GIOBERTI, VINCENZO

VINCENZO GIOBERTI. — He is the most representative figure of that Catholic liberalism which accompanied our Risorgimento with the intention—combative and doctrinally refined—of leveraging the religious tradition of the Italians for the redemption of their moral conscience and, consequently, for their political redemption and the unification of the fatherland.

Born in Turin on 5 April 1801 to Giuseppe and Marianna Cepra, Gioberti was soon orphaned of his father and entrusted by his mother to the care of the Fathers of the Oratory of St Philip for his education, being directed towards the priestly state. He was ordained in 1825 and in the same year was appointed as an aggregated doctor of the Theological College of the Turin Athenaeum; the following year he was promoted to court chaplain.

From childhood an avid reader, he absorbed all the cultural influences of the age and left evidence of his fervour and youthful restlessness in many manuscripts, some of which were published after his death. His spiritual itinerary in his youth can be summarised as a passage from a phase of doubt to a fideistic and traditionalist period, and from traditionalism, through a pressing rationalistic exigency, to deism and pantheism. A letter to Mazzini, published in 1834 in fascicle VI of *La giovane Italia* under the title *Della repubblica e del cristianesimo* and the pseudonym Denoffio, reflects, alongside his ideas for social and political reform, the final phase of Gioberti’s thought before his exile. He was never enrolled in *Giovine Italia*, but belonged to a secret and political society—probably of Carbonarist inspiration. Compromised also by his open profession of liberal ideas, after being dismissed from his court office, he was arrested in May 1833 and held in prison until September of the same year, when Charles Albert, unable to extract from the trial sufficient grounds for a conviction, ordered his release and simultaneous banishment to the borders of the Royal States.

Exiled in Paris from October 1833 to December 1834, Gioberti was able, through personal acquaintance with men and institutions, to observe directly the consequences of some of the more advanced ideas with which he had departed from Italy. The fruit of this experience was the repudiation of deism, together with an ever more decisive aversion to Mazzini’s revolutionary methods and to the politico-religious ideas of Lamennais, to whom he had felt close in the pre-exile period. Thus, when in December 1834 he moved to Brussels to the *Istituto Gaggia*, where he would remain until July 1845 as a teacher of philosophy and history, he developed through indefatigable study and intense reflection a new orientation of thought that found expression in the various works published during this period: *Teorica del sovrannaturale* (Brussels 1838); *Introduzione allo studio della filosofia* (ibid. 1840); *Considerazioni sulle dottrine religiose di V. Cousin* (ibid. 1840); *Lettre sur les doctrines philosophiques et politiques de M. De Lamennais* (ibid. 1841); *Del bello* (Venice 1841); *Degli errori filosofici di Antonio Rosmini* (3 vols., Brussels 1841–44); *Del buono* (ibid. 1843); *Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani* (2 vols., ibid. 1843).

In *Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani* (1843), Gioberti set forth his political programme: the moral and civil primacy of Italy, to be achieved through a federation of the existing political entities on the peninsula. Above all, he looked to Rome and Turin, respectively the spiritual centre and the military and political centre of the peninsula: “if it be true that ideas and arms together move the world, from Rome and from Turin the destinies of Italy hang in unison” (ibid., p. 118). The advent of Italian political unity is hastened as a mature personality won by popular consciousness, by drawing the principalities around the living and personal centre of the Roman pontificate, which is “the civil and perpetual conscience of Italy” (ibid., p. 398), “the sovereign guarantee of rights, the living constitution of each people in particular and the pivot of their civil and fraternal alliance” (ibid., p. 211). In Rome, the Italic league would find the peaceful arbiter that coordinates interests and resolves disputes within a sphere of higher spirituality. Moreover, since Italy is “the ideal space of the European republic” (ibid., p. 582), and nothing is properly Italian that is not worthy of being given to the world, one might hope for the advent of a moral and civil confederation of nations, as they enter into the orbit of brotherhood and spiritual paternity established by Christianity. Here the “prophecy” of the *Primato* goes beyond the fortunes of the Italian Risorgimento: the utopia of peace cannot be effected by means of a European congress unless this is bound to a living and permanent centre” (ibid., p. 589). The union of men is not founded on protocols or armies: it is a permanent congress of nations, according to the *Primato*, a chimera unless coupled with the idea of arbitration, which in turn, to avoid becoming an abstraction, must be embodied in the Pope.

