By Giovanni Gentile
I.
The speech that I intend to make is very delicate, because it easily lends itself to misunderstandings while it touches upon all the interests of human life.
And I will therefore strive to be frank and explicit, using the utmost sincerity, resolutely evading from the soul any consideration alien to the subject, in the hope that those who listen to me will believe in my sincerity and will be willing to take my words for how they they sound, without looking for any hidden meaning behind them that I did not say.
I also want to warn you that my way of philosophizing has accustomed me to the absolute sincerity of one who confesses with himself, and it has planted in my soul the conviction that the philosopher—the true philosopher—cannot speak to his fellow men except by using precisely that same language that he uses deep within himself.
And I would like to add, that today more than ever, in the present moment in which every Italian worthy of this name feels in his heart the tremendous responsibility of his past and present life and must, collecting himself, feel the presence of God, today I would be more ashamed more than ever to entertain my audience with the rhetoric of some academic discourse, or with the virtuosity of arrogance suggested by the stale expertise of theologians and philosophers.
Today more than ever it is time to take matters seriously.
Thus, I will begin by making my open profession of faith, which perhaps will not appear as altogether new to those who are familiar with my writings.
I already made this profession in 1926; but since then it has benefited me very little, because many looked upon me with that distrustful attitude of those who fear "Danaos et dona ferentes"...
I thus repeat my profession of faith, whether it be pleasing or displeasing to my listeners: l am a Christian. I am a Christian because I believe in the religion of the spirit. But I would like to immediately add, to avoid any misunderstanding: I am a Catholic. And not merely since today; let this also be very clear.
I have been rigorously Catholic since June 1875, i.e. since the day I was born. And so I regret not being able to announce to you a story about a crisis, a storm of the soul, a sudden conversion, a stroke of lightning. I have been prosaically on the road to Damascus since the day I was born. [...]
"But" — I can already anticipate someone interjecting — "you complained that you didn't want to be misunderstood... You can't call yourself a Catholic except by giving that word a different meaning than how it is understood by the Catholic Church itself, which alone has the authority to define its meaning, so much so that the Church has condemned your writings, and you have engaged in so many polemics against various doctrines and sayings and manifestations of the Church. So how can we take seriously your claim of wanting to avoid misunderstandings?"
Allow me to recall that there was a time when parish priests and preachers showered me with divine graces.
I had the Crucifix put back in schools, and there were so many applauses and praises that, frankly, I thought I was starting to undergo a solemn canonization. Was this merely political on my part, i.e. opportunism or government trickery?
I had already openly expressed my opinion at a teachers' congress that was held in Naples in 1907, and I was met with strong opposition: I clearly reiterated my position again when the scholastic policy of the Fascist Regime, exaggerating and substantially altering my reform of 1923, wanted to extend religious education to middle schools and entrust it to ecclesiastics: this was contrary to my thesis of 1907, to which I remained firm. [...]
Since then the hosannas have turned into shouts of "crucify him!". And my name, also due to this, has passed into the realm of legend. And concerning this, if I must tell the whole truth, I do not regret this; because legends, with their element of mystery, are problems that cause us to think, discuss and search, and, in short, move the spirits...
This does not mean, however, that I am so pleased with the legend that I want to artificially maintain it in the chiaroscuro of being and non-being. Let us therefore set the legend aside; and let's try to explain with the greatest possible clarity. If you ask me what my religion is, I tell you in all sincerity that I feel, and therefore I believe I am not only Christian, but Catholic.
II.
I told you why I am a Christian. The Christian religion is the religion of the spirit, by which God is spirit; but He is spirit inasmuch as man is spirit; and in the reality of the spirit God and man are two and they are one: so that man is truly man only in his unity with God: divine thought and divine will. And God for his part is true God insofar as he is one with man, who completes His essence: God incarnate was made man and was crucified.
Why Catholic? Because religion is church; like any spiritual activity (scientific, philosophical, artistic, practical) it is universal, proper to a subject that expands to infinity: unlimited community, in which my God is God if He is God of all.
