L'Armonia della Religione con la Civiltà
Catholic battle journal, founded in Turin in 1848. De facto director was the priest Giacomo Margotti; the paper began publication on 4 July, twice weekly at first, then three times. Among its faithful collaborators were Marquis Fabio Invera, Gustavo di Cavour, Rosmini, and the future cardinal Gaetano Alimonda. Under the intransigent safeguarding of the other principles and the temporal rights of the papacy and the Church, it soon imposed itself as the most respected—and, by its adversaries, feared—clerical organ of the peninsula. It addressed all the major religious and political issues of the time, from laws on religious corporations to the wars of independence, from discussions on the inamovibility of bishops to the Eastern Question, from the Congress of Paris to civil marriage, from the abolition of ecclesiastical jurisdiction to annexations and the proclamation of the Kingdom, covering the entire anti-ecclesiastical and anti-curial policy of Cavour. Enriched in 1850 with supplements, news, and excellent weekly reviews of the press, in 1852 it changed its publication days, also introducing a Sunday supplement, followed the next year by issues exclusively devoted to the dissemination of contemporary documents. In 1855 it finally became a daily paper with a new program, and from 1856 it published the *Effemeridi libertine*, to keep alive the memory of the secularizing reforming work of liberalism in Piedmont. Suspended indefinitely by Cavour in 1859 and temporarily replaced by another paper, it reappeared in 1860 with an ever more temporalist hue and increasingly reactionary tendencies; but it slowly and decisively declined, especially when, three years later, at the suggestion of Pius IX, Margotti launched *L'Unità Cattolica* in Florence, where the *Armonia* itself moved on 4 December 1866, ceasing publication shortly thereafter.
Preestablished Harmony
It is a central doctrine—or hypothesis—of Leibniz, which, although having various historical roots (Pythagorean harmony, Platonic mimesis of ideas in things, the scholastic doctrine of analogy, the problem of predestination in 17th-century theology, etc.), is specifically grounded on the platform of Cartesian philosophy. Descartes, in fact, with his dualism of *res cogitans* and *res extensa*, had split the substantial unity of man into two complete substances, soul and body, each with its own attributes and laws perfectly heterogeneous. Thus, mutual influence between them became impossible, and the problem arose of rationally explaining their relationship, which experience nonetheless attests. Working from this Cartesian basis, Malebranche had appealed to the causality of God, operating in bodies and spirits *ad occasionem* of certain modifications (*occasionalism*, q.v.); while Spinoza had concluded in the pantheistic monism of a single substance, expressing itself and conceivable through different attributes, whose modifications correspond in parallel series (*parallelism* of the modes of extension and thought). Leibniz’s speculation introduces critical corrections and original contributions. He criticizes Descartes, radicalizing his demands with the observation that the soul cannot only not increase the quantity of motion in bodies but cannot even alter its direction; he integrates Descartes by transcending mechanism and rationalism through the vindication of the unity and finality of the organic body and by expanding the intellectualistic *mens* into an *anima* also endowed with subordination. He criticizes Malebranche, noting that this recourse, case by case, to the direct intervention of God postulates more or less a continuous miracle. Against Spinoza, he asserts the indestructible existence of a pluralism of active or conscious centers, i.e., of substantial and microcosmic monads. Yet unshaken remains the conviction (*metaphysical* and methodological) that mutual influence between monads or between mechanical laws and vital and spiritual laws is impossible. Thus, to explain the *consensus* or *correspondence* between body and soul and between monad and monad, there remains only the hypothesis of preestablished harmony: God, that is, has so arranged from the beginning, once and for all, the elements and the nexus of the existing world that every monad, in every moment of its independent and spontaneous development, agrees with the contemporary state of the universe (one may recall the parable of the clocks, a bit mechanical, but precisely for that reason significant).
It is easy to imagine the discussions this doctrine provoked: debates that continued in various ways for more than thirty years among philosophers and theologians. The main difficulty raised against it stemmed from the concern to preserve the freedom of the human will, which, from this perspective, seemed commanded by a rigorous yet refined rationalistic mentality. Soon, however, after the mid-18th century, accusations, defenses, and attempts at compromise and reconciliation by epigones gave way to a transfiguration of the problem, due to the resolution of Leibnizian rationalism into idealism. In Kant and the great systematic idealists (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), with the subjectivization of the corporeal world and the absorption of monadic selves into the transcendental Ego, the very terms of preestablished harmony were emptied and lost—though the problems of harmony reappeared to fertilize transcendental idealist subjectivity and almost to overcome certain deadlocks (especially in Kant’s *Critique of Judgment* and in Schelling).