CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALISM. — One of the principal currents of contemporary Italian philosophy. It is called “spiritualism” because the concept of “spirit” (v.) is essential to it, just as it is essential to the actualism (v.) GENTILI (v.), from which nearly all its representatives derive. Yet precisely the adoption of “spirit” in its full integrity carries within itself a critique of actualism and of every immanentist idealism, inasmuch as spiritual activity is constituted by elements that drive its dynamism toward theistic-Christian transcendence (v.). Therefore Christian spiritualism is still idealism, but not subjectivism (v.); it is a transcendentalist or objective idealism, inspired by Platonic-Augustinian thought.
Above all, it aims to be an integral conception of philosophy and of life, an integral and authentic humanism. As a constructive movement, it appeals to traditional Christian philosophy, with a decided preference for that strand which runs from Augustine (v.) ROSMINIANI (v.). Christian spiritualism therefore claims the original priority of spirit over the external world, of the transcendent and absolute Spirit who is God and of the finite spirit that is every human being. It is thus not a movement of “reaction” but of critical deepening of the fundamental exigencies of modern and contemporary thought, a critique pushed to the utmost of its possibilities, so that it may reveal the authenticity of thought (v.) and the supreme destiny of man. From 1936 to 1943 its organ was the journal Logos; from 1946, the Giornale di metafisica, directed by Sciacca, to which are added the journal Filosofia, directed by A. Guzzo, and scholarly collections.
The initiator of Christian spiritualism may be considered Armando Carlini (b. 1878), formerly professor at the University of Pisa, who posed its problems and exigencies; but precisely because he is the initiator, he represents its initial moment, still too bound to transcendental Kant (v.) and his concept of transcendentalilty. Hence Carlini finds himself compelled not to go beyond the subjective moment of exigency and to resolve the problems of metaphysics (the existence of God and the immutability of the soul) by an act of faith. The stages of his speculative research are marked by the works La vita dello spirito (Florence 1921); La religiosità dell’arte e della filosofia (ibid. 1934); Il mito del realismo (ibid. 1936); Lineamenti di una concezione realistica dello spirito umano (Rome 1942). By positing Gentile’s act as an act in itself, outside the subject-object relation and the logical dialectic in which the act in itself remains imprisoned as a problem (this is what each of us is for himself, La religiosità dell’arte, p. 103), Carlini holds that its solution requires, beyond the critical attitude (philosophy), also the dogmatic attitude (religion), beyond “thought,” “faith.” In Kantian terms: the exigency of the transcendence of God arises from the problem of the transcendent, no longer considered in relation to the world of cognitive experience and thus turned outward, but “considered in itself and for itself, in its interior life, as pure interiority.” Thus arises in Kant a spiritualist problem, which is at once a moral and a religious problem” (Il mito, etc., p. 19). In the act of pure spirituality, that is, in the act that is self-consciousness, man not only finds reason for the world of experience and of history, but also for that deeper and original reality which alone gives value to the world of man and is therefore transcendent even while immanent in the human act. To this immanent transcendence thought can attain only if supported and integrated by faith; and faith, respectful of the value of man and of his world, can attain it only if guided and integrated by thought” (ibid., pp. 49-51). The act of self-consciousness (v.) thus performs a twofold function: as transcendent, in that it renders possible the world of historical experience, and as a problem of pure interiority, which can find a solution in an act of faith. Carlini has committed himself to a problem without hope of solution: to derive from Kantian-idealist transcendentalilty, which is an a priori form whose validity is limited to experience, theistic transcendence. Hence he is forced to renounce metaphysics and to “add” religious faith to his Kantian philosophy.
The idealism of Augusto Guzzo (b. 1894), professor at the University of Turin, is of more directly Platonic-Augustinian inspiration. Thought is impassable (hence idealism), but it is qualified thought: the thought of a world, the thought that contains or attests that a world is; hence an idealism that is the opposite of that which makes “the world be posited” by thought (Verità e realtà [Turin 1925]; Giudizio e azione [Venice 1928]). Thus three fundamental problems may be identified in Guzzo’s spiritualism: 1) nothing exists outside thought, but to know does not mean to nullify the object, but to realize it; 2) spirit is essentially ethicity, but is guided by a universal and obligatory ideal that is free to actualize or not; 3) this ideal is truth in interiore homine, the voice of God that sounds in our conscience, that gives us existence and calls us to itself. Thus the three problems of knowledge, of morals, and of religion are three aspects of the single problem that is spiritual reality in its determining, its becoming, and its being (Idealismo e cristianesimo [2 vols., Naples 1936]; Sic vos non vobis [2 vols., 1939-40]; La filosofia domani [1943]; L’Io e la ragione [Brescia 1947]; Mordalia [ibid. 1950]). For Guzzo, the universal is in the particular, but does not identify with it: duty is in every dutiful action without resolving into it; the true “guides” research, but is not “produced” by research (truth is mater and not filia temporis). The true lies in individual true ideas, but none of these is the true, but rather a true. This is “that work which is thought, which is not such without truth and is thought only if it is not itself the truth” (Idealismo e cristianesimo, I, p. 269). Now, if by idealism one understands that philosophy which resolves all reality into the act of thought and identifies the need for the Absolute with the total immanence of the Absolute in human experience, then this idealism, which is anti-idealism and positivism, does not accord with Christianity. If man is a need for the Absolute that expresses itself in an experience and thus renews itself, in this need for the Absolute man is not the Absolute... but is of the Absolute” (ibid., II, p. 255). Yet even in his later works Guzzo seems still anchored to the principle of transcendentalilty and to a moral exigency (as well as to a voluntarism of Cartesian-skeptical origin: intelligibles are created by God ex decreto), which leave one perplexed about the possibility of critically founding a metaphysics.
