Six Kings

ON the eve of the visit of Britain’s King and Queen to the United States, a writer to the Times, obviously concerned over the possible misbehavior of American individuals or groups, uttered this caution: —

(1)The King and Queen do not govern England.

(2)They are not responsible for the trouble in Palestine or anywhere else.

(3)They are to the British Empire what our flag is to us — a symbol.

This is a definition as adequate as frequent in the tradition of the most exemplary limited monarchy of our age. It sounds radically different from the definition of kingship as worded in Luke XXII: 25: ‘The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them.’

The greatest of all crowned kings today is a symbol, a flag. The smallest — we shall take as an example the king of Italy — are souvenirs.

Yet there are kings to-day who ‘exercise lordship.’

I

Italy, the country where legitimate and traditional kingship has shrunk to its tiniest and well-nigh invisible size, is also the country where the idea of kingship as lordship, of leadership as actual monarchy, experienced its earliest resurrection in the commotion of our age. It happened sometime between 1919 and 1926. For it would be a precision defeating itself to determine more rigorously at what moment of that septennium Fascism grew fully aware of itself and shaped a theory and practice of absolute authority. This one fact is sure, that until the rise of Italian Fascism there had been two kinds of monarchies: a group of them, mainly Western, in which kingship had almost wholly evaporated into symbolical values, flaglike; and another group, especially represented by Russian Czarism and Turkish Sultanate, which the large majority of political and social observers contemplated as fossils of a defunct past. Wherever and whenever any other form of individual rule rose out of the vicissitudes of history, the consensus of the observers — not contradicted even by autocratic rulers such as Lenin or Ataturk — pointed to these new autocratic rules as to temporary expedients or practical devices, not at all as stumbling blocks across the progress of man towards Republican liberty.

The novelty of Fascism and its particular greatness consist in its having theoretically denied that this trend of man toward Democracy and Freedom is fated. For the first time, at least since the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, reaction stood up uncompromising and with a claim on perpetuity. Without any unctuous or apologetic demeanor, the One assumed the responsibility of the many, of all. His title, although no longer or not yet again the title of a king, was the Duce, a word of intense military meaning implying a much stricter and more active rulership than the word Re, rex. Rex, in fact, is is qui regit, the ruling King with all the implications of the word pointing to a rule rather in the service of peace than in the emergency of war. But Duce, dux, is the captain of war, the conqueror; he is the unfettered master of men, above all law, a law unto himself and to those behind and beneath him, an absolute. Verbally and actually there is hardly a difference between the title of Duce and the title of Imperator, commander of armies, and therefore commander of peoples. The small Italian-Latin word Duce was transliterated a few years later into the German Führer, a leader whose leadership has the very same implications of the Cæsarian monarchy.

Magnitude or pettiness in Mussolini’s character, genius or mere vulpine shrewdness in his doings, heroic predestination or the vulgar gambler’s luck in his success, are not the relevant issues in the appraisal of the epochal reversal of which he was the early agency. Some day the personal elements of his experience and career will be engulfed in the universal and mostly unconscious meaning which they assumed at the start of this era. A sail, however ragged and dirty, may chance on a high wind which fills it with a speed fit for a discovery or a disaster, and the analysis of the yarns of which the sail was made testifies about an explorer’s course or a pirate’s shipwreck as much and as little as the critical knowledge of a revolutionist’s biography about the import of his reform. Be Mussolini a titan or an inflated dwarf, a man of providence, as a Pope dubbed him, or a picked villain, a flag or a rag, — and readers know to which alternative we incline, — It was, however, a mighty and significant wind that made of this rag a racing sail. He it was who first became conscious of restoring to the field of reality the Machiavellian dream of the conquering Prince, he who first dared brazenly to think in terms of Empire and kingship absolute. Through him our contemporary world first became aware of the possibility of revolutions not necessarily in a progressive and leftist direction, such as the Western world had been accustomed to for about three hundred years; it became aware of the feasibility of backward revolutions, burying the living and resurrecting the dead.

It was Italian Fascism that stripped of a juridical and sentimental camouflage the right of might, the unblushing authority of conquest, the boundless lordship of the One. Of all the ideas embodied by ihe English, the American, and the French revolutions it made laughingstocks. The League of Nations, summarizing the Western system in international law, was finally smashed by the Roman Duce in the early summer of 1936.

The wind filling that sail blew from the Roman past of antiquity and the Middle Ages. The real patterns of the Duce’s behavior, unknown to most and probably obscure even in his own consciousness, are men like Crescentius in the tenth century, Arnold of Brescia in the twelfth, Cola di Rienzo in the fourteenth, and Stefano Porcari in the fifteenth century. Each and all of these lived, and more or less heroically died, in the delirious conviction that the world was out of joint because it did no longer acknowledge the primacy and divine right of the Roman people and of the world-ruler chosen by the Roman people. The Roman people, indeed, from the tenth to the fifteenth century, from Crescentius to Porcari. was a helpless rabble, ‘sitting-up ruins.’ This did not, however, stop the flight of the imagination; and the warning of reality against an absurd desire did not become effective until it was repeatedly twisted into the rope of the hangman or sharpened in the killer’s steel.

