TAPARELLI D'AZEGLIO, LUIGI. - Jesuit philosopher, b. in Turin on 24 Nov. 1793, d. in Rome on 21 Sept. 1862. Prospero (such was his baptismal name, changed to Luigi upon entering the novitiate), was the son of Cesare count of Lagnasco and marquis of Montanera, a man of ancient faith, and of Cristina Morozzo di Bianzè; fourth of eight children, brother of Roberto and of Massimo (v.).
He completed his early studies at the Tolomei College in Siena, continued them at the University of Turin, obtaining on 15 Nov. 1809 his diploma in teaching. Appointed by Napoleon as a pupil first of the military school of St-Cyr and then of St-Germain, after a seven-month stay in Paris he obtained on 22 Oct. 1810 to be dispensed from it, thanks to the intervention of the archbishop of Turin, Giacinto Della Torre, and was able to devote himself to sacred studies in the Seminary, in order to become a priest. Once the Empire had fallen and the ancient sovereigns had been restored, the marquis Cesare was appointed by King Victor Emmanuel I as minister ad interim at the court of Pius VII, and he brought with him to Rome his two sons Prospero and Massimo. Meanwhile the re-establishment of the Society of Jesus took place with the apostolic letter Sollicitudo of 7 Aug. 1814, and Prospero offered himself among the first recruits who inaugurated on 12 Nov. of that year the revived novitiate of S. Andrea al Quirinale. Having completed the ordinary training, he was made minister of the College of Novara (1818-24), where he was ordained a priest by his uncle Cardinal Bishop Morozzo on 25 March 1820; then first rector of the Roman College, when with the brief Cum multa of Leo XII of 17 May 1824 it was restored to the Society; afterwards provincial superior in Naples (1829-33), and finally assigned to the Collegio Massimo of Palermo.
In Palermo, where he lived for fifteen consecutive years (1833-49), he had to discharge the most varied offices, as a worker, as spiritual director, as director of the musical chapel, as a teacher of French, and also as a professor of natural law. This chair revealed the extraordinary talents of T., and, with an uncommon success in teaching, procured for him the well-merited fame of a master and restorer of natural law. He was in Palermo when, with the elevation to the throne of Pius IX, new destinies seemed to dawn for Italy; and he willingly extended his friendly hand to the leaders of the moderate movement, among whom he counted several very dear persons, the brothers Roberto and Massimo, his cousin Cesare Balbo, the abbot Gioberti, his former fellow student, etc. But it was a short-lived dream; T. found himself attacked with slanderous pamphlets, plunged into controversies, and even suspected and arrested; for which reason he had to emigrate to France, where Father General Roothaan was living as a refugee with his assistants.
The course of events having rapidly changed, already in Aug. 1849 T. had returned to Palermo, where he attended to the reorganization of studies at the Collegio Massimo, until he was called to Naples to be part of the first editorial group of the new review La Civiltà Cattolica (v.), created by Fr. C. Curci, which indeed began publication in Naples in 1850, later transferred to Rome after Pius IX, from Portici, returned there. And to the Civiltà Cattolica he devoted, without pause, the inexhaustible resources of his luminous intelligence, his vast learning and his uncommon gifts as a writer, in the last twelve years that remained to him of life. With the authority of his name and with the series of his learned and profound treatises, T. contributed greatly to creating for the revived review world renown and credit. The politico-religious polemic with the brothers Roberto and Massimo, always courteous, but without reticence, was T.'s reserved hunting ground. Moreover, the affectionate union between them never failed, as is shown by the beautiful pages that Massimo dedicates to his «Jesuit» in My Memoirs and by their correspondence.