The accession of Pius IX to the pontificate and his initial liberal reforms seemed to realise the ideal that the exile had agitated before the conscience of Italians. The names of Pius IX and Gioberti were linked in the enthusiasm of our first *Risorgimento*, and under the great inspiring aegis the campaign of liberation was begun. When the exile returned to Italy in May 1848, he was greeted by a triumph that marked the height of what Solmi would call his “hegemony” over Italians. Yet already, with the allocution of April, Pius IX had indicated the limits of his participation in the national cause; already the Piedmontese arms had suffered the setback of Custozza. In these difficult moments Gioberti had to assume responsibility for power, first as President of the Chamber, then as Minister without Portfolio in the Casati cabinet (29 July–9 August 1848), and finally, after the Armistice of Salasco and the Sostegno-Perrone ministry, as President of the Council of Ministers (13 December 1848–19 February 1849). In this position of highest responsibility he pursued his inflexible idea: union with a view to unity, union of the states of the peninsula and union of the parties. But to be above the parties, it was still necessary to take sides: drawing closer to the left, he had to let the right slip away. And he lost the *Società nazionale per la confederazione italiana*, which he had founded to unite the forces of governments and peoples; he lost it because it degenerated into the Tuscan Constituent of Montanelli, whose extremism served rather to divide forces further than to unite them. Because of the opposition of those whom he called the “municipalists”—men tied to the particularist politics of Piedmont—he also missed the chance to realise the projected Piedmontese intervention in Tuscany and Rome, to forestall the foreseeable foreign intervention in favour of the deposed princes. He was forced to leave government a month before Novara.

As Minister without Portfolio in the de Launay government, extraordinary envoy and plenipotentiary minister to Paris, in May 1849 Gioberti resigned these offices and retired into private life, resuming the figure of the embittered exile who looks with disdain—not at the fatherland—but at the men in the fatherland who had opposed the execution of his political design. The solitary retirement of his final years bore fruit in the great political work *Del rinnovamento civile d’Italia* (Paris-Turin 1851), which might be called his second *Primato*, because in it Gioberti intended to vindicate the continuity and rectitude of the line that he had consistently pursued.

It brings together the various moments of his earlier political activity and, extending beyond the present, marks the direction to be followed in the future. It allowed Massari to collect some of his writings and speeches in the volume *Operette politiche* (Capolago-Turin 1851) and gave a regrettable sequel to the recriminations aroused by *Il rinnovamento* with various pamphlets of bitter personal polemics. Philosophy owes to this period the *Discorso preliminare* to the 2nd edition of the *Teorica del sovranaturale* (ibid. 1850): a discourse aimed at demonstrating the consistency maintained in all his philosophical writings, just as *Il rinnovamento* was aimed at demonstrating the consistency of his political activity. To this period is also largely due that body of manuscripts, mostly in fragmentary and draft form, from which Massari would later compile the posthumous works *Protologia* (Turin-Paris 1857), *Filosofia della Rivelazione* (ibid. 1856), and *Della riforma cattolica della Chiesa* (ibid. 1856). Of the latter, Balsamo-Crivelli would later produce a more accurate and complete edition under the title *I frammenti di Della riforma cattolica e di Della libertà cattolica* (Florence 1924). Among the posthumous works, *Protologia* (first science) holds particular importance: the work whose idea G. had conceived even before writing the *Introduzione* and which he carried in his soul throughout his life, never managing to bring it to completion, not even during the brief solitude of his second exile. Amid anticapitalist visions of the future destiny of his homeland and palingenetic dreams about humanity’s destiny before God, the exile was struck by sudden death in his little room in Paris on the night between 25 and 26 October 1852.

As for G.’s political activity, criticism almost unanimously recognizes the essential contribution he made to the cause of the Risorgimento, both for the inspired first message with which he infused the nation’s most intimate spiritual forces with a sense of national orbit, and for having tempered the ardors of the revolutionary current with a moderate and realistic program, and finally for the “prophecies” of *Il rinnovamento*, which guided the politicians of Piedmont—especially Cavour—in the subsequent developments of national policy during the decade of preparation and beyond.

