LAMBRUSCHINI, RAFFAELLO. — Religious thinker and educational theorist, b. in Genoa on 14 Aug. 1788, d. at Figline Valdarno on 8 March 1873. He studied in Genoa and Rome; received sacred orders at Orvieto; when Napoleon suppressed that diocese, he secretly administered it from 1810 to 1812 as vicar general; discovered, he was deported to Corsica; in 1815 he was in Rome as a Congregation official; dissatisfied with that career, in 1816 he withdrew to his paternal estates at S. Cerbone (Figline), reflecting, writing, and devoting himself to the theory and organization of education. In 1860 he was appointed senator.
L. is among the most representative figures of Tuscan liberalism: a convinced proponent of a new Christian reform wholly directed toward the inner renewal of consciences, he felt the need not to mix politics and religion and hence the necessity of separating the temporal from the spiritual (in 1848 he opposed the declaration of Catholicism as the state religion in the new Tuscan constitution); he was opposed to temporal power (at certain moments he was a determined supporter of the secularization of offices in the Papal States: spiritual authority, he wrote in the newspaper La Patria on 16 Feb. 1848, «will return to its former splendor if a power that most often sullies the hands, or at least makes them appear sullied, is left to be handled by lay hands»). The theory of separation between Church and State is nevertheless not as unequivocal in L. as in a Vinet, because L. presents his separation as open to specific alliances between the two powers.
On the religious level, in his youth he had doubts about the necessity of the papacy, but later declared it «the marrow of the full truth of God and of his wise charity» (cf. correspondence, II, p. 246); he was not favorable to Protestantism as such, but asserted that Protestantism possesses a portion of truth in upholding the principle of liberty rejected by Catholicism: liberty alone is for L. a fatal principle, because religious authority is also necessary, founded above all on tradition and the clergy. L. has rightly been defined as a neo-Enlightenment thinker, because for him Revelation must pass through the filter of reason. The laws of nature are immutable: God has caused only certain phenomena to appear that human ignorance regards as contrary to the laws of nature (an assertion by L. that is nevertheless contradicted elsewhere); the miracles of the Gospel, too, are for L. to be entrusted to «criticism» and «individual faith». L. supports the theory of the negativity of dogmatic definitions: «definitions — he writes (ibid., pp. 123–24) — are not “an explanation of the Mystery but a negation of heretical explanations”»; for Catholic unity it suffices «to accept dogmas in their indeterminate obscurity, as an exercise of faith, not as an object of cognition, and to reject heresies». For L. there are only two properly so-called dogmas, the essence of God and the remuneration of the external life; in the other dogmas there may be no intrinsic truth (thus he wrote in 1832, but in 1835 he instead asserted that the essence is true). For L., sacramental efficacy is not inherent in the rite. L. polemicized against those who are not content to adore and contemplate the mystery and wish to explain it (Dell'autorità e della libertà. Pensieri d'un solitario, edited by A. Gambaro, Florence 1932, p. 120), but his is probably not a mystical position, but rather the position of the extreme defense of «reason», which on a discursive level cannot accept what repels II. In this sense L. is truly a precursor of Italian modernism.
