Thomas Aquinas—Aristotle’s Janus—like countenance. The “Reception of Roman Law,” of which so much has been written and said, was preceded and accompanied by the reception of classical thought and culture. The strange transition from pagan Rome to Catholicism may be traced in the plastic arts, especially in architecture, e.g. in the Roman Pantheon. This ocular proof impressed me more deeply than the arguments of modern theologians who draw from literary sources their accounts of the Classical-Catholic synthesis.
And Catholicism itself, the Church and the Papacy, the grandiose continuation and culmination of the Roman Empire, is the work not of the Romans alone but also of their successors, the Italians. Catholicism is a product of the Roman spirit, though Jesuitism, the basis of neo-Catholicism, came from Spain. Italy has contributed, besides, notable moral and religious individualities standing more or less apart from the Church, like St. Francis of Assisi, Savonarola, Giordano Bruno and Galileo.
Nor do the later periods of Italian thought lack interest. I was attracted especially by the genius of Vico, his philosophy of society and of history, his psychological insight into the real social forces and their workings, his grasp of the spirit of Roman Law and of Roman civilization—again and always a synthesis of Catholicism and Classical Antiquity, for Vico was a priest as well as a philosopher of history and the first of modern sociologists. Indeed, Catholicism, with its long ecclesiastical tradition, led to the philosophical writing of history; and Vico’s predecessor was Bossuet.
Politically, the rebirth and unification of Italy commanded our sympathies; and, in point of time, the period of the Risorgimento coincided with that of our Czech national revival. In Italy likewise there arose the serious problem of the relationship between Church and State. Many a powerful Italian thinker racked his brains over the fate of the Papacy and the part it might play in relation to national unity. In this respect Rosmini and Gioberti, both priests and men of keen mind, interested me as did their opponent, Mamiani, who ended by adapting himself to their ideas—far more than the Italian disciples of Kant and Hegel; and in all three of them can be felt the pulse of Italy and the nature of her problems after the French Revolution. At length Italy was unified, in despite of the Papacy. For her, and not for her alone, the year 1870 is memorable. In July the Vatican Council proclaimed the new dogma of Papal Infallibility; a few weeks later an Italian
