Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

Ernest Boyd

III. AS AN ITALIAN SEES IT

In a typical form of primitive society, where institutions and ideals, collective representations and individual reactions, coincide, no distinction can be made between culture and civilization. Every element of the practical culture is a spiritual symbol, and there is no other logic or reason than that which is made manifest by the structure and habits of the social group. Life is a religion, in the two meanings of the word, that of a binding together of men, and the deeper one—of gathering the manifold activities of the individual in one compact spiritual mass. The mythical concepts, which limit and integrate the data of experience, in a sphere which is neither purely imaginative nor purely intellectual, present to the individual mind as irresistibly as to the mind of the group, a world of complementary objects which are of the same stuff as the apprehended data. Thought—practical, æsthetic, ethical—is still undifferentiated, unindividualized, as if a collective mind were an active reality, a gigantic, obscure, coherent personality, entering into definite relations with a world homogeneous with itself.

Such an abstract, ideal scheme of the life of the human spirit before it has any history, before it is even capable of history, affords, in its hypothetical indistinction (within the group, within the individual), a prefiguration of a certain higher relationship of culture with civilization, of a humana civilitas, in which the practical should be related to the spiritual, nature to the mind, in the full light of consciousness, with a perfect awareness of the processes of distinction and individualization. In the twilight and perspective of historical knowledge, if not in their actuality, Greece before Socrates, Rome before Christ, the Middle Ages before Saint Francis (each of them, before the apparition of the disrupting and illuminating element of growth), are successive attempts or étapes towards the creation of a civilization of such a kind—a human civilization.

Between these two limits—the primitive and the human—the ideal beginning and the ideal end—we can recognize, at any given moment in history, through the segmentation and aggregation of a multitude of cultures, different ages and strata of culture coexisting in the same social group; and the individual mind emerges at the confluence of the practical cultures, with science and philosophy and the ethical, non-tribal ideals, germs and initia, of the human civilization remaining above the given society as a soul that never entirely vivifies its own body. History begins where first the distinction between civilization and culture appears, or, to state the same fact from a different angle, where individual consciousness is born. It ends, ideally, where the same distinction fades away into Utopia, or death, or the Kingdom of Heaven; where the highest form of individual consciousness is at no point higher than the consciousness of the group from which it originally differentiated itself.

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The writer of these pages belongs, by birth, education, and election, to the civilization of Rome and to the culture, or cultures, of Italy. The civilization of Rome, the latina civilitas, is a complex mind, whose successive phases of growth are the abstract humanism of ancient Greece, the civic and legal humanism of Rome, the moral and spiritual humanism of the Latin church, the æsthetic and metaphysical humanism of the Renaissance. Each phase is an integration of the preceding one and the acquisition of a new universal principle, made independent of the particular social body in which it has partially realized itself before becoming a pure, intelligible ideal, an essential element of the human mind. The first three phases, Greece, Rome, and the Church, are still more or less closely associated, in relation to the forms of humanism which are peculiar to each of them, with particular cultures. But the last one, which, in its progress from the 13th century to our days, has been assimilating, purifying, and clarifying all the preceding ones, does not, at any given moment, directly connect itself with any definite social body. In its inception, as a purely Italian Renaissance, it may appear as the spiritual form of Italian society from the 13th to the 15th century; but its apparition coincides with the natural growth of the several, sharply defined European nationalities, and very soon (and apart from the evident insufficiency of any individual nation to fulfil its spiritual exigencies) it manifests its intrinsic character of universality by overflowing the frontiers of Italy and becoming the law of the whole Western European world.

The history of Europe during the last six centuries is the history of the gradual penetration of that idea within the circle of the passively or actively resistant, or inert, local, national cultures. The Reformation, of all active resistances, is the strongest and most important. The Germanic tribes rebel against the law of Rome, because a delay of from five to ten centuries in the experience of Christianity, and an experience of Christianity to be made not on a Græco-Roman, but on an Odinic background, create in them the spiritual need of an independent elaboration of the same universal principles. Germany is practically untouched by the spirit of the Renaissance until the 18th century, and Italy herself is for two centuries reduced to spiritual and political servitude by the superior material strength which accompanies and sustains the spiritual development of the nations of the North. Through the whole continent, within the single national units, as well as between nation and nation, the contrast and collaboration of the Romanic and Germanic elements, of Renaissance and Reformation, is the actual dialectic of the development of European civilization: of the successive approximations of the single cultures, or groups of cultures, in a multitude of more or less divergent directions, with alternating accelerations and involutions, towards the common form, the humana civilitas.

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Of all the nations of Europe, Italy is the only one that, however contingently and imperfectly, has actually realized all of the four phases of humanism in a succession of historical cultures: Magna Græcia, the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, the Renaissance. And as each of these successive cultures was trying to embody in itself a universal, not a particular, principle, nationality in Italy is not, as for other nations, the acceptance of certain spiritual limits elaborated from within the social body, but a reaction to the pressure of adjoining nationalities, which presented themselves as obstacles and impediments, even within the life of Italy herself, to the realization of a super-national principle. This is the process through which the humanism of the Renaissance, after having received its abstract political form at the hands of the thinkers and soldiers of the French Revolution, becomes active and militant in Mazzini’s principle of nationality, which is a heroic effort towards the utilization of the natural growth of European nations for the purposes of a universal civilization.