TAPARELLI D'AZEGLIO, LUIGI

TAPARELLI D'AZEGLIO, LUIGI. – Jesuit philosopher, b. in Turin on 24 Nov. 1793, d. in Rome on 21 Sept. 1862. His baptismal name was Prospero (changed to Luigi upon entering the novitiate), and he was the son of Cesare, Count of Lagnasco and Marquis of Montanera, a man of ancient faith, and of Cristina Morozzo di Bianzé; he was the fourth of eight children, Massimo (v.).

He completed his early studies at the Collegio Tolomei in Siena, then continued them at the University of Turin, obtaining his teaching diploma on 15 Nov. 1809. Appointed by Napoleon first as a student at the military school of St-Cyr and then at St-Germain, after seven months in Paris he obtained dispensation on 22 Oct. 1810, 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. With the fall of the Empire and the restoration of the old sovereigns, the Marquis Cesare was appointed by King Vittorio Emanuele I as interim minister to the court of Pius VII, and brought with him to Rome his two sons, Prospero and Massimo. Meanwhile, the restoration of the Society of Jesus took place through 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 restored novitiate of S. Andrea al Quirinale. After completing the usual probation, he was made minister of the College of Novara (1818-24), where he was ordained priest by his uncle Cardinal Bishop Morozzo on 25 March 1820; then he became the first rector of the Roman College, when it was restored to the Society by the brief Cum multa of Leo XII of 17 May 1824; later he was provincial superior in Naples (1829-33), and finally was sent to the Massimo College in Palermo.

In Palermo, where he lived for fifteen consecutive years (1833-49), he held the most varied offices, as a laborer, spiritual director, director of the chapel music, teacher of French, and also professor of natural law. This chair revealed T.’s extraordinary talents, and, with an uncommon success in teaching, earned him well-deserved fame as a master and restorer of natural law. He was in Palermo when, with the elevation of Pius IX to the throne, new destinies seemed to dawn for Italy; and he willingly lent his friendly hand to the leaders of the moderate movement, among whom were several very dear persons, his brothers Roberto and Massimo, his cousin Cesare Balbo, and Abbot Gioberti.

He was a staunch defender of the principles of the Society, which prescribes as fundamental texts for courses in philosophy and theology Aristotle and St. Thomas: and at the Roman College he led the first campaign in favor of Scholasticism, which he continued in Naples as superior of that province. The outcome was not very encouraging, but from that time he gathered around himself a small group of young Jesuits of great promise, such as Curci and Liberatore, then students, and among the external pupils Gioacchino Pecci, the future Leo XIII, who understood him and remained faithful to him. Now, at La Civiltà Cattolica the field was divided between Liberatore and T., assigning to the former speculative philosophy, to the latter moral, political, and social philosophy, with ever-increasing success, crowned finally by the memorable encyclical Aeterni Patris of Leo XIII, which prescribed the philosophy of the Angelic Doctor for all Catholic schools.

As long as his eyesight was good, which soon began to fail, he also cultivated painting and music. For many years he worked on the invention of a musical instrument which, by means of a mechanical device, combined the characteristics of keyboard and string instruments; the work was patented in 1854 under the title of “violino cembalo” and won the praise of Franz Liszt, who had occasion to play it, but, after four or five specimens were built, the instrument fell into disuse.

The masterpiece of T., the work to which his fame is mainly due, is the Saggio teoretico di diritto naturale appoggiato sul fatto. It was conceived and compiled as a school textbook, and the author himself explains how this came about (Carteg., cit. in bibl., p. 738). Having reached mature age, never thinking of becoming a professor or writer, also because of his frail health, he suddenly found himself, from Naples where he was provincial, transferred to Palermo to teach natural law, a subject with which he had had no previous occasion to deal; and he found himself in possession of a poor school textbook, the Burlamachi, worsened by notes from an ardent regalist. He was therefore advised by friends to compile a textbook himself. So he did. Taking as his starting point Grotius, Pufendorf, and those authors who at that time “were considered the only masters in this science,” he constructed a system of his own, which he lacked only in measure, as a touchstone, to the orthodox sense of ecclesiastical teaching, St. Thomas and the good forgotten Scholastics. Nor did he fail to notice that “this science is already beautifully made in the Scholastics, and particularly in St. Thomas, Suárez, Bellarmine, de Vitoria, etc.” (ibid., loc. cit.).

