for All the Year Round, 1859, Dickens begins with the revelations provided by a travelling companion in a railway train. The journey was by night, and the fellow passenger, armed with a pencil and pocket-book, was perpetually listening and taking notes.

‘I have passed the night—as indeed I pass the whole of my time now—in spiritual intercourse,’ explained the man—‘a goggle-eyed gentleman of a perplexed aspect’—in the cold light of morning.

The messages had not been rapped on any table, but had been deciphered in the jolts and bumps of the carriage. (Many of us are familiar with the rhythmic utterance of railway engines.) The seance—‘conference’ the goggle-eyed gentleman preferred to call it—began with the greeting : ‘Evil communications corrupt good manners.’

The following extracts from the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas may be of interest and value to our readers. They are found in the Secunda Secundae.

Question 33. Article 4.

Whether a man is bound to correct his prelate.

Obj. 2. A gloss on Gal. II, 11 : ‘I withstood him to the face adds : as an equal. Therefore since a subject is not equal to his prelate, he ought not to correct him ....

.... I answer that a subject is not competent to administer to his prelate the correction which is an act of justice through the coercive nature of punishment.

But the fraternal correction which is an act of charity is within the competency of everyone in respect of any person towards whom he is bound by charity, provided there be something in that person which requires correction.

Now an act which proceeds from a habit or power extends to whatever is contained under the object of that power or habit. Thus vision extends to all things comprised in the object of sight. Since, however, a virtuous act needs to be moderated by due circumstances, it follows that when a subject corrects his prelate he ought to do so in a becoming manner; not with impudence and harshness, but with gentleness and respect. Hence the Apostle says (I Tim. v, 1), An ancient man rebuke not, but entreat as a father. Wherefore Dionysius finds fault with Demophilus, a monk (Ep. viii), for rebuking a priest with insolence by striking and turning him out of the church.

The Church has produced much spiritual writing in the five and a half centuries which have elapsed since this extraordinary genius of the Middle Ages, this woman of strenuous action, left us the written expression of her contemplative life. She, and the friends who wrote it for her, always spoke of it simply as ‘The Book,’ and after five hundred and fifty years it may well retain the title, for it has lost none of its unique character in Christian literature. It was written under peculiarly arresting circumstances : dictated by a woman of thirty-one, while in ecstasy, to three or four members of her famous circle: Barduccio, Stephen, Neri, Tuscan youths of noble family, who were her ardent disciples, and Christopher, a Sienese notary. This is the Saint’s own description of her mental and bodily state when in ecstasy:

. . . . the bodily powers alone departed, becoming united to Me through affection of Love. Then is the memory full of nought but Me; the understanding uplifted to contemplate My truth as object; the will, that follows the understanding, loves and unites itself to what the eye of the understanding sees. These powers, being united and gathered together and immersed and inflamed in Me, the body loses its feeling, so that the seeing eye sees not, and the hearing ear hears not, and the tongue does not speak, except as the abundance of the heart will sometimes permit it for the alleviation of the heart and the praise and glory of My name.’

‘Apellabo martyrem; praedicavi satis.’

—St. Ambrose.

With what emotion must he who travels from the south first break upon the Campagna, and see presently the Appian Way. Here, on the outskirts of the City, is the heart of Rome. Not the centre of her grandeur and dominion, not the seat of justice and power, but the cradle of Christianity suffering and victorious.

‘Now—the single little turret that remains On the plains,

By the caper over-rooted, by the gourd Overscored . . . .

Here is ‘love among the ruins.’ But divine, not human, love. Along the line marked by the cypresses lie the catacombs, untouched by any pious transformation. These were the sleeping places of the martyrs. Who were they, and what have they done for Christianity?

First, they have supplied certain proofs needful for the understanding of the nature and continuity of the Faith and of the Church.

No cause was ever so hopeless as that of Christianity on the morning after the Crucifixion. No religion has ever won a wider dominion in a shorter time.

We feel sure that readers of Blackfriars will welcome a résumé of the open correspondence between Mr. Charles C. Marshall and Mr. A. E. Smith. It will be forever memorable in the history of English-speaking Catholicism. Mr. Marshall is an eminent Episcopalian lawyer; Mr. Alfred E. Smith, the popular Governor of the New York State, is almost certain to be the next democratic candidate for the American Presidency, and would undoubtedly have been so at the last nominations, were he not a Catholic and therefore a victim of sectarian prejudice. This prejudice, whatever be his disclaimers, must unconsciously have moved Mr. Marshall to publish his ‘Open Letter to the Honourable Alfred E. Smith’ in the April number of The Atlantic Monthly (pp. 540-549).

The general drift of his letter is shown clearly enough in the opening and concluding paragraphs; the Governor’s reply sufficiently explains the rest of the attack.

Sir,—The American people take pride in viewing the progress of an American citizen from the humble estate in which his life began toward the highest office within the gift of the nation. It is for this reason that your candidacy for the Presidential nomination has stirred the enthusiasm of a great body of your fellow citizens. They know and rejoice in the hardship and the struggle which have fashioned you as a leader of men. They know your fidelity to the morality you have advocated in public and private life and to the religion you have revered; your great record of public trusts successfully and honestly discharged; your spirit of fair play, and justice even to your political opponents.