We do not need to write a biography of Descartes here; we need only consider each of his works as a living thing, explain their birth, follow their development, and thus rediscover the philosopher’s preoccupations. We will therefore leave aside his family genealogy, which would teach us nothing, and his education with the Jesuits, which has been very well described by all his biographers. As for the little-known periods of his youth, we will add no obscurity to our ignorance. Two features deserve to be recalled: on the one hand, his teachers certainly advised their pupil, as they did all his classmates, to work ad majorem Dei gloriam; on the other hand, the young man, like many others, from a very early age demonstrated the most profound contempt for books. It was, says Baillet, in the year 1613 that he acquired this conviction, but, and here he is more original, he did not believe that this disdain could be an honest pretext for laziness or that the uselessness of books meant the uselessness of science. The young Descartes intends to find the truth: such is the postulate of his entire life; when was it posed? No one can say; such a will precedes all work, precedes all determined study, precedes all intellectual crisis, since without it there would be neither work, nor study, nor crisis; it is born with intelligence. There are people who are indifferent: they keep themselves on the margins of the true and false. There are others who are curious, who like to know for the sake of knowing, without feeling the need to settle down. There are others finally who seek in order to find; they do not cultivate curiosity for its own sake; for them it is an appetite for truth - which only truth can satisfy. Descartes was one of them.

I. — The Winter of 1618-1619

We can only begin Descartes’ life in the winter of 1618-1619, that is, at the time when the correspondence with Beeckman allows us to follow his preoccupations. Descartes was twenty-two years old; he was in Breda, in the ranks of Maurice of Nassau; he was learning painting, military architecture, and Dutch. He became very close in November 1618 with a young doctor, Beeckman, eight years his senior. Cohen has rightly emphasized the importance of these relationships. At that time, everything interested him: mathematics, physics, mechanics; he is in contact with many Jesuits, scholars and scientists, Beeckman tells us, “however he says that apart from me, he has never met anyone who closely unites physics and mathematics in his studies” ([Adam-Tannery vol.] X, p. 52); solicited by the Dutchman, he writes a memoir on the fall of bodies, a memoir on the pressure of liquids, a compendium musicae; he collects notes on algebra and geometry. Milhaud, who has very clearly exposited these first scientific essays of Descartes, notes that “already, in any case, with the first more or less distant vision of his future solution, his tendency to see big, to dream of a complete, total work is naively expressed: to seek exhaustive solutions, to conceive of his works as having to realize the integral and definitive science”. Let us add that in at the end of 1618, science did not appear to him as a simple amusement; most probably on the advice of Beeckman, he made it the goal of his life, and he immediately conceived a great work in which a new science would be revealed to the world.

On January 24, 1619, he wrote to his friend: “As for me, I remain idle as usual; I have barely written the titles of the books that I will write on your advice” (X, p. 151). Thus, in the last months of 1618, Beeckman gave him the idea of ​​writing; of writing what? A treatise? A small book like the compendium musicae on a point of detail? No, but books; the two young scholars together drew up the program for a vast study, and Descartes began by looking for the titles of each part. In the three letters that follow, Descartes keeps his friend informed of his project. “Certainly, in order to lay my projects completely bare before you, I want to bring not an Ars brevis of Llull, but an entirely new science, by which all questions that could be proposed in any order of quantity, continuous as well as discontinuous, can be resolved” (X, pp. 156-157); all problems can be resolved with the help of appropriate lines, and by this new method some will be resolved which, until now, could not be resolved by any other; this science will definitively classify all problems into a certain number of categories, precisely according to the nature of the lines which allow them to be resolved. “Certainly, it is an infinite work, and one which could not be the work of a single person. It is of incredible ambition; but I have perceived I know not what light through the obscure chaos of this science, with the help of which I believe I can dissipate the thickest darkness” (op.cit., pp. 157-158). These lines are dated March 26, 1619; a month later, on April 23, he promises Beeckman not to forget their project during his trek across Europe. “If I stop anywhere, which I hope will happen to me, immediately I promise you to seriously set to work on my mechanics or my geometry.” Descartes therefore fully intends to compose a great work of mathematical physics, and he is so happy to have given this goal to his life, that he warmly thanks the one he calls “the promoter and the first author of his studies” (X, p. 163). “It is you alone, in fact, who have shaken me out of my idleness; you have recalled in me knowledge already almost erased from my memory, you have brought back to serious and better occupations a mind that had strayed from it. If therefore something comes out of me that is not contemptible, you have the right to claim it and I myself will not fail to send it to you either so that you can profit from it, or so that you can correct it” (id.). He therefore sets off on his journey with the hope that something will come out of him; from now on he can affirm that he has a certain number of inventions and that his work will be “new and not contemptible” (id.).

It was at the beginning of 1619, after the decisive meditations of November and December 1618, that he wrote down the notes we now call Cogitationes privatae. At the head is the famous text, which only has its full flavor in Latin: “Ut comoedi, moniti, ne in fronte apparatus pudor, personam induunt: sic ego, hoc mundi theatrum conscensurus, in quo hactenus spectator existiti, larvatus prodeo” (X, p. 213). Look at this soldier; he carries within him a world that only he has penetrated and that only he has explored; who would believe it? He resembles all the others, and yet it is he who will bring to the universe “a new science”, “an astonishing science”, he will say later, “scientia admirabilis”; until then he was a spectator; he listened; now he will speak; it is this contrast between his external life and his internal life that he expressed a few days before, on December 31, 1618, in the last lines of the Compendium musicae. “I allow this child of my mind,” he wrote to Beeckman, “formless as he is, my “bear”, to come to you, so that he may be a memory of our intimacy, and the surest affirmation of my affection for you: on this condition, however, that eternally hidden in the shadow of your chests or your study, it does not have to face the judgment of men. They would not turn their eyes away, as I am sure you will, from its imperfections, to fix them on the pages where I do not deny that some outlines of my mind are traced, taken from life. They would not know above all that all this was composed in haste, for you alone, among the ignorance of the soldiers, by an idle man, subject to a kind of life entirely different from his thoughts” (X, p. 141).

II. — The Winter of 1619-1620

Such are the projects and ideas that stir in his mind: Descartes, encouraged by his recent discoveries, proposes to bring a new science to the world; this dream puts a mystery in his life and he cultivates the artist who lives in him, unknown to everyone, except Beeckman; finally, his studies and his successes have revealed the vanity of books. As soon as he could stop, he would seriously get to work. In November 1619, the army of Maximilian of Bavaria, of which he was a member, took up its winter quarters near Ulm; since April, Descartes had been traveling in Germany, without it being possible to determine his itinerary, and we can suppose that he did not arrive until November 10 at the famous stove where he was to spend the winter; it is permissible to think that he began by making an inventory of his discoveries and a sort of overall examination of all his projects; let us not forget that he had barely written the titles of each part, that he did not know what writing a book was, that he had elements in hand and that he was undoubtedly very embarrassed to group them; let us not forget, above all, this reflection that we have quoted and which is dated March 26, 1619: “It is an infinite work, and which could not be the work of a single person”; he therefore has a hesitation: his ambition is “incredible”, that is his own expression, and yet he feels that it is not pure madness. To the extent that we can speak of these things without too much fantasy, it is not improbable to believe that these thoughts imposed themselves on Decartes with more force than ever at the moment when, stopping for a few weeks, he must keep the promises given to Beeckman and set to work...

Perhaps these scruples, combined with the difficulties that an author experiences when moving from projects to execution, deserve not to be forgotten when we recount the night of November 10, 1619. We know the results: the Spirit of Truth enlightened his soul: he revealed to him at the same time that:

1. Science is one: all the sciences contained in the dictionary of the dreams exist only in and through science.

2. The one science is the work of a single person; it is the particular sciences that require collaboration; therefore, a major cause for concern disappears from his mind.

3. He who follows the inspiration of the poets will be master of science, for we have within us the seeds of science, and it is not the logical processes of so-called scholars that will awaken them.

4. These divine counsels were addressed to Descartes because he is capable of understanding them and because he is designated to endow humanity with “astonishing science.”

From now on, the dream of 1618 is no longer “an incredible ambition”; it is a mission. The intoxication of November 10, 1619, which, in the words of Maritain, “is in his person like a Pentecost of reason”, marks a break in his life; when he interprets his three dreams, he relates the first two to his past and the third to his future. “The terror that struck him in the second dream”, says Baïllet, “marked, in his opinion, his synderesis, that is to say, the remorse of his conscience concerning the sins he might have committed during the course of his life up to that point” (op. cit., p. 186). Before setting out in search of the truth, purification is necessary, and the pilgrimage he wished to make to Loreto at the end of November was both a prayer and a reparation: he would walk from Venice to Loreto and “if his strength could not cope with this fatigue, he would at least assume the most devout and humble appearance possible to fulfill it” (ibid., p. 187).

The foundations of the admirable science discovered on November 10, 1619, cannot be as precise as one might have believed when thinking of universal mathematics or a reform of algebra, because the next day he was unsure what to do. “The embarrassment in which he found himself made him turn to God, to pray to Him to make His will known to him, to enlighten him, and to lead him in the search for the truth. He then addressed himself to the Blessed Virgin, to recommend to her this matter which he considered the most important of his life” (id., p. 186). — A few days later, his enthusiasm left him, and “he did not become more decisive about the resolutions he had to take” (id., p. 187). Heaven had helped him, it was up to him to realize the first part of the old proverb. Then, he began to compose a treatise; a note in the Cogitationestells us: “I will completely finish my treatise before Easter, and if I find booksellers and if it seems worthy to me, I will publish it as I promised today, 1620, February 23” (X, p. 218). What was this treatise? We know that this winter of 1619-1620 was a decisive turning point in his scientific life; at this moment universal mathematics and the first remarks on the method were formulated in his mind; he composed the small treatise on solidorum elementis; but his activity is very little known; he wrote the Olympica, a sort of speech in which the episode of November 10th holds an important place. In these Olympica, two passages have particularly attracted the attention of historians:

1. “Just as the imagination uses figures to conceive bodies, so the intellect uses certain sensible bodies to represent spiritual things, such as the wind and light: from which it follows that by philosophizing in a more profound manner, we could elevate the mind through knowledge to sublime heights” (X, p. 217).

2. “Sensible things are very suitable for making us know the Olympica: the wind signifies the spirit; movement with time signifies life; light, knowledge; heat, love; instantaneous activity, creation.”

A very clear idea is expressed there: one can translate non-sensible things by means of sensible things. What exactly does he mean? The error of the interpreters is, in our opinion, to have posed this question not for itself, but in relation to the night of November 10; in seeking what the “mirabilis scientiae fundamenta” could be, one turned to these two texts and asked them for an answer, which perhaps they could not give.