The error of the Reformation, as our Renaissance thinkers quite clearly saw, was that of wanting to turn religion into a private affair of that imaginary individual, who is not a man, a spirit, but a simple puppet of man placed in the spatiality and temporality of nature.
So much so that every Christian, who wants to be a pure Christian, is led by the very nature of the spirit to become proselytes, to form sects, to create a church: that is to say, everyone tries to be Catholic in his own way. Catholic means a church which, like any society, has an order and an authority that asserts itself: let's say a pope. A pope, an authority that approves or condemns; and a system from which it derives its operative norm and value.
It will be said: "But this definition purely and simply is not historical Catholicism, the Catholicism of the Catholic Church: it will be your version of Catholicism."
An old objection, which all the great Catholics have had to reckon with at all times. Those men, being great with that originality which is the mark of greatness, have always been—willingly and sometimes unwillingly—reformers; and in their attempts at reform they have impacted the disciplinary and ideal structure of the Church, which was always met with opposition by the conservative forces who reacted. It is a history which constantly repeats itself; it is the history of the Catholic Church itself.
And what was always the response of the reformers? The most effective one was that given by one of the greatest reformers that the Church has ever had in Italy: Gioberti. [...] Skepticism? Protagorism? No. Gioberti was not a sophist; and if he sinned in some parts of his philosophizing, his sin was certainly not that of skepticism.
[...]
Just as no one would contest my right to call myself an idealist because my idealism is my idealism and not everyone's idealism (which has never existed and never will exist), so I also have the right to call myself a Catholic of a Catholicism that is, will be and can not be anything other than my Catholicism.
[...]
...thus it can be said that true Catholicism is that which historically takes the form of a system of institutes and dogmas, but it is also true that institutes and dogmas do not objectively exist and operate outside the mind and soul of the believer; they are accepted and understood in the interior homine in the way that is possible for everyone to understand them: freely, with their own mind.
One can distinguish between nature and grace for all eternity: but a margin of freedom will always remain in human nature; a margin by which man can be redeemed by grace and an animal can not, much less a stone. Thus the institutes and dogmas and the whole actual Church have a history, which will always be human, although assisted by a superior divine inspiration; indeed they have it precisely because it was assisted by divine inspiration.
The dogmas of the Church are and cannot be anything other than my dogmas; and, in general, the Church to which I ascribe cannot be anything other than my Church: and obedience or rebellion, conformism or non-conformism, have a meaning only in relation, not to my Church, but to a Church that is not the true Church...
[...]
Historically the Church, in order defend its discipline and its unity and therefore its existence, has, through its central organs, endeavored at all times to repress and annihilate this subjectivism eternally swarming from the depths of the spirits which it wanted to contain in its sphere. And how could the Church do otherwise. It did what was right, since the Church is necessary; it is, as is said, a divine institution, and can exist only on the condition of remaining a single, united Church.
But this does not mean that dissensions were not necessary, as well as rebellions and struggles, without which the Church would be stagnated in a dead sea, deprived of that spirit that gives it life, and therefore development, and therefore effective power, which is vitality.
And the divine inspiration of the religious spirit is precisely that which ends up making us see the soul fraternally linked to us in the sublime aspiration for truth, even through that grim look with which the enemy seems to stare at us. Hence the forgiveness and love of one's neighbor, which really makes us feel that "we are brothers, we are bound together", which is the greatest teaching of Christianity.
Which, it must be acknowledged, has never died out nor dried up through the events of the Roman Church...
[...]
What the Catholic Church wants to teach is worthy, in all its demands, of being welcomed by every high Christian spirit aware of the revolution brought about in the thought and life of man by the Gospel as a discovery of the life of the spirit.
[...]
Certainly I do not think I have betrayed the first religious teaching that was given to me by my mother (whose voice I still and always will hear within me), although perhaps today she would find me to be a very changed person. Changed, of course, on the inside, just as I have changed on the outside...