From the very first years he began, together with Fr. Matteo Liberatore, a close campaign for the restoration of Scholastic philosophy, which for about a century had lain almost universally neglected. T.'s philosophical formation had taken place under the influence of eclecticism and sensism, systems then in vogue. His first contacts with ancient philosophy would have occurred through his confrere Serafino Sordi, a disciple of Canon Vincenzo Buzzetti, of Ferrara, with whom he found himself in the novitiate of Genoa and at Novara. But T. attributes his own conversion to Thomism to the opportunity offered him by the office of rector of the Collegio Romano to implement the Ratio studiorum of the Company, which prescribes Aristotle and St. Thomas as fundamental texts for courses in philosophy and theology; and at the Roman College he sustained the first campaign in favor of scholasticism, which he continued at Naples as provost of that province. The outcome was not very encouraging, but even then he gathered around himself a small group of young Jesuits of fair promise, such as Curci, Liberatore, then students, and among the external pupils Gioacchino Pecci, the future Leo XIII, who understood him and remained faithful to him. Now, at the Civiltà Cattolica the field was divided between Liberatore and T., reserving speculative philosophy for the former and moral, political and social philosophy for the latter, with ever-growing success, finally crowned by the memorable encyclical Aeterni Patris of Leo XIII, which prescribes the philosophy of the Angelic Doctor for all Catholic schools.
As long as he enjoyed good eyesight, which weakened quite early, he also cultivated painting and music. For many years he pursued the invention of a musical instrument which, by means of a mechanical device, combined together the prerogatives of keyboard instruments and those of stringed instruments; a work that was patented in 1854 under the title of "violincembalo" and won the praise of Franz Liszt, who had occasion to play it, but, after four or five examples had been built, the instrument fell into disuse.
T.'s masterpiece, the work to which his fame is principally due, is the Saggio teoretico di diritto naturale appoggiato sul fatto. It was conceived and compiled as a school textbook, and the author himself relates how this came about (Cartag., cited in bibl., p. 738). Having reached mature age, never thinking of becoming a professor or a writer, also because of his frail health, he suddenly found himself summoned from Naples, where he was provincial, to Palermo to teach natural law, a subject with which he had until then had no occasion to occupy himself; and he found in his hands as a textbook the poor Burlamachi, made worse with notes by a rabid regalist. He was therefore advised by friends to compile a textbook himself. This he did. Taking as his starting point Grotius, Pufendorf and those authors who then passed "for sole masters in this science," he constructed an ideal system in his own way, which, as he gradually formed it, he measured, as a touchstone, against the orthodox sense of the ecclesiastical magisterium, St. Thomas and the good forgotten scholastics. Nor did it take him long to realize that "this science is already found beautiful and complete in the scholastics, and particularly in St. Thomas, Suárez, Bellarmine, de Vitoria, etc." (ibid., loc. cit.).
The work came out in 5 vols. with the publisher A. Muratori of Palermo from 1840 to 1843, and even "in its form," says T., "it shows itself improvised, appearing at first a single volume, to which by way of completion the second, larger one was added, and this gave birth to three others much larger than itself, without premeditated design, without symmetry of divisions, in short like all improvised things." However this 1st ed. might present itself, in truth very modest, yet the favor with which it was received by the competent was such that it was soon exhausted, and editions and versions in various languages, during T.'s lifetime and after his death, multiplied. With the most recent Roman ed. of 1949, we are at the 11th reprint, and at the 7th from the definitive one edited by the author in 1855; a fortune not so frequent in works of this kind.
He would be mistaken who, giving a one-sided meaning to the words "supported by fact" added to the title, and to the other "facts and inferences," which likewise frequently recur, took them in a purely physical and experimental sense. Talamo clarifies this excellently: "Facts and inferences, this sovereign methodological criterion," he says, "is T.'s constant watchword, and it means that, banishing hypotheses from the domain of science, he wished to make his starting point the fact of consciousness and of human nature." Thus, he adds, "he left us a splendid example of the only form of experimentalism that can be pursued with excellence of results in the domain of the moral sciences, and which it is the merit of Christian philosophy to have constantly vindicated, both against the subjective and fictitious creations of idealism and against the supine materialities of empiricism. T. has provided with his work a truly comprehensive and dialectical doctrine, which reconciles, tempers and therefore corrects the contrary excesses of idealism and empiricism."
