The Giobertian Philosophy, Pt. 1; BQR April 1864 (A Review of Vincenzo Gioberti and his Fight against the Modernists)
The Giobertian Philosophy
We have for some time meditated laying before our readers, in a series of articles, a fuller and more connected account of the Giobertian Philosophy than we have heretofore given or than is accessible to the simply English-speaking public. We shall draw our account or expostion solely from Gioberti's own writings, without reference to the expositions which have been given either by his friends or his enemies. We intend, at first, to precede our expostion by a sketch of the author's life, but have concluded to confine ourselves to a few brief notices, as we have not as yet received the very full and elaborate Biography in three volumes octavo, not very long since published at Turin.
Vincenzo Gioberti was born in Turin in the year 1801, and was educated in the University of his native city. His parents were respecatable, but apparently not wealthy. They brought up their son for the priesthood, and at a suitable age he received orders, and became one of the chaplains to the king, Carlo Alberto. He was a most diligent student, and devoted himself most assiduously to the study of theology, philosophy, history, and literature, both ancient and modern. At an early age, whether before or after receiving orders, we are unable to say, he had his period of doubt, as have most young men of generous minds and liberal studies with sufficient seriousness ever to think in regard to the grounds of their faith, and was induced to study profoundly the foundations not merely of the Catholic Church in whose communion he had been brought up, but of Christianity itself, nay, all of religion. The result of his studies was a firm and unwavering conviction, which never deserted him to the hour of his death, not of the truth and utility of all that passes for religion even among Catholics, but of Christianity, the Catholic Church, and the real Catholic dogmata. He studied the terrible questions raised by his doubts not professionally, as a lawyer studies his brief, but seriously, earnestly, in order to arrive at truth for himself, for his own mind and his own conscience, and with a science, an ability, and a genius for grappling with the profoundest and most abtruse philosophical and theological problems never surpassed, if equalled, since St Augustine. He has especially investigated the relation of reason and revelation, faith and science, Church and state, religion and civilization, and attempted to determine scientifically the real ground on which the antagonism existing between them disappears and their dialectic harmony is founded and practically preserved. His genius as well as his learning is encyclopaedic, and his works may be studied with equal advantage by the scholar, the artist, the philosopher, the theologian, and the cultivators of the so-called exact sciences.
Gioberti was a patriot, an Italian, and ardent lover of liberty, though not precisely in the sense of European democrats. He had the indescretion, one day, to say in presence of a friend, that he thought "the people might, without danger to the State, be admitted to a liberal share in the governemnt." His words were reported to the police, and on that very night he was ordered to leave, within twelve hours, the Sardinian territory. He belonged to none of the secret societies which were then plotting Italian insurrections, and does not appear to have had any political relations with the Italian Revolutionists of the time. He was a student, and an exemplary priest, not at all mixed up with political affairs. But he had in private conversation given utterance to a liberal sentiment. That was enough, and he was exiled. Exiled from his native country, he thought first of going to South America, but was induced by a friend to go to Paris. He found himself a stranger in that centre of the best and the worst infleunces of the age, poor, destitute of friends, suspended from his priestly functions, and without means of support, but the scanty and precarious pittance to be gained from ill-appreciated literary labors. He remained not long in Paris, but soon wwent to Belgium, and took up his residence at or near Brussels, where he remained during the greater part of his exile, finding employment and the means of living as a teacher in a private literary institution. He performed faithfully the duties of an instructor, lived frugally, gave very few hours to sleep, and devoted the greater part of his nights to study and the composition of his works, after all, he has left unfinished. Here he composed and published the greater part of all his works published during his lifetime, while living in comparative obscurity, loved and honored by a few friends with whom he kept up an affectionate correspondence, and especially the poor, whose wants he freely and lovingly relieved to the full extent of his means. His works obtained at first only a limited circulation, and, though they secured him the admiration and esteem of the few, they gained him but little public consideration, and failed to make him regarded as the great man of Italy. The first work which obtained him that consideration was his Del Primato Morale e Civile degli Italiani, published, 1843, under the pontificate of Gregory XVI, a second edition of which, published at Lausanne, in 1846, in three volumes octavo, is now lying before us, and is the edition we use. This work met with an immense success; its publication was an event in the Italian Resorgimento.
In this work Gioberto maintains - which not everyone will concede - that the moral and civil primacy of the world was given to Italy and the Pelasgic or Italo-Greek race, and belongs to the modern Italians as the representatives of that race and the old Romans. He maintains that this is the reason why the religious and ecclesiastical Primacy has been established at Rome, and hence is in some sense the right of the Roman or Italian people. The moral and civil primacy of the world was possessed and exerted in the interests of civilization by the old Romans, under both the Republic and the Empire, and by their successors the modern Italians, through the Moderatorship exercised by the Sovereign Pontiffs after the fall of the old Roman world, down to the end of the Middle Ages. But in consequence of the loss of the Papal Moderatorship and the division of the Peninsula into a number of petty States, the most of them dependencies on non-Italian powers, as Spain, France, and Austria, Italy, having in herself no centre of unity, has ceased for three hundred years or more to excercise the moral and civil primacy which belongs to her. She must now, for her own interest, the interest of both religion and civilization, recover it. As the means of recovering it, the several Italian States must unite and form an Italian Confederacy under the Presidency of the Pope, the several states retaining their respective constitutions and independence each within its own limits and in regard to all internal affairs, whilst all national interests much be managed by the Federal Congress or Government. This plan was adopted by both France and Austria at the Premilinary Peace of Villa Franca, but its execution has thus far been defeated by Piedmontese ambition, and the monarchical and republican Unitarians, demanding not Italian union, but Italian unity, and supported by British diplomacy. The plan was not revolutionary in the least, and would have been admirable had it not been impracticable.
But whatever may be thought of the plan itself, it appealed to Italian patriotism, falttered Italian vanity, and held out a chance for the assertion of Italian nationality. It addressed also the purest and best feelings of the Italian people, and really inaugurated what has been called the Resorgimento d' Italia, and at once stamped its author as one of the leading minds, if not the leading mind of the Peninsula. The election of Pius IX, which soon followed, a friend of Gioberti, and himself an Italian patriot, who inaugurated his reign by several bold and liberal measures, looking to Italian resusciation and independence, gave it new significance, and the introduction of Constitutional Government into Piemont by Carlo Alberto seemed to open the way for Italian independence and a confederated Italy. Gioberti was recalled from his exile, and restored to his native country. He visited Rome, where he was cordially received by the Holy Father, who gave him his blessing, and permission to celebrate Mass, and where he was honored by all that was distinguished in the city. His journey from Rome to Turin was a succession of ovations. In his native city he was held in the highest esteem; and after the disasters to the King in his attempt to rescue the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom from Austria, and to place its crown on his own head, he was made prime minister, and for a few months wielded the Piedmontese government. In this capacity he refused to recognize the short-lived Mazzinian Republic at ROme, opposed the intervention of the non-Italian Powers for the restoration of the Pope, so as to give them no pretext for interfering in the affairs of Italy, and urged the Italian States themselves to unite and restore him his temporal principlaity. After the renewal of the war with Austria, which he opposed, but could not prevent, and the disastrous defeat of the Sardinians at Novara by old Radetzki, he left the ministry, went or was sent to Paris, where he remained till his death in 1852.
As a practical statesman Gioberti was not successful. He failed, for he was guided by principle rather than expediency, had a respect for vested rights, and was more Italian than Piedmontese. He flattered no party, and favored the peculiar prejudices of no class or faction. He wished to retain the temporal sovereignty of the Pope, and was opposed to the consolidation of all Italy into a single unitarian state, whether monarchical or republican. His sympathies were Italian, embracing freedom and independence for the Peninsula, but he was not revolutionist, and had no sympathy with the Italian democrats, save in the one respect of rendering Italy independent of all ultramontane Powers. He wished Italy to be independent alike of France and Austria, and to enable her to suffice for herself. He was, therefore, opposed alike, save so far as they hoped to use him, by the respective adherents of France and Austria, by both the monarchical and the democratic Unitarians, who demanded unity, not union. He had for enemies even among the nationals Mazzini, Garibaldi, and the Carbonari on the one hand, and all who, like Count Cavour who succeeded him, aimed simply at making Italy Piedmontese. Lacking the usual Italian suppleness, these porved too many and powerful for him, and his failure was inevitable. It is not as a practical statesman that he will live in the memory of mankind, oe even in that of his own countrymen. A statesman as well as the commander of an army to be remembered must succeed. He who fails the world always holds to be without merit. The Piedmontese minister is even now forgotten, though not even Cavour has contributed so much or half so much as Gioberti to the uprising or innovation of Italy; and if he had had his way, Nice and Savoy would not now make a part of France, giving the passes of the Alps to the perennial enemy of Italy. He must live, if at all, as the thinker, the erudite scholar, the classic writer, the profound philosopher, the acute theologian, the bold Catholic reformer.
