§ 4. Italy
1. Returning to Italy, no longer the leader of European thought, but still full of veiled freethinking, we find in the seventeenth century the proof that no amount of such predisposition can countervail thoroughly bad political conditions. Ground down by the matchless misrule of Spain, from which the conspiracy of the monk Campanella vainly sought to free her, and by the kindred tyranny of the papacy, Italy could produce in its educated class, save for the men of science and the students of economics, only triflers, whose unbelief was of a piece with their cynicism. While Naples and the south decayed, mental energy had for a time flourished in Tuscany, where, under the grand dukes from Ferdinando I onwards, industry and commerce had revived; and even after a time of retrogression Ferdinando II encouraged science, now made newly glorious by the names of Galileo and Torricelli. But again there was a relapse; and at the end of the century, under a bigoted duke, Florence was priest-ridden and, at least in outward seeming, gloomily superstitious; while, save for the better conditions secured at Naples under the viceroyalty of the Marquis of Carpi,[77] the rest of Italy was cynically corrupt and intellectually superficial.[78] Even in Naples, of course, enlightenment was restricted to the few. Burnet observes that “there are societies of men at Naples of freer thoughts than can be found in any other place of Italy”; and he admits a general tendency of intelligent Italians to recoil from Christianity by reason of Catholic corruption. But at the same time he insists that, though the laity speak with scorn of the clergy, “yet they are masters of the spirits of the people.”[79] Yet it only needed the breathing time and the improved conditions under the Bourbon rule in the eighteenth century to set up a wonderful intellectual revival.
2. First came the great work of Vico, the Principles of a New Science (1725), whereof the originality and the depth—qualities in which, despite its incoherences, it on the whole excels Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws—place him among the great freethinkers in philosophy. It was significant of much that Vico’s book, while constantly using the vocabulary of faith, grappled with the science of human development in an essentially secular and scientific spirit. This is the note of the whole eighteenth century in Italy.[80] Vico posits Deity and Providence, but proceeds nevertheless to study the laws of civilization inductively from its phenomena. He permanently obscured his case, indeed, by insisting on putting it theologically, and condemning Grotius and others for separating the idea of law from that of religion. Only in a pantheistic sense has Vico’s formula any validity; and he never avows a pantheistic view, refusing even to go with Grotius in allowing that Hebrew law was akin to that of other nations. But a rationalistic view, had he put it, would have been barred. The wonder is, in the circumstances, not that he makes so much parade of religion, but that he could venture to undermine so vitally its pretensions, especially after he had found it prudent to renounce the project of annotating the great work of Grotius, De Jure Belli et Pacis, on the score that (as he puts it in his Autobiography) a good Catholic must not endorse a heretic.
Signor Benedetto Croce, in his valuable work on Vico (The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, Eng. tr. 1913, pp. 89–94), admits that Vico is fundamentally at one with the Naturalists: “Like them, in constructing his science of human society, he excludes with Grotius all idea of God, and with Pufendorf considers man as without help or attention from God, excluding him, that is, from revealed religion and its God.” Of Vico’s opposition to Grotius, Signor Croce offers two unsatisfactory explanations. First: “Vico’s opposition, which he expresses with his accustomed confusion and obscurity, turns ... upon the actual conception of religion.... Religion ... means for Vico not necessarily revelation, but conception of reality.” This reduces the defence to a quibble; but finally Signor Croce asks himself “Why—if Vico agreed with the natural-right school in ignoring revelation, and if he instead of it deepened their superficial immanental doctrine—why he put himself forward as their implacable enemy and persisted in boasting loudly before prelates and pontiffs of having formulated a system of natural rights different from that of the three Protestant authors and adapted to the Roman Church.” The natural suggestion of “politic caution” Signor Croce rejects, declaring that “the spotless character of Vico entirely precludes it; and we can only suppose that, lacking as his ideas always were in clarity, on this occasion he indulged his tendency to confusion and nourished his illusions, to the extent of conferring upon himself the flattering style and title of Defensor Ecclesiæ at the very moment when he was destroying the religion of the Church by means of humanity.”
It is very doubtful whether this equivocal vindication is more serviceable to Vico’s fame than the plain avowal that a writer placed as he was, in the Catholic world of 1720, could not be expected to be straightforward upon such an issue. Vico comported himself towards the Catholic Church very much as Descartes did. His own declaration as to his motives is surely valid as against a formula which combines “spotless character” with a cherished “tendency to confusion.” The familiar “tendency to hedge” is a simpler conception.