No collective insanity is thoroughly void of rational justifications. What was and is right in all the Roman heirs, from Crescentius to the Duce, was and is the explicit or implicit protest against the international lawlessness and anarchy which followed the crumbling of the Roman Empire. What was and is obviously wrong in them is the assumption that law and order among the nations can and must be restored in the shape of a resurrected Roman Empire, and that it is they who are the miraclemakers called to fling open that grave: Cola di Rienzo as a second Scipio, Benito Mussolini as a greater Augustus.

II

‘In those days — I admit it openly — I conceived the most profound admiration for that great man south of the Alps who, full of ardent love for his people, would not deal with the internal enemies of Italy, but pushed their annihilation in every way and by all means. What will rank Mussolini among the great of this earth is the same determination not to share Italy with Marxism, but to save the fatherland from it by dooming internationalism to annihilation.

’How wretchedly dwarfish our German State yes-men appeared in contrast and how nauseating it is when these nonentities undertake, with boorish conceit, to criticize a man a thousand times as great; and how painful it is to think that all this goes in a country which, barely half a century ago, might still call a Bismarck its leader.’

Thus spake Hitler in Mein Kampf at least as early as 1926, when Mussolini had not yet to his credit any final accomplishment — not the blasting of the League of Nations, greatest of his feats, not the march on Addis Ababa, not even the jaunt into Albania —except the totally autocratic seizure of his native Italy: a man rather of words than of deeds, and the neologist forger of winged and felicitous slogans such as Fascist, Totalitarian, Corporative. But he seemed already very great — and rightly so — to Hitler, the obscure rioter in a Munich Bierhalle, the untiring scribbler in a Bavarian fortress.

Hitler now overtowers both the inspirers of his vigil, Bismarck and Mussolini. Much more, however, than the Prussian chancellor — who for all his iron had fallen, and whose unfinished building of Empire had spelled disaster to the coming German generations — the Latin Duce had been and remained paramount in the Führer’s formative years. A Southerner and a Catholic by birth, Hitler’s mind was steeped in schemes of Latin and Roman rather than of Northern Protestant make. One annotation among others is suggestive in the Alvin Johnson edition of Mein Kampf. We learn from it that the ‘Senate chamber and study in the Brown House, Munich, are proudly displayed as examples of the Führer’s [artistic] work. In the first, which is primarily a study in red leather, the Swastika serves as an allusion to the SPQR of ancient Rome [Senatus Populnsque Romanus].’

This is indeed the repetitious story of Roman-German political intercourse from the deepest Middle Ages, at least as early as Charlemagne and earlier, to our daily news. Whatever the Latin imagination brewed on behalf of the resurrection and perpetuity of Roman Empire and Roman unity, the Germans stole home, elaborating the politico-literary plagiarism into a thing of flesh and blood, and whipping a feeble daydream into a galloping nightmare. Thus stuffed with a political theory which they had grabbed from their Latin vassals, the German war lords and Emperors of the Middle Ages in the real clank of their armors could scoff at the empty clang of Roman rhetorics. It was as far back as the middle of the twelfth century that a deputation of Romans ‘filled with a vain conceit of their own importance,’ approached Frederick Barbarossa and dwelled in ‘high-flown language on the dignity of the Roman people and their kindness in bestowing their sceptre on him, a Swabian and a stranger.’ Frederick’s anger — thus James Bryce dramatizes the event — did not let them finish: ‘ Who are ye, that usurp the name of Roman dignities? Your honor and your authority are yours no longer ... it was not you who chose us, but Charlemagne and Otto . . . conquered by their own might the Imperial crown. That Frankish might is still the same. Wrench, if you can, the club from Hercules.’

In much the same way Hitler, the reawakened Barbarossa, would have spoken long since to the reawakened Arnold of Brescia, Benito Mussolini, if his German Reich and his German race flooded a seemingly dikeless world as they did in the high tide of the Middle Ages. But there are dikes to-day — at least France and England close by and a mystery westward, America, which might change into a threat, and a darkness eastward, Russia, which might cover an ambush. It is not so much the reverence and affection of Hitler, however sincere, for his Latin teacher and precursor that make of Hitler’s Germany, so far, a courteous associate of the Roman country, as the sore need for an adequate alignment. Very realistically Hitler, from the very start of his career, thundered against those German patriots — obviously masquerading Jews — who, appalled by the enslavement of German South Tirol under the Roman rule, clamored for the revindication of those specks of Deutschtum, only to balk the German alliance with the Latin man of providence and make of all Germany the thrall of Westerners, Jews, and Bolsheviks. Risen to power, he faithfully dismissed the claim on South Tirol; the brown-black axis ran through all the width of Europe, parted the West from the East. Actions and counteractions have mixed and to some extent fused in one the competing or conflicting desires of the Roman orator and the German lord. They must fall or win together. A rupture of the axis remains and ever was a childish dream, a thought born of incompetent wishes. But the outlook on the rationally predictable future discloses a gaping contrast between the eventual destiny of Hitler’s Third Reich and of the Duce’s Imperium Romanum. If they fall, they fall. If they win together in peaces of the Munich sort or in triumphant war, the German Kaiser or Führer high on the Alpine ridge would be the real monarch of Europe with or without South Tirol; and the Roman Emperor, whatever the size of his nominal holdings, whatever even the perfunctory glamour of, say, a double coronation on the Capitoline Hill and under Saint Peter’s Cupola, would shrink to a crawling puppet in the shadow of German heels.