After his retreat, exile, or mission to Paris, we know not which to call it, in 1849, he applied himself to his usual studies, and published, in 1851, his Rinnovamento Civile d'Italia, his last publication during his lifetime. In this work, he reviews, in part, his political career, points out the errors committed by the friends of the civil renovation of Italy, and gives his views of the course that should be taken in future to secure that renovation. The work is really his apology for his political doctrines and action. In it he approaches more nearly than he had before done to the republican party, though he gives a most masterly refutation of the false democratic theory adopted by the European democratic party. He had attempted the renovation of Italy through the Princes, and they had failed him, and henceforth he must look to the people. In this work, also, he has a most bitter chapter on Pius the Ninth, not as Pope, but as temporal Prince, in which he accuses him of having deceived and betrayed the hopes of Italy, of having proved false to every one of his pledges; who, having commenced as a liberal Italian Prince, had fallen back under the Austrian oscurantismo, and used all his power and influence to defeat Italian independence and the progress of liberty. It is a bitter chapter, in which very little of the Christian or the philosopher is detected. It is unjust. Pius IX, if not a great man, is a good man; and if he has deceived others, it is because he first deceived himself. He is, if you will, a weak man, but he is honest and kind-hearted. His mistake as Prince was in raising expectations that he could not satisfy, in raising a storm that he had not the power to control or to direct. He miscalculated his own strength, or the power in our times of the Papacy. We felt it at the time, and our pages bear witness to our fears that the result would be disastrous. We were not for a moment deceived. Yet there was something grand in the position he assumed on his inauguration, in placing himself at the head of the modern movement, in giving it the sanction of his high office and sacred character, and in attempting to direct, as the Father of Christendom, that movement to the advancement of religion and civilization. The applause he received from the non-Catholic even more than from the Catholic world, so hearty, so enthusiastic, proved that it was not the Pontiff the world for four centuries had been warring against, but the defender of an obsolete phase of civilization; and that the moment he is seen marching at the head of modern society, all nations are ready to own his authority and follow his lead. But he assumed a position which he was personally too weak to maintain. He was not a Gregory VII, an Innocent III, nor even a Sixtus Quintus. He was unequal to the emergency himself had created, and, instead of overcoming adverse circumstances, was forced to yield to them, and take refuge in mere passive resistance, in the non possummus. The system he found established by his predecessors was too strong for him, and he succumbed, and suffered the world he had sought to guide, but could not, to float past him. French arms restored him, reestablished him nominally in his principality; but he has been, ever since he returned to Rome, virtually a prisoner of France on parole. Hence we heard no protest from him against the unprovoked war of France on Russia in 1854, or against the infamous Italian campaign in 1859, directed against him as temporal Prince no less than against Austria. He is the prisoner and the pensioner of France, and there is no power in Europe on whom he can rely to set him free, and sustain his independence. This might have been foreseen, and should have been, and therefore he should not have ventured to raise the storm which he could neither allay not direct. Still, Gioberti has no excuse for his bitter invectives against him, or for denying his moral worth, his goodness of heart, and his real excellence of character.
GIoberti, in the beginning of his career, while he confined himself almost exclusively to theology and philosophy, met with no serious opposition from the Jesuits- they were even disposed to applaud him; but after the publication of his Del Primato, and his Italian and political tendencies became manifest, they seem to have attacked him with great severity, not avowedly, indeed, for these tendencies, but for philosophical and theological views which they had previously commended. This brought out his most terrible work against the Society of Jesus, as reorganized by its so-called Second Founder, the celebrated Aquaviva, their fourth General, the Gesuita Moderno, in five volumes octavo. This work we have glanced over, but not read, and can speak of its character only by report. We began it, but we were repelled from continuing it by its uncalled for severity, and, as it seemed to us, its gross injustice to an illustrious body of men. He charges the Jesuits with having perverted Catholic theology, and with having instroduced another Christ than the Christ of the Gospels and the Church. He exposes rudely their philosophy, ridicules their style as writers, and impeaches, apparently on documentary evidence, their honesty and historical veracity. This book sealed his fate. No Catholic writer can afford to have this illustrious order for his enemy, or can survive its enmity. He must not expect to hold his footing in the Church as an author, as a man, hardly as a Christian; and if he is not driven out of the Church into heresy and schism, it will be through no forbearance of theirs. From the date of his publication of the Gesuita Moderno, Gioberti lost his standing with the dominant portion of his co-religionists, and it was more than and it was more than any Catholic's reputation with his brethren was worth to venture to speak well of him even as a philosopher. We might quote Plato, Aristotle, Averroes, or Avicenna, any pagan or Mahometan even, with respect, but must not name Gioberti without an anathema. More disinterested, more self-denying and laborious priests than the Jesuits generally, we have never known, and never expect to find; but like all religious orders and congregations of the Church, they are apt to forget in their corporate capacity, that they have only a human origin, and to proceed against their enemies as if they were founded immediately by God himself, and that they who question their honor as a society question his. Chiefly through their exertions, and those under their direction, Gioberti has been widely regarded by Catholics as one who dishonored the priesthood, abandoned his faith, and died under the excommunication of the Church. His works, it is said, have been placed on the Index, and we certainly cannot cite them as the works of an approved and unsuspected Catholic author. But we say frankly that we have neverfound them maintaining any proposition censured by the Church. In his theology he follows the Thomists and the Augustinians much more nearly than he does the Jesuits; but this does not impeach his orthodoxy, though it may his judgment, and, still more, his prudence.
The circumstances attending GIoberti's death at Paris, at fifty-one, in the prime of his life, and the full vigor of his intellect, while engaged in completing works of vast extent, profounder and more important than any he had published, are variously related, and the exact truth will, perhaps, never be known, or if known, will never be acknowledged. It seems agreed on all hands that his death was caused by a fit of apoplexy, brought on by too intense study and over exercise of his brain, with too little rest, and too little sleep. he is said, by some, to have died suddenly, alone in his room, and without the last Sacraments, or the presence of a priest. This is the more common version. Others report that he so far revived as to receive the visit of his confessor, and the last rites of his Church; and that he finally expired with the most edifying marks of firm faith and tender piety. Which is the true account we know not, although we believe that it is conceded that he received Christian burial in consecrated ground, which would seem to imply the more favorable account. He was a man naturally of strong passions, but his life was morally irreproachable; remarkable for his temperance, his purity, and his charity to the poor. He is described to us by those who knew him well, to have been a very handsome man, above the medium size, with head, hair, and features of the English rather than of the Italian type. From a bust executed at Rome, in 1847, which we have seen, and which is said to be a capital likeness, we could not say that the representations of his character by his enemies are necessarily false. The head is large, the features are regular, classical, and finely chiseled, but they lack that open, frank, genial expression that at once inspires confidence and wins the heart. They have the air of a man too conscious of his own superiority, and too well satisfied with himself. It is the bust of a strong man, but of one against whom you feel it is no lack of charity to be on your guard.