The work appeared in 5 vols. published by A. Muratori of Palermo from 1840 to 1843, and even “in its form,” says T., “it shows itself improvised, seeming at first a single volume, to which a second, larger one was added for completion, 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 modest this 1st ed. may have appeared, the favor with which it was received by experts was such that it was soon exhausted, and editions and translations into various languages, during T.’s lifetime and after his death, multiplied. With the most recent Roman edition of 1949, it has reached the 11th reprint, and the 7th since the definitive one edited by the author in 1855; a fortune not so frequent in works of this kind.

One would be mistaken who, giving a one-sided sense to the words “appoggiato sul fatto” added to the title, and to the other “facts and illusions,” which indeed recur frequently, took them in a purely physical and experimental sense. This is excellently clarified by Talamo: “Facts and illusions, this sovereign methodological criterion,” he says, “is the constant motto of T., and means that, banishing the hypotheses of the dominion of science, he wished to have recourse to the facts of conscience and human nature.” Thus, he adds, “he left us a splendid example of the only form of experimentalism that can be pursued with excellent results in the domain of 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 materiality of empiricism. With this work T. provided a truly comprehensive and dialectical doctrine, which reconciles, tempers, and thus corrects the contrary excesses of idealism and empiricism.”

The Saggio is divided into seven dissertations, subdivided into chapters and paragraphs, and interspersed with numerous notes, which are sometimes real treatises, such as that on the influence of the clergy on civilization (cxviii), on Kant’s Christian society (cxx), on the efficacy of Latin for the universality of science and civilization (cxxvii), on nationality (cxl). 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 an examination of individual rights and actions, the Saggio goes on to deal with social being, the action of the individual, both in the formation of society and in society already formed, the relationships between morality and politics, and the mutual relationships between society and society.

The final dissertations, in particular, contain perhaps the most personal and original part of the work, a “treatment frankly in the manner of Taparelli,” rich in moral and social insights that we might describe as modern in the best sense of the word.” (Foroni, op. cit. in bibl., p. 83). Reference is made in particular to that international organism which he calls “entarchia.” From the reciprocal relations among several societies tending toward the same end, T. sees arising, by an irresistible force inherent in their very nature, the need for a higher order and law that tends to bind them in a federal unity. Others have seen in this conception almost a foreshadowing of the defunct League of Nations and of the present 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 later scholastics and the jurists of the 17th and 18th centuries, this natural tendency of civilized and free peoples toward a higher union for their common good had been glimpsed. T.’s merit lies in having studied the problem with the greatest concreteness and breadth of vision, devoting to it his entire fifth dissertation, and in having explored its various aspects, both theoretical and practical, eliminating what others might have introduced into it of utopian and false. To this “entarchic” society T. attributes lofty aims, in the service of justice and progress, of religion and of peace among peoples.

To the Saggio is appended a General Epilogue to the entire work (printed separately by F. Pergolesi, Bologna 1940), which, suitably revised and expanded, gave rise to an Elementary Course in Natural Law for use in schools, first appearing in a lithographed edition in Naples in 1843, and then in print in 1850. As a school textbook it enjoyed great popularity and numerous editions, the most recent of which are the Latin edition edited by C. Pollando, published in San Francisco, California, in 1890, and the Portuguese edition edited by N. P. Rossetti in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1945.

T.’s second major work is the Esame critico degli ordini rappresentativi nella società moderna (2 vols., Rome 1854), a thorough critique of liberal doctrinarism and modern parliamentarism, in the unhappy forms they assumed after 1848, especially in Piedmont. T. was moved to this treatment in La Civiltà Cattolica by an anonymous letter sent to the periodical; and given the various aspects and important subjects it embraces, it expanded considerably