12 MAR 2025 · Vincenzo Gioberti, in the examination of the Compilers of the Neapolitan neo-Thomist periodical “Science and Faith”. (Pasquale Giustiniani)
1. The periodical “Science and Faith” among the “winds of university reform”
When, in 1865, the main inspirer of the periodical “Science and Faith” (founded in Naples in 1841) dies, namely Canon Gaetano Sanseverino, struck by the fatal disease (cholera), assisted by his friend, collaborator and ordinary confessor, Canon D’Amelio -, the funeral eulogy will be pronounced by Giuseppe Provitera. This person - a member of the Almo Collegio dei teologi dell'Università Neapolitan -, on the occasion of those funerals - which took place in the church of San Giovanni Battista alla Sapienza - informs us that Gaetano Sanseverino had been, among other things, the animator of a group of intellectuals, members of the clergy and university professors, with the declared aim of reconciling the Christian faith, science and literature. The same essay reiterates what, as we will see, will be a persistent line of dissent of the Neapolitan Neo-Thomist Circle, not only with respect to the philosophical and political positions of Vincenzo Gioberti, but, in general, with respect to the widespread orientation that sometimes appears labeled as pantheism and ontologism. While the Kantian legacy remains influential in German-speaking countries, in Italy and France, on the other hand, ontologism has enjoyed considerable success for several decades, although contemporary historians of theology have labeled it a “firework without a future”. In fact, as we read today in Paul Poupard: «in Italy and France, the aim is to use Cartesianism, which has been replaced in the younger generations by the traditionalism of Lamennais and De Maistre. Around the middle of the century, the firework without a future of ontologism explodes. This is the situation in which the rediscovery of scholasticism flourishes. The cause of the rebirth of Thomism, in addition to providing a bulwark and barrier against Cartesianism, was the credit given to traditionalism and romanticism». How, then, does the Christian direction of philosophy and theology, coordinated by the Compilers of Science and Faith, orient itself in Naples? With respect to certain Giobertian openings, twenty years later, exactly in 1860, the Introduction to the first issue of the Neapolitan periodical “La Scienza e la Fede” will textually warn its readers of the risks of progressivism, which would be induced, moreover, precisely by the cultural currents that were supporting the unitary insurrections. It would be, the Neapolitan Compilers warn, a dangerous path because it assimilates the Idea to God, causing a sort of fusion/confusion between the One and the whole (as then, deplorably, happens in idealistic rationalism): «dangerous path in which some admirers of a progressive theory have placed themselves in learning! To whom almost nothing more seems good and admissible than what the ancients taught, and they want to make changes even to the terminology of sacred science. The thrice-holy name of God has changed for them into Idea or Unitutto; the power of the Church has uncertain formulas three categories of hierarchical, extra-hierarchical or supra-hierarchical power; they clash in theology, in canon law, everywhere, the one and the multiple harmonized, as they repeat at every third word, thought and action".
2. The resistance of "La Scienza e la Fede" to the reforms
As we are well reminded by a distinguished Neapolitan professor: "more solemn than usual was the inaugural ceremony, on November 5, of the academic year 1859-60 of the University of Naples, preceded by the mass to the Holy Spirit celebrated in the Church of the Gesù Vecchio by the priest Giovanni Ibello, professor of Dogmatic Theology, attended by the Rector and the professors in robes and adorned with the medal of St. Thomas Aquinas and the students. A new life seemed to penetrate, in addition to the flourishing private studies, in the ancient and only University of the South». Francesco De Sanctis meanwhile continues the previously started university reform works. This involves, among other things, the dismissal of several professors, including that of the aforementioned neo-Thomist canon, and Compiler of “La Scienza e la Fede”, Gaetano Sanseverino, who was still holding a university teaching position whose holder was ill. This periodical will be, even after many years, considered, not only as the point of reference of traditional Christian philosophy, but also as the training ground of a real School, both in the philosophical and theological fields, as can be explicitly read in an essay by another eminent neo-Thomist, Salvatore Talamo: the illustrious philosophers inventoried by Talamo will be, following the leader of the school, Gaetano Sanseverino: Nunzio Signoriello (who is also considered the “prince” of the Neapolitan Neo-Thomist School); Salvatore Calvanese; Francesco Gambardella; Salvatore Cacace; while the inventoried theologians, as of 1875, are: Luigi Coletta and Giuseppe Giustiniani.