Judgment is far less unanimous regarding the “consistency” and “gradualism” that he claimed to have maintained in transitioning from one phase to another in his ideological campaign and militant politics. Some, like Onodoro (*V. G. e la sua evoluzione politica*, Turin 1941), describe the spiritual process of the exile as a rapid succession of contradictions—whether unconscious or deliberate and calculated. Others, like Croce (*Discorsi di varia filosofia*, I, Bari 1945, pp. 95–96), argue that he too often resorted to expedient compromises that ultimately slipped from his grasp. From the initial enthusiasm stirred by *Il Primo*, Catholics moved to distrust and hostility when the rigorous dialectic of that work—which sought to reconcile all forces toward a common cause—gave way to an antagonistic need to exclude what he called “the exclusivism of the exclusivists,” launching an intemperate campaign against the Jesuits. The five weighty volumes of *Il gesuita moderno*, which sold fourteen thousand copies across the peninsula, fueled popular uprisings in Turin, Genoa, and Cagliari against the Jesuits, and it is certain that the exile’s persuasion contributed to the expulsions of the Jesuits from Sardinia, Genoa, and that decreed on 2 March 1848 in Turin. The jurisdictional politics G. attempted or advocated in his writings so decisively limited the Church’s rights in favor of the State that it was difficult to see the Turinese statesman reconciling the role of Catholic priest with that of statesman. Despite all this, which explains the aversions and condemnations, it must be acknowledged that there is no glaring contradiction between the Guelfism of *Il Primo* and the liberalism of *Il rinnovamento*, as some have claimed. There is nothing illiberal in the Guelfism of *Il Primo*, nothing that suggests hierocracy or theocracy, if the essence of G.’s Guelfism lies in affirming the decisive influence that the religious factor and inspiration should have for Italians in their political redemption. Conversely, there is nothing secular in the liberalism of *Il rinnovamento*, where—after the refutation of events—he renounced temporal power and papal guidance, entrusting the political direction of the nation to secular authorities, while assigning them the task of transferring to Rome to establish there a new Italy, reconciled in the distinction and harmony of civil and ecclesiastical powers, guardian of the values of Catholic transcendence—the only ones capable of saving Europe from the moral decay that inevitably follows the pantheistic chaos. In *Il Primo* and *Il rinnovamento*, the idea of the State is indeed identified with the ideal of the nation, and the State is the expression of the highest moral awareness achieved by the aristocracy of intellect capable of governing public affairs and educating the people. Yet even in G.’s final political works, there is nothing that suggests Hegel’s “ethical State” or a terrestrial conclusion to human destiny. In the consciousness of those capable and worthy of governing it, the State is always confronted with the actual infinite, personally determined in its absoluteness—that is, with God, who judges history and judges states. Without this, any possibility of a morally regulated civil society would be lost, if earthly life were abandoned to the potential infinite—that is, to the passage of time in the successive moments of humanity’s finitude. The Catholic idea, personified in the magisterium of Rome, continues to be, in *Il rinnovamento*, the inspirer in the immense task of human redemption.

G.’s philosophical ideology did not escape criticism and censure any less harsh than those that accompanied his political activity. Some initial support within religious circles greeted the *Introduzione allo studio della filosofia*, and even an ontological streak persisted in the Jesuit schools of Sicily under the influence of the Giobertian Father Giuseppe Romano, professor of philosophy at the Collegio Massimo in Palermo. But especially after G.’s campaign against the Order, it was natural for the Jesuits to take up arms in defense and further define the critical position they had adopted from the outset in the writings of Curci, Sordi, Liberatore, and others, issuing the severest condemnation of every aspect of G.’s activity. Chiefly imputed to him was the doctrine of intuition, which, by abolishing the intermediary of the intelligible species between the human spirit and its object, identifies man with God and, with the consequent pantheism, opens the door to rationalism: that rationalism which, skillfully concealed in G.’s early writings, would later manifest itself openly in his posthumous works with the intent of secularizing the State and reducing religion to philosophy. Everything that the Jesuits condemned was praised by those who judged G. from the opposite shore—that is, by the Hegelians, who, with Spaventa first and then Gentile and Saitta, integrated the Turin abbot’s doctrine into the developmental cycle of modern idealistic immanentism. Padovani drew on this idealistic interpretation to reinforce the condemnation from the standpoint of Catholic orthodoxy. Yet with other writings by Piccoli, Calò, Pavese, Bonomi, Palhorès, Bonafede, and Bruers, a less unfavorable attitude toward G. began to take shape in criticism, with due emphasis on all the elements of his doctrine that align with the Catholic tradition.