Thus the idle Latin scheme of a reborn Roman unity is transmuted into a real thing by the reality of German power. Many to-day underestimate the actual strength of the Duce, his influence still leading at times the Führer, but more than a glint of prophetic truth pierces the fog of misinformed opinion. Nothing short of a miracle of history or a timely revolution in Italy could save Italy from defeat in war or from servitude to Germany in the growing disproportions of a successful ‘peace.’ But on the other side there are chances, at least theoretically, for a German world unity. Germany is to-day, as she was for nearly fifteen centuries, the sole heir to the Roman political will, whenever that will comes to probate. It may be that the Holy Roman Empire, from Charlemagne’s Aachen to Vienna’s Hofburg and the Gardens of Potsdam, seldom was a thing of loveliness, often was unholy. But it never was, neither is it to-day, a hollow verbiage bound for silence, a writhing wish doomed to dust.

This difference in historical structure accounts somewhat for the striking difference in character and biography between Duce and Führer. The former is all color, change, adventure, unexpectedness. Hitler has practically no biography. So little of him can be told that in the perspective of world history it amounts to little more than nothing.

There he is, empty of individual happenings (or emptied of them by his own unrelenting purpose), as emblematic as the Duce is problematic — the statuary standard-bearer of an obsession, a fanatic, as his Southern precursor is an adventurer in the gamble of chance. Thinned to the transparence of its primary impulses, the character of Mussolini reveals the restless upstart, the reckless anarchist who, from the confusion of his wasteful youth, picked the tradition of the Roman Empire as an opportunity for cheat and feat. This tradition of a mission of the Roman chosen people had been extinct for ages in our factual world; to build on it is to build, less than on moving sands, on echoing sounds. But the Führer had and has behind him the legitimacy of an unbroken continuity for those very ages in the course of which the limelight of factual history seldom if ever deserted the German race. Hitler’s idea of the German race as the people chosen by nature’s divine right to rule the universe may be and is inhuman; it also may be and is, for the scientist’s mind, a blunder as gross as the transgression is hurtful for the humanitarian’s heart; it finally may be headed, and head Germany and the world, for a major disaster. But this blunder or crime is made of the stuff which things of flesh and will are made on; it has substance in it; it is a creed, father of deeds, not a strain or refrain.

Hence, too, the unmistakable difference of accent when the Duce talks of the state as of the entity supreme in human life, as of the only standard of thought and action, and when the Führer stresses in his own way the same basic tenet. One feels that Mussolini might have felt otherwise — indeed, he felt and taught otherwise at other times of his life — whereas Hitler is ‘immovably centred,’ if we are allowed to apply to the most distasteful of heroes Emerson’s definition of heroism.

‘Then the basic realization is that the State represents not an end, but a means. It is indeed the presumption for the formation of a higher human culture, but not its cause. On the contrary, the latter lies exclusively in the existence of a race capable of culture.’ Thus wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf.

What he means by culture, God or Beelzebub knows. But when he speaks of his German state as the means to the totalitarian City of Man, usurping the City of God, Hitler — an occasional liar in ephemeral tactics — is permanently true to himself.

III

So true is he to himself, so candidly aware of a suprapersonal avocation coinciding with the highest scope of man, that he unhesitatingly flings the value of his personality to a sacerdotal level. The thinking and doing of this remorseless foe of all established religions, of this Wagnerian fan and alleged worshiper of Teutonic deities, are modeled on orthodox patterns. More exactly, on the Roman Catholic religious pattern.

Both the Duce and the Fèhrer grew up in a Catholic entourage. The Duce himself, a frantic anticlerical and antiCatholic all through his long youth, preserved, in the very fibres of his fantasy and logic, the Catholic imprint which he had received from his devout mother and the Salesian Fathers whose pupil he had been in early boyhood. But, here again, what in the Latin is mere habit or blind emotional response is a conscious behavior, a substantial purpose, in the German Cæsar.

Few out of multitudes whose attention is blunted by the daily clamor about the daily episodes of Hitler’s fight against the Jewish and the Christian churches, few even among the most careful readers of Mein Kampf, realize that Hitler sang, sometime in the past, a glowing hymn to the Catholic Church as the paragon of political wisdom, and that he still clings to the meaning and feeling of Mein Kampf’s most surprising paragraph.