As a writer, Gioberti, for classic purity, clearness, force, and dignity of style, has no superior, if any equal, in the Italian language. His taste is correct and his judgment sound, his diction is pure, choice, and exact, and his style noble, grand, majestic, as much so as that of Bossuet; calm, equal, natural, and graceful, fitted to the grand and lofty subjects on which he writes. He is a perfect master of his own language, and knows the exact value of every word he uses, its exact meaning, even to its finest and most delicate shade; and you cannot change a single word in any sentence he writes without changing its sense, or take a sentence out of its connection without impairing its meaning, and doing the writer great injustice. Yet he is never dry, stiff, or stilted; he moves with an easy, natural grace, and passes on through the most difficult and abstruse problems of theology and metaphysics without relaxing his gait, without the slightest apparent effort, or consciousness that he is not dealing in the ordinary way with the most ordinary topics. He has never to stop and take breath, is never labored, involved, obscure, or difficult. His march is even, easy, and unrestrained, and if you cannot follow him it is because you have no genius for the topics he discusses, or are fettered by your false training, and have your natural understanding perverted by absurd and incomprehensible systems. He is always master of his language and of his subject, and the Italian is flexible to his purpose, and proves in his hands equal to the expression of the deepest and loftiest thought, and the nicest shades of meaning. He is never obliged to force it into any unnatural or unsual forms, to adopt any unidiomatic or unfamiliar locutions, or to disfigure it by the introduction of new and barbarous terms, as the scholastics were in their use of Latin, and as the recent English and Scotish writers are, or imagine they are, in the use of their own language. The metaphysians of Oxford and Edinburgh write in a sort of jargon which has only a remote affinity to genuine, idiomatic, and classical English. They are as far from being masters of their mother tongue as they are from being masters of true philosophic thought.
Gioberti may not have the fervid eloquence we meet in the philosophical Lecons of our old master, Victor Cousin, nor his genial warmth, but he surpasses him in depth of thought, in ease, in sustained elegance and dignity of expression, and nobility and grandeur of style. He is master of what the French rhetoricians call the "grand style,' which we need not say is infinitely remote from the pompous, met with so often in Italian, Spanish, and Irish writers who affect it, and fail ridiculously. Among French writers Bossuet stands first and almost alone as master of the grand or majestic style, and he succeeds only by sometimes forgetting to be French. Even he now and then fails, and gives us mere bathos, and in his famous "Madame se meurt, Madame est morte." Even he lacks the repose, the calm strength, and the east, natural, and graceful gait of Gioberti. We see, as in his Elevations, or Meditations, on the Mysteries, that he does not rise easily and by his native strength to the height he aims at, and is obliged to work himself up, to make an effort, to strain and tug, as if in need of help. Gioberti's strength is always equal to his demands, and he rises easily and without effort to the highest possible regions of human thought, and possesses himself of the sublimest truths revealed to the human understanding. Among philosophers, Plato is the only one with whom, in this respect, it would not be unjust to compare him. He is clearer, more distinct, more exact in his thought and expression than Plato, equally profound and sublime, with a wider field of truth, and a firmer grasp, but is inferior to him in the poetic charm of his imagination. He is as witty as the old Greek, but has less of that modification of wit which the Latins called urbanitas, and less of that good-natured raillery which exposes the error without wounding its defender, so conspicuous in the Athenian. His wit is apt to express itself in sarcasm, is a little bitter, is too superb, and seldom fails to wound. The Athenian laughs at you, makes you confess yourself a fool, but without offence, or forfeiting your friendship; you love him all the better for it. But in this respect he has the advantage of the Italian, it is the only advantage. In philosophic genius, in intellectual strength, in the wonderful mastery of language, the Italian yields nothing to the Athenian, while in grasp of thought, in natural grandeur, in science, erudition, penetration, intuition, he surpasses him, and has been able to correct and complete his philosophy.
The great defect in Gioberti's character is an excessive pride, and a manifest lack of what is called the humility of the cross. His private correspondence, and even here or there a passage in his published writings, as well as the testimony of his friends, prove that he did not lack tenderness of heart, and that he was susceptible of sincere and lasting friendship. But in his finished writings his air is too superb, his manner toward his opponents too disdainful. He seems always too conscious of his own immeasurable superiority. But in all this we may misread his real character and do him great injustice. Genuine humility is always unconscious of itself, and what passes under its name is often only the most offensive form of pride. The studious effort which many writers make to conceal pride always betrays its existence. There is often less egotism in using than in avoiding the pronoun I. We know from experience that authors are accused of exorbitant pride, when that is the last vice with which they should be charged. Christian humility is the root of every Christian virtue, but it does not consist in hanging down one's head like a bulrush, or in proclamations of one's own unworthiness. It has no relation with self-abasement or sevility of spirit or manner. It is incompatible with magnanimity, nay, is the very basis of true magnanimity of soul. Its manner is always open, frank, manly. The humble man does not depreciate himself any more than he depreciates others; he simply forgets himself, and acts ingenuously, naturally, always according to the true relations of men and things. The humble man is a gentleman from an innate sense of truth and justice, from good feeling and good nature, what others are b artificial training. Still, we should like GIoberti better if he was more human, and less bitter and sarcastic; if the smile on his lips was less self-complacent, less sardonic, more genial and warmer, more evidently a smile of the heart. The irony of Plato cahrms us and binds us to him as our brother, even when we feel that we are its subject. He is roguish, but not malignant. His wit is playful, good humored, little of the bon diable, but never satanic. But Gioberti's wit, though delicate and keen, is felt, and the victim winces under the operation, and grows indignant at the wound it leaves. Yet he may be, after all, really as good natured as the old Athenian, but simply graver and more in earnest, and less conscious of the wounds he inflicts, or the pain he gives.
Since GIoberti's death, his friends have published, at Turin, eight volumes in octavo of unedited manuscripts, consisting of treatises blocked out, but unfinished, and selections from his correspondence. Of these, the Protologia, two volumes, Della FIlosofia della Rivelazione, one volume, Della Reforma Cattolica della Chiesa, one volume, are all that we have studied. They were left indeed unfinished, and lack the developments and the last literary touches of the author, but they had advanced so far towards completion, that the reader familiar with his system of thought as contained in the works published during his life, finds little to regret under the point of view of philosophy or theology. Their general system of thought harmonizes with that in his finished productions, but there is to be found in them, here and there, a detached proposition which, it is very possible, is either not his, or if his, would have been modified or striken out had he lived to complete and publish his works himself. These begun, but infinished works, which we feel cannot in every respect be relied on, are necessary to the full understanding of the Giobertian philosophy, and they indicate, on the part of the author, more extended studies and more maturity of mind than his finished productions. What he had published during his life was only an ontroduction to the study of philosophy, only the prodrome to his system of thought, and these were intended, when completed, to be the system itself. It is this fact that renders the exposition of the Giobertian philosophy so difficult. We have it not as a whole, nor with the author's last developments. It lay as a whole in his mind, he tells us, from the beginning, but we have only fragments of it. What he has left is a magnificent torso, which we are obliged to repair or completeby our own genius, in accordance with the original design of the artist. To do justice to the exposition, one must be in some measure competent to conceive and fill up the original design from his own genius and philosophical knowledge. He needs to be the twin brother of Gioberti himself. We have no pretensions of this sort; and though not an absolute stranger to the subject he treats, or the order of thought in which he moves, we are far from being able to do more than seize the bases and method of his system, and to present a few of its more salient points. We have neither the genius nor the learning, nor even the books at our command to do more, were we rash enough to attempt more.
The works GIoberti published during his life, with those published in his name by his friends since his death, embrace all science in its principle, method, unity, and universality, whether natural, revealed, metaphysical, theological, cosmological, political, ethical, physical, or aesthetical. But the outlines of his whole system, or sketch of the whole as first conceived in his mind, is in the volume named at the head of this article, the first work he published. He never deviated from his original conception, and no one can hope thoroughly to understand either his system or the growth of his mind without beginning by studying this volume, the driest and least attractive of all his works. Evidently, when he wrote it, though his whole scheme may have been in his mind, he was far from being master of his thought, and still farther from that thorough master of style and language which he subsequently became, and of which the best specimens are the Introduzione allo studio della Filosofia, second edition, Brussels, 1842, in four volumes octavo and his Gesuita Moderno, published in 1847, in five volumes octavo, and his Degli Errori Filosofici di Antonio Rosmini, three volumes octavo, 1842. In his Teorica del Sovrannaturale is the germ of all he has written, and nothing he has written is superior of its kind to the Parte Terza, which treats of the supernatural, of religion, and the Church in their relation to society, the state, or civilization.