III.
At the beginning of this century, when I was teaching in Palermo, there was an excellent seminary, very cared for by the archbishop, Cardinal Lualdi, a person of fine intelligence and a high soul; and there was at the University a school of philosophy, to which numerous groups of clerics flocked.
And in the air was the smell of battle; souls were restless; and in the streets groups of young people and professors became heated in very lively discussions. Inquietum cor meum. And the youth anxiously searched for a faith.
The very restless heart of a good seminarian, who, no longer knowing how to endure the torment of doubts on which he was assailed concerning not a few articles of faith, asked the archbishop for comfort, tearfully making a vast and candid confession to him of the painful crisis he was going through, and imploring him to answer the most pressing questions that besieged him.
And the intelligent prelate did not scold him, nor did he have words of reproach that might have more than upset that agitated conscience or sound in any way like a condemnation or request of difficult consents. He preferred the language of paternal affection by asking him: "But tell me, dear son, do you believe in God?" The young man immediately answered yes: "Well", he added, "that is enough. Have courage and trust that He will provide you with the rest, which will help you overcome every doubt and regain lost peace."
That anecdote was joyfully reported to me by Don Onofrio Trippodo, an unforgettable friend during those years in Palermo, to whom my thought now returns with a sense of heartfelt nostalgia: he was a teacher in the seminary, but a student at the University and in continuous communion with the youth and with the teachers.
An assiduous reader of the modernist writers of the time, he was in correspondence with Laberthonnière and I believe also Professor Blondel; he was sincerely open to that vivifying breath of Catholic thought and to those modern philosophers which inspired modernism; but he was so wise and moderate and above all so absorbed in the divine, with a flame of faith that stood out in his eyes, that he earned the respect and love of the ecclesiastical authorities themselves.
Good and holy Don Trippodo, daily confidant of all my thoughts, teacher of religion to my children, what ardor in your soul, how it vibrated in your words and in your whole person! What power of love and sparking of life was in your happy and lethargic smile! What inner appeal in the sound of your voice, which interrogated me without pause but also without indiscretion, and forced me to think! To think with you, to think without preconceptions and without vain doubts, with confidence, with sincerity, with infinite desire for light and truth.
Your voice has still not faded from my heart; and in re-hearing it I wonder if I am worthy of you. You knew and recognized my Christianity and my Catholicism and you used to defend me against malevolent or corrective judges; because of your affectionate esteem, because of your fraternal company... you put so much faith and certainty in my heart.
After my departure from Palermo, he wanted to be a professor of Christian History at the University. And for ten years he taught a crowd of pupils with the joy of a soul that expands amidst its neighbor in the highest form of thought addressed to God.
But when he died in 1932, he had published none of his thoughts; and I think he left almost nothing written. Like Socrates, he preferred spoken discourses to writings: he preferred men to books; although he bought or procured many books and magazines any chance he could and always read them passionately: still more he loved to converse, to interrogate, to scrutinize like the ancient Athenian, and to turn towards his fellow souls, and live in the lively dialectic of spirits.
But his words, although not written, remain and are immortal; they live in those who were familiar with him and who propogate his spirit: a good seed that renews life forever, even better than books.
How pleased Don Trippodo was with the few wise words marked by love which had been given by the archbishop to the young, lost and anxious seminarian!
And, indeed, faith in God is the substance of religion: And, indeed, faith in God is the substance of religion which, like everything that has spiritual value, is nothing definite and concluded, a system, a complex of ideas or revealed facts; that which is called a given. It is a seed that matures, sprouts and develops in minds which are well disposed, prone to meditation and open to love. And the dogmas or are generated by faith fertilized by love, and then they are living and vital things; or else they are thrown about like empty formulas: lifeless words, faces of Pharisees, whited sepulchres.
IV.
I agree therefore that the most religious religion is the Christian one; that this, like any other religion, cannot but be a church, and catholic (universal).
I also agree that the Church, as the positive life of religion, is history, and hence dogmas.