‘ Here,’ he wrote, ‘ the Catholic Church can be looked upon as a model example. In the celibacy of its priests roots the compulsion to draw the future generation of the clergy, instead of from its own ranks, again and again from the broad masses of the people. But this particular significance of celibacy is not recognized by most people. It is the origin of the incredibly vigorous power that inhabits this age-old institution. This gigantic host of clerical dignitaries, by uninterruptedly supplementing itself from the lowest layers of the nations, preserves not only its instinctive bond with the people’s world of sentiment, but it also assures itself of a sum of energy and active force which in such a form will forever be present only in the broad masses of ihe people. From this results the astounding youthfulness of this giant organism, its pliability and its steel-like will-power.’

Thus he transferred his celibacy into a Freudian sublimation and painted the latter in stern Catholic colors. The transference, which also was a return to the Austrian’s childhood, made of him the candidate for an anti-Papacy or super-Papacy more gigantic, if possible, than the Roman Church itself, with its pliability moulded for a temporal purpose and its will-power rooted in earth and blood.

Yet there was and is a Pope in Rome. Of the three kings in Central Europe, he is the most powerful, although with no territory under his throne except a palace with a garden, Vatican City, and no other army than a handful of guards.

Some aspects of this unique kingship have been often described. Seemingly disembodied, an Empire of the Soul, it embraces a larger number of subjects than any terrestrial power except the British Empire. But the links welding into a flexible unity the British citizenry, scattered across the seven seas, are variable and often loose; the allegiance of transmarine vassal nations to the British metropolis may thin away, as nominal as the authority of the British king—a crown rather than a head—over the republican oligarchy managing, from Westminster, its ganglionary commonwealth. Unitary discipline, on the contrary, is supreme in the Roman Spiritual Empire. It stops before no tide or divide. More than three hundred million, whether Irish Americans from a pedigree of thirty Catholic ancestors, or recent Chinese neophytes, or converts in the African jungle, are pledged to the same obedience as the few hundred officials within the gates of the Vatican. Nay, distance magnifies the influence. All human shortcomings shot off by the curvature of the earth, holiness and eternity alone radiate from St. Peter’s dome, firm as a firmament.

Nothing, however, save the number and geographic omnipresence of its lieges, would be so striking in the papal power if it affected the soul of man alone and his supernatural destiny, unconcerned with politics and economics in this transient world below. But that is not so, current opinions notwithstanding; and, in the Roman Church, the temporal and the eternal, the worldly and the overworldly, are as closely interrelated as they needs must be in any religion or metaphysics. True it is that the dogma of papal infallibility confines the power of the Pope to the fields of faith and morals; but no pope or doctor, so far, has drawn recognizable lines between ‘morals’ and a field of politics indifferent to morals and hence irrelevant to the Church. The very concept of political action as dissociated from ethical values sounds scandal to any believer’s ears.

Historically, the Roman Church rose with Constantine the Great, sixteen centuries ago, as the wielder of spiritual authority beside and within the frame of the Roman Empire. Its doctrine grew to full maturity in the same fourth century, and the Christian shepherd already was heir apparent to almost all of Antiquity, Oriental mysticism and Greek philosophy as well, Jewish Tora and Roman Law. In the wake of many precursors, Innocent III, at the turning of the twelfth century, definitely knew that he had received the mitre as a sign of spiritual command, and the crown as the symbol of temporal supremacy. He also knew that the Italian nation had been privileged for all times with a God-given primacy in the world unity under the twofold emblem of the tiara.

The sceptre of this Holy Emperor or King of Kings — a Christian incarnation of Plato’s philosopher-king — proved, however, much shorter than his pastoral. It never reached beyond the boundaries of a narrow state belting from sea to sea the Italian peninsula. This state’s size grew slowly from the deep Middle Ages to the Renaissance; then it stopped short, and the dwarfed condition of its inhabitants, their numbness and poverty, refractory to all advancement of Western civilization, could not possibly be interpreted, by Protestant or free-thinking nations, as tokens of administrative genius and of ability, in the papal rule, to help a more comprehensive crowd in the pursuit of temporal happiness beside and before the attainment of timeless bliss. Shortly after the middle of the nineteenth century, liberal Italy, acting as the spearhead of aggressive Protestantism and rational science, smashed the papal state to nothingness.

But the seed of resurrection sprouted from the disaster. The corpus delicti, the evidence of the Church’s failure in the management of temporal things, having been removed from all eyes, the Church survived revindicated, a faultless pretender. Against the deadly challenge of modern society it fought back, with weapons from which that conceited society was only too flimsily shielded: weapons of words, in obdurate Latin. Indeed, nearly all contemporary observers deemed the dogmas and encyclicals of Pius IX to be nothing more than mere words, impotent lamentations of a dispossessed sovereign. They were much more. They started the age in which we live and may die. This age is the second Counter-Reformation, much larger than the first. If, through the CounterReformation of four centuries ago, the Catholic Church succeeded barely in stemming the rise of Protestantism, it now, in the same spirit, is attempting to overwhelm whatever rose in mind and society, out of Renaissance and Protestantism, in a spirit of rebellion and schism. Jonah, as a reborn prophet of mediæval authority, slowly emerged from the whale, in stormy waters.