The work, however, which must take precedence of the others in studying his Philosophy, is the Introduzione allo studio della FIlosofia, only the student must bear in mind, that though extending to four octavo volumes, it is only an instroduction, and makes only one book out of eight contemplated by the author. In connection with this, must be studied the controversial work, Degli Errori Filosofici di Antonio Rosmini. These works contain his philosophical principles and method, together with his criticisms on the various systems opposed to his own, especially the psychological syste placed in vogue by Descartes, the pseudo-ontologcal theories of the modern Germans, and the French Eclecticism as so eloquently and learnedly set forth and defended by Victor Cousin, an author who must always have a place in the history of philosophy. Yet all that has been published by the author, even the incomplete works edited and published by his friends since his death, must be studied by one who would really master his philosophy in its relation to revelation, politics, the sciences, literature, and art. He will even then find many gaps, and regret that the author died before his work was done.
In endeavoring to give our readers a connected and systematic view of what we shall call the Giobertian Philosophy, we must, however, be permitted to proceed in our own way, and give his views, as we understand them, in our own language. We shall make our own statements of his principles, method, and views, without pretending to support them by textual citations. Those of our readers who have not read his works and have not access to them, will necessarily have to rely to a great extent on our understanding and fidelity for the correctness of our eposition, which will detract not a little from its value. The character of his works is such that we could not pursue a different course without reproducing the entire, and our space, as well as the patience of our readers, is limited. What we propose is really an exposition, not a critical examination, not a defence, nor a refutation. On many of its points we have heretofore given our views, but we have never attempted to give a general view of Gioberti's philosphy as a system, and to enable our readers to judge of its mertis or demerits for themselves. This is what we now undertake, without committing ourselves for or against it.
We know perfectly well that few of our countrymen hold philosophy in much esteem, and fewer still have studied it sufficiently to take an interest in the exposition of the system of even so distinguished a philosopher as GIoberti. The present, too, may be thought a most unfavorable time to call the attention of any class of readers to the examination of metaphysical questions, which requires repose, the mind to be at ease, in a period of peace and public tranquility. It may be thought that men's minds are now in no fit mood for such examination. When the nation is engaged in a fearful struggle for its existence, and the public duties and public affairs tax to the utmost every thought and energy of our Scholars as well as of our Statesmen and the Generals of our armies, who is at leisure for calm and tranquil studies? But times like ours are always times of great mental actiivity as well as of great physical energy, and the midn wrought up to its highest tension on public affairs must have its occasional relaxation; and there are always in every noble and generous nation minds of a character that find relaxation in a simple change of study, or in passing for but a brief hour from the agitation of public affairs, the excitement of battle, the cares of office or command, to the calm and serene study of philosophy, however severe it may be in itself. It gives relief and allures the mind to rest, although it exercises it severely, for it exercises it in a different way, on a different topic. We ourselves feel the dangers of the country, are agitated in its agitation, and fear some blunder may ruin it, and we should grow crazy, if we could not find distraction in those severe studies which we should, perhaps, shrink from, if all around us were tranquil and peaceful, and our mind found nothing around it to stimulate its activity. We might go to sleep, lie listlessly under a shady beech, or on a green bank, under the soft moonlight, listening to sweet music in the distance. The odds are that our exposition of the Giobertian Philosophy may find more readers now than it would in calmer and less stormy times.
Moreover, never was there a time since America was a nation, when it was more important for us as a people to have a true and solid philosophy, on which the statesman can rest his fulcrum. Whether we are aware of it or not, our institutions are not only on trial, but are undergoing revision, and it depends on the wisdom of our statesman whether they shall be the better or the worse for it. All their defects are due not to what is called the practical wisdom of the framers, but to the false theories of government that prevailed at the time when they were framed; and those theories were due to the unsound philosophy which was then in vogue, - the sensist philosophy, represented for the English speaking world by John Locke, and for France by the Abbe Condillac, and the Encyclopaedists. This unsound philosophy flowed as an inevitable consequence from the psychological method of Descartes, who based all philosophy on a fact of consciousness,- Cogito, ergo sum. This reduced all certainty to a sentimental affection, or an interior affection of the subject. From interior sentiment, to simple sensation, there is but a step, and that step was taken by Condillac, who not only resolved all knowledge, but the thinking subject itself, into sensation transformee. This metaphysics applied to society could give no human race, only simple isolated individuals, and applied to politics it could give only le Contrat Social of Rousseau, and vest the sovereign power of the state in the irresponsible will of the majority. It either denies all government, or asserts the despotism of the state: - of the majority, if the form of the government is republican; of the monarch, with Hobbes, if it is monarchical. Locke was an Englishman, and like Englishmen generally, failed to push his principle to their logical consequences, and threw together in his system of philosophy and of politics, ideas and principles which have no affinity for each other, and which will never assimilate and form a harmonious whole. The British government is made up of inherent antagonisms, and is carried on only by the adroitness of the statesmen in playing off one antagonism against another.
Locke was the great master of our American statesmen, and they undertook to found the state on a nicely adjusted balance of antagonisms, and relied solely on enlightened self-interest to preserve the balance. They builded better than they knew, adn they left traces of their theory in both our State governments and the General Government. To those traces we owe the present rebellion and civil war. The real, the Providential, or unwritten constitution of the American state is profoundly philosophical- the only really dialectic constitution to be found in the history of nations. But the written constitutions only inadequately represent it, and the theories on which we have interpreted them are false, or at least one-sided. We have been developing them in the sense of the social-contract theory of Rousseau, or that of pure individualism; and therefore, in the sense of democracy, which is simply social or civil despotism. The democracy of John Jacues Rousseau had its good side, we admit: it asserted the rights of the people, drew attention to the poor, the humble, the oppressed, and brought them into the state. It recognized the manhood of every man; but it failed to recognize the social rights of man, and to secure his manhood in the face of the majority. It gave to society no solid basis, and recognized no law prescribing its rights and limiting its powers, but that of the variable will or might of the individual. We have seen its sad effects in the first French Revolution, from 1790 to 1795, and can judge of it by the systems of socialism and communism to which it has given birth. The people are logical in the long run, and they tend constantly to eliminate all anomolies from their social and political systems. In Great Britain there is a strong tendency, on the one hand, to eliminate from the British Constitution the Established Church, the House of Lords, and the hereditary monarchy; and, on the other, to eliminate the democratic element, or to subject it by increasing the power of the throne. The struggle goes on, and may last for a century, should nothing extraordinary occur to hasten a conclusion; but, if it goes on, the stonger party must win the victory; and that party, in Great Britain, is certainly the Commons or the people. If the king and nobility become alarmed, and undertake to prevent any further development of the democratic element, they will precipitate a revolution, and the scenes of blood and terror of the old French Revolution will be re-enacted in the British Isles.