For a quick inventory, which allows some orientation amid the debates of criticism, it is useful

to distinguish in the philosophical activity of GIOVANNI two moments, stemming on the one hand from the *Introduzione* and on the other from the *Protologia* and the other posthumous works. The first is characterized by ontologism, the second by transcendental psychologism. An examination of the intermediate writings, in the chronological succession indicated, would make it possible to establish the continuity and progression between the two moments.

In the initial phase, almost as a corrective to the young man’s “pantheistic and deistic” error, GIOVANNI was entirely preoccupied with the exigency of safeguarding the “externality” or, as it may be said, the transcendence of the object of the intelligence over the act of understanding. All the errors of modern thought, in his view, reduce to psychologism, that is, to the reduction of the object to a mode of being of the knowing subject, whether by sensism, which seeks to derive the idea from pure sensibility—that is, from an internal modification devoid of objectivity—or by Kantianism, which subjects the matter of knowledge to the subjective forms of the understanding and thus allows the thing-in-itself to slip away. Human finitude and contingency do not provide the conditions for a scientific knowledge—that is, absolute and necessary—unless man transcends the conditions proper to him and transfers into the object known what is lacking to the knowing subject. Hence, to philosophical psychologism follow all forms of hedonism, social and political sensism, arising from the loss of a universal criterion of truth and of an authoritative principle that would contain individual arbitrariness and discipline the tumultuous humors of the masses. Against psychologism stands ontologism, according to which the idea, instead of presenting itself as a subjective term of understanding, identifies itself with its absolute object, that is, with Being that, as it is understood by us insofar as it posits itself, posits itself insofar as it is understood (*Introduzione allo studio della filosofia*, I, Capolago 1845, ch. 4). The idea is the true absolute and eternal, insofar as it presents itself to human intuition. The idea cannot be demonstrated but must be admitted as a primitive truth, because it is the source of every proof and every demonstration, as it is the foundation of the entire encyclopedia of the sciences and the keystone of the entire moral and social edifice. The First Psychological and the First Philosophical identify with the First Ontological: the first idea identifies with the First Being, that is, with God (*ibid.*, pp. 148-45).

It is clear that, had GIOVANNI’s doctrine stopped at this level, it would not have avoided the pantheistic and immanentist outcome imputed to him by vigilant opponents. Indeed, human thought does not resolve itself into the passivity of intuition unless it reconstitutes itself, as absolute thought, in the intuited object. The ontologist’s immanence of the ego in God is the historical and logical antecedent of the idealist’s immanence of God in the ego. But GIOVANNI safeguards himself against the pantheistic and immanentist consequences of ontologism by specifying that the intuition of the idea is the intuition of the idea in its relations with created nature, that is, it is the intuition of the ideal formula: “Being creates the existent” (*ibid.*, p. 195). The distinction that risked being lost in the identification of the act of knowing with the object of intuition is preserved in the two terms of the judgment, in which the distinction between God and the soul, between Being and the existent, between Creator and creature reappears; and between the two terms the copula of creation exercises its unitive and disjunctive function. The concept of creation, which is thus intrinsic to the formula, becomes central to GIOVANNI’s entire ideology and enables him to distinguish heterodox systems, which have ignored it and thus fallen into immanentism and pantheism, from the orthodox system of thought preserved through the centuries by Catholic tradition. The principal difficulties of speculation in which heterodoxy remains entangled are overcome by this concept, according to an analysis that GIOVANNI deepens and develops in every direction (*ibid.*, pp. 180-85; ch. 5, pp. 47-50). The concept of creation is the presupposition of the concept of causality, inasmuch as the former is the concept of absolute causation; and thus the difficulty that Kant opposed to the possibility of demonstrating the existence of God by means of the cosmological argument—on account of the infinite regression he supposed in the series of effects and causes—is overcome. Creationism resolves the antinomy of the one and the many, inasmuch as the varied multiplicity of creatures proceeds from the absolute cause without compromising the unity of the principle. Creationism resolves the antinomy of the discrete and the continuous, inasmuch as the existent is the discrete while Being is the continuous, and creation is the conjugation of both: the continuous is in organic relation with the discrete inasmuch as it creates it and in its act conjugates II. The same may be said of the antinomy of the infinite and the finite: the infinite comprehends the finite without losing its absoluteness in finite modes and without identifying itself with the infinite, inasmuch as the infinite contains the finite by way of efficient creation and not by way of containment or modality. These are elements of doctrine that ought not to be lost to the philosophy of Christianity.