Between Fascism-Naziism and Roman Catholicism there have been giving and taking, coincidence, parallelism, and clash. In braving, with stupendous single-mindedness, the tenets of a rational and liberal society, in raising against the wavering dogmas of science and progress the unshakable ones of revelation and emotion, the Church had done a pioneering without which the intellectual onslaught of Fascism and Naziism would hardly ever have been conceivable. In preserving, through so many centuries, an elective but absolute monarchy in which the restricted electoral body is appointed by the monarch himself and all power descends from on high, the Church also had provided Fascism and Naziism with the fundamentals of their institutions. Even by its disproof of class warfare and restatement of the mediæval concept of corporate society, the Church had taken its place among the precursors of Fascist and Nazi economy.

True, the Catholic monarchy may also claim, and rightly in many ways, the title of a democracy — nay, of a democracy par excellence. But Fascism and Naziism raise the same claim, and they too are right in their own ways, if democracy is the principle of the people’s being ruled for the people (although not by the people), with all Fascists and Nazis of Aryan stock — regardless of class origins — equal under the lawgiver and his law. The Duce himself used to be a penniless wanderer, the Führer a small jobber. In the same way, there is no objection to a cardinal’s having spent his childhood in a shanty or to a saint’s having walked the earth in the tatters of a pariah. Neither is there any honest reason for doubting the sincerity of the Church’s desire to promote a better justice in behalf of the forgotten man and to bring about, through charity from on high and appeasement from all sides, a sensible compromise among conflicting interests and classes. This social program was named ‘Christian Democracy.’ The inward attitude, however, of official Catholicism toward political democracy — that is, toward the representative system and the doctrine of the people’s being ruled by the people — was manifested too often and in a too consistent set of major and minor examples to leave margin for question marks. That a dissenting cardinal was bluntly stripped of his purple and confined as a simple monk, by Pius XI, to the obscurity of conventual life may still be laid aside as a case of spiritual indiscipline and discipline. But in clearly temporal matters, one among the many rash gestures of that same pontiff seems to be more expressive than a whole treatise of political science. In 1929, he was endowed by the Duce with an area of sovereignty, however small, and with a number of subjects, however modest. He certainly did not summon a miniature parliament, neither did he call his citizens to cast secret ballots for the election of councilors. With one stroke of the pen, he united in his hand the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary powers of his state.

Not that the Church to-day would care to try shaking the pillars of the democratic states. She prefers to seep through their frittered foundations, when they are frittered; and otherwise assumes that all power — hence also a democratic power — comes from God. But similarity breeds familiarity, and it is no wonder if the Church, a paragon of absolutism, cherishes her own image in the absolute monarchies, hoping even against hope that the day will come when kings with firm hands will bend all human hearts to the true faith, while nothing can be taken for granted in electoral democracies where the gust of a popular whim can blow to naught the crop of toilsome seasons.

Of clashes between the papacy and Fascism — and, much bitterer, between the papacy and Naziism — the daily papers have been full for years; and it seems likely that their capacious pages will brim over with such material for years to come. History, more perspective than chronicle, perhaps will stress the facts above the words. Facts, among others, are: that the Roman Church, at least since 1929, harbored Italian Fascism behind her moral authority; that she blessed the eagles flying to the conquest of Ethiopia as a vanguard of the Cross; that she did not mourn over the wreckage of the League of Nations; that she thrust a spear, spiritual but lethal, into the side of Republican Spain, whereupon Franco’s triumphant veterans kissed in long file the ring of the newly crowned Pope; that she endorsed the spirit of Munich, slogancd ‘peace with justice’; that she opposed the alliance of the Western mights and Russia with an industry bordering on the efficiency of a veto. On the whole, the weight of the Roman Church has helped much to tilt the scales of power-politics in favor of Duce and Fèhrer.

Hitler, the apprentice, had learned much from Austrian Christian Democracy. In a wrathful paragraph of Mein Kampf, he turned his thumb down on the traitors — obviously, masquerading Jews — who kept afire the ultramontane question. ‘The Jew, in any event, achieved the desired goal: Catholics and Protestants were merrily at war with one another and the deadly enemy of Aryan humanity and of all Christendom laughed up his sleeve.’ Obviously his thought was, and still probably is, that the churches — above all, the most powerful of all — will, if conveniently tamed, prove invaluable agencies of the Cèsar’s will, instrumenta regni. After all, the swastika contains the cross. The papacy’s dream runs a different course. To be sure, anti-Christian blasphemy, implicit or explicit in the Duce’s funambulatory oratory, is hard to bear (even with a smile); mail-fisted in the Führer or his associates, it is anathema. But these clay-footed colossi may crumble on their faces — or God may change their hearts. At any rate they may prove to have been those who, led in the night, opened the ways of the Lord. The day may dawn when a ruler of Italy will be, to say the least, as filially dutiful as the Countess Matilda, chatelaine at Canossa; when a German Cæsar will be trudging again to Canossa, and kneeling before the King of Kings.