In our own country, we have, as a people, ever since 1801, been eliminating from our State Constitutions every thing we had retained from our English ancestors, or from Colonial times, not in harmony with the false democracy taught by Rousseau, and of which Thomas Jefferson was the American exponent; and we have gone so far, and been so successful, that we have already precipitated the revolution, or the Rebellion seeking to become a revolution. Now, when we have put down the rebellion, what are we to do? Replace the anomalies we have eliminated? That would avail nothing, for the ineviatble struggle would commence to eliminate them anew. Go on the direction we have been going, and seek to give a fuller expression still to the social-contract theory, to the false democracy inaugurated by Jefferson? We cannot, without running into anarchy, and being obliged to seek relief in monarchical despotism, to which too many among us are already beginning to look. This will never do, for it were a huge stride backward to barbarism. What are we to do? Where lies our salvation? Not the mere practical statesman, not the mere empirical philosopher can answer, as the confusion and uncertainty witnessed in Congress and the Administration amply prove. The Constitution of the state cannot rest on a mere fact, it must rest on a principle, and have a dogmatic, nto a merely empirical basis. This dogmatic basis or principle must be not an abstract theory which men weave from their brain, or spin from their own bowels, as the spider does his web; but must be real, with a real existence in the constitution of things, and as permanent and invariable as the law of nature. How are we to arrive at such a principle or dogmatic basis, and to build on it, without the science that explains to us the laws of the universe in their political application? And what is this science but philosophy, the science of reason, or reason knowing and comprehending itself? If you base your state on individualism, you establish an inextinguishable antagonism between the individual and the government, and can maintain the state only by force; that is, by constant violence to what you acknowledge to be individual rights. If you found it exclusively on the social idea, on the assumed authority of society, you establish despotism, destroy individual freedom, and the very conditions of progress. If you found it on both ideas, without the principle that harmonizes them, you have the British government over again with its inherent antagonisms. You must, if you would have it stable, both authoritative and free, conservative and progressive, preserving society and fostering individual progress, found your state on both ideas, but on them in their real synthesis, as they really exist in nature, not arbitrarily or artificially placed in juxtaposition. The grand defect of so-called all mixed governments, which have hitherto existed, is that they have been unscientific, arbitrarily constructed, not founded on the real relation which nature, or rather God in nature, establishes between them. They have recognized the dualism, but not the middle term that unites the extremes in one and the same conclusion. SUch governments tend perpetually to dissolution, to simplify themselves by excluding one or the other idea, and therefore to become despotic; for all simple forms, that is, governments founded on one idea, whichever of the two ideas it may be, are real despotisms. Mr Calhoun clearly saw and illustrated this, but he saw no way of remedying the evil save by a nicely adjusted balance of antagonisms, or in rendering the resistance equal in force to the aggression. Hencehis doctrine of Nullification. But no man has so well illustrated this as Gioberti in his Della Rinnovamento Civile d' Italia, especially in his chapter on False Democracy, or democracy as set forth by John Jacques Rousseau. The problem is, how to escape the despotism of any of the simple forms of government, and the inherent antagonisms and tendency to dissolution of so-called mixed governments. If our statesman understand not the solution of this problem, they understand not how to meet the wants of American civilization, and to preserve the original and fundamental, the Providential constitution of the American people. But this solution they cannot understand, if they are ignorant of the nexus, the natural copula, which unites the two terms without destroying or distorting either; and they cannot arrive at this nexus without a philosophy as taught in the schools has ever yet done, or can do.
The great bond of social union, and incentive as well as guide to individual progress, is religion, which represents the Idea or DIvine element in human life, and the government of human affiars; but not a religion which has no Divine authority, and is itself subjected to the very opinions, passions, and interests it ought to control. No society, no government can long exists where religion is wanting. But here again meets us the same problem we have found in organizing the state, which is as truly a divine institution as the Church, and has, in its own order, just as good a right to exist. The difficulty in all the past has been that the two orders have existed in society as antagonists; and while Churchmen have struggled to subject the state to the Church, statesmen have labored to subject the Church to the state; the former to introduce the pantheistic idea, which denies the distinction between God and creature; and the latter to introduce the atheistic idea, which denies both God and creature - pure negation, and really no idea at all. Now here, as elsewhere, the problem is to reconcile the dualism without destroying it; the recognize the divine authority of the Church without losing the freedom and autonomy of the state; the invariability of faith without lesion to human progress; to reconcile the permanence of the Idea with its free and progressive development and application; for it is only on such conditions that religion can give stability and freedom to the state and aid the progress of civilization. Here, again, there is needed a middle term to unite the two extremes; and this middle term can be no human creation, no arbitrary contrivance; but to be a real middle term, and really effective, it must exist in the real universe; and man's business is simply to recognize it, and govern himself accordingly. But this is the work of science, of philosophy, which recognizes and explains the divine order, the real relation between the Creator and his works, what is called theological science, and which in our expositions varies with our philosophical systems. Never were we more in need of that sublime and profound philosophy, which sees and expalins things and relations as they really are, than now, when we have to take our reckoning and put the ship of state on its course. We cannot think, then, that we are forgetting the practical duties of the hour in calling the attention of thinking men to the consideration of those great principles, those stable and immutable ideas, as St Augustine calls them, without which the world of mere facts could not exist, and without a knowledge of which, facts have no significance for the human mind- are absolutely inexplicable.
The first thing that strikes the ordinary reader, on becoming partially acquainted with the Giobertian Philosophy, is its apparent lack of novelty. It seems to be an old acquaintance and substantially what has always been known and held in the schools, only presented in a new suit of clothes. The majority of those who read his works, we suspect, find little, if any thing, new or remarkable in them. GIoberti's solutions of the old problems they will take to be the ordinary solutions, and his principles those which have been generally received. There is some truth in this. Gioberti is not absolutely new and original, and there is scarcely a proposition to be found in the whole of his works to which we can point and say, Here is a proposition never before made. His principles are not new in philosophy, nor is his method of philosophizing. He nowhere breaks with the past, or interrupts the continuity of the higher philosophical tradition from Plato down to our own times. He himseld says his philosophy is old, and no new invention of his- a philosophy that has been substantially held by all great philosophers, theologians, and doctors, in every age and nation. He does but renew the chain of philosophic tradition from the remotest antiquity, unhappily broken by that blundering Bas-Breton, Rene Descartes, since whom there really has been no philosophy in Europe; for the psychological and sensistic systems to which he gave birth, and which can result only in the destruction of both subject and object, or pure nihilism, do not deserve the name of philosophy, not even as developed by Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, or Victor Cousin. But, if he accpets the universal philosophical tradition, he has his own way of explaining it; and, to those who understand him, he has presented it in a new light, given it new significance, and made it appear a new thing. His originality is in the new relations under which he presents old and familiar truths, and in bringing out their deeper meaning, and presenting them in their unity and universality, and in their mutual relations in the order of reality. Here he presents much that is new, and which gives a new face to the whole of philosophical science.
The scholastics distinguish between the order of being and the order of knowing, and it is not rare to find them asserting that a proposition is untrue in the order of cognoscendi, and yet true in the order essendi, or really true but ontologically false. That is, dialectics follow the order of the mind, not the order of things. Hence originates the interminable question of certainty, around which the excellent Balmes says revolve all the questions of philosophy. The pons asinorum of nearly all modern philosophers is precisely this question of certainty, or to prove that knowing is knowing. They ask not, what do we know, but how do we know that we know? As if to know that we know was something more than simply to know! To know equals to know that we know, and if the simple knowing needs confirmation, so does the knowing that we know; and as it is impossible to get any thing more ultimate than knowing, or more ceratin than knowledge, the question of modern philosophers has and can have no other effect than to cast doubt on all knowledge, and to place philosophy on the declivity to universal skepticism, and absolute nihilism, to which nearly all philosophy since Descartes inevitably conducts. Cogito, ergo sum, is, in the first place, a paralogism, for sum, I am, is in cogito, I think, and that I think is no more evident than that I am or I exist. The one is as immediately a fact of consciousness as the other. In the second place, the pretended enthymeme simply states a fact of consciousness, or an internal affection of the sentient subject, from which it is impossible to deduce any objective existence. Moreover, if the simple knowing is not to be taken as certain till it is confirmed by something more ultimate, the fact of consciousness itself becomes uncertain, for consciousness, or what the schoolmen call the sensus intimus, is only knowing. How do we know that we know that we have the internal affection? I think, therefore I am. But how do I know that I think. I think I think. But how do I know that I think I think? Thus we go on questioning forever, and can never get beyond the simple fact of knowing. If it be disputed that to know is to know, there is and can be for man no certitude either subjective or objective.
GIoberti finds, in his philosophy, no place for such questions, and does not once raise, or have occasion to raise, the question of the certitude of knowledge. To know is to know, and we either know or do not know. The error of modern philsophers arises cheifly from their discussing the question of method before discussing the question of principles, which compels them to deal with logical abstractions instead of realities, and give us a mundus logicus, diverse from the mundus physicus or real world. What is not, is not intelligible, is not and cannot be known, for it is simply a negation, and negations are intelligible only in the truth they deny, and hence a universal denial, or the assertion of universal negation, is simply impossible. Descartes begins his philosophy with a Discourse on Method; Bacon's whole science is reduced to methodolgy; Locke begins his Essay on Human Understanding by a dissertation on the origin of ideas, and proceeds to answer the question how we know, and what we are able to know, before he proceeds to discuss what we do know, or what are the principles of all science. Kant's masterly Kritik der reinen Vernunft is really a criticism on method, not science; Victor Cousin says expressly all philosophy is in method. Tell me a philosopher's method, and I will tell you his philosophy. Balmes, who is constantly sailing in sight of the coasts of truth, but is always afraid to land, though he discovers many an inviting inlet and safe harbor, begins with method, and devotes his first book to the question of certitude. All assume that the first question to be settle is, How know we that we know? and that their first business is without science to construct a science of science, a Wissenschaftslehre. Consequently, and not only to place their philosophy out of reach of the common mind, but in eternal opposition to common sense. The philosophy they build up with infinite labor and pains is no science of the living world, of concrete reality, but of logical abstractions, without real existence in nature.
