Tears filled his eyes. Suffering of the Son of God, of God himself incarnate as man. Suffering endured by the loving Saviour of all sinners, this darkest sinner among them. Recede a me, quia homo peccator sum.7 And yet the Saviour name, and took this leper in his arms, and knelt before him, and washed his feet. Tu mihi lavas pedes? 8 These feet that have walked in wickedness, that are all caked with the filth of sin and ignorance?
Yes, and not only washes his feet, but, for the sinner’s sake, permits himself to be taken, judged, mocked, scourged and crucified. He came back to the Calvary in his heart, to the suffering, the suffering of his God. And the annihilation for which he had striven seemed now to be consummated in a kind of rapture of devotion and compassion, love and pain. He was absorbed into a blissful participation in the sufferings of God incarnate of God incarnate and therefore at the same time of the pure essential Godhead out of which the God-Man had proceeded.
That body upon the cross was the invisible made visible. Calvary was bathed in the uncreated light, irradiated by it, consubstantial with it. Absorbed into its source and ground, the crucified Christ was annihilated in the light, and there was nothing but the shining rapture of love and suffering.
Then, as it were, re-condensing, the light took form again in Jesus crucified, until a new transfiguration once more assimilated Calvary with the glory that surrounded it.
Striding along, the friar’s body measured out with its bare feet the furlongs and the minutes, the hours and the miles.
Within, his soul had reached the fringes of eternity and, in an ecstasy of adoration and anguish, contemplated the mystery of the incarnation. A donkey brayed; the outriders in front of a coach sounded their bugles; someone shouted and there was a sudden outburst of women’s laughter. Under the Capuchin’s hood, there was a distant consciousness of these things. Eternity receded. Time and self came gliding in again to take its place. Reluctantly, the friar raised his head and looked about him. His myopic eyes discerned a house or two and the movement of men and animals on the road before him. He looked down again and, to cushion the shock of this abrupt return from one world to another, reverted to a discursive meditation on the Word made Flesh.
At the Milvian bridge a group of soldiers had been posted to keep check on all incoming travellers from the North. The Capuchin answered their questions fluently, but with a foreign accent that automatically aroused suspicion. He was taken to the guard-room to give an account of himself. The officer in charge touched his hat as the friar entered, but did not rise or remove his booted feet from the table on which he had propped them. Standing before him, his hands crossed over his breast, the traveller explained that his name was Father Joseph,that his convent was in Paris, that he had been sent by his superiors to attend a meeting of the Chapter General of his order. The officer listened, picking his teeth, as he did so, with a silver-gilt toothpick.
When the Capuchin had finished, he touched his hat again, belched and said that, while of course he had no reason whatever to doubt the truth of the Reverend Father’s words, the existence of certain malefactors, certain brigands, certain (he made an emphatic flourish with the toothpick) certain enemies of God and man, who did not scruple to hide their wickedness under the Franciscan habit, made it necessary for him to ask for the Reverend Father’s papers. The Capuchin hesitated for a moment, then inclined his head in acquiescence. Opening his habit at the neck, he reached into an inner pocket. The packet which he brought out was wrapped in blue damask and tied with a white silk ribbon. The officer raised his eyebrows as he took it, then smiled. Undoing the ribbon, he remarked facetiously that there had been a time when he carried his mistresses’ love letters in just such a packet as this. Now, with a jealous wife in his bed and his mother-in-law actually living in the house.
Suddenly the smile on his fat face was replaced by a look of astonishment that gave place to one positively of alarm. The object he had extracted from the packet was a letter sealed with the royal arms of France and addressed, with the most magnificent flourishes, to His Holiness Urban VIII. He glanced apprehensively at the friar, then back again at that formidable superscription, that portentous seal; then with a great jingling and clatter he took his feet off the table, sprang out of his chair and, removing his hat, made a deep bow.
‘Forgive me, Reverend Father,’ he said. ‘If I had only known… If only you had made it clear from the outset.’ ‘There is also a letter to His Eminence the Cardinal Nephew,’ said the Capuchin. ‘And another, if you will give yourself the trouble of looking, to His Most Christian Majesty’s Ambassador. And finally a passport delivered to myself and signed by His Eminence the Cardinal Minister’ At each name the officer made another obeisance.
‘If I had known,’ he kept on repeating, while the friar gathered up the letters, ‘if had only known .. .’ Breaking off, he rushed to the door and began shouting furiously at his men. When the Capuchin left the guard-room, he found his way across the bridge lined on either side by a company of papal musketeers. He halted for a moment, humbly acknowledged the officer’s salute, raised a hand in blessing, and then crossing his arms on his breast, he bowed his head and, without looking to right or left, hurried forward noiselessly on his bare feet between the double row of pikes.
CHAPTER II Childhood and Youth
Any given event in any part of the universe has as its determining conditions all previous and contemporary events in all parts of the universe. Those, however, who make it their business to investigate the causes of what goes on around them habitually ignore the overwhelming majority of contemporary and antecedent happenings. In each particular case, they insist, only a very few of the determining conditions are of practical significance. Where simple events are concerned this is true enough. Here, for example, is a boiling kettle. We want to find out why it boils. We investigate, discover a lighted gas ring, make experiments which seem to prove that there is an invariable connection between boiling and a rise of temperature.
After which we affirm that the ‘cause’ of ebullition in kettles is a neighbouring source of heat. The statement is crude, but adequate for most practical purposes. In the case of simple events, we can ignore all but one or at most a very few of their determining conditions, and still have sufficient understanding of them to enable us to control them for our practical purposes.
This is not true, however, in the case of complex events.
Here, the determining conditions which have a practical significance are much more numerous. The most complex events with which we have to deal are events of human history. If we wish to establish the determining conditions of, say, the war of 1914-1918, we are compelled, even for such purely practical purposes as the framing of future policies, to consider a great variety of ‘causes,’ past and contemporary, local and remote, psychological, sociological, political, economic. To determine the full list of these practically significant ‘causes,’ their relative importance, their mode of interaction -this is an exceedingly difficult task. So difficult, indeed, as to be quite beyond the capacity of the human mind in its present state of development.
But, alas, the insolubility of a problem has never deterred men and women from confidently propounding solutions. The method adopted is always the same that of over-simplification.
Thus, all but the immediate antecedents of the event under consideration are ignored, and history is treated as though it began only yesterday. At the same time, all embarrassing complexities are mentally abolished. Men are reduced to convenient abstractions.
The varieties of temperament, talent and motivation are flattened into uniformity. The event is thus made to seem simple enough to admit of explanation in terms of a very few ‘causes,’ perhaps even of only one. This theoretical conclusion is then used as a guide for future action. Not unnaturally the results are disappointing.
To over-simplify is fatal, and it is impossible to determine fully and correctly all the practically significant causes of complex events. Are we then doomed never to understand our history and therefore never to profit by the experiences of the past? The answer is that, although understanding will probably never be complete, we can yet understand enough for some at least of our practical purposes. For example, we can probably find out enough about the causes of our recent catastrophes to be able (if we so desire) to frame policies at least a little less suicidal than those we have pursued in the past.
No episode in history can be entirely irrelevant to any other subsequent episode. But some events