Yet, even if with the intuition of the ideal formula and the creative bond between Being and the existent GIOVANNI saves himself from the immanentist consequences of ontologism, a difficulty arises in reconciling intuition and formula, that is, in reducing a formula that is a judgment and thus mediation to an immediate apprehension. Under the stimulus of this difficulty, the transition is determined from the ontologism of the early works, through the intermediate works—especially the *Errori* and the *Prolegomeni*—to the “transcendent psychologism” of the *Protologia*. The characteristic motif of this second moment of Giobertian speculation is the preeminent function assumed by “reflection,” that is, the act by which the existent makes its own the object of intuition, elaborates it, and expresses it from itself as its own meaningful word, as the *verbum mentis* (*Protologia*, I, Torino-Paris 1858, pp. 153, 183, 253). Even in the early works reflection was not absent alongside intuition, but it appeared merely as a secondary intuition, a reflection of intuition, which did not directly engage the activity of the knowing subject. Now, however, primacy is assigned to reflection, and intuition loses the character of actual knowledge, of immediate vision of the object, and becomes potential, virtual thought, a “possibility of knowledge” that reflection must develop and actualize (*ibid.*, pp. 138-39, 141-42, 263; *Il rinnovamento civile d’Italia*, III, Bari 1912, pp. 4-6). Although it is always God, present to human mentality by his creative act, who determines in us the possibility of knowing him, it is for human reflection to put into action the means to recognize him. Hence God is no longer an axiom but a theorem: no longer the object of intuition but of rational demonstration (*Discorso preliminare alla Teorica del sovrannaturale*, I, Capolago and Torino 1850, p. 223; *Protologia*, I, p. 291; II, p. 42). Bare intuition, without the aid of reflective cognition, is excluded from both language and science. This dominant motif of the *Protologia* makes clear how the ontologist traces that persist there are meant to be corrected by the accentuation of the active powers of the subject, so that the distinction between the knower and the known is further marked and thus the transcendence of the divine is reaffirmed, in accordance with the purpose declared by GIOVANNI in naming this second phase of his doctrine “transcendent psychologism” and not “transcendental psychologism,” in contrast to the variation improperly introduced by idealist criticism.

Within the orbit of the dominant theme, the disordered and fragmentary pages of the *Protologia* accumulate motifs of rare speculative depth, to which only a series of statements can here be devoted: the distinction between the infinite actuality proper to God and the potential infinity or indefinite finitude that is its projection and image on the plane of created nature (*Protologia*, I, pp. 185–89, 239–42, 327–33, 343; II, pp. 319–20); the denunciation of the Hegelian error of confusing the indefinite process of human mentality with the infinite actuality that human mentality can signify by referring it to God, though never attain as its own condition (*ibid.*, I, pp. 455, 466); the universal dialecticism as an ever-unfinished process of finite mentality to unite the terms of sensible experience and ideation with a view to the final synthesis, namely the absolute relation established essentially in God and participated in image through the creative act (*ibid.*, pp. 239, 244, 249, 285, 478); the contradictory or adiacuity of contradiction (*ibid.*, I, pp. 301, 487; II, pp. 133, 166, 307); evil conceived as a sophistic moral interruption of the dialectical process that links the existent to its principle (*Introduzione allo studio della filosofia*, ch. 8, ed. cit., p. 301; *Prot.*, II, pp. 318, 323, 342–43); art as the “fiction of infinity” by which the human spirit, creating its phantom, possesses and enjoys itself therein (*Del bello*, ch. 5, Venezia 1849, p. 55; *Prot.*, I, pp. 204, 345; II, p. 73); modern thought seen as a great heterodox poem, true as poetry yet false as philosophy, that is, as the product of an intellectual mythology which, instead of keeping the human act transparent in allusion to the transcendent divine, closes in upon itself to sanction the divine sufficiency of the world and of man (*Del bello*, ch. 10, p. 142; *Prot.*, I, p. 86; II, pp. 156–60); the personal conception of being in its absolute principle and in finite persons, who are destined, after earthly trial, to coexist in the palingenesian society of souls in the beatifying vision of God (*Prot.*, I, pp. 193–94, 360–61, 464; II, pp. 414, 475–76, 480, 482).

