BERZI, ANGELO. — Bergamask theologian, born at Chiuduno on 8 May 1815 and died there on 10 January 1884. He completed his studies at the seminary of Bergamo and, after being ordained a priest, taught philosophy there. A man of sincere piety and fervent intellect, he exerted a powerful influence on the seminarians, whom he initiated into a new philosophical-theological-mystical system that, as he said, was gradually maturing within him through inner impulses. The novelty of his doctrine and methods provoked violent reactions, which forced B. to travel from Bergamo to Rome, Cremona, and Brescia. Condemned by the Holy Office (7 March 1855) and suspended « a divinis » for five months, he withdrew to his family home at Chiuduno, where he spent 28 years in solitude, prayer, and tireless study, leaving approximately 80 works, all unpublished except two.
Berzism is a mystical-leaning theology, with a fundamentally gnostic tendency and an essentially monistic method. Beginning with the problem of knowledge, it concludes that reason is incapable of bridging the abyss between the finite and the infinite, as this appears in the order of cognition (the immense distance between particular sensation and the universal idea) and in the real order (the created and the uncreated), without recourse to the one bridge that unites the two extremes in itself, Jesus Christ (hence the necessity of revelation and the vanity of rationalism). The Incarnate Word is the link between the finite and the infinite, the measure of the universe, and the beginning and end of all things, because in him there is, besides the temporal aspect, an eviternal (supratemporal) aspect. Christ’s humanity, in fact, participates in eternity according to the concept of the aeon and in immensity according to the concept of heaven; yet through this participation it becomes neither eternal nor immense (attributes belonging exclusively to God), but obtains a celestial extension to all times and all places (through a certain analogy with the sacramental presence of Christ’s body in the Eucharist). By virtue of this, it is not made externally contemporary with all times, nor spread throughout all places; rather, internally (mystically, celestially, and inaccessible to the senses), it is interior, subsequent, and present to all places and all times, so that from its mystical hiding place it may at any moment burst forth into external reality and manifest itself. Thus the God-Man, as if grafted into ...