Gioberti differs from them, and places the determination of principles before that of method. The principles give the method, not method the principles. The principles of philosophy are real, not mental abstractions; they are that without which the human mind can neither exist nor operate, without which all science is impossible, and therefore are given, not invented or found by the mind operating without them. Nearly all our philosophers send the mind, assumed to be as yet ignorant of principles, forth to seek them, forgetting that the mindwithout principles can neither operate nor exist, because the first principles of all science are those which create and constitute the human intellect itself, or man as an intellectual or rational existence, capable of know or understanding. The mind, destitute of principles, cannot seek principles, and ignorant of them it cannot recognize them, or know them to be principles. Principles, then, must be given antecendently to all our mental operations, and be constitutive of the human reasonor understanding, and therefore given by the Creator himself, and as given by him they are a priori, ideal, apodictic, not empirical, contingent, or doubtful, since, as doubt is a mental operation, we could not even doubt if we had them not. What these principles of all sciences are, adn what are their characteristics, we shall endeavor, in a subsequent article, to set forth. Here we restrict ourselves to their objective reality.
Victor Cousin begins with method, and adopting the psychological or Cartesian method, could never attain to any but psychological principles, and hence his great difficulty was to identify what he calls absolute ideas, the ideas of the True, the Good, and the Fair, with being or objective reality. Psychological observation and induction may, perhaps establish the psychological existence of these absolute ideas, as psychological facts, though not as ideas, but how from their psychological existence conclude their ontological existence or objective reality? Here was his difficulty, and he has never yet answered the criticism of Sir William Hamilton, published in 1829, in the Edinburgh Review. They are with him mere generalizations, like all inductions of psychological or even psychical phenomena, and therefore simply abstractions; and abstractions, we repeat, have no existence, but are simply formed by the mind operating on the concrete. The mind forms them by abstracting from a number of concrete objects what is common to them all, and by considering it apart; but they have no reality, no subsistence, as separate or distinct from their concretes or the mind that forms them. An ontology based on them is no real ontology, is only a generalization, without reality. The character of necessity which Mr. Cousin says inheres in all absolute ideas, and which he relies on as evidence of their objective validity, or real ontological truth, avails him nothing, for that is only a psychological necessity, and cannot be shown by him to be an ontological necessity. Hence the God he concludes from them is only an abstract God, only a generalization, and no real God, no real, necessary, living Being at all.
Yet Cousin approaches the truth when he asserts that what he calls absolute ideas are constitutive of the reason, without which reason could neither exist nor operate. Whether his account of absolute ideas, and his analysis of what he calls the objective reason, are to be accepted or not, or whether he has any right on his own doctrine to assert reason as objective, or ideas as absolute or necessary, we do not now inquire. His merit does not, in our judgment, lie in stating truly the constitutive principles of reason, but in recognizing and giving prominence to the fact that reason has constitutive principles, and in maintaining, in opposition to his psychological method, that the ultimate principles of human science are given intuitively, not obtained by reflection. They are in the mind prior to all reflection, and therfore are not obtained, as his system pretends, by the baconian method of observation and induction. So far he rises to a higher order of thought than his psychology warrants, at least apparently. But he falls back into psychology the moment he undertakes to explain the fact of intuition. He distinguishes very clearly between intuition and reflection, shows that intuition must precede reflection, for reflection is a voluntary turning back of the mind upon what has been intuitively presented; but he makes intuition itself a psychological fact, making it depend on the spontaneous activity of reason or the intellect, forgetting that reason can no more operate spontaneously than reflectively, without its constitutive principles. Gioberti escapes his error, his contradiction, and confusion, by asserting the principles, the primitive intuition, not as the product of reason, but as really constitutive of it, as creating man, and enabling him to know by giving him a priori the faculty and the object of science.
Having settled the question of priciples, we may proceed to the question of method. The peculiarity of GIoberti, in regard to method, is that while he holds that the first principles of all science are intuitive and constitutive of intelligence, and therefore objective and real, not merely psychological generalizations, or logical abstractions, and consequently affirming to us the real, not a fictitious world, he in the construction of science uses the data given by revelation as well as those given by natural reason. Philosophy, in his sense of the term, is not a science separate from theology, or that can be constructed without the aid of the superintelligible, which we can know only analogically through the medium of supernatural revelation. In his view all true philosophy is Christian and Catholic. Considered in itself there is but one order of truth, and in the higher sense but one truth, which he calls the Idea or God himself, considered as the object of knowledge, or as it stands toward the human intellect, and it to us partly intelligible and partly superintelligible. As the intelligible has its root, its source, its essence, in the superintelligible, and has no existence without it, it follows that it is simply impossible to have a science of truth, of being, of things as they are, without the knowledge of that which is to us superintelligible. That knowledge of the superintelligible, of the origin, causes, and end of things which can be known by us only through the medium of revelation, is as essential to science as it is to being or existences. Here he separates from the pure rationalists, who reject revelation, and from the supernaturalists who reject reason, as well as from the Jesuits and their admirers, who, though they accept both rational truth and revealed truth, present them as two orders of truth, not contradictory the one to the other indeed, but lying one above the other, and without any real or necessary relation between them, constituting a dualism which can never be reconciled and brought into dialectic union, or real synthesis, by a middle term. This needs explanation.
The total separation of philosophy from revelation, and the attempt to make it a purely rational science, or to construct it by our natural light alone, is modern, and dates from Rene Descartes. We find nothing of the sort in antiquity, Jewish or Gentile. Plato and Aristotle are ignorant of it, and use revelation as they had it, or as the Greek world had retained it in their traditions; and if they fail to attain to a philosophy that truly explains the origin, cause, laws, and end of the universe, it is not because their reason is false or uncultivated, but because their tradition of the primitive revelation is not preserved in its purity and integrity. The early Fathers understand by philosophy the Greek or Gentile wisdom, and some of them seem to take it for granted that the Gentiles had only the light of nature, and that this Greek wisdom is the measure of what man can do without revelation; but none of them ever suppose that philosophy can be complete without revelation, or theology be complete without philosophy, or the order of truth cognizable by the light of nature. They distinguish between Christian wisdom and Gentile wisdom, but never separate reason from revelation. The great Fathers, Origen, Clemens, Alexandrinus, Athanasius, Basil, the Gregories, Augustine, do not admit that Gentile wisdom is to be taken as the expression of reason isolated from revealed truth, and palinly teach that the Gentiles retained traditions of revealed wisdom. The Word, which is with God, is God, and the true light that enlighteneth every man coming into the world, they would have us believe, did not confine his inspirations and revelations to the Jews only, but in some degree extended them to the whole human race.