The Saggio is divided into seven dissertations, divided and subdivided into chapters and paragraphs, and interspersed with numerous notes, which are sometimes true little treatises, such as that on the influence of the clergy on civilization (XCVIII), on Kant's Christian society (CXX), on the efficacy of Latin for the universality of science and civilization (CXXVII), on nationality (CXLᵃ). The latter may be regarded as the first organic treatment of the subject, and gave rise to discussions and polemics on the part of C. Balbo, V. Gioberti and others.
Starting from the examination of law and of individual action, the Saggio proceeds to treat of social being, of the action of the individual, both in the formation of society and in society already formed, of the relations between morality and politics, of the mutual relations between society and society.
The last dissertations, especially, contain perhaps the most personal and most original part of the work, "a frankly Taparellian treatment rich in moral and social insights that we might call modern in the best sense of the word." (Foroni, op. cit. in bibl., p. 83). Reference is intended in particular to that international organism which he calls "ethnarchy." From the mutual relations among several societies tending toward the same end, T. sees springing, by an irrepressible force inherent in their very nature, the need for a superior order and law, which tends to bind them into a federative unity. Others have seen in this conception almost an anticipation of the so-called League of Nations and of today's United Nations (cf. A. Brucculeri, Un precursore italiano della Società delle Nazioni, in Civ. Catt., 1926, 1-11).
The idea was not new, as T. himself acknowledges; from St. Augustine to the last scholastics and the natural-law theorists of the 17th and 18th centuries, this natural tendency of civilized and free peoples toward a higher union in the common advantage had been glimpsed. T.'s merit is to have studied the problem, with the greatest concreteness and breadth of view, to which he devoted the whole of the V dissertation; and to have illuminated its various aspects, both rational and practical, eliminating from it whatever others might have inserted that was utopian and false. To this ethnarchic society T. attributes very high purposes, on behalf of justice and progress, of religion and of peace among peoples.
To the Saggio is added a general Epilogue of the whole work (printed separately by F. Pergolesi, Bologna 1940), which, suitably reworked and expanded, gave rise to an Corso elementare del natural diritto ad uso delle scuole, which appeared first in a lithographic edition at Naples in 1843, and then in print in 1850. As a school manual it enjoyed great vogue and various editions, the most recent of which are the one in Latin edited by C. Pollando, which appeared in San Francisco, California, in 1890, and the other in Portuguese edited by N. P. Rossetti in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1945.
The second of T.'s major works is the Esame critico degli ordini rappresentativi nella società moderna (2 vols., Rome 1854), a thorough critique of liberal doctrinairism and of modern parliamentarism, in light of the not fortunate incarnations of it that were seen after 1848, especially in Piedmont. T. was moved to this treatment in the Civiltà Cattolica by an anonymous letter sent to the periodical; and given the various aspects and the important subjects it embraces, it kept expanding far more than the author had thought, so as to furnish material for many articles that appeared from 1852 to 1854. In collecting them into two volumes, the author sought to give greater cohesion to the material and to eliminate the occasional and ephemeral parts; yet even so it still retains the color of the time and of the circumstances for which it was written, especially in the lively and at times harsh tone of its polemic. It is divided into 2 vols. and into two parts: the first is devoted to general theoretical principles, the second to the practical implementations of "modernized governments," especially in Piedmont, which the author never loses sight of. The work had only a single edition and today is almost forgotten. In it, nevertheless, is found the most acute and most apt critique to which modern representative methods have been subjected.
The Civiltà Cattolica offered T. a broad field for expanding the treasures of his inexhaustible vein and of his vast culture: it would be long to enumerate the articles or series of articles published in that review on the most varied subjects. One will recall only the last series of articles that he began to bring to light in 1836 on matters of political economy, a series left interrupted by the author's death, but of such interest that T.'s biographer, l'abbé Jacquin, thought it useful to collect them in a volume and publish them in French translation under the title: Essai sur les principes philosophiques de l'économie politique (Paris 1943).
Bibliography6 works
Pietro Pirri