Hamelin addresses these texts from the Olympica at the end of the chapter he devotes to “the discovery of the method”: “what he had to discover in 1619 was, with the principle of geometry, if you like, the generality of the method. He had to perceive by a stroke of genius that the method, of which mathematics is only the envelope... applies, as with mathematical things, not only to physical things, but also to spiritual things. At that moment, he had an idea of ​​the unity of knowledge, which he perhaps allowed to fade later, and which nevertheless alone makes it clear what is most specific and most characteristic in his method.” Having thus deduced Descartes’ discovery, Hamelin adds: “And what suggests and justifies our assertion is the symbolism of the Olympics, a symbolism to which Foucher de Careil and Millet drew attention, but whose full scope they perhaps did not dare to see.” He cites the two texts and adds: “these are not poetic metaphors, the symbolism of the Olympics must be taken strictly. Spiritual things, thoughts according to Descartes are, like mathematical things, composed of simple natures and their mode of composition can be represented by mathematical symbols.” Here, Hamelin cites in support of his hypothesis a letter on the universal language of November 1629, which, for our part, we cannot take into account, since we are in 1619 and we intend to stay there. “What Descartes invented on November 10, 1619, was perhaps his geometry, but indivisibly with it, it was also, before Leibniz, the possibility of a universal characteristic.”

Milhaud also encountered these two texts while searching for what Descartes had discovered during the mystical crisis; Hamelin’s hypothesis, “in whom firmness of judgment and such a keen critical sense did not exclude a certain flight of fancy” may appeal to the philosopher; it cannot satisfy the historian, except the historian of Hamelin. There is a long way between these simplistic notes, these banal metaphors, and the idea of ​​a universal characteristic. Milhaud, freed from this hypothesis, gives a much simpler interpretation of these two texts: the words “spiritualia” and “Olympica” do not signify thoughts as opposed to corporeal things, but things from above. Unfortunately, here, Milhaud returns to dreams and encounters insurmountable difficulties: these spiritualia are the divine things that manifested themselves in dreams, and Descartes drew his examples from them. Now, Milhaud finds the “wind-spirit” couple very easily in the first dream (the wind that pushes Descartes against the Church is a malus spiritus); he finds the “light-knowledge” couple with great difficulty (lightning identified with the spirit of truth); as for the other examples, he had to give up looking for traces of them: “here we are in the presence of examples that are not found in the interpretation of dreams. Should we therefore see here a general preoccupation whose interest would go beyond the incidents of the night of November 10, 1619, and which would perhaps tend to constitute a science of things above, a general mode of interpretation of celestial language? It is not absolutely impossible, and would it then be “the admirable science” whose essential features Descartes would have conceived on the occasion of his adventure?”.

The reality seems simpler to us. Milhaud knew this well, and if he had not been preoccupied by Hamelin’s hypothesis and by the precise subject of his article, he would have arrived at the conclusion that seems right to us, by developing this very suggestive remark: “these texts borrowed from the Olympica would perhaps find a sufficient explanation in being brought closer to the reflection relating to the poets, as they are in fact brought closer to it in the Inédits... The poets, who proceed by images, know how to express the things from above to which they rise through enthusiasm, by using precisely these very natural correlations”. For our part, we do not hesitate: we must no longer think of “admirable science”, take these two texts in themselves, bring them closer to the texts on the poets as Milhaud requested, and, in addition, see if other related texts could not fit with them, and if it would not be possible to find the broad outlines of a whole that is today fragmented.

However disjointed the notes collected under the title Cogitationes privatae may be, some of which come from the Olympica, it does not seem impossible to rediscover some themes dear to Descartes after the episode of November 10. First, he establishes a parallel between the geometric representation of bodies and the divination of intelligible things through sensible data: “Just as the imagination uses figures to conceive bodies, so the intelligence uses certain sensible bodies to represent spiritual things, such as the wind and light: from which it follows that by philosophizing more profoundly, we could elevate the mind through knowledge to sublime heights.

It might seem surprising that profound thoughts are found more in the writings of poets than in those of philosophers. The reason is that poets write inspired by enthusiasm and the power of imagination: there are in us seeds of science, as in a pebble [there are germs of fire], which philosophers draw out by reasoning, but which, thanks to their imagination, poets make sparkle and make more brilliant” (X, p. 217).

In the following fragments, we find applications; this poetic imagination allows us to decipher the world and move alternately from spiritual to tangible things. Here is a theme: in things there is a single active force, love, charity, harmony” (X, p. 218). We first have a key:

“Tangible things are very suitable for making us aware of “the Olympics”: the wind signifies the spirit; movement with time signifies life; light, knowledge; heat, love; instantaneous activity, creation” (ibid.).

This being said, let us see to what sublime heights this philosophy leads us:

1. The World. — “Every corporeal form acts in accordance with harmony. There are more wet parts than dry ones, more cold parts than hot ones, because without this the active force would have won the victory too quickly, and the world would not have lasted long” (id.). He posited that there was an active force and that the universe was harmonious; however, physics shows us imbalances; the active force which is love is represented by heat (in accordance with the key), and the history of the world is the history of the triumph of love.

2. God. — There is a difficulty in the Bible: “God separated the light from the darkness”, says Genesis; “this means that he separated the good angels from the bad, because the deprivation of a property cannot be separated from the possession of this property; this is why it must not be understood literally. God is pure intelligence” (id.). According to the key, light is knowledge and God could not create “ignorance”, “darkness”; he can only create intelligence and light; ignorance and darkness will be deprivations of these.

3. The works of God: “God has done three wonderful things: he created things from nothing, free will, and the Man God” (ibid.). Here, no sensible representation accompanies the idea of ​​creation, for which he has nevertheless given a symbol: the “activitas instantanea”.

The movement of Descartes’ thought could be this: at the same time as his mathematical projects lead him to seek equivalences between curves and numbers, between geometric figures and things, and to constitute systems of algebraic and geometric symbols, he reflects on three dreams of supernatural origin. God did not speak to him directly; he used symbols; Descartes deciphers them. What could be more natural then than the idea of ​​establishing a sensible notation of spiritual things? Let us be clear; we do not mean that he composes a key to dreams; he knows well that uninspired dreams are pure imaginations and that the Spirit of Truth does not lavish his visits; but it is a fact that men raise themselves with difficulty to abstract ideas; it is a fact that their philosophical masters render this effort fruitless by straying into dialectical complications; it is a fact that poets achieve them in a single burst and express them in a way that is both simple and striking in those “profound thoughts”, graves sententiae, which pepper many of their writings; Descartes does not tell us what the content of these beautiful formulas is, but, since it is a question of poets, it is permissible to think that algebra and geometry have nothing to do here and that he is thinking of the precepts of wisdom and the great human themes on the world, man and divinity. If this is so, could we not draw from their writings a vocabulary that would allow us to lead carnal men to the most sublime truths, to make them aware of the force of love that carries the universe, to explain to them that God is pure intelligence, and to make the miracle of the triple creation, of things, of freedom and of the Man God, burst forth. (Later, he will definitively renounce reaching God by means of sensible things, even used as symbols.) What a magnificent subject to meditate on while on the roads which lead from Venice to Loreto!

This hypothesis does not imply that the “mirabilis scientia” discovered on November 10, 1619 is this symbolism; this is a consequence of the discovery that Descartes would have made while reflecting on his marvelous adventure and on the means of thanking God. Milhaud made a judgment full of good sense about the Descartes of 1619; he has “a soul more naively religious, simpler, less complicated than one is generally inclined to believe”. Cartesian symbolism is quite banal; the first example “wind-spirit” is obviously taken from a dream; the examples “light-knowledge”, “heat-love”, did not require a very great effort of imagination; as for the symbols of life and creation, it is permissible to doubt their evocative power. We must therefore not attach excessive importance to this early essay; it is nevertheless, to our knowledge, the first philosophical manifestation of Descartes’ religious thought; his religious life ceased, for a moment, to be purely interior and was expressed in a gesture; Descartes took up the pen, and it was not to draw figures or write equations; the winter of 1619-1620, so important in the history of his scientific thought, is no less so in the history of metaphysical thought, since, for the first time, he placed himself at the service of spiritual things.

III. — From 1620 to 1628

We know little about Descartes’ life from 1620 to 1628; we barely know where he travelled. At the end of 1621, he wrote a pamphlet, Experimenta, a sort of psychological note, and a Studium bonae mentis; “his intention”, Baillet tells us about this last treatise, “was to blaze a completely new trail; but he claimed to be working only for himself and for the friend to whom he addressed his treatise under the name of Museus” (X, p. 191); it was to be a technique of intellectual life, in which he defined imagination and memory (id., pp. 200 and 201), and in which he classified knowledge (id., p. 202). He pushed his mathematical work to such an extent that he was able to announce to Beeckman, during his visit in 1628, that in terms of arithmetic and geometry, he had nothing left to desire (X, p. 331); he approached optics, a science to which he had not become attached before 1620 and in which he began on November 11, 1620 with an “admirable invention”, that of glasses intended for the observation of the stars.

He was certainly aware of the polemics against the libertines, of the trial of Théophile de Viau (1623-1625), of the books of Mersenne and Father Garasse “against the intellectuals of the time”; perhaps he also followed the anti-scholastic struggle, led in particular by Gassendi, whose Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos date from 1624, just at the time when the Parliament of Paris condemned the authors of fourteen anti-Aristotelian theses, the defense of which was, moreover, banned at the last moment, when more than a thousand people had already invaded the room.

Descartes, at this time, was in contact with scholars like Mydorge and Morin, with philosophers like Mersenne, Silhon, Gibieuf. We do not know exactly when his friendship with Father Marin Mersenne began, but it was very lively; the Minim at this time was fighting the libertines and he enlisted science and philosophy in the new crusade; in 1624, he published “The Impiety of the Deists, Atheists and Libertines of this Time, Combated and Overthrown from Point to Point by Reasons Drawn from Philosophy and Theology”, in 1625 “The Truth of the Sciences Against the Sceptics or Pyrrhonians”, in 1626 a “Synopsis Mathematica”, for the Use of Preachers; his main idea is that the defenders of religion must possess the enlightenment of science: and that geometry, far from being drier than a pebble, is an excellent means of raising oneself to God.

Is he thinking of writing? It is certain that the excitement of the years 1618-1619 has faded; the Olympica, and even all those books he spoke to Beeckman about and whose titles he was looking for, were juvenile projects; yet, has he really forgotten them? It is doubtless with them as with the famous pilgrimage to Loreto, which he made in 1624 after the Venice festivals; he will return to his first promises if the opportunity arises. Is this the echo of his reflections that we find in Beeckman’s journal, after his visit of October 1628? “I believe that the reason why there are so few scholars here is that all those who are gifted for science, as soon as they have made a discovery, are eager to write it down”, and then display an erudition that stifles their reason. “This one, on the contrary, has not yet written anything, but, meditating until the thirty-third year, he seems to have found better than the others the thing he was looking for” (X, p. 332).

If he does not write, he talks a lot, and he lets slip promises to his friends; a letter from Balzac gives us a glimpse of the content of his conversations: he recounts his travels, he speaks of his discoveries and above all he insists on the originality of his methods; he is made to promise to publish “the history of his mind”. “It is awaited by all our friends”, Balzac wrote to him in 1628, “and you promised it to me in the presence of Father Clitophon, who is called in the vernacular Monsieur de Gersan. It will be a pleasure to read your various adventures in the middle and highest regions of the air; to consider your prowess against the Giants of the School, the path you have taken, the progress you have made in the truth of things, etc…” (March 30, 1628, I, p. 570). All these pleasant things, framed by the latest echoes of literary polemics, and a flattering appreciation of Descartes’ “butter”, give us an idea of ​​the tone that could reign in these conversations.