It will be noted that, in the involutive parable of a position persistently criticized by the periodical - which Provitera, in his years, will explicitly brand as rationalism -, the philosophical and political position of Vincenzo Gioberti plays, in fact, some role, at least as a constant “target” in the eyes of the Compilers. To this thinker - who the Compilers often call, not without a critical point, as a "Piedmontese philosopher", also for reasons of rivalry between Kingdoms, before and after the unification season - numerous pages of "La Scienza e la Fede" are dedicated. This can be seen in the periodical since 1857, when the pen of the philosopher Giuseppe Prisco (formerly a teacher of Benedetto Croce at the "La Carità" Gymnasium-Liceo in Naples) became interested in Gioberti. It is Giuseppe Prisco himself (later the future archbishop of Naples and cardinal) who, in an essay on Anselm - that he defended against the contemporary direction of rationalism -, even recognized some rationalistic notes in Vincenzo Gioberti.
3. Giuseppe Prisco's criticisms of Vincenzo Gioberti's alleged rationalism.
During the year 1858, "La Scienza e la Fede" dedicated several hundred pages to what seemed to be becoming, in the eyes of the Compilers, a real "Gioberti" issue. In addition to Prisco's signature, another author should also be recorded, in an anti-Gioberti vein, who shared the criticism of the one who, perhaps also in polemic with the reforms of the Savoy kingdom, was now explicitly apostrophized also as a "Piedmontese philosopher". In the first of his two essays, Giuseppe Prisco, as proof that the criticism he leveled at Gioberti, particularly expressed in the years from 1839 onwards, is not gratuitous and preconceived, declares that he has read Gioberti's works dispassionately, but that he has, unfortunately, drawn not a few contradictions, particularly in the peculiar formula of the ideal vision, which the Piedmontese would have intended to correlate, unduly according to Prisco, with the Christian patristic tradition and Catholicism: «Certainly I do not know, whether I should say greater folly the Ideal Vision, or more that dreamed scientific tradition, by which he believes to validate it, and make it understood as very Catholic. The most renowned philosophers of antiquity, both pagan and Christian, Plato in particular, Saint Augustine and Saint Bonaventure, not once, nor ten, but a hundred times are proclaimed by him as the first traditional link of that ideal Vision, of which Malebranche is the legitimate successor in the modern age». Truly a sort of great historical-philosophical theater, that of Gioberti to which he also unduly ascribes the precursors of ancient, late-ancient and medieval philosophy! And yet, Prisco continues, if up to this point «Plato appears dressed as an ontologist in the great theater of Giobertian ontologism», a little further on Gioberti himself contradicts himself, in that he makes Plato sit on the same bench as Descartes regarding the meaning of innate ideas. Even in Del primato morale e civile degl’Italiani , the same Gioberti, in addition to distorting Platonic doctrines, contradicts himself at every step, insists the neo-Thomist, almost showing that he has fallen asleep: In the volume, this time under the Sciences section, the examination signed by Giuseppe Prisco continues. He maintains that the ideal of Malebranche, of whom Gioberti would be an epigone, would go back directly, through the Fathers and the Neoplatonists, to Plato, who would be, in this way, the fiercest ontologist of paganism! Or also, as we read: «Gioberti, links the philosophy of the Fathers, which is, in his opinion, essentially ontological to that of the Neoplatonists, considering the latter as the antecessors of the former in the order of science» We therefore come to be ironic, speaking directly to the readers of the Neapolitan periodical: «My friends, we would be sent if we had remained with the miserable and fruitless philosophy of our ancestors, and if providence had not removed from among the Italians Vincenzo Gioberti, who, making use of a sovereign and dialectical speculation, left behind as much the philosophy of his predecessors, as the conciliatory dialectic of Hegel left behind the vulgar philosophy of his times». 4. Giuseppe Provitera's criticism of Gioberti
The tight critical line of the Neapolitan periodical towards Gioberti's positions will become a clear distancing, linguistically even more ferocious, following the condemnation of the Index in 1852. Reviewing the Discorso di Pier Biagio Casoli - appeared in L’avvenire dell’Italia, Casoli, Milan 1889 -, “La Scienza e la Fede” will observe, about forty years after the first positions of Vatican condemnation and, therefore, of anti-Giobertian dissent pursued by the...