IV

All three kingships along the totalitarian Axis of Central Europe — Ducedom, Führerdom, and Papal Christendom — are emanations from the ancient, unextinguished sun of Roman Unity. But the fourth kingship too, the Eastern Monarchy, draws primarily its energy and direction from that same source, although steering them along a baffling parallax which most telescopists have failed so far to identify.

The fourth kingdom is the U.S.S.R. It is the legitimate heir — unaware of its legitimacy — to Byzantine Empire and Czarist conquest. They both endeavored to mould the classical unitary idea, which they somehow traced back from the Roman Cæsars to Alexander the Great, in Oriental patterns, as if they performed symbolically, century after century, the wedding of Alexander with the princess of Persia. Or they diluted the consistency of that idea in the shapelessness of a fanatic, intuitional mood.

The Basileus or Czar of to-day is one who has changed his name and wiped out the memory of his origin, as Popes and Cæsars do. No longer Joseph Dzugashvili, Zozo the Georgian, he is Stalin, the Man of Steel. He wears no crown, an outfit for nominal kings (except the Roman King of Kings); he bears no sceptre, an implement yet exhumed by none, except Göring, the Fat Pretender. Even the title of Leader would sound too ceremonial for Stalin, whose most ambitious attributes are those of a Secretary or Commissar, and whose military coat, bare of ribbons and medals, fits his broad chest almost as loosely as a workman’s blouse. Yet his kingship is absolute, and the idea behind it is world-embracing. His subjects in Europe and Asia outnumber any other self-ruling political aggregate on any continent; his following beyond the boundaries spreads as universally as the Catholic Church and vies with the latter’s masses in the passivity of obedience and in the militancy of service as well.

Like the Duce’s childhood in his mother’s lap and in the Salesian Fathers’ school, or the Führer’s adolescence in the magnetic field of the Christian Social Party of Austria, Stalin’s early years were imbued with religious suggestions of the orthodox kind. It was Russian or Russianized orthodoxy, in his case, Eastern Christendom. A riotous and violent lad, Zozo Dzugashvili nevertheless was the most promising pupil, a promised priest, in the Seminary at Tiflis. Much as a consequence of the exceptional catechumen’s brooding and doing, the Seminary evolved to an underground preparatory school for revolutionary Marxism. The black lamb was ousted. ‘The pupil Joseph Dzugashvili has been expelled from the institution owing to socialistic heresy.’ Now he became the officiant of another orthodoxy, as uncompromising as the creed of his clerical teachers — or more. When, a few years later, he inspected that strange School of Communism that had been founded on the island of Capri under the auspices of Gorki and Lunacharsky, he sombrely despised all those ‘heretics’: among others the ‘Godbuilders,’ who were suspected of trying to reconcile religion and Socialism. He stuck emphatically to Lenin’s atheistic materialism. He was, however, misinformed about himself: as inadequately in touch with the deep layers of his nature as, for that matter, Lenin was and Marx had been in other ways with their own. Seldom the apostate’s god lets him out of his shadow.

The pulp’s decay already is slackening the fibres and yellowing the borders of an unusual book, by Dr. Fritz Gerlich, published in the short-lived Socialist Bavaria of Kurt Eisner. Its truths are heavily dosed with error and strained by overstatement; yet some of them deserve to survive the perishable stuff on which they are printed and the fleeting circumstances from which they rose. Truthful, in the main, is the title itself: Communism as a Doctrine of the Millennium. And the first introductory sentences strike a note which should sound familiar, but does not, to all thinking minds. ‘Most people nowadays,’ says Gerlich, ‘fail to understand the Communist movement because they have been accustomed to see in it and in its father, Marxist Socialism, nothing else than an economic theory. In its reality, however, Marxism as well as any other form of modern Communism belongs in the category of religious movements. More precisely, it is an attempt to build a new religion.’ Metaphysical character, for that matter, he adds, is recognizable in many Communist doctrines of the past, at least as far back as Plato’s Utopia. Concerning contemporary events, we may condense his basic concepts in the statement that the Book of Revelation was as powerful, in the subconscious drive of the Russian Revolution, as the Communist Manifesto in its conscious will.