He also speaks in 1628 of a treatise on divinity; he would have undertaken it, in June 1628, at M. Le Vasseur’s, but he could not succeed “for lack of having sufficiently settled senses” says Baillet. A letter to Mersenne of April 15, 1630 recalls him in the Minim (I, p. 144). Let us not forget that at this time he had completely finished his algebra and his geometry; he was in possession of an absolutely new and fruitful method of discovery; he ardently pursued his work in optics, he had glasses cut to continue his experiments; quite naturally the idea came to him to put this method at the service of religion, and it was not Mersenne who was to discourage him.

Also, it is a game for him to rout a certain Mr. de Chandoux who was expounding a new philosophy at the Papal Nuncio’s; in a letter to Villebressieu, from 1631, he recalls the triumph of his method “in the conversation I had with the Papal Nuncio, Cardinal de Bérulle, Father Mersenne and all that great and learned company who had assembled at the said Nuncio’s to hear the speech of Mr. de Chandoux concerning his new philosophy” (I, p. 213). Everyone recognizes the superiority of his principles not only over those of his adversary, but over all those “who are already received among scholars”. “You remained convinced of it, like all those who took the trouble to implore me to write them down and inform the public.” (Ibid.)

The Lord of Chandoux, says Baïllet, “was one of those free geniuses who appeared in fairly large numbers in the time of Cardinal Richelieu, and who undertook to shake off the yoke of scholasticism. He was no less distant from the Philosophy of Aristotle or the Peripatetics than a Bacon, a Mersenne, a Gassendi, a Hobbes.” He boasted of having a new philosophy, and that is why the Papal Nuncio held a meeting for him. As we see, Descartes’ philosophical reform did not burst forth like a bolt from the blue; it was expected, and people were quite ready to welcome a new system; the society gathered at the Nuncio’s gave Chandoux an excellent welcome, precisely because his ideas were new. When Descartes spoke at this famous meeting, he could begin by congratulating the speaker on his excellent intentions, that is to say, his desire to escape scholasticism... and he continued by reproaching him for returning to scholasticism without realizing it! “He claimed that it was returning to the same goal by the same path, and that his new Philosophy was almost the same thing as that of the School.” This is what, in 1628, interested the guests of Mgr. Baigné, the Papal Nuncio in Paris.

Descartes began with a few tricks of skill: demonstrating in twelve arguments the falsehood of a proposition whose truth was unanimously admitted; and he began his exercise again with a proposition that everyone believed to be false and whose truth he revealed. After thus exhibiting his talents, he revealed his “universal rule” or “natural method” which, drawn from mathematics and capable of infinite applications, allows us to go beyond probability and reach the truth. He was a great success. “Cardinal de Bérulle, above all others, marveled at everything he had heard and begged Mr. Descartes to hear him again another time on the same subject in particular.” It was during this visit from Descartes that the Cardinal imperiously demanded the publication of what he had heard. “Mr. Descartes gave him a glimpse of the consequences that his thoughts could have, if they were well conducted, and the usefulness that the public would derive from them, if his way of philosophizing were applied to Medicine and Mechanics, one of which would produce the restoration and preservation of health, the other the reduction and relief of human labor. The Cardinal had no difficulty in understanding the importance of the plan; and judging him very suitable for executing it, he used the authority he had over his mind to lead him to undertake this great work. He even made it an obligation of conscience to him, on the ground that having received from God a strength and a penetration of mind with light in this that he had not granted to others, he must give him an exact account of the use of his talents, and would be responsible before this sovereign judge of men for the harm that he would do to the human race by depriving it of the fruit of his meditations. He even went so far as to assure him that with such pure intentions and such a vast capacity of mind as he knew he possessed, God would not fail to bless his work and to fill him with all the success he could expect from it.” These expressions, in the mouth of the founder of Carmel, are not simply manners of speaking with which ecclesiastical language is lavish; a mystical soul, in intimate communication with God, Bérulle spoke in the name of God and prophesied the success of his friend, as he formerly prophesied the capture of the island of Ré and the fall of La Rochelle. This story, whose source is the testimony of Clerselier, seems extremely curious to us: Descartes does not speak at all of Religion or apologetics; the holy Cardinal makes it an obligation of conscience for him to reveal to men the means of healing themselves and of making industry prosper. We read elsewhere in the Discourse on Method: “as soon as I had acquired some general notions concerning Physics, and beginning to test them in various particular difficulties, I noticed how far they can lead, and how much they differ from the principles which have been used until now, I believed that I could not keep them hidden, without sinning greatly against the law which obliges us to do as much as is in us for the general good of all men.” (6th part, VI, p. 61.)

Blanchet did not believe that these profane projects in themselves could have seduced the Cardinal; he saw in him a mystic whose eyes were forever turned away from earthly things. “If Descartes’ projects were purely scientific, how did they arouse the Cardinal’s interest and enthusiasm to the highest degree?”; industry and medicine could not inflame the founder of the Oratory nor determine him to adopt “the tone of the spiritual director or confessor addressing the disciple or the penitent.” “The hypothesis is very unlikely. It does not explain the seriousness of the language used with the philosopher”. Reconstructing in 1920 a conversation held in 1629 is a rather bold undertaking; Blanchet, however, does not hesitate and sets out in search of the likely: there are “facts”, it seems, which guide our inductions: Descartes’ main occupation upon arriving in Holland was metaphysics; so the cardinal expressly invited him to fight the libertines; these “facts”, naturally, prove nothing: on the one hand, Descartes did not wait for the cardinal’s advice to deal with divinity, since a few months earlier he had begun writing a treatise on this subject; moreover, we shall see that he in no way interrupted his major work on optics and that the trip to Holland in no way disrupted the order of his work. As for the Cardinal’s psychology, from which the supplement to Baillet’s account is claimed to be derived, it is based on three quotations from Father Cloiseault. In his portrait of the Cardinal, he points out his contempt for “this vain self-esteem that the human sciences ordinarily produce in souls”, for “this itch to dispute about everything that the subtleties of the School inspire in new doctors” and for “this excessive passion for knowledge that is so natural to people of study” and yet “so opposed to the spirit of Jesus Christ”. But Descartes precisely did not speak of these vain sciences that are the fruit of pride and that engender dispute; it is the very opposite of the “subtleties of the School” that he brings! He spread before Bérulle’s eyes the new science, entirely turned towards the happiness of men and whose truth will make scholastic disputes vanish. In itself, the work is good, even in Bérulle’s eyes; Descartes is a layman, he is not a pastor who has charge of souls; Bérulle does not have before him a man who wants to enter the convent, but a young gentleman who is wasting his time in the world, while God has clearly reserved for him a place among the princes of the spirit, just as others are destined to become the princes of the earth. Bérulle, moreover, never recommended his priests to abandon their studies; although it was not in his original plans, he did not hesitate to send them to teach in seminaries and colleges; as Mr. Brémond says, “Berulle and his first companions would have been very surprised to learn that their Institute was soon to become a nursery for scholars and writers. Such was certainly not their ambition. They dreamed only of holiness… they did not despise science, but they hardly distinguished it from prayer.” In a word, and this is in our opinion a very important point, it was not essential that Cardinal de Bérulle expressly ordered Descartes at the end of 1628 to find proofs of the existence of God, for Descartes to have the feeling of doing a Christian work.

After this conversation, Descartes decided to flee Paris and its entertainment. In the spring of 1629, he settled in Holland. Where did he spend the winter? Beeckman’s journal records his visit to Holland in October 1628. Decartes, at this time, would therefore have returned to the Provinces and Baillet would have made a mistake in sending him to La Rochelle at the same time. Cohen wonders if Descartes would not have simply stayed in Holland during the winter of 1628-1629. “When did Descartes’ second stay in Holland begin, the main and longest, since it occupied twenty years of his life..? The usual answer is 1629; it should be 1628”. In fact, Beeckman’s journal only gives two dates that could relate to Descartes’ visits, October 1628 and February 1629; The most that can be said is that Descartes returned to Holland in February 1629 and not in April, as is generally claimed. But a decisive fact destroys Cohen’s interpretation: the meeting at the Papal Nuncio’s, which we have just spoken about; it is true that Cohen did not believe it necessary to report this event, which nevertheless holds a certain place in Descartes’ life. Baillet, who sent his hero to the siege of La Rochelle, declares that he was back in Paris for Saint-Martin’s Day), that is to say, on November 11; “a few days after Mr. Descartes arrived in Paris, a meeting of learned and curious people was held at the home of the Papal Nuncio…” It was therefore in November 1628 that this important interview took place, and Descartes, having returned from his trip, was in Paris.

What had he been doing in Holland in October? Adam sees this short excursion as a way “to revisit the area before returning the following year to settle there permanently” (X, p. 35). This idea seems very accurate to us: for some time now, he has felt he is in poor working conditions, and even the temperature is bothering him; he has been unable to complete the treatise on divinity that he attempted to write in June 1628, and he is already thinking of retiring to a region whose climate is more suited to him and where the worker can isolate himself. The advice of Cardinal de Bérulle puts an end to his hesitations and strengthens a long-standing plan. “He considered him”, says Baillet, “after God as the principal author of his designs and of his retreat from his country.” Principal does not mean unique. Descartes was no longer at the age when the Spirit of Truth visited his dreams, but this divine guarantee which November 11, 1619 had brought to his young hopes found an analogue in the exhortations of the pious cardinal; Bérulle’s advice, like divine inspiration in the past, made his projects and dreams a mission.

Introduction

The question seems surprising, almost indecent, to many readers. Rationalism for more than a century — that is to say, for as long as the word has been used — generally passes for having in Descartes its master, its model, and its father. Descartes, we are assured, engendered it, as he engendered “modern philosophy”, and idealism, and secularism — and the French Revolution to boot. It is for this reason that he is accustomed to being celebrated by some, reviled by others. To disagree with such a traditional opinion seems like a gamble in bad taste.

Yet was it not Descartes himself who taught us to distrust the most authoritative traditions? Moreover, from the seventeenth century, Cartesianism received many contrary interpretations on other important points. Today, the differences have only increased. To be convinced of this, it suffices to compare the Descartes of Hamelin with that of Espinas, that of Brunschvicg with that of Gilson, that of Gouhier with that of Msgr. Olgiati, that of Boyce Gibson with that of Cassirer, or even leaf through the Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Philosophy, the two volumes of Cartesian Studies. Why should it be that among all the “prejudices” concerning doctrine, only the prejudice of Rationalism should have this privilege of escaping all discussion?

Boyce Gibson rightly remarks: the work and the person of Descartes are exceptionally complex.