I agree that dogmas define the truth or content of religion, as negatives rather than positives: negation or condemnation of errors, from which the truth must be distinct and preserved, rather than positive determination of the essence of the Divine.
[...]
Hence the nature of the relationship between the individual, who is a member of the Church, and the authority to which he must submit because the Church rests in the concreteness of its dogmas...
But is there still any need to illustrate the dialectic of this relationship between authority and freedom? Do we still need to make it clear that there is no authority that is not freely recognized? That is to say, that authority is indeed a limitation of freedom, but an internal limit and not an external one...? A limitation which the free activity of the believer himself subjects himself with by own freedom of choice?
[...]
And the shepherds of the Church, illuminated by that light which warms the hearts, opens the eyes and the intelligence and therefore avoid the vain attempts of sterile and provocative violence, they know that authority is exercised better with love than with force; and rather than the severe and dark intolerance of a Bellarmine, they prefer as much more effective and a more Christian example the humane and cheerful love of a Philip Neri, indulgent and thoughtful in the conviction that the sin of others is also our sin and that a saint is a holy if he does close himself selfishly and proudly in his holiness, but descends with his love upon the weak, and supports them and lifts them up with him in the hard work of goodness.
The adult must be like a child: "sinite parvulos venire ad me".
[...]
Love unites the adult with the child that must become an adult. And love, on the other hand, not hatred, must inspire the inferior towards the superior who, historically constituted as the end of the relationship of which he is another term, is not our enemy except in the first aspect, and must be known; and therefore we must meet him with sympathy and trust, certain that he is a man like us...
[...]
V.
Can there be a religion of the spirit without love and solidarity?
And what is spirit if not love, and therefore solidarity or that universality which is unity of all?
Christianity is imbued with this concept of unity, not of the cosmos or of nature, but of the spirit. Which is not multiple reality. Because multiplicity with the reciprocal negativity of its elements is a mechanism, or matter, although it is baptized.
When in fact we begin to recognize our spiritual reality, which is the only one knowable for us, since monads have no windows, all reality is spirit, as we experience it through the development of our own inner reality.
There are things in front of us: but, when questioned, they answer us.
[...]
They respond to us and participate in our feelings...
[...]
And then, besides things, there are our fellow men, other men. Similar at first in appearance; but only if we look at them with sympathy, and behold their smile which manifests to us a very deep similarity. The soul shines from the face. And already the face replied to us with a language that is the form of our secret thought. Here we truly are in our world: the spirit.
The object in which our feeling and thinking were affixed, the more we feel and think and the more we speak and understand; and his word gradually sounds in our ears like the word that flows from our chest: the same word, the same soul.
[...]
This divine being whose immediate presence in the depths of our conscience constitutes the ineffable human feeling of God, the supreme certainty in which is the root of every certainty; this divine being annihilates and exalts us, makes us bend our knees and bend our foreheads in the dust but it infuses us with the strength to raise our eyes to heaven, and makes us feel in our hearts that superior grace, that powerful inspiration from which man is from time time transcendent in the eternal.
[...]
Here is the origin and essence of religion.
But religion does not stop at this initial and negative moment. The object is placed and rises before man so that man may realize himself in his inner being of self-consciousness...
[...]
God humanizes himself; and man in dialogue and in communion with God (spirit, person), ascertains that he as a man is nothing immediate, but thinks, wants, loves and, in short, is eternally realized in the living actuality of the synthesis of the divine and human.
Man would not recognize himself in a God who was not a spirit and a person; and through his objectivity, closed and refractory to every human interpenetration, he could not carry out that self-consciousness in which he also consists.
To say man is therefore to say God; and to say God is to say man; that man that every son of Eve always is and never is: that ideal that he finds in himself as the one who has freedom, that is, the possibility of moving in the infinite, and therefore thinking according to truth and acting by observing his duty and therefore to participate in the world of eternal values; but he finds it—this ideal—in himself as a term that infinitely transcends what he finds himself to be whenever he returns to consider what he is, what he has said, done, thought.