Highly commendable in G.’s genius is the demand to bind every contingent moment of practical and political reality to the supreme postulates of moral and religious order, making action and speculation advance together and involving the Italian Risorgimento in the cycle of a cosmic and metaphysical redemption. The urgency of political struggle and the brevity of life did not allow him to close his system in clear and definite doctrinal lines. In the pages of *Il Rinnovamento* he attained a vigor of expression that is sober, energetic, incisive, and worthy of literary praise. A physical infirmity, which he bore throughout his life, influenced his suspicious and irascible temperament, unstable in love and friendship. His yearning for a magnanimous universal understanding of men, ideas, and parties was in competition with an antagonistic temperament, insistent and intemperate in polemic and personal attack. Proud, eager for recognition and consensus, he scorned the vanity of honors. He asked no more for himself than what was sufficient to live, and he died in poverty, rich in the palingenesian vision that animates his final papers left in heritage to science and as a gift of hope to mankind.

All of G.’s works are on the Index (*decr. 30 May 1849; 14 Jan. 1852*).

Studies: a) on G.’s political thought: D. Berti, *Di V. politico e ministro*, Firenze 1881; E. Solmi, *Mastrocinte G.*, Milano 1913; B. Giuliano, *Il primato di un popolo: Fichte e G.*, Catania 1917; G. Maggiore, *G. e Fichte*, Milano 1918; A. Anzilotti, *G.*, Firenze 1922; id., *La funzione storica del giobertismo*, Firenze 1923; G. Gentile, *I profeti del Risorgimento italiano*, ibid. 1923; A. Bruni, *V. G.*, Torino 1937; A. Omodeo, *V. G. e la sua evoluzione politica*, ibid. 1941; b) on his philosophical thought in general: B. Spaventa, *La filosofia di G.*, Napoli 1863; G. Gentile, *Rosmini e G.*, Pisa 1868; G. Saitta, *Il pensiero di V. G.*, Messina 1917; V. Piccoli, *V. G.*, Roma 1923; U. Padovani, *V. G. e il cattolicesimo*, Milano 1927; S. Caramella, *La formazione della filosofia giobertiana*, Genova 1927; F. Palhoriès, *G.*, Paris 1929; G. Bonafede, *V. G.*, Palermo 1941; A. Bruni, *Scritti filosofici*, Bologna 1941; B. Croce, *Del G. filosofo*, in *Discorsi di varia filosofia*, Bari 1945, pp. 73–96; L. Stefanini, *G.*, Milano 1947; S. Scimè, *Il trionfo dell’ontologismo in Sicilia. G., Mille e mille*, Roma 1950, pp. 47–64; G. Bonafede, *G. e la scienza*, Palermo 1950; c) on his aesthetic thought: A. Faggi, *V. G., critico e letterato*, Palermo 1901; V. Piccoli, *L’estetica di V. G.*, Milano–Roma 1917; S. Caramella, *Lo sviluppo dell’estetica giobertiana*, in *Giornale critico della filosofia*, 2 (1921), fasc. 1–2; C. Sgroi, *L’estetica e la critica letteraria di V. G.*, Firenze 1921; C. Calcaterra, *Gli studi danteschi di V. G.*, in *Dante e il Piemonte*, Torino 1922. See also the bibliographical guide by A. Bruni, *G.*, Roma 1924.