3. It is noteworthy, indeed, that the “New Science,” as Vico boasted, arose in the Catholic and not in the Protestant world. We might say that, genius apart, the reason was that the energy which elsewhere ran to criticism of religion as such had in Catholic Italy to take other channels. By attacking a Protestant position which was really less deeply heterodox than his own, Vico secured Catholic currency for a philosopheme which on its own merits Catholic theologians would have scouted as atheism. As it was, Vico’s sociology aroused on the one hand new rationalistic speculation as to the origin of civilization, and on the other orthodox protest on the score of its fundamentally anti-Biblical character. It was thus attacked in 1749 by Damiano Romano, and later by Finetti, a professor at Padua, àpropos of the propaganda raised by Vico’s followers as to the animal origin of the human race. This began with Vico’s disciple, Emmanuele Duni, a professor at Rome, who published a series of sociological essays in 1763. Thenceforth for many years there raged, “under the eyes of Pope and cardinals,” an Italian debate between the Ferini and Antiferini, the affirmers and deniers of the animal origin of man, the latter of course taking up their ground on the Bible, from which Finetti drew twenty-three objections to Vico.[81] Duni found it prudent to declare that he had “no intention of discussing the origin of the world, still less that of the Hebrew nation, but solely that of the Gentile nations”; but even when thus limited the debate set up far-reaching disturbance. At this stage Italian sociology doubtless owed something to Montesquieu and Rousseau; but the fact remains that the Scienza Nuova was a book “truly Italian; Italian par excellence.”[82] It was Vico, too, who led the way in the critical handling of early Roman history, taken up later by Beaufort, and still later by Niebuhr; and it was he who began the scientific analysis of Homer, followed up later by F. A. Wolf.[83] By a fortunate coincidence, the papal chair was held at the middle of the century (1740–1758) by the most learned, tolerant, and judicious of modern popes, Benedict XIV,[84] whose influence was used for political peace in Europe and for toleration in Italy; and whom we shall find, like Clement XIV, on friendly terms with a freethinker. In the same age Muratori and Giannone amassed their unequalled historical learning; and a whole series of Italian writers broke new ground on the field of social science, Italy having led the way in this as formerly in philosophy and physics.[85] The Hanoverian Dr. G. W. Alberti, of Italian descent, writes in 1752 that “Italy is full of atheists”;[86] and Grimm, writing in 1765, records that according to capable observers the effect of the French freethinking literature in the past thirty years had been immense, especially in Tuscany.[87]
4. Between 1737 and 1798 may be counted twenty-eight Italian writers on political economy; and among them was one, Cesare Beccaria, who on another theme produced perhaps the most practically influential single book of the eighteenth century,[88] the treatise on Crimes and Punishments (1764), which affected penal methods for the better throughout the whole of Europe. Even were he not known to be a deist, his strictly secular and rationalist method would have brought upon him priestly suspicion; and he had in fact to defend himself against pertinacious and unscrupulous attacks,[89] though he had sought in his book to guard himself by occasionally “veiling the truth in clouds.”[90] As we have seen, Beccaria owed his intellectual awakening first to Montesquieu and above all to Helvétius—another testimony to the reformative virtue of all freethought.
Of the aforesaid eight-and-twenty writers on economics, probably the majority were freethinkers. Among them, at all events, were Count Algarotti (1712–1764), the distinguished æsthetician, one of the group round Frederick at Berlin and author of Il Newtonianismo per le dame (1737); Filangieri, whose work on legislation (put on the Index by the papacy) won the high praise of Franklin; the Neapolitan abbate Ferdinando Galiani, one of the brightest and soundest wits in the circle of the French philosophes; the other Neapolitan abbate Antonio Genovesi (1712–1769), the “redeemer of the Italian mind,”[91] and the chief establisher of economic science for modern Italy.[92] To these names may be added those of Alfieri, one of the strongest anti-clericalists of his age; Bettinelli, the correspondent of Voltaire and author of The Resurrection of Italy (1775); Count Dandolo, author of a French work on The New Men (1799); and the learned Giannone, author of the great anti-papal History of the Kingdom of Naples (1723), who, after more than one narrow escape, was thrown in prison by the king of Sardinia, and died there (1748) after twelve years’ confinement.
To the merits of Algarotti and Genovesi there are high contemporary testimonies. Algarotti was on friendly terms with Cardinal Ganganelli, who in 1769 became Pope Clement XIV. In 1754 the latter writes[93] him: “My dear Count, Contrive matters so, in spite of your philosophy, that I may see you in heaven; for I should be very sorry to lose sight of you for an eternity. You are one of those rare men, both for heart and understanding, whom we could wish to love even beyond the grave, when we have once had the advantage of knowing them. No one has more reasons to be convinced of the spirituality and immortality of the soul than you have. The years glide away for the philosophers as well as for the ignorant; and what is to be the term of them cannot but employ a man who thinks. Own that I can manage sermons so as not to frighten away a bel esprit; and that if every one delivered as short and as friendly sermons as I do, you would sometimes go to hear a preacher. But barely hearing will not do ... the amiable Algarotti must become as good a Christian as he is a philosopher: then should I doubly be his friend and servant.”[94]
In an earlier letter, Ganganelli writes: “The Pope [Benedict XIV] is ever great and entertaining for his bons mots. He was saying the other day that he had always loved you, and that it would give him very great pleasure to see you again. He speaks with admiration of the king of Prussia ... whose history will make one of the finest monuments of the eighteenth century. See here and acknowledge my generosity! For that prince makes the greatest jest possible of the Court of Rome, and of us monks and friars. Cardinal Querini will not be satisfied unless he have you with him for some time at Brescia. He one day told me that he would invite you to come and dedicate his library.... There is no harm in preaching to a philosopher who seldom goes to hear a sermon, and who will not have become a great saint by residing at Potsdam. You are there three men whose talents might be of great use to religion if you would change their direction—viz. Yourself, Mons. de Voltaire, and M. de Maupertuis. But that is not the ton of the age, and you are resolved to follow the fashion.”[95] Ganganelli in his correspondence reveals himself as an admirer of Newton[96] and somewhat averse to religious zeal.[97] Of the papal government he admitted that it was favourable “neither to commerce, to agriculture, nor to population, which precisely constitute the essence of public felicity,” while suavely reminding the Englishman of the “inconveniences” of his own government.[98] To the learned Muratori, who suffered at the hands of the bigots, he and Pope Benedict XIV gave their sympathy.[99]