We also may state that a thin but unbroken thread of continuity, in an emotional disagreement about the ultimate destiny of mankind on earth, runs through the rambling and confused theological dispute between the Eastern and the Roman Churches all through the ages. In the Roman Church’s cosmic picture, God’s kingdom on earth receded towards a dimmer and comparatively irrelevant background; it stood in fuller light somewhere in the foreground of Eastern religion and of its poetic and political derivatives. Besides the contrasting shades of Oriental and Occidental mysticisms, historical differences account for the different attitudes. The Roman Church, on the whole, remained grounded in the territory of the Western Roman Empire and consistently drew its nourishment from the complexes of its origins in the Roman social and political soil. It had been born of terror and persecution at the hands of Roman emperors. These circumstances had driven both Paul and Peter — agreeing at least on this one issue — to the doctrine of the Christian’s plenary conformism and supine submission to the worldly powers that be, even though they be Neronian, in order that the Church might perhaps be left free in her catacombal or outdoor pursuit of otherworldly happiness. The anti-Neronian manifesto of the Book of Revelation, necessarily wrapped in forbidding riddles, could not be much heeded; and the subsequent vicissitudes of the mediaeval and modern Church, caught between her own shortcomings in her own rickety temporal state and the intricacies of her diplomacy amidst and against the mighty of the earth, grooved more and more deeply her trend toward a bliss-haloed pessimism, making of this earth a valley of tears, of justice here below a licit but deluding desire, of misery and sorrow a trial hard to bear but short, and eventually a Godspeed for endless reward. Much as lofty prophets like Joachim of Floris or naive saints like Francis of Assisi may have strained to bridge the gap between Heaven and earth, Heaven and earth drifted farther apart, and the official Church could not help crystallizing as an accomplice or at best a tolerant witness of political oppression and social iniquity — a distiller, in Marxian language, of ‘opium for the people.’

But in the East, whatever the iniquities or atrocities, Christianity of a sort felt secure in the hands of the ruler wielding both the temporal and the spiritual power. The Basileus or Czar not only could, he must promise — although, perforce, within the unpredictable delays of eternity and time — celestial bliss and terrestrial welfare alike: ‘Heaven and some of this too.’ In such conditioning, the eschatological hope of the Millennium could brave the harshest winds. It bloomed anew, with efflorescences of unexpected glamour, in the sacroprofane Russian literature of the nineteenth century. Both Tolstoi and Dostoevski bid for ‘Heaven and all this too.’ They, and many others with them, indignantly flayed the Churches playing up the hope of Heaven against the hope of Man. Their anger’s gleam was focused on the biggest of all Churches: Roman Catholicism, with its enslavers and Inquisitors. Atop the pyramidal diatribe a pun burst like a firecracker: Andreev’s cardinal in his Satan’s Diary (1919) exclaiming: 'Vade Petro, Satanas’ — ‘Go, Satan, to St. Peter’s, where thou belongest.’ It is from this hoary and yet evergreen tradition that men like Lenin and Stalin inherited their God’s kingdom on earth.

To be sure, it is a kingdom of God without God.

It also seems past doubt that it is not yet a kingdom of peace and plenty where everybody sits, even if only allegorically, ‘under his vine and under his fig tree.’ The history of its twenty-two-year growth is honeycombed with error and terror. It is also likely that the Russian kingdom of God without God has its cornerstones rooted in the sands of a faulty or disputable economic doctrine; and — were that not so, were Marxist economy a quintessence of perennial truth — a society founded on the belief that economic justice alone, without any metaphysical chart or cosmic compass, will take man from prehistory to history and from all lands to the one promised land resembles anyhow the cripple marching toward a noble goal on his one leg, perhaps a wooden one.

But F. A. Voigt, author of Unto Caesar, that most brilliant advocate of British churchgoing Toryism and of its foreign policy, sails treacherous waters when assailing as blasphemy all ‘secular religions’ — Russian Communism above all — which claim God’s kingdom for man on earth. He certainly does not mean that Gardens of Eden with trout-swum rivulets should be glossed over as one more trifling adjunct to the many irrelevancies which an inscrutable providence has forced on the British leisure class. Yet, for all his learning and piety, he just glosses over the basic script of Christendom, the Lord’s Prayer asking for God’s kingdom to come and for His will to be ‘done in earth as it is in heaven.’ Neither is there anything else in the Gospels or in the Acts of the Apostles which countenanced, from the social and economic angle of Christ’s Christianity, the most reverent rector’s ukase expelling from the Tiflis Seminary ‘the pupil Joseph Dzugashvili, owing to socialistic heresy.’ It is not Socialism, not Marxist Communism, that smacks of heresy on that score.

On the other hand, the Catholic Church — whatever possibly the archaisms of her philosophy, whatever certainly the nemeses of her commitments to plutocracies and tyrannies — fights behind impregnable bulwarks when she strikes at the savage metaphysical nakedness of Russian Communism.

Both equally defective, although in opposite ways, they yet emerge, Roman Catholicism and Jewish-Russian Communism, — much above the levels of Fascism and Naziism, of French Parliament and British aristocracy, — as the giant fighters in our world.

They share in variable measure right and wrong, strength and weakness, light and night.

V

The third branch of Christianity, Protestantism, weakened in a cluster of twigs. Its fragmentary multiplicity, often insignificant, curtailed it of expansive power and lastly even imperiled its resistance to the resurgent push of totalitarian systems.