There is something “meditative” in him, to quote Malebranche — and, to quote Péguy, something like a “French knight”; a pure “intellectual”, who flees entertainment and business to speculate in peace in his retreats in Holland — and also a man of action, who loves life, who cares about his health, and who is concerned to ensure the success of his doctrine in order to serve humanity; a philosopher à la Rembrandt (or, if you prefer, à la Franz Hals) — and also a gentleman who knows his world and follows fashion, who enjoys talking to women and fights for them if need be, is not even afraid of illegitimate loves, an aristocrat of thought, disdainful of bookish knowledge, giving “a few hours a day” to scientific speculations and “a few hours a year” to metaphysical speculations, in short, controlling his metaphysics and his science; a rebellious layman, who makes fun of the “Schurmans girl” and her superstitions, who detests theologians and makes puns about Saint Thomas — and also a Christian faithful to his religious duties and respectful of ecclesiastical censorship, the “pilgrim of Loreto” who received in a dream sent by God the first inspiration of his philosophy.

And this philosophy, in turn, is the expression of his character. It wants to be coherent and connected, to the point that recognizing a single proposition as false would risk upsetting everything. But at the same time it proceeds from very disparate influences: Thomist scholasticism and the physico-mathematical sciences after the Renaissance; Montaigne and Saint Augustine. And it gave birth to all sorts of diverse, even opposing currents: from Cartesianism came Spinoza, but also Malebranche, but also Leibniz; and, to a large extent, Arnauld, not to mention Régis; to a large extent also, Locke, and Berkeley, and Hume; and Condillac, and La Mettrie; and again Kant and Hegel; and Maine de Biran; and Auguste Comte; and Husserl. All these people refer to Descartes; all are, in some respect, his disciples. Descartes comprehends and surpasses them all.

Such a complex philosophy is not easy to systematize. And we are naturally drawn to making a choice among so many riches. This is what the exegetes of Cartesianism have hardly deprived themselves of. Some have even erected this choice into a principle. Whether it is freedom, or the union of soul and body, the imagination, confused ideas, experience, faith, we retain, in each part of the work of Descartes, some theses that we consider essential; one develops them complaisantly and one endeavors to press the consequences of them. The rest, everything that overflows and corrects these theses and modifies their scope, is neglected. It is reputed to be a “survival”, an “inadvertency”, a “makeshift solution”, a “concession” made to the demands of theologians and the prejudices of the time. It is insinuated (as Fichte did with regard to Kant) that Descartes himself did not always rightly grasp the full meaning of his discoveries. Or else one supposes that he did not express all his thoughts. Sometimes it is even asserted that he deliberately concealed and “masked” them. By all these means, and in the name of an alleged “fidelity to the spirit, not to the letter”, we manage to construct a “de jure Cartesianism”, which we prefer to “de facto Cartesianism”, and for which it is substituted.

Such a method does not lack illustrious patronage. It is undoubtedly of great interest to anyone wishing to know the personal tendencies and opinions of such an eminent historian; much less for those who simply want to know those of Descartes. To tell the truth, it suppresses the main fruit of the history of philosophy, which is to teach the philosopher to come out of himself. It can only lead, it has in fact only led, in the words of Paul Valéry, to “a plurality of plausible Descartes”, each as artificial as the other, and none of which has a right to impose itself as the true one. Moreover, is it not impertinent to claim to discern better than Descartes what Descartes wanted to signify, and quite arbitrary to decide, where he has not explained it himself, what part of his work is for him of secondary importance? The history of philosophy, like any history, is never anything but a reconstruction of the past. This reconstruction is not susceptible of direct verification, since the past is dead, “and we have invented nothing that can bring it back to life”. The only criterion, in this case, is the conformity of our hypotheses with the surviving texts. The historian, to place these texts, postulates that the author, by writing them, knew what he said and said what he thought, and that he did not contradict himself from one day to another, either — unless we have special reasons for believing this author to be deceitful or doddering or inconsistent, in which case he would hardly be worth studying. The first rule of history is therefore to take into account all the texts, and not to deliberately sacrifice any of them. Attaching oneself to the spirit, yes, no doubt. But we will not grasp the spirit in any other way than complete and scrupulous meditation on the letter. The spirit is precisely what organizes and harmonizes the texts. If we cannot fully reconcile the Cartesian texts, it is because we have not been able to rediscover the spirit of Descartes, the guiding principle that animates them and gives them meaning.

Does Rationalism provide this guiding principle? All the difficulties, all the inconsistencies, all the ambiguities that have so often been noted in Cartesian philosophy and which lead commentators to oppose other commentators, would they not stem, on the contrary, from the fact that in order to interpret Descartes, one and all, place themselves at will on the terrain of Rationalism?

That is what one wants to find out.

But, beforehand, it would be advisable to specify how one understands Rationalism.

The “Rationalist”, like Plato’s “sophist” is — with all due respect — “an elusive monster”, or one who is seized only at the cost of a long and arduous hunt. What is special about him is that he generally rejects all definitions in which one tries to confine him, and that he is not too inclined to define himself.

To manage to fix his elusive nature, the best plan is undoubtedly to briefly review the main types of philosophy to which we agree to give the name of “rationalist”, and to identify their distinctive features.

In Greek antiquity, two philosophers immediately present themselves to us, philosophers who present themselves as “friends of reason” and adversaries of “misologists”: Plato and Aristotle.

What do they admit under the name of reason?

Plato admits an intelligible world (κόσμος νοητός) superior to the sensible world. This intelligible world is made up of spiritual realities, or Ideas, ordered and linked together under the dominion of the supreme Idea of Good, according to relations determined by the Dialectic. The form of thought which discovers it, and which is the νόησις, is at the same time the principle of the highest knowledge and of the noblest life.

Aristotle on this point — although he poses as an adversary of Plato — says nothing very different. He too admits Ideas or intelligible essences. They are not, it is true, χωριστά, separate from the sensible. They are sensitive. But they are enveloped within it like gold within its ore. And the νοῦς ποιητικός draws them out of it, by a mysterious transforming operation, to imprint them in the νοῦς παθητικός, where they are perceived in a kind of intuition. Before the operation, the νοῦς παθητικός contained them only potentially. But since nothing passes from potency to act except under the influence of a cause which is itself an act, the νοῦς ποιητικός must first have contained them in actuality. And we know that the νοῦς ποιητικός is transcendent in relation to the rest of the soul where it occurs θύραθεν. There is therefore, for Aristotle as for Plato, a set of supra-sensible realities, living and active, by the contemplation and imitation of which man is reasonable.

On the other hand, for Plato no more than for Aristotle, the sensible is no stranger to Ideas: it participates in them. The world of becoming is made of a mixture of ideas (μῖξις εἴδων), which the Demiurge ordered as well as he could, not without some imperfection, however, because he had to take into account a cause of disorder and aberration (πλανωμένη αἰτία): the other or the non-existent (μὴ ὄν) is the source of the fortuitous, of the accidental, of the indeterminate exactly as is, in Aristotle, the matter (ὑλή) that the essencesinform. The two thinkers therefore recognize an irrational; but an irrational reduced to the rank of an inferior element, and appertaining to an inferior mode of knowledge, namely opinion. True science neglects this, and is interested only in the general, that is to say in essences.

The Epicureans, who have never passed for “friends of reason”, endeavor to highlight this factor of contingency under the species of the Clinamen, the central piece of their philosophy, from which come the meeting of atoms and the formation of worlds, human freedom and morality.

On the contrary, Stoicism, philosophy of the Logos, aims, as Bréhier rightly wrote, “to eliminate the irrational, and to no longer see, in nature as in conduct, anything but pure reason”. The Stoics, no less sensualists than the Epicureans, refer only to the sensations, and the prenotions (προλήψεις) which result naturally from the accumulated sensations. But sensations and prenotions reveal to us a world entirely subject to Destiny (εἱμαρμένη) and therefore reasonable, since it is entirely animated by the λόγος. Destiny, in fact, is no longer, as with the first Greek thinkers, the blind force which distributes their different fates to men, it is the order “according to which past events have happened, the present arrives, and the future will come”. And this order, both causal and final, both necessity and providence, is divine. It is, in Stobeus’ words, “Universal Reason”, working within the world, organizing all things, including movement, time, becoming. No detail of reality escapes it. And our behavior is moral insofar as it proceeds from the knowledge that we have of it and from the adhesion that we give to it. For the Stoics, it is not a question of eliminating the sensible given, but rather of seeing reason take shape there. This universe thus imbued with reason, “linked” in its smallest parts, without any place left to chance, is properly nature.

This is the second form of ancient Rationalism: rationalism no longer of the Idea, but of the Law.

The Middle Ages, in many respects, are modeled on ancient philosophy, and particularly on Aristotelianism. Saint Thomas, who is readily described as a rationalist, professes roughly the same views as Aristotle concerning the intelligible (or universal) that the intellect, by an operation sui generis, releases from the sensible and which alone is the object of science strictly speaking, while the particular, as such, or the contingent, derives from a merely probable knowledge, the only one, moreover, of which practice makes mention.

But, on the other hand, medieval philosophy received from Judeo-Christianity, with a new conception of the Infinite, the revelation of an irrational of another kind and above all of another value. This irrational, which is above and no longer below our reason, is expressed on the speculative plane by the notion of mystery, on the moral plane by the notion of grace understood as an extraordinary, temporary, and free infusion from the divine life into the most intimate aspects of human life. Its real name is the supernatural.

It is relative to the supernatural that, in the question of rationalism, the division between the schools or rather the medieval tendencies is most easily made. On the one hand, the supporters of theological rationalism — the “rational theologians”, as Leibniz would say — who, with Scotus Erigena and Berenger of Tours, with the Cathars and the Albigensians, with David of Dinant and Joachim of Flora, prefer reasoning to the sacred authorities in matters of dogma, and pride themselves on scrutinizing and understanding the mysteries themselves — rationalibus omnia velle comprehendere — even if it means giving them, as has been seen for the Eucharist, explanations which distort or suppress their content. On the other hand, the disciples of Albert the Great and of Saint Thomas, who radically separate the domain of reason and that of faith, who consider reason capable of demonstrating the existence of God and perhaps, at least in a probable way, the reality of divine Revelation, but by no means of revealed dogmas, and who forbid it even to try. Finally, the disciples of Saint Augustine, Saint Anselm and Saint Bonaventure, often mistakenly confused with the “rationals”, and a little too opposed, nowadays, to the Alberto-Thomists, have as their motto fides quaerens intellectum: reason, left to itself, could not reach dogmas, but, instructed by Revelation, and enlightened by the special graces which God dispenses to those who have first had a docile faith and an ardent charity, it can come to penetrate some things, to grasp more or less obscurely, by way of analogy and even, among the mystics, by direct intuition, their meaning and appropriateness.

Thus the Christian Religion brings to the philosopher a double discovery: outside of him, a reality which seems to go beyond reason and which is the mystery; in him, a mode of knowledge which seems heterogeneous to reason and which has its root in the heart.

With the Renaissance, considerations of another kind are introduced. A new physics is constituted. By applying mathematics to experience, it aspires to dominate, more and more precisely and completely, the material universe, and even living beings, and even human things. Determinism would reabsorb chance. The individual would allow itself to be fully measured and explained as a point of intersection of several determinisms. Are these ambitions legitimate? This is what the thinkers of the last centuries have constantly disputed. Henceforth the two reference planes in relation to which the rationalist positions will be situated are science and religion.