Felice Battaglia (b. 1902), professor at the University of Bologna, has recently arrived, through a self-criticism of idealism, at his own form of Christian spiritualism (Il valore nella storia [Bologna 1948]; Il problema morale nell’estetizialismo [2nd ed. ibid. 1949]). Having completed the idealist itinerary, the logicism of spirit (Gentile), thoroughly re-examined, appears to Battaglia as naturalism (La mia prospettiva filosofica [Padua 1950], p. 54). The logical cycle of idealism, like that of every immanentist philosophy, is human and only human, since for it philosophy is only worldliness and consciousness of worldliness.
But the finite world, absolutized by immanentist philosophies, does not satisfy: the circle of the microcosm (v.), which summarizes and recapitulates the macrocosm, and of the macrocosm, which unfolds and deploys the microcosm, so that, in the end, the natural cosmos adjusts to the spirit and the spirit finds its adjustment in the world, presents a fracture, an imbalance, namely the inadequacy of the spirit to nature. It is precisely because of this inadequacy that one moves beyond naturalism (v.) and proceeds toward the foundation of spiritualism. Thus, within the very concept of spirit, the religious instance becomes legitimate. In Battaglia, the passage from immanentist idealism to spiritualism itself is marked by the problem of value (v.), or rather by the spiritualistic justification of value, which B. recovers through his critique of Croce’s and Gentile’s concept of history (v.). So that value may escape death, it must elude the immanence of a logicized and rationalized whole, impersonal and transcendental (Il valore nella storia, cit., p. 149). Duality is internal to the act, which is inseparably consciousness of its being and of its ought-to-be. It is precisely through value that history acquires a meaning that transcends it: it is no longer for itself but for another, for personal and moral consciousness, which, while realizing itself in history, refers to a radiating center of values, which is God or absolute Value.
Luigi Stefanini (b. 1891), professor at the University of Padua, has defined his philosophy as “Christian idealism,” then “s. c.” [spiritualismo critico], and more recently “metaphysics of the person,” with idealistic and existentialist (as well as Giobertian) influences. “Being is personal, and all that is not personal in being falls within the productivity of the person as a means of manifesting the person and of communication among persons” (La mia prospettiva, etc., p. 205). Hence the starting point for every demonstration is the experience I have of myself, inasmuch as the ego is the primordial and central fact of experience. And the ego is person (v.). If one loses the sense of the plurality of spirit in the intimate experience of each individual, one does not recover it again. “No metaphysics can be constructed if its first chapter is not psychological” (ibid., p. 209). Evidently, this is not a matter of subjective vision. Indeed, the person, which is not exhausted in sensible experience, becomes discourse, mediation, reason (v.). But one must avoid the danger that reason becomes a spectacle to itself, “reason reasoned” (impersonal and constant logical procedure) that takes the place of “reason reasoning.” Far more than “unity,” the person is “uniqueness”: an irrepeatable, unmistakable reality. Yet this uniqueness does not mean absoluteness: I persist, despite my finitude, in being, but I am not being. Stefanini has made extensive applications of this metaphysics of the person to aesthetics (v.), to the social problem, etc. (La metafisica dell’arte [Padua 1948]; La metafisica della persona [ibid. 1949]).
Neither Battaglia nor Stefanini, it seems, goes beyond the exigent and psychological motive, which is insufficient to found a metaphysics (v.) and to provide a truly philosophical answer. Hence Sciacca, having moved beyond the exigent phase and the transcendence from which transcendence ought to arise (Linee di uno spiritualismo critico [Rome 1936]; Problemi di filosofia [ibid. 1940]), in his more recent theoretical writings (Filosofia e metafisica [Brescia 1949]; Intériorité objective [1951]), has attempted to recover, through a personal elaboration of Augustine and Rosmini and a deepening of Gentile’s actualism within s. c., the ontological moment (of being) and the intellectualistic moment, convinced that anti-intellectualist positions, purely exigent and fideist, remain on the margins of the true problematic of s. c., which works to constitute itself as a philosophy of spirit and a metaphysics of truth and thus on rational bases, but of a reason grasped in the concreteness of the person and in the totality and integrality of spiritual life.