[...]
VI.
I hope that among my listeners nobody thinks to accuse me of humanizing God, or deifying man, thereby reducing to one the two essential terms of the relationship.
And even more so I hope that no one thinks of attributing to me the insane claim of man as the creator of God, as the fearful fetish worshipers often like to impute; for, unfortunately, in the bosom of the Catholic Church there are some who ascend the pulpits and horrify the frightened souls with unlikely stories of actualism.
These fears and misunderstandings derive from the un-Christianly separation of what God has joined together: God himself and man, making them two opposite sides of a single street, in which one will never be able to meet without a miracle....
Man and God are certainly distinct; but they are not separate except as abstract terms from the living reality which is synthesis.
Synthesis of God who becomes man, and man who by grace adapts to God, doing his divine will ("fiat voluntas tua!").
Without that unity which is the reason for this synthesis, there is no Christianity, no religion of the spirit; which, to reduce it to a formula, is duality, but a duality which is unity.
Divorce or antagonism, which purports to save, is worse than paganism; because even the pagan believed, and therefore trusted, hoping for a reconciliation of the natural and the supernatural, of man with God.
The man who discovers God in himself, and in a certain way thus creates him, is not the natural man, but the man who is spirit, already entered into the kingdom of the spirit, where he is man but is also God. Which therefore comes to be created not by man, but rather by himself. And the God who is humanized is Christ; and those who, through his grace, share in his divine nature.
How is it possible for intelligent Christians to be scandalized? I believe that Christianity requires intelligence; it requires, like all that is human, a spirit that revives words, not words that kill the spirit.
[...]
Indeed, I too have always spoken of the unknown and of mystery, as the domain of religious faith; and I affirmed that religion begins where the critical process of reason that investigates and discovers the truth stops.
To define it, God is the abstract object; which, abstract from the subject, is the Whole, next to which the subject no longer remains. God everything, and man nothing: this is the motto of the mystic, the most logically religious spirit.
[...]
And I have said many times that even the mystic, despite his fierce desire to annihilate himself, adores God. He kneels, humiliates himself, but raises the altars, builds temples and enriches them with the cheerful fantasies of art, in which the exuberant wealth of his misunderstood subjectivity pours forth and triumphs for the benefit of the believer's mysticism itself.
And yet I have warned that in practice the act of the spirit will never be neither pure art nor pure religion, and that the only religion that exists is the one celebrated in the actual life of the spirit, where all its vigor is explained in the synthesis of thought.
Therefore religion is nurtured and cultivated in intelligence, outside of which it evaporates and vanishes into an elusive phantom.
The mutual exclusion of opposites is a tendency to limit, the achievement of which would be the fall of both opposites.
Religion grows, expands, consolidates and lives within philosophy, which incessantly elaborates the immediate content of religion and places it in the life of history.
Because religion stricto iure has no history.
History contaminates it with its development, which removes it from the immediacy in which religious sentiment jealously arises as a rigid truth, whose alteration is falsification, a work of man and not of God. Which is the reason why, since its origin, the historiography of religion has been held in suspicion as the source and germ of heterodox and heretical doctrines.
[...]
VII.
And here my speech can come to end. If for no other reason, for the sake of discretion.
But in truth it resembles the Palazzo Nonfinito—the "Unfinished Palace"—which is located here in Florence on Via del Proconsolo. Unfinished, but still beautiful; and inside there are so many things to behold.
I know that many things still remain to be clarified, so many doubts remain to be eliminated, so many problems remain to be solved.
But I do not pretend that my listeners can, thanks to me, climb up to the top of the mountain, illuminated by the sun; nor do I claim to have reached the summit...
I feel the light of the summit, but the peak still remains to be conquered.
And I cannot promise myself or others anything more than the effort of climbing...and if in departing from you I cannot presume to leave you fully satisfied, at least I have made you think! My goal has been reached.