With respect to undisputed rationalists, the modern era has three species:

First the rationalists in the manner of Spinoza and Leibniz. For Spinoza the unique Substance which is God is defined as causa sive ratio: which means that all things not only spring from absolute Being, but are deduced from its nature with the same necessity that the properties of the triangle follow from its definition. But mathematical necessity is for man intelligibility itself. There is therefore nothing, as Lucas Meyer says, “above human comprehension”. Revelation is only a symbolic expression, for the use of the simple, of rational truth. — For Leibniz also, substance, although it is not unique, is essentially a principle of deduction: it is necessary that, in the “complete notion” of each being, one can recognize a priori all the predicates which are or will be affirmed of this being, therefore all that will happen to it, to it and to the universe. In truth, a priori knowledge seems to be based here on reasons other than mathematical ones, since it appeals to grounds of “fittingness”. Yet these reasons for fittingness end up being reduced to the appreciation of the “quantity of being”. What is sure, in any case, is that everything has its “sufficient reason”. Everything is therefore intelligible, even particular facts, even religious dogmas, since all truth is demonstrable with the aid of either finite or infinite analysis, and since the infinite is not heterogeneous to the finite, the rules of one are “successful” in the other. — This is what one might call dogmatic rationalism.

Kant represents an antidogmatic, or better relativist, rationalism. In his eyes, rationality consists principally, not in the possibility of an analytical deduction, but in the synthetic connection, which occurs through a transcendental activity of our mind. This spiritual activity, which informs the data of the senses to fashion according to its own laws the world of the phenomena, results only in a relative knowledge. But there is no other accessible to man. The same spiritual activity is moreover, as a practice, the principle of duty and morality. Kantian reason therefore has, in the words of Delbos, “sovereign jurisdiction over knowledge and over life”. Faith itself, insofar as it is legitimate, is a Vernunftglaube. Religion must confine itself “within the limits of bare reason”, it is only “an extension and a dependency”.

Finally, after Kant, rationalism flourishes in the various forms of absolute idealism: that of Fichte (the first way) and of his contemporary disciples, for whom human intelligence “constitutes” by its progressive determinations, not only the form but, in a way, the content of experience; that of Hegel and the neo-Hegelians, for whom the world is completely reconstructed by a series of conceptual syntheses, following the Dialectic of Reason.

To all these varieties of thinkers, others are opposed, who are commonly called “irrationalists”: Pascal, Huet, Rousseau, Jacobi, Bergson, or even Renouvier and William James; some endeavoring to bring to light those sources of knowledge — feeling, instinct and intuition — which “reason does not know”; the others insisting on the insufficiency of science, and raising the importance of what proves, in the world, difficult to reduce to an effective intelligibility: indetermination, contingency, freedom.

Such are roughly the lessons that can be drawn from the history of doctrines.

By what features do they enable us to define the “rationalist attitude”?

Some call rationalist anyone who claims only to break prejudices, emancipate themselves from traditions and reject “authority in matters of philosophy”. This is to confuse rationalism and critical spirit. On this account Pascal would be a model of rationalism. Hume even more so. And also Luther and many mystics, who elevate their own ideas above ecclesiastical teachings.

Authentic rationalism can be recognized, it seems, by two orders of affirmations concerning the nature and the value of reason.

The first mark of the rationalist is undoubtedly, says the Philosophical Vocabulary, to believe in reason; and to believe in reason, one must begin by believing that it exists. To speak frankly, this is a rather widespread belief: few people would like to deny that man reasons, and that he has the power to discern the true from the false. But some relate this discernment and this reasoning to the play of imagination, feelings, or tendencies. Is one a rationalist when one declares with the Treatise of Human Nature: “reason is nothing but a mysterious and unintelligible instinct of our souls”? Evidently not. The rationalist must therefore claim for reason an original nature, irreducible to that of instinct and affectivity.

Let us be careful not to conclude from this that he necessarily conceives of reason as a faculty of the soul. Rationalism has often been confused with innateism, and opposed as such to empiricism. But there are philosophies which want no other basis than experience, even sensible experience, and which are rightly reputed to be rationalisms, because experience, even sensible, is for them the manifestation of a Rationality. Thus, we have said, the Stoics. And, in the 18th century, materialists like Holbach or La Mettrie. And, in the 19th century, evolutionists like Spencer. Of the latter, Secrétan wrote: “We will gladly grant him that the truths of reason have not always seemed necessary, provided he grants us that evolution should one day make the necessity appear.” Now, he added, Spencer must grant this to us, “in accordance with his fundamental maxims.” A very judicious point. It reduces to their real scope the secular discussions touching on the initial seat of reason. Maudsley summarizes evolutionism by saying that “the uniformity of nature becomes self-conscious in the mind of man”. Conversely, the a priorists, believing in the objective value of rational principles, cannot fail to think that these principles regulate and support experience, that they have therefore been imprinted therein either by the common author of the mind and nature, as Leibniz wants, or, as Kant wants, by the mind itself. What does it matter then whether one takes reason from one end or the other? If we understand by Reason a necessary, and consequently universal, order, we will always end by finding that it extends from thought to things, or else that it is reflected from things in thought; in both cases, that it imposes itself on things as on thought.

The real debate is therefore not between Kant (or Leibniz) and Spencer, it is between Kant (or Leibniz) and Hume: is there only brute fact, that is to say pure contingency? Or is there a necessary order, that is, a set of universally validrelations? The essence of Rationalism lies in this formula of Spinoza, which could be from Aristotle, as well as from many of our contemporaries, Hamelin for example, or Goblot, or Pradines: “It is the characteristic of reason to consider things not as contingent, but as necessary.”

Does the definition suit all kinds of rationalism? It seems to enclose reason in a rigid framework of categories established once and for all, this notion of category, which applies equally to reality and to thought, bringing together in it both the two essential factors of ancient rationalism and modern rationalism: the Idea and the Law. — But, object many idealists nowadays, this rationalism, ancient or modern, is a rationalism of the concept. Quite different is the rationalism of judgement, which has Brunschvicg as its principal current representative, Fichte as its grand master, and which presents itself as the heir of Kantianism, but of a Kantianism passed “from the crystalline state to the colloidal state”. The rationalism of judgment, or, to use the word that its adepts readily use, intellectualism, envisages in reason less a set of rigid frameworks than a living and consequently changing dynamism: that of intelligence, such as it shows itself at work above all in scientific research, always on the alert, always in search of something new, not letting itself be bound by any category and progressing precisely because at the slightest “shock” of facts it does not hesitate to break preconceived categories. Intelligence, or reason, for rationalism thus understood, is all spontaneity. We would define it quite well with Belot: “the autonomy of the mind in the use of experience”. One must continually change his mind, adapt, surpass himself, in order to manage to follow and understand the experience. But, in doing so, the mind does not come to terms with a foreign principle, it sacrifices nothing of itself, on the contrary it enriches itself: for this experience, it is itself which “prepared it”, which “defined it”: in physics as in mathematics — in the case, for example, of the discovery of incommensurables — the experience can be compared to a “fleeting sting”, which momentarily stops the mind and gives it the opportunity of a new effort of coordination and construction, but does not, strictly speaking, have any “intrinsic content”, does not represent a reality foreign and irreducible to the spirit. This is the conception of “rational idealism”, which would be “true rationalism”. Perhaps it is not as far removed as its followers think from the “necessary” conception, from a Kant or a Spinoza. After all, does this intellectus sibi permissus, whose suppleness and variability we celebrate, unfold in contact with experience in a purely arbitrary way? Then it would not distinguish itself from the games of the imagination or the whims of the divinatory instinct. Its spontaneity must therefore follow certain rules. And if many of these rules are provisional, it must still, when it substitutes for the rules that are provisional, it must still, when it replaces the outdated rules with better rules, be “directed” by a constant tendency towards some determinate end — determinable, at least, in the manner of certain mathematical limits, like the “law of convergence” of a series. Otherwise we could not speak of its “progress”. Moreover, does Brunschvicg not invoke the “unifying function of reason”? Does he not declare that “unity gives spiritual life the law which explains it and the ideal which orients it”?

So there is something that determines the orientation of the so-called rational process. And this something, whether we call it unity or identity, or whatever name we like, it will always be the equivalent of a structure, of a very general law, therefore of a category. — Moreover, when we admit a dynamism of pure intelligence and oppose it to that of affective tendencies, by what sign do we distinguish it? One could be tempted to answer, according to the spirit of Malebranche, that the affective is always in some way obscure and as it were opaque to consciousness and that, on the contrary, pure intelligence is entirely “transparent to itself”. But is it not a very floating and uncertain mark? Are there cases where such a sensation or such a feeling seems clear to us, and such a mathematical operation, on the contrary, very dark? It depends on the people, on their dispositions. It is absolutely necessary to refer to some less subjective criterion: the characteristic of a rational process will be precisely its objectivity, that is to say its ability to be valid for all and in all cases, or, as the idealists readily say, for the “understanding in general”. But what can this aptitude to take for granted be due to, if not because it seems to impose itself so much on everyone? Universality, here as elsewhere, is only a fortuitous fact or else it is the expression of a necessary law. We are therefore, as soon as we want to put a specific meaning under the word rational, brought back by one way or the other to Spinoza’s formula.

It remains to be seen, the meaning of the word being thus circumscribed, what extension of it will be recognized.

Should one, to be a rationalist, profess with Hegel that “all that is real is rational and that all that is rational is real”, or with Brunschvicg that “human intelligence can understand everything”? In reality, and in spite of these ambitious formulas, there is hardly a rationalist so fanatical that he does not allow a little “irrationality” to subsist in some corner of his doctrine: in Brunschvicg, “exteriority” as such; in Hegel, the individual, the accidental of history; in Leibniz, the appearance of the continuous. It is true that for them these are negligible things, of no more importance, says Hegel, than a rash of the skin. But a Meyerson, a Lalande, according to whom reason has identity as its ideal, agree that it leaves aside, with each new identification, an increasingly considerable portion of the real. Yet these thinkers are generally, and want to be, seen as rationalists. And likewise Kant, according to whom reason is obliged to postulate the existence of things in themselves of which it will never possess knowledge. How then can they deserve this title? It is because, we are accustomed to answer, they grant reason a limited value, no doubt, and relative, but exclusive. Our reason may be incapable of reaching the absolute, but it remains for us the sole source of all that we can know, of all that we must do, of all that we have the right to hope. So thinks Kant. So thinks Meyerson. So think these scholars, so satisfied with their science and the kind of certainty it gives them, that they say, according to the formula of their panegyrists: “it alone has the quality to define its own limits”; or even more bluntly: “What I don’t know, let no one claim to know!”

On the contrary, a Pascal raises, above the certainties of reason, those of the heart. A Bergson believes that intelligence is capable of knowing, and even of knowing absolutely, in the domain of matter, but in the domain of life, he appeals to intuition. A Rousseau appeals to feeling and the voice of conscience. A Newman to the illative sense. Others to mystical experience. This, it seems, is the crux of the matter. The characteristic of the rationalist is not only to have, according to the formula of the Philosophical Vocabulary, “faith in reason”, but to have faith only in it, to sacrifice to it, to subordinate to it or to bring back to it every other principle of knowledge or action — to see, for example, in the suggestions of the esprit de finesse a rapid condensation of unperceived reasonings or calculations, and in mystical communications an implicit metaphysics (unless they are sheer delusion). Decisive in this respect, today as in the Middle Ages, is the position taken in relation to religion. The rationalist accepts religion, provided it is a rational religion, translating into a symbolic language the affirmations of reason, or limiting itself to the very consciousness that we have of reason as a principle of universal communion between men. He rejects all transcendence. He locks itself into immanencebecause he thinks that reason, our reason, is not based on anything else, that it needs to be completed by nothing else, that it does not therefore have to worry about any beyond. He will accommodate himself to the rigor of the unknowable. He will never tolerate the supernatural.