The Scholastics coming after the fall of Rome, the breaking up and almost total destruction of the old Italo-Greek civilization, the lapse of the greater part of western Europe into barbarism, when learning had declined and historical studies had fallen into almost universal neglect, very generally adopt the view that the Gentile wisdom, which with them as with the Fathers is what is meant by Philosophy, was the product of reason unaided by revelation, and hence its defects as philosophy. Exceptions to this statement may be found, but generally the Scholastics either were silent on the question, or regarded the Gentile world as abandoned to the simple light, or darkness, of nature, and as having never received, or if they had received, as having wholly lost all tradition of revealed wisdom. But none of them teach, not even St Thomas of Aquino in his Contra Gentiles, that a consistent and complete philosophy or science even of the natural order is practicable with the simple light of reason alone; and we may add for what it is worth, that the late distinguished Theatine, Padre Ventura, labors to prove the Angel of the Schools, as St Thomas was called, was a traditionalist, and held philosophy impossible without the tradition of revelation. This in a certain sense is true of all the Scholastics, for even the most rigid of the Peripatetics never pretended that Aristotle, whose writings were their Bible of Science, had given a complete science of the natural order, although they held that he had given the last word of unassisted reason. In no instance do they separate faith from reason, or philosophy from theology, and present philosophy and theology as two distinct and mutually independent sciences. The error of the Scholastics, which had so disastorus effect, grew out of the clerocratic tendency of their times, which would subject the temporal to the spiritual, make the Pope, as head of the Church, the universal and sovereign lord in temporals, and vest the civil and political supremacy in the clerical order, and consisted in subjecting reason to faith, and in presenting philosophy as the handmaid, slave [ancilla] of the clergy. They did not reject philosophy, but they enslaved it, first, to the clergy, and secondly, to Aristotle. As they held and were obliged to hold that the Bible interpreted by the Church was authoritative in matters of revelation or faith, so they held and insisited that all should hold that the writings of Aristotle interpreted by the professors, was authority in all matters of reason or science. He who departed from Aristotle was treated as a heretic in science, as he who departed from the Bible was a heretic in religion. Berengarius hardly fares worse than did poor Friar Bacon. Aristotle had given and closed the canon of science, as the Bible had that of revelation. No new scientific investigations in regard to either was needed or permitted, and the onlyu intellectual labor allowable was that of the interpreter and the commentator. St. Thomas scrupulously reproduces Aristotle, whom he calls Philosophus, the Philosopher, and never in the slightest particular deviates from him, unless compelled by the revealed dogma. The same order was asserted throughout, and all was subjected by a merciless logic to external authority.
This clerocratic order, as far as it obtained, created an intolerable tyranny, allowed no freedom of mind, no intellectual or social development and progress. It created an invincible antagonism between the Church and Society, the Pope and the emperor, the clergy and the politicians, theology and philosophy, revelation and reason. It produced a powerful reaction, and the enslaved elements, after a long struggle, emancipated themselves, but only to subject their former masters, and to tyrannize over them in turn, as they themselves had been tyrannized over. Descartes was born in this reaction, and he labored to emancipate science alike from its subjection to the theologians and to Aristotle. He rejected, mentally, all the past, discarded all tradition, alike of revleation and of science, and resolved to accept nothing as science not obtained by logical deduction from the facts of his own individual consciousness. Hence his famous, cogito, ergo sum, as his primium philosophicum, or first principle in science. He pretended that with reason alone, operating on the incontestable facts of individual consciousness, without any aid from tradition of revelation, it is possible to arrive at a complete philosophy or true science of the natural order, or in other words, individual reason alone is able, by its own light, by its own conceptions, to attain to a complete scientific system of the universe. He thus assued what had never before been pretended, effected, in theory, an entire separation of philosophy from theology, and made it purely rationalistic. The rationalists, adopting his theory, go farther, perhaps, than he was prepared to go, and conclude that, if our own reason, by its own light, operating upon its own conceptions, can expalin the universe, there is no reason for demanding or accepting revelation. Here is the great difficulty in the way of teaching which is generally patronized by the Jesuits. They assert the possibility of naturla beatitude, and the sufficiency of reason in the order of nature, and so far are pure rationalists. They found the necessity of supernatural revelation on the fact of alleged fact that God has created or instituted a supernatural order, above the natural order, and by entering which we may attain to supernatural beatitude. But, if God had not seen proper to establish a supernatural order, man would have been left, without any detriment, to his simple natural light. Reason does not herself need or demand such supernatural order, and then there is no real or intrinsic relation between the two orders. How then prove to reason that the supernatural order really exists, or that a supernatural revelation has been made? This question is unanswerable, and the Society's teaching labors under all the disadvantages of exclusive rationalism on the one hand, and of exclusive supernaturalism on the other, and the Jesuits have had, in point of fact, the mortification of seeing the world under them as teachers either lapsing into rationalism and treating the question of revelation with superb indifference, or rejecting reason, discarding science, and taking refuge in a one-sided, sophistical, and therefore immoral asceticism.
The scholastics recognize philosophy, assert even scientific tradition, but enslave the mind to the tradition, and philosophy to theology; the Cartesian emancipates philosophy from theology, and the mind from tradition, but at the expense of the continuity of the race, and of leaving all the past, all history unexplained, and without significance, thus isolating man from God, from nature, and from society, and ending necessarily in pure individualism, egoism, - nihilism, as history but too clearly demonstrates; Jesuitism accepts both rationalism and supernaturalism, rational conceptions and traditions, but as unrelated, without any intrinsic connection, or middle term which converts the dualism into a synthesis. Gioberto claims here to have found in the original principles of science and of things this middle term, which renders the two dialectic, unites them in a real synthesis, and destroys all antagonism.
There is, undoubtedly, a dualism which all science does and must recognize, and it is that of the supernatural and the natural, or in other words that of Being and existences, God and his works. The asserters of the sufficiency of reason and the defenders of the necessity of revelation, however, alike misplace this dualism, the only real dualism, by confounding the natural with the intelligible, and the supernatural with the superintelligible. But the superinteligible is as natural as the intelligible, and the intelligible as supernatural as the superintelligible. The intelligible and superintelligible are not two distinct or diverse orders; they are one and the same order, and the sole distinction between them is is relation to our understanding. We know the intelligible by immediate, direct intuition, but the superintelligble only analogically and as supernaturally revealed; but that which is revealed and made indirectly known to us through the medium of anologies borrowed from the intelligible and the sensible, is but the hidden complement of that which is intuitively apprehended, the part that remains in shadow, and which reason by her own light alone cannot illumine. This holds true with regard to the profoundest mysteries of Christianity. The reality asserted in these mysteries is an essential part of the intelligible reality, and intrinsically, substantially, joined to it, essential to its existence as a whole. God as real and neccesary being is intelligible,- in his essence he is superintelligible; but God cannot be without essence, and there is no real distinction between being and essence, as the schoolmen say, between the Divine esse and the Divine essentia. The essences of things are in all cases superintelligible, even the essences of created or natural things, but there is no thing without its essence, for the essence is that by virtue of which a thing is what it is. From revelation we learn that the essence of God is relation, the threefold relation, expressed in Christian theology by the word Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, but there is no distinction admissible between these and God, or between these and the Being of God, for they are relations in his being, and esssential to him as one living being, or one God.
All the distinctively Christian mysteries are included in the Incarnation. The Incarnation, or the act of assumption by the Word of human nature, is supernatural, but no more supernatural than the act of God creating the cosmos, and indeed is only that act completed. It is teleological, not cosmic, but it is no after-thought designed to meet some unforeseen difficulty, or reapir some unexpected damage. It is integral in the original plan of creation, and was as necessary to complete the cosmos, before as after man had sinned. It redeems man from sin, provides the atonement, and thus manifests the infinite mercy of God. It is, as redemption, an act of free, sovereign grace, for God is not obliged to pardon the sinner, and the sinner, who has knowingly abused his free will can do nothing to merit pardon, but it is always necessary to the fulfillment of creation, for never could man attain to the end of his existence, or to his complete beatitude, possible only in the supernatural, without being regenerated in Christ, united to him, and made one with him as he is one with God the Father. The mysteries are supernaturally revealed, because they are superintelligible, but they are themselves no more supernatural than the intelligible itself. The cosmos and palingenesia are supernatural in the creative act of God, and in that act they are identical, and simply the one completed creative act of God. There is then no radical diversity between what is called nature and what is called grace, between the natural order and the Christian order, for the Christian order is simply palingenesiac, the completion of the cosmic or generative, which without it would remain simply initial, inchoate, as is and must be our present life, which has no end, no purpose, no meaning, no reason, if there be not another. The distinction between the two is simply the distinction between the commencement and the completion. Hence Gioberti says man in this life, or the cosmos, is a God that begins; in glory he is consummated, God completed. Through union by nature with the Incarnate Word, creature becomes one with the Creator, and God is all and in all.
The supernatural is God andhis immediate act. The natural is what is done, produced, or effected by second causes, operating according to their own laws. Viewed in its origin and end, or the creative act, the created universe is itself supernatual; for neither its origin nor its end is explicable by natural laws, or without the immediate creative act of God. The human race is propogated by natural generation, and its propagation is explicable on natural principles, but Adam and Eve must have been immediately created, and therefore in their origin supernatural. You do not get rid of the difficulty even if you prove, which you are not likely to do, that man has been developed from the tadpole, the chimpanzee, or the gorilla, for wherever you assert development, you must come at length to the commencement of the the series, or to that which is not the product of development. You may even prove the gaseous theory held by some physicists, and the the universe existed primarily in a gaseous state, and even go so far as to resolve all the various gasses into a single gas; but you have got rid of no difficulty. Whence that single gas itself? You can no more explain the origin of that gas without the creative act of God, than you can that of the universe itself, supposing it to have existed originally in the same state in which we find it. The universe is, then, inexplicable without creation, and, therefore, without the supernatural.
