Carducci, the author of the phrase about the _contorcimenti
dell'affannosa grandiosita spagnola_, has written (in _Mosche Cochiere_)
that "even Spain, which never attained the hegemony of the world of
thought, had her Cervantes." But was Cervantes a solitary and isolated
phenomenon, without roots, without ancestry, without a foundation? That
an Italian rationalist, remembering that it was Spain that reacted
against the Renaissance in his country, should say that Spain _non ebbe
egemonia mai di pensiero_ is, however, readily comprehended. Was there
no importance, was there nothing akin to cultural hegemony, in the
Counter-Reformation, of which Spain was the champion, and which in point
of fact began with the sack of Rome by the Spaniards, a providential
chastisement of the city of the pagan popes of the pagan Renaissance?
Apart from the question as to whether the Counter-Reformation was good
or bad, was there nothing akin to hegemony in Loyola or the Council of
Trent? Previous to this Council, Italy witnessed a nefarious and
unnatural union between Christianity and Paganism, or rather, between
immortalism and mortalism, a union to which even some of the Popes
themselves consented in their souls; theological error was philosophical
truth, and all difficulties were solved by the accommodating formula
_salva fide_. But it was otherwise after the Council; after the Council
came the open and avowed struggle between reason and faith, science and
religion. And does not the fact that this change was brought about,
thanks principally to Spanish obstinacy, point to something akin to
hegemony?

Without the Counter-Reformation, would the Reformation have followed the
course that it did actually follow? Without the Counter-Reformation
might not the Reformation, deprived of the support of pietism, have
perished in the gross rationalism of the _Aufklaerung_, of the age of
Enlightenment? Would nothing have been changed had there been no Charles
I., no Philip II., our great Philip?

A negative achievement, it will be said. But what is that? What is
negative? what is positive? At what point in time--a line always
continuing in the same direction, from the past to the future--does the
zero occur which denotes the boundary between the positive and the
negative? Spain, which is said to be the land of knights and rogues--and
all of them rogues--has been the country most slandered by history
precisely because it championed the Counter-Reforma