Ultimately, the characteristics of a rationalist philosophy boil down to two:

1) To admit the specific reality of a reason, understood either as the necessary order of ideas and things, or as an autonomous spiritual activity constitutive of experience — the latter only differing from the former, moreover, as the dynamic from the static;

2) To admit that this reason is valid either for understanding everything, or at least for understanding everything that is accessible to us and for regulating everything that depends on us — reason abolishing or rather absorbing into itself every other alleged principle of knowledge and action, sufficient for man and self-sufficient.

We have to determine to what extent these characteristics are found in the philosophy of Descartes.

We must therefore seek in the texts to determine what is, for Descartes, the proper nature of reason, and, to this end, begin by examining in general his views on knowledge, with respect to the method, with respect to the faculties, with respect to objects, with respect to the origin.

We must then investigate what is the value, for Descartes, of reason: to what extent it puts us in possession of a solid truth, and if it is capable of extending to all truth, or if it has limits, and assignable limits.

We have finally, in the event that limits should indeed be assigned to it, to ask ourselves what interest a beyond reason has for Descartes, in other words what conception is to be made of religion.

After that, we will probably be in a position to specify whether or not Descartes’ doctrine deserves the epithet of rationalist. We shall have the chance, in any case, of having laid bare its intimate tendencies.

Perhaps even the effort that we will have had to make in this direction will have brought us some precious lessons, today as three hundred years ago, for philosophical reflection. And thus we shall reap, from a study of history which seeks to be rigorously objective, the fruit without which the whole history of philosophy would not deserve an hour of trouble.

Conclusion

Here we are at the end of this long investigation. Let us try to summarize the results.

We were wondering: Was Descartes a rationalist?

And, to tell the truth, it might seem only of middling interest to know whether or not it is appropriate to stick on a philosophy that is three centuries old a label of much more recent and already somewhat faded confection. But sticking labels, or, if you prefer, comparing and classifying, is for the human mind the only way to understand and to make others understand. The word rationalism has been used a lot. In this way it is capable of evoking a quantity of connections and contrasts in the light of which, perhaps, one becomes capable of entering further into the understanding of a work that is rich and profound even among all others. We have claimed nothing other than to penetrate Descartes’ thought as completely as possible.

This is why we have taken as our instruction, contrary to a practice that is too widespread, the scrupulous respect of the texts. To take advantage of all of them, to highlight them all, to connect them, to reconcile them, to situate even the most aberrant (there are some) in their place and in their day, this has been our constant aim. Have we succeeded? One would have to be very sure of oneself and of one’s memory to boast of not having committed any omissions. At least we have not committed any wilful omissions. On two points only, one concerning the ontological proof of the existence of God, the other the limits of space, we had to recognize that, to remain fully in the Cartesian line, certain formulas of Descartes would call for corrections or extensions. Apart from these reservations, we have not encountered any serious exegetical difficulty. It was enough to set aside the quasi-official biases and the consecrated glosses which, for some hundred years, have imposed on the cultivated reader of the Meditations or the Discourse on the Method real a priori forms of interpretation. The texts have arranged themselves as if by themselves into a sufficiently harmonious whole.

But this whole is not oriented in the sense that we are accustomed to calling rationalist.

To be rationalist, we have said, is to admit the specific reality of reason, its universal value and its sufficiency. It is to believe in a necessary structure, either of reality or of the human mind – or rather of both at the same time: for any necessary structure of one cannot fail to be imprinted on the other. In whatever form it presents itself, rationalism always refers to notions such as those of order and law, or even – which, in essence, amounts to the same thing – of “regulated tendency”, of “constitutive spiritual activity”, of “autonomy”, of “immanence”.

Now these notions either do not figure in Descartes’ philosophy or figure there only with a particular meaning and at an accessory rank.

The mind, in Descartes, is not active as a faculty of knowing. Knowledge as such, which is summed up in the “sight” (intuitus) of the understanding, is only the passive reception of a given. The understanding has no structure. It does nothing, it orders nothing, it constitutes nothing: it observes.

Certainly this faculty of observing would be of little use to us, if it were not implemented by an active faculty which is attention. But attention, the condition of evidence, the source of comparison, of abstraction, of generalization, and of that effort which results in conceptual or imaginative “representation”, is only another name for the will. By the will, therefore, are all the so-called intellectual processes ordered, prepared, guided, and even fleshed out. And the will, too, has no structure: for it is freedom, that is to say, the indefinite power of opposites.

As for things – “natures” or “essences” – to which our will applies our understanding, they do have a structure, made of the necessary connections which exist between their simple elements and the various “compositions” which are formed from them. But first of all these necessary connections are not unified into a whole: they are distributed among several “regions” (in Husserl’s sense), each of which is defined by a primitive notion, and which is entirely separate from the others, without relations with them - except, as happens in the union of soul and body, certain factual relations. Then, where they allow themselves to be perceived - for example in the sphere of mathematical essences - the necessary connections are themselves only facts of a higher degree. They owe nothing to our understanding, which limits itself to contemplating them as they have been established by creative Freedom. We call them necessary, and they are so with regard to us, because we are powerless to change them. In themselves, and with respect to God, they are absolute contingency.

Thus the human mind does not make truth; it finds it ready-made. It finds it in itself, no doubt, by a reflection on its being, whose innate ideas express, each in its own way, the essential properties and relations. But it is neither its author nor its measure. It knows it only insofar as God is willing to reveal it to it by natural light or by that of grace. It adheres to it by a movement of its will; but in this movement it needs to be continually supported, and even recreated, like any creature in any of its steps, by divine assistance. On the other hand, this will could not have free will, that is to say a power of determination of immense amplitude, if the divine impulse did not arouse within our limited nature an incessant tendency to surpass itself; it could not exercise this power, that is to say determine itself effectively, if particular inclinations leading it towards this or that prospect were not, in what is positive about them, placed in it by God. Whether we consider then acting or thinking, in no sense do we have anything that is not given to us elsewhere: our condition is independencerelative to other finite beings, but total dependence relative to the infinite.

This dependence cannot be understood, as happens in pantheism, as a participation or identification of the finite being with the infinite. A Spinoza can well dream of this sort of coincidence of man with God, which leads, through knowledge of the third kind, to eternal life. And the mystics claim to have experienced it. But for the mystics it is a grace that is ineffable as well as exceptional; for Spinoza, a conquest that man is master of realizing by the simple progress of his knowledge. Descartes is far from denying the possibility of a union of this kind, which is properly the beatific Vision of Heaven, such as Christianity promises us. But, for him as for the mystics, or rather as for all Christians, it is an extraordinary state, to which only an extraordinary “beneficence” from God gives us access. And everything that is given to us here below is part of a “beneficence” which, although ordinary, is nonetheless gratuitous. Gratuitous, this term expresses well the kind of relationship that unites the finite and the infinite; a relationship of dependence, but not reciprocal: if the finite cannot be without the infinite, the infinite can be without the finite. We cannot therefore deduce the latter from the former, as – following the example dear to Spinoza – we deduce the properties of geometric figures from their definition. The passage from God to man involves a hiatus, a sudden and unpredictable leap that constitutes “the miracle of Creation”. Descartes’ God is Creator; and the Creator can only be transcendent to the nature he creates.

If the favorite themes of the Rationalists are: radical necessity, constitutive spiritual activity, autonomy, immanence, those of Descartes are: divine transcendence, heteronomy of the human spirit, passivity of the understanding in knowledge, freedom in man and in God.

But finally, is not the strong point of Rationalism the love of Reason? And is not Descartes possessed by it? Doesn’t he always have “Reason” on his lips? Is it not in the name of Reason that he undertakes to reform philosophy? Is it not “at the level of Reason” that he wants to “adjust” speculation and practice?

One cannot deny this. Although he does not in any way disregard the value of certain inspirations, of certain “unreasonable” movements of the soul, it is to Reason that he gives first place. But what does he mean by Reason? Nothing other than pure and simple knowledge. Knowledge in its naked state, stripped of the affective elements that mix with it and obscure it. Awareness in its positive aspect. It could just as well be called pure experience – and Descartes, in fact, sometimes uses the word experiri to designate it. The rational in him has no original character: it is the real whatever it may be, intelligible or sensible, one or multiple, particular or general, necessary or contingent, as soon as it is clearly and distinctly perceived, that is to say, integrally present to the mind. And the sign of this presence or this clarity, which we call evidence, is not a logical criterion, but a psychological one: the feeling of not being able to escape affirmation.

On the other hand, we do not know if the rational, or what is the same thing, the content of our distinct thought, covers, in us and outside us, the totality of reality. We observe, on the contrary, in some of our ideas, the marks of a resistance to our effort to think them quite distinctly. The union of the soul and the body has in itself something inexplicable. The being of God is incomprehensible and even inconceivable to us. We have no less evidence that our soul is united to our body and that God exists.

Finally, God, who is all-powerful and incomparable with us, can, if he pleases, communicate to us of his being and his acts what we would not know of them in the normal conditions of our nature. He can bring about, by his own ways, that this communication and the indication of his divine origin become “present to our minds”. Our Faith in Revelation therefore has exactly the same foundation as our rational certainty: evidence, although the evidence here bears on other objects and proceeds from another light. It is Reason itself which leads us to escape from its jurisdiction and which obliges us to welcome the supernatural.

“Nothing is more in conformity with Reason than this disavowal of Reason.” This sentence, as we know, is from Pascal. It defines Descartes’ position very precisely. If Descartes must be a rationalist, he will therefore be so in the manner of Pascal. But who would want to give this name to Pascal - unless they are determined to give it to everyone?

It is certain, however, that we will not resign ourselves without difficulty, either to seriously holding Pascal to be a rationalist, or to not making any distinction in this between Descartes and him.

Perhaps it is because we are accustomed to judging them less by the content of the doctrines than by the mentality, and, if we dare say, the intellectual temperament of their authors.

There is a rationalist temperament. It is that of the man whom we could qualify as: the optimist in matters of knowledge. This man does not hesitate in his research. He shamelessly gives himself all the postulates that seem useful to him. He goes forward, sure of overcoming the difficulties or that someone else will overcome them. He has, as this Dialectician said, “faith in a priorisynthesis”. Faith is indeed the right word. The rationalist has confidence in reason, understand: in his reason.