Great Britain, inspired by an intelligentsia in which the defeatists or skeptics and the Catholic relapsers are no longer a minority, can hardly any longer be listed as a Protestant country. The Protestant spirit, as recast by the lay philosophies of the eighteenth century, still is operative behind the ruling class of France; there, however, calcified in bourgeois rationalization, it forfeited most of its religious stamina. But Protestantism, in its permanent essence, still is the vital breath of the United States, the one extant advancing democracy in our age; and in this, its young body, it does not seem as yet to be ripe for defeat.

In an inner build-up of which the average American is scarcely or not at all aware, Calvinism evolved into an optimist Christianity, with theology open to the interpretative changes of science and language, and with predestination watched by the human will, Grace manifest in works. There coil the springs of American virtue: fortitude with hope. The hope is of God’s kingdom on earth, in the unspeakable presence of the unknowable God.

Of the five kingdoms in the white world, this is the remotest from the Roman pattern of unity — whether blueprinted in Rome, or disfigured in Germany, or palimpsested in Moscow. Yet, the ideal of classical political theory nowhere and never came as close to fulfillment as in the American Constitution. In interstate relations, the ideal of the best classical ages often was federalism; in domestic institutions it was a trinitary harmony — seemingly as unattainable as it evidently was desirable — of the spirit of democracy with the spirits of aristocracy and monarchy. This ancient ideal was fused in America with seventeenth-century Protestantism and eighteenth-century philosophy. The American spirit of democracy as represented in Congress, its spirit of aristocracy as embodied in the Supreme Court, and its spirit of monarchy as symbolized in the President, would meet, in the main, the approval of Cicero and Aristotle.

The President is an elective, popular king, limited in authority and time. His power stands as much below the allmight of the autocrats in the bulk of Europe as it rises above the pageantry of the nominal kings on Europe’s fringes. The line of kings, or Presidents, stretching over one hundred and fifty years of American history, is at least as remarkable as the sequence of the Roman Good Emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius, or of the irreproachable Popes of the Second Counter-Reformation from Pius IX to Pius XII.

The mediocre among them floated passively on the current of American destiny. The worst — seldom, if ever, conspicuously bad — dared not run counter to it. In the best of them, from the founders to Lincoln and from Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson and F. D. Roosevelt, the destiny or historical will which lies instinctually sunk in the masses sprang to greater or lesser intellectual clarity again.

Roosevelt, in inner and social policy, seems surer of the ends than of the means. In the half-obscurity of the environment, he half-gropingly reaches for some new’ direction which leads neither forward to the Fascist penitentiary or hive nor back to wild laissez faire and class warfare. Clearer in international sight, be knows — as Wilson, his precursor, did — that American isolationism, besides being a slow polysyllabic catchword in the airplane age, is one more semi-collectivized expression of that very same rugged individualism and atom-splitting fragmentariness which doomed Protestantism to this pallor, Democracy to this plight.

Wilson was beaten. Much of Roosevelt’s fortune hangs on the forthcoming Fascist war or Fascist peace in Europe and Asia.

To date, it still seems as if a longer time should elapse ere a whisper, faintly audible to-day across the isolationist unison, becomes a voice, a call for America’s inevitable leadership. To that whisper a writer, Clarence K. Streit, lately lent his words: ‘Union now.’ His ‘now,’ however, still sounds like an inverted historical present., the projection of an indistinct future into the actuality of desire.

Yet, in years or generations, a sixth king should come, the king: not a word-catapulting Duce, not a nightmare-whipping Führer, not a Guardian of incorruptible sepulchres, not a one-eyed Cyclopean shepherd of peoples, not a restricted president of this United States — but the President of All Men, the elective, popular, temporary, uncrowned, unfeathered ruler of the League of all Nations which must rise at last from the ashes of all prophets’ frustrations.

The time may come when Hugo’s announcement of the Répuhlique universelle will not rebound against hollow echoes, when perhaps even Tennyson’s ‘Parliament of Man,’ ‘Federation of the World,’ will no longer elicit better-knowing smiles from a cruel wisdom.

A common purpose drives, to goals beyond their wills, the Five Kings of to-day. They all rose from anarchy; they all — in truth or error, or truth mixed with error — fight the anarchy from which they rose. Beneath the seething surface of discord, the deep waters of history flow toward the unity of Man.

This the New-Englandish school principal of Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber knew very well. More confidently, his metaphor ran the surface of the waters. ‘I meant to guess aloud that Fascism comes from something new in the air everywhere in our time. . . . From a new wind blowing over the world of men. . . . To this great wind, Fascism spreads black sails on a pirate ship. But that is not the fault of the wind. If we will but learn to set our sails it will carry us to undreamed goals of . . . into feeling as never before the oneness of mankind. . . .’

The new king should be the new Cyrus.

Him, all gods of all past Babylons would call — as Marduk, the god of Babylon, called Cyrus, the first worldking, when he entered bloodless the intact city of the god.

‘In all lands everywhere Marduk searched, he looked through them and sought a righteous prince, after his own heart, whom he took by the hand. Cyrus, king of Anshan, he called by name, to lordship over all the world he appointed him.’