The distinction between the ssupernatural and the natural is not that between the intelligible and the superintelligible, for God and his creative act are supernatural, but nothing, as we shall show in our second article, is more intelligble to us than God and his creative act. God is not only intelligible per se, but He and His creative act are the source and conditions of all intelligibleness and intelligence.
Now God and his works constitute a real dualism, and are distinguishable one from the other, but not separate. They are distinguishable as Creator and creature; and are never to be confounded one with the other; but they are also united as Creator and creature joined together in a real synthesis by the creative act; for the act is in the actor, and the effect is in the act, and cannot subsist a moment without the act. Let God cease his creative act, and the universe instantly drops inot nothing, and is as if it had not been. The conservation of existences is their continued creation; the creative act and the conservative act are one and the same act, and we have already seen that identical with it is the teleological and palingenesaic act, or the act of consummation and glorification, and hence the Universe in its origin, its medium, and its end, is, to those who can understand it, only the exterior expression of the interior essence of God, of Being itself, asserted in the Christian dogma of the Trinity. Hence, all ages and nations have referred the origin, preservation, and consummation of things to the sacred Triad in some form, and held that in the Sacred Triad, in some form, is the secret of all being and existence, the key to the Universe. As the universe is dialectically, synthetically, really, united to God in the creative act, and though distinguishable, inseparable from him, it follows that there can be no philosophical science separate from theology, or science of God. Philosophy must explain the Universe in its principles and causes, and as these are in God, it must include the science of Being as well as of existences, of the supernatural as well as of the natural. Humboldt, in his Cosmos, gives us much useful information, but he gives us science only in a secondary sense, for science, properly so called, is not in the observation and classification of facts, not obtained from them either by deduction or induction; for it consists precisely in their explication, in joining them to their principles and causes in which is their true sense or significance. As these principles and causes are to a great extent superintleeigible to us, it is clear that no true science, in its higher sense, no real philosophy is possible without revelation, any more than it is possible without theology. Hence, Gioberti unites Creator and creature, reason and revelation in his philosophy. He so unites them because they are united in reality, and the science of the creature is not possible without the science of the Creator, of existences without the science of Being, of the intelligible without the science of the superintelligible, of the cosmic without the palingenesiac. Science is science of things as they really are, in their real principles and relations, not as they are not. As the two series of terms in the real world, are never seaparable the one from the other, so must they be inseparable in all real science, or true philosophy. This iswhat is meant when it is said philosophy in its principle and method must follow the order essendi, and not what the schoolmen call the order cognoscendi, which is merely that of conception or abstration.
The difficulty which so many feel in accepting revelation as an element in philosophical science, is much lessened, if not completely removed, by Gioberti's doctrine of the supernatural, which distinguishes it from the superintelligible, and unites or identifies the natural and the supernatural in the creative act of God, thus making the supernatural as intelligible to us as the natural. The difficulty has grown out of supposing revelation to be the revelation of an order distinct from, above, and intrinsically unconnected with the order intelligible to our natural reason,- a doctrine of which the Jesuits and their followers are the chief patrons, of which we find no trace in Jewish or Gentile antiquity, in the early Fathers, hardly any in the great medieval doctors, and which has grown out of the misunderstanding of the condemnation of the 55th Proposition of Baius, and the very poorly managed controversy with the Jansenists; or, to be more precisely exact, of the controversy about nature and grace, which arose in the early part of the sixteenth century, between Catholics and Protestants, and in the seventeenth between the Molinists or Jesuits and the Augustinians and Thomists - a controversy which had in the same century its counterpart amongst Protestants in the controversy, not yet ended, between the Calvinists and the Arminians. But by showing that the distinction between truths of reason and truths of revelation is not the distinction between nature and grace, or between existence, and that what is revealed pertains to and is an integral part of what is intuitively apprehended, combined with our faculty of superintelligence, places revelation, in regard to our science, in precisely the same category with all history or tradition, and renders it creditable in the same way and by the same degree of testimony. Gioberti is not a Cartesian, and does not hold it possible to construct philosophy by logical deductions from the facts of individual consciousness, simply, because man does not exist as an isolated individual, and because he is progressive and has a history. He takes man as he finds him, as the theologians say, in the sensus compositus, with his memories and his hopes, his reminiscences and his prophecies. Revelation, in relation to the man of today, is historical, traditionary, and for the philosopher is in the category of general tradition. It enters into and forms an integral part of the traditionary wisdom of mankind, embodying his past developments, his Ideal, and the law of his future progress. The human race is continuous, and it needs not to begin, and cannot begin de novo, today, in science any more than in existence. Philosophy must accept and explain the past as well as the present and future, for the whole life of man, past and to come, is but one life, indissolubly united both to God and to nature. It must give us the Divine Idea which the past has been developing, and which the future must develop and complete in the life of the race.
It will, perhaps, relieve some minds prejudices against recognizing supernatural revelation as an element or condition of science, to know that Gioberto holds that the revelation was made in the beginning, that it is coeval with the race, and was infused into man by his Creator along with language, whcih is the medium of its transmission, and from which it is taken. Language contains both the intuition of the intelligible and the revelation of the superintelligible. They are incorporated into it in their true synthesis or union, and the human mind has never operated without them both, for it has never operated and never could operate without language of some sort. There never has been a purely rational science, borrowing nothing from revelation; nor a purely revealed science or faith, borrowing nothing from natural reason. There has never been an age, nation, or individual wholly destitute of revelation. The revelation is as old and as universal as language. The WOrd, the Idea, the Truth, both as revealed and as naturally intelligible, is universal, but is transmitted in its integrity only when and where language, the medium of its transmission, is preserved uncorrupted. Where language is corrupted and the integrity of speech is lost, the tradition of the truth in its integrity, whether revealed or rational, is corrupted, and comes to us distorted or mutilated; and hence, though all nations have it, all do not receive it or transmit it in its integrity and purity. Since the confusion and corruption of language at the building of Babel, and the consequent dispersion of mankind, the tradition has been transmitted through two channels - the one orthodox, the other heterodox. The heterodox tradition comes down to us through the Gentiles; the orthodox from the Patriarchs, through the Jewish Synagogue and the Christian Church, infallible by the divine assistance in preserving the language of truth in its integrity and free from corruption or confusion. Nevertheless, the philospher must study the tradition under both its forms, if he would master it and understand the past civilization of the race; as he who would master the Christian dogmata, get at their real sense, must study them in the sects, in their heterodox developments as well as in the infallible speech of the Church. The study of heresy helps us to the comprehension of orthodoxy.
If we have Gioberti's thought at all plain, it will be seen that, though he combines both reason and revelation in the development of science, he does not, with the French Traditionalists, make the first principles of science depend on revelation; or, with the Scholastics, make philosophy the slave of theology, for theology itself is a human science. For him reason and revelation stand on the same footing, are alike supernatural and divine in their origin and light, and both present to the mind one and the same objective truth. If there is apparent collision, for real collision is impossible, neither yields to the other; for one or the other has been misconceived, and the investigation must be continued till the mediating term that reconciles them is found. The dogma expresses the Idea, which is divine and infallible, but the language in which it is expressed may be misinterpreted, and our theories and speculations concerning it may need revision. The dogma is infallible, but theologians are fallible; and while they have retained the infallible speech in which it is expressed, they may fail to seize its true sense; though the dogma is infallible, nothing guarantees the infallibility of our minds in our understanding and appropriation of it.
But it is time to close this article, already too long. The full appreciation of much that we have thus far advanced depends upon principles and views which remain to be set forth. We have not followed Gioberti's order, but have followed the order which best suited our own convenience. The view we have given is a general view, taken substantially from the work before us, and is, in the main, introductory. In a second article we will give an exposition of his Ideal Formula.