Descartes certainly shows much of this optimism in his attitude and in his words. He is rightly aware of his genius, proud of the proofs he has given of it, and, as he himself writes, of the battles he has won. Perhaps he is even inclined to exaggerate his triumphs, to believe them more decisive than they are, to hope a little too quickly for even greater ones. As he is marvelously intelligent and subtle, he does not fail to feel the limits of both the human mind and his own mind. He almost always perceives difficulties where they exist, and even where others do not perceive them. But he does not like to look at them. Let us recall the formula of his letter to Father Mesland, concerning divine freedom and the faculty it has of realizing even the contradictory: “I admit that there are contradictions that are so obvious that we cannot represent them to our minds without judging them entirely impossible, like the one you propose: that God could have made it so that creatures were not dependent on him. But we must not represent them to ourselves, in order to know the immensity of his power.” It therefore happens that, in order to think properly, we are obliged to divert our attention from certain truths? It is in this spirit that Descartes sometimes seems to pose a priori as irrefutable certainties principles or laws of physics that he knows well can only be absolutely established by means of the confirmation of facts. These principles or laws account for everything so well! How can we imagine that the facts prove them wrong? “Exceptions” to the conservation of motion can occur? Yes, of course, but these exceptions are extremely rare. There will be time to think about them when they occur. In the meantime, let us use the principle, which is so convenient and so fruitful. Similarly, when we boast of refuting “refractions” by new observations, let us not be troubled: these observations must have been badly made, and we will find a way to rectify them! But nowhere does Descartes reveal his turn of mind better than in the question of the “foundations on which all human certainty is based.” The only foundation of certainty is evidence, or clarity. And as we can always ask ourselves to what extent it is clear that we see clearly, our belief, ultimately, has no other guarantee than the invincible force of our tendency to believe. Pascal and Hume, placing here the intervention of nature or instinct, will say nothing very different. But Pascal, who has a restless soul, and Hume, who has a fussy character, conceive of it as a skeptical malady, in which they delight. Descartes does not. He sees like them what, at the base of our most certain knowledge, still remains defective in the eyes of a demanding mind. But he refuses to dwell on it. We may well have the idea that the evidence deceives us. But — everyone agrees — we cannot believe it. So “what have we to do with worrying about it”? Let us turn our attention away from these chimeras. And he continues on his way with a firm step. He has a dogmatic look and tone. That is why he is so commonly taken for a rationalist.

The misunderstanding has other causes as well. There are in the Cartesian work a number of elements which certainly smack of rationalism: if only the mechanization of Physics, mathematical deduction recognized as a model of rigorous reasoning, the principle of causality erected as an instrument of metaphysics, the hierarchy of perfections established as the basis of moral judgment, and the rule of clear ideas as the driving force of the method. We are right to observe this. We are wrong not to see that these rationalist elements are, in Descartes, mixed with many others of a very different and even opposing character. Descartes, it is commonplace to recall, is the father or ancestor of a host of disparate doctrines: Spinoza and Malebranche, Arnauld and Régis, Pascal and Leibniz, Locke and the English empiricists, Condillac and the French materialists, Voltaire and Rousseau, Kant, Biran, Auguste Comte, Hegel, Husserl, and many others, among whom those who criticize him the most are not those who owe him the least. All these doctrines are in embryo in his own. And of all of them one can say what Leibniz said (with a malicious ulterior motive) of Spinoza’s: one obtains each of them by “cultivating certain seeds of Descartes’ philosophy”, provided, however, that one specifies that the chosen seeds will be cultivated to the exclusion of the others. Thus, from a complicated equation, one obtains this or that variety of curves by canceling out this or that coefficients. Take from Descartes the idea of ​​mechanism and leave aside the theory of the soul and God: you have the materialism of La Mettrie. Take the notion of the adequately distinct idea, as implying the clear view not only of its parts, but of the nexus which exists between them, add to it the reference to mathematics as the norm of truth, the application of algebra to geometry, the heterogeneity of thought and extension, the mechanics of the passions, deny on the other hand free will and the distinction of a double form of substantiality: you have Spinozism. Take, with what Spinoza admits, free will and double substantiality, which he rejects; take again the conception of knowledge as pure passivity, and of the idea as the immediate object “distinguished” from the subject who contemplates it; reject only the causality of creatures, divine indifference and the substantial union of soul and body: you have Malebranchism. Similarly, to Cartesian innateness, meaning the existence in the soul of virtual properties and relations, add the equally Cartesian definition of truth by the omne praedicatum inest subjecto, and the idea of ​​the cause as reason (causa sive ratio), suppressing the Cartesian dualism of extension and thought, and the indeterminate freedom of man and God: you are very close to Leibniz. Combine the Cogito with the conception of the idea as modification of the soul: there is Locke; the Cogito with the feeling of effort and the immediate consciousness of the action of the soul on the body: there is Biran; the Cogito with the distinction between material realityand the objective reality of ideas and the position of essences as true and immutable natures: there is Husserl. Emphasize this Cartesian observation that the Cogito accompanies all our other representations, and the role of pure perception of space as the framework of all our sensible perceptions: you are on the path that leads to Kant. Just as you tend toward the Würzburg School and the modern Psychology of Thought by opposing intellection to imagination. Similarly, by reducing evidence to presence of mind, and by admitting the possible gap between this effective presence and the consciousness that one has of it, you prepare the ground on which Hume will practice. Finally, dig into the indications of the Regulae and the Correspondence on this spontaneity which makes us judge rightly outside of all reason, those of the Meditations on our inclination to believe, on the role of attention in judgment, and on this infinite capacity to want by which man ceaselessly aspires to something greater and better, think also of these three orders of reality which Cartesianism distinguishes and superimposes: you have the main ideas of Pascal.

All these diverse themes that will be developed respectively, by accentuating them more or less, by the various post-Cartesian philosophies—both those that are usually called rationalist and those that are called irrationalist—can already be found in Descartes. And they can be found there in the company of themes coming from earlier philosophies, those of Saint Thomas and Saint Augustine, those of Aristotle and Plato. Such a variety of views could not fail to give rise to antagonisms that have often disconcerted historians: the distinction between soul and body contrasts with their substantial union – finality with mechanism – free will with necessary connections – the search for clear thought with the recognition of confused thought – the concern for observation with confidence in reasoning – attachment to natural evidence with the unquestioned acceptance of religious dogma. We think of the assembly of “contrary reasons” (complexio oppositorum), which, according to the Augustinians, Catholic truth would be composed of. But the assembly, here, does not take place by a synthesis in the manner of Hegel: there is no third term to reconcile the two opposites (being, nothingness, becoming). Nor does it take place, as with the Augustinians, by subordination of one term to the other (nature and grace, merit and predestination, letter and spirit). In Descartes, each truth “holds its place”. A well-defined place, where it does not hinder the others, but where it does not allow itself to be absorbed by the others either. Nothing authorizes the claim to reduce reality to unity: unity, if it exists, has its source in God, and is inaccessible to us, just as the absolutely simple essence in which the divine attributes are identified is inaccessible to us. Cartesian philosophy, despite the efforts often made to present it according to a unilinear dialectic, is not, strictly speaking, a system. It could be called a pluralism, in the sense that its content can neither be derived from a single principle nor confined within a single formula. A coherent pluralism, one should add: not only because the oppositions revealed therein are not (whatever has been said) formal contradictions, but above all because each of the opposing terms has been admitted therein only by virtue of the same attitude of mind, docility to evidence. To bend in all things to what one sees; to record it as one sees it, in whatever order it belongs, without mixing anything of one’s own sensibility into it: this is the Cartesian attitude, as it manifests itself in the theory of method, as also in the Cogito and in the approaches that proceed from it. This is the empirical attitude, in the first and authentic sense of the word: only the inveterate associations of those who are reluctant to admit it always lead to the confusion of empirical and sensualist. So that, if we absolutely want to characterize Descartes’ philosophy by a name, the name that would best suit it would be, paradox aside, that of empiricism — radical and integral empiricism.

But is it therefore essential to give it a name? It is better to understand and profit from the lesson it teaches us—and, let us repeat, if it could teach us none, it would not have been worth studying.

Descartes’ lesson lies in the two fundamental notions that we have found in each chapter of his work, one of which summarizes his philosophy of knowing, the other his philosophy of being: experience and freedom.

These two notions are correlative: for on the one hand, freedom is attained only through experience; on the other, truth, in every order, is a matter of experience only because it is the product of freedom. And their correlation is made manifest to us in the Cogito, which marks both the beginning and the end of Cartesianism.

The Cogito, in fact, begins with doubt. And what is doubt if not our free will giving itself free rein as much as it can? Upon which, the mind, becoming aware of this free will, realizes that it is being, and that it is its being: I think, therefore I am. Further progress will consist in clarifying, through a reflective effort that is still an application of free will, the features that originally remained in the shadows. The final step will be to recognize that human free will, an infinite power within a finite being, requires and attests to the influence of an actual infinity, that is, of an absolute freedom.

Now, these approaches of Cartesian thought seem to be essential, today more than ever, to all philosophical reflection.

The great authors of recent centuries are almost unanimous in testifying that all philosophical reflection has its obligatory starting point in the Cogito. Spinoza excepted, who does not fear to write: “The Scholastics began with things, Descartes begins with thought, I begin with God.” But this is because Spinoza is an unrepentant dogmatist. Will we renounce the critical spirit? Or will we believe, by chance, that we have fewer reasons than Descartes to challenge the prejudices and clouds of our time? It is fashionable today to mock proofs: we are happy when we have expressed some opinion that might pass for rare, ingenious or profound. The attitude of a poet or an “essayist.” Whoever wants to be a philosopher must resign himself to a “calling into question of everything”, to Husserl’s ἐποχή, that is to say, to Descartes’ methodical doubt. — One objects with Leibniz: why must doubt be universal? Wouldn’t a limited and special doubt suffice, relating to doubtful matters and not to others? — But a certainty, if it is special, always presupposes something before it, even if it is only the experimental procedures or the rules of reasoning that have procured it for you. To be entitled to proclaim it not doubtful, you must first have examined these procedures and these rules. Step by step, you cannot refuse to trace the examination back to our faculty of knowing. And this is the whole meaning of the Cogito. To those, then, who, in the scholastic manner, would like to start from being and not from knowing, it is enough to reply: to start from this being, you must first have the assurance of possessing it. — We have the assurance, you affirm; in which you imitate Spinoza: “He who has a true idea knows that he has a true idea.” — Wonderful! But others besides you believe they have true ideas, which you do not fail to consider greatly deluded. — They are not really certain! — Childish defeat. Has it not happened to you, too, to say that you are certain on occasions when you now recognize that you have been mistaken? Whatever your certainty may be today, there is always reason to question whether it is an authentic certainty. By this simple question mark, your affirmation is “suspended”, or, as Husserl says, “reduced”—reduced to the consciousness that you have of affirming. You will only reestablish it as a position of truth or value on the condition of revising, starting from this consciousness and in its light, the series of operations which had made you posit for the first time, without sufficient guarantee, value and truth. You can well try to begin with the object: if you want to control your judgment on it, you will be forced to regress to the initial contact between this object and the knowing subject. Even if you perceive being in itself, you will only be sure of it after having experienced in the broad daylight of consciousness the act or attitude by virtue of which you perceive it. This test, this initial contact, is the Cogito itself.

It is rich in lessons.

