It has been said and often repeated that the Church was in the Middle Ages in Europe the continuation of the Roman Empire, that the Pope is yet the real successor of the Emperor in Rome.  In fact he carries one of the Emperor’s titles, Pontifex maximus.  The observation is just, but it should not make us forget that the Christian Empire, so to call it, and the Roman Empire, were between themselves as radically opposed as two forces that created the one and the other; politics and intellectuality.  The diplomatists, the generals, the legislators of Rome created by political means, by wars, treaties, laws, a grand economic and political unity, which they consolidated, quite giving up the formation of a large intellectual and moral unity.  The intellectual men, who formed the most powerful nucleus of the Church after the fourth century, took up again the Roman idea of unity and of empire; but they transferred it from matter to mind, from the concrete world of economic and political interests, to the world of ideas and beliefs.  They tried to re-do, by pen and word, the work of the Scipios, of Lucullus, and of Caesar, to conquer the world, not indeed invading it with armies, but spreading a new faith, creating a new morality, a new metaphysics which must gather up within themselves the intellectual activities of Graeco-Latin culture, from history to science, from law to philosophy.

The Church of the Middle Ages was therefore the most splendid edifice that the intellectual classes have so far created.  The power of this empire of men of letters increased, as little by little the other empire, that of the generals and diplomats, declined.  Christianity saw with indifference the Roman Empire decay; indeed, when it could, it helped on the disintegration and was one of the causes of that political and economic pulverising which everywhere succeeded the great Roman unity.  Political and economic unity on the one hand, moral and intellectual on the other, seem in the history of European civilisation things opposite and irreconcilable; when one is formed, the other is undone.  As the Roman Empire had found in intellectual and moral disunion a means of preserving more easily the economic and political unity, the Church broke to pieces the political and economic unity of the ancient world to make, and for a long time preserve, its own moral and intellectual oneness.

I shall make an effort, above all, to explain the origin, the development, and the consequences of this contradiction, because I believe that explaining this clears one of the weightiest and most important points in all the history of our civilisation; in truth, this contradiction seems to be the immortal soul of it.  For instance:  in time, Augustus is twenty centuries away from us, but mentally and morally he is, instead, much nearer, because for the last four centuries Europe has been returning to Rome—­that is, striving to remake a great political and economic