LAMBRUSCHINI, RAFFAELLO. - Religious thinker and educationist, b. in Genoa on 14 Aug. 1788, d. at Figline Valdarno on 8 March 1873. He studied in Genoa and Rome; he received holy orders at Orvieto; when that diocese was suppressed by Napoleon, he governed it secretly from 1810 to 1812 as vicar general; discovered, he was deported to Corsica; in 1815 he was in Rome as an official of a Congregation; dissatisfied with that career, in 1816 he withdrew to the family estates at S. Cerbone (Figline), meditating, writing and occupying himself with educational theory and organization. In 1860 he was appointed senator.
L. is among the most representative figures of Tuscan liberalism: a convinced champion of a new Christian reform wholly directed toward the inner renewal of consciences, he felt the need not to mix politics and religion and therefore the need to separate 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 decided supporter of the secularization of the offices of the Papal State: spiritual authority, he wrote in the newspaper La Patria on 16 Feb. 1848, «will return to its ancient splendor by letting a power that most often soils the hands, or at least makes them appear soiled, be handled by lay hands»). The theory of the separation between Church and State is in any case not as decided in L. as in a Vinet, because L. outlines his separation as open to specific alliances between the two powers.
On a religious plane, in his youth he had doubts about the necessity of the papacy, but later he 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 he affirmed that Protestantism has a part of truth in upholding the principle of liberty repudiated by Catholicism: liberty alone is for L. a fatal principle, because religious authority is also necessary, founded besides on tradition and on the clergy. L. has rightly been defined a neo-Enlightenment thinker, because for him Revelation must pass through the filter of reason. The laws of nature are immutable: God has brought about only phenomena that human ignorance deems contrary to the laws of nature (an assertion of L. that is, however, contradicted elsewhere); even the miracles of the Gospel are for L. to be entrusted to «criticism» and to «individual faith». L. is a supporter of the theory of the negativity of dogmatic definitions: «the definitions — he writes (ibid., pp. 123-24) — are not «an explanation of the Mystery but a negation of heretical explanations»; for Catholic unity it is enough «to accept the dogmas in their indeterminate obscurity, as an exercise of faith, not as an object of cognition, and to reject heresies». For L. there exist only two dogmas properly so called, the essence of God and the remuneration of the outer life; in the other dogmas there may be no intrinsic truth (thus he wrote in 1832, but in 1835 he affirmed instead that the essence is true). For L. sacramental efficacy is not intrinsic to the rite. L. polemicized against those who are not content to adore and contemplate the mystery and want to explain it (Dell'autorità e della libertà. Pensieri d'un solitario, ed. by A. Gambaro, Florence 1932, p. 120), but his is probably not a mystical position, but rather the position of an extreme defense of «reason», which on a discursive plane cannot accept what is repugnant to it. In this sense L. is truly a forerunner of Italian modernism.
Bibliography7 works
Massimo Petrocchi
THE PEDAGOGIST
In the field of pedagogy L. was able to acquire notable worth through his rich educational experience, which impelled him to start periodicals and to compose particular works, where, along with some shadows, even serious ones, there are found maxims, counsels and vigorous and effective ideas. To him is owed the first pedagogical periodical to arise in Italy: Guida dell'educatore, which he founded and directed from 1836 to 1845, flanking it with Letture per i fanciulli and Lettere per la gioventù. There followed, then, La famiglia e la scuola (1859-61) and La gioventù (1862-69). Works that are always useful are: Dell'educazione (Florence 1849), Della istruzione elementare e di secondo grado (ibid. 1850), Della istruzione (ibid. 1881, new ed. edited by G. Calò, ibid. 1923), Delle virtù e dei vizi (Milan 1873), Primi scritti religiosi (edited by A. Gambaro, ibid. 1918), a