Thought in its quest for truth, that is, for being, first learns, as we have said, that it is itself in being. Everything we think clearly, that is, effectively, is by that very fact real. And no force in the world can erase its reality. As Malebranche would say, “to see nothing is not to see”: from the moment we see, we see something. This something can be judged more or less perfect, more or less durable, more or less interesting for practical purposes. It cannot be annulled. Therefore, we cannot avoid taking it into account in speculation. The flaw of many ancient and modern philosophies is, after establishing a hierarchy of planes in reality, to neglect the so-called lower planes. Because we have risen to the level of the spirit, the universal, the eternal, we believe we no longer have to concern ourselves with matter, accident, or time. We relegate them to the realm of illusion. We forget that, for consciousness, illusion is still reality. Because we have transcended it, we imagine that it never existed. But it did exist, even if it no longer exists now. And we cannot fail to mention it without distorting our general view of the world. Descartes understood this admirably. No one valued the clear and distinct more than he did; no one distrusted the sensible more than he did. But more than any other philosopher, he insisted on the irreducible character of the sensible as such. And he was almost alone in highlighting the role, undoubtedly unfortunate but crucial, of confused thought in the life of the mind. This is in the name of the very principle of clear ideas: for we see clearly that there exists within us confusion impossible to unravel, feelings impossible to intellectualize. The data of consciousness is what it is: under the pretext of knowing it better, to substitute another for it is properly to indulge in words.

Let’s not beat around the bush: this is the second fundamental teaching that comes from the Cogito. It comes from it by a sort of reversal of the principle of clear ideas. Descartes told us on the one hand: every thought, as thought, contains being and is therefore true. He tells us on the other hand: no thought is true except insofar as it is clear, because only a clear thought is truly a thought. Clarity, in fact, is only presence in the mind. Therefore, obscure representation, in its obscure aspects, is absent from the mind. Apart from the affective elements, foreign to representation, which mask this absence from us, it has no content, or rather it has none other than the symbols intended to translate its content if it had any. We see: Descartes, in prescribing us to think clearly, simply recommends that we not speak empty words. The recommendation was not superfluous in his time. It is no less appropriate to ours. For in our time, verbalism is more rampant than ever. Has scholasticism known a worse logomachy than that which fills so many contemporary dissertations on Being and Relation, Act and Action, Essence and Existence, Becoming and Time? Our metaphysicians are in this, as they have always been, victims of dialectical vertigo. But in matters of physics too, and especially microphysics, how many scholars who pride themselves on philosophy or philosophers steeped in science enjoy juggling with concepts that defy all conception! That today’s science implements basic notions—such as those of the corpuscle or the field—that are difficult to think about in a completely precise and logically satisfactory way, is admitted by its most eminent masters. And Descartes would be ill-advised to reproach them for it. For he himself proposes clarity to us as an ideal, he does not guarantee that we will always achieve it. On the contrary, he warns us that certain phenomena may depend on a “kind of being” that we have never experienced, and that in this case we must be content to think of them by analogy. But he sees this as an indication of a gap in our knowledge. He does not think of transforming defeat into victory, and the impotence of our intelligence into a superior type of intelligibility. He prefers as much as possible the clear to the obscure, knowing how to resign himself to the obscure where it cannot be clarified, and above all taking care not to present as clear what is obscure. The true Cartesian spirit demands this and nothing more. Is it true that it has become foreign to our 20th-century science? That would be a shame: for it is confused with the positive spirit, or, more simply, with intellectual probity.

The Cartesian mind is positive in that it is committed to welcoming reality whatever it may be, wherever it appears. But among the objects that intuitus may have to observe, Descartes does not hesitate to include deprivation, or lack. And deprivation reveals itself to us notably in the awareness we have of our own being. While we feel free, we feel that we are “an incomplete thing”, constantly aspiring to “something greater and better.” We discover within ourselves perspectives where our intelligence is lost, and which are symbolized by the word infinity. Now infinity, which frightens Descartes, does not frighten certain modern philosophers, disciples in this respect of Spinoza and Leibniz. Their intelligence, before it, feels at ease, assured of having mastered it, thanks to Infinitesimal Calculus and Set Theory. But they should remember that the whole art of Infinitesimal Calculus is to elude the direct consideration of infinity by taking, in place of the infinitely large or the infinitely small, magnitudes larger or smaller than any given magnitude, and that Set Theory (which, moreover, does not avoid antinomies) starts from the postulate that the infinite series of numbers can itself be posited as a number. In either case, the “Science of the Infinite” is, according to Leibniz’s expression, only a “successful fiction.” Infinity itself is neither penetrated nor grasped. Descartes was therefore right to say, in two sentences which seem to want in advance to restrict to their proper scope the later inventions of mathematicians: the notion of infinity is the spring of all numeration, and at the same time it means that “there is something in the matter of numbering which surpasses our forces.” Let us meditate on these two sentences. We will be led to recognize that, the infinite being found everywhere in nature and singularly in man, man can neither exhaust nature nor equal himself, that he is therefore not sufficient unto himself, and that he therefore needs superhuman help. — And this is the third great lesson that Descartes gives us. In a century of “humanist” pride, it is opportune and it has its price.

Not everything in Cartesianism is equally valuable. It contains gaps, even major errors, which prevent it from being assimilated without reservation.

First, with regard to the subject-object relationship. Not that Descartes ignored or neglected this relationship. It is notably implicated in the opposition between the objective reality of ideas and their material reality. But nowhere is it studied for itself. Nowhere is its original and primary character highlighted. The Cogito, in particular, is presented in such a way that it seems to reduce the object to the subject. Hence the debates that will arise between Malebranche, Arnauld and Régis on the true nature of the idea; and the false problem that will torment later philosophy, on the passage from the self to the non-self.

Perhaps Descartes should also have been clearer about our knowledge of rational principles, whether speculative or practical, and especially the principle of causality. But the weak point—which is also a central point—of his doctrine is undoubtedly the theory of distinctions, the foundation of those of substance and necessary connections. Abstraction is its soul. Now, on this abstract process, distinguishing what is not separate, Descartes gives us no clarification. The distinction, he says, takes place “by attention.” But how does attention, which is limited to directing the intuitus mentis, have the virtue of making us see separately what is truly inseparable? He has nowhere explained this. Let us not blame him too much, since he has this in common with almost all the other great philosophers. But, for lack of having elucidated the nature of abstraction, he was led to exaggerate its power, and to treat its products as things capable of subsisting by themselves. Is it not only through abstraction that one can discern, for example, the secondary qualities from the primary qualities and the color from the figurative and mobile extension? Let us therefore admit it: the Cartesian mechanism is based on realized abstractions. All the physical theories that have succeeded it, from the 17th century to the present day, have done the same, or even worse – insofar as they have claimed to bring us more than symbols and experimental recipes, allowing us to predict sensible phenomena and to act on them. Their error does not make the Cartesian mechanism philosophically more acceptable.

There is no question of accepting Cartesianism as a whole. Cartesianism is a block for the historian who intends to restore its original figure – τὸ ἴδιον – not in the eyes of the philosopher who intends to draw from it nourishment for his personal thought. It is one thing to reconstruct, another to use. Absolute fidelity to the work is for the historian the only way to recapture the spiritual impulse from which the work originated. But once this impulse is recaptured, what prevents the philosopher from appropriating it, and from inflecting it, if necessary, to the best of his own ends? Bergson rightly noted that in every philosophy there is, on the one hand, the current of intuition that represents the personal “genius” of the author, and on the other hand, a whole “material” of ideas that come from elsewhere, from contemporary science, from the prevailing mentality, from tradition, and that the current of intuition must raise and organize in its own way — like an electric current passing through a pile of iron filings. Descartes is no exception. Although he wanted to free himself from received ideas, he could not help but be influenced by them. We might believe that if, born in another country or in another time, he had had to deal with a different stock of prejudices, common tendencies and current data, his initial intuition would have expressed itself in a completely different doctrinal organization. Nothing, then, prevents us, starting from Descartes and filled with his thought, from still believing ourselves to be under his inspiration, while we subsequently follow paths quite divergent from his. Husserl claimed to be a descendant of Descartes in setting out the foundations of his Phenomenology. A philosophy of experience and freedom that would ensure it remained close to the concrete and immediately brought out, in the Cogito, the cogitata in the face of the ego cogitans, would it not, however closely related it might be to Berkeley and Hume, Biran and Bergson, have the right to be called Cartesian?

It remains to be constituted.

A sectarian once stigmatized Cartesianism as “the great French sin.” On the contrary, it seems that if French thought, perverted and sterilized since the last century by so many unhealthy influences, is destined for renewal, it must be on the condition of returning to “this free way of philosophizing” that Arnauld pointed out, with sympathetic astonishment, in the Meditations: seeking the direct view of things, fleeing hermeticism and vain technicality, not encumbering oneself with any category, any school terminology, respecting nothing in advance, but always being ready to bow unreservedly before what, after examination, will prove worthy of respect — in short, making predominate in oneself that very simple and rare disposition of the soul in which Descartes put the summary of Wisdom and which he called, giving the word its strongest meaning, Good Sense.

It is undoubtedly true that the religious moment of Descartes’ philosophy corresponds to that of the loss and reconquest of the world in meditation, and the secular moment to that of the return to the world, after its reality has been guaranteed by divine truthfulness. The wisdom professed in this last period is characterized by the total separation of rational truth and religious truth. And since the immortality of the soul is not in the strict sense the object of rational demonstration, but of faith, and one cannot speak of my cooperation with God’s ends because of their impenetrability, his sole interest becomes the béatitude naturelle, the improvement of the present life, not coordinated, if not by the simple absence of contradiction, with a transcendent end; Descartes presents himself as someone who science has put in possession of techniques that allow the improvement of this purely human condition. Because of this secularism combined with meliorism, his position seems to measure the leap from libertinism to Enlightenment. He is also moving towards it in understanding the transcendence of man in the world, no longer as detachment, as it might appear from the Meditations, but as dominion; and it may seem that he spoke of God as of a purely philosophical principle, of a simple guarantee of science. And yet, it must be said that Descartes is not aware of this secular inflection: by having the French translations of the Meditations and the Principles edited, he reaffirms the necessity of the metaphysical foundation; and he continues to be certain of the apologetic character of his philosophy.

In reality, if one considers it carefully, his position in this period is perfectly coherent with that of the previous one, so that one must say that it is not a question of a development, but of the fact that in both of these periods, in relation to the problem (of truth in the first, of life in the second) and to the [particular] public, [respectively] that religious moment and that secular moment which have been seen to be present together are more accentuated.

One cannot speak of a pre-Enlightenment position with regard to his return to the world. He encountered the philosophical problem not as a metaphysician or a theologian, but as a gentleman whom the plan of his educators at the College of La Flèche had already destined for practice: he had to return to the metaphysical problem in order to respond to a doubt that arose from the uncertainty of tradition; and the final metaphysical thesis at which he arrived (the creation of eternal truths), in which he recognized the most religious moment of his thought, is also the one that defines a type of philosophy that has no contemplative character. Meditation therefore does not exhaust life, but is only a moment of it; thus, having overcome the doubt that was suggested to him by the historical situation, he can return to his original practical destination. As for separatism, certainly in this last period that “Pelagianism” of which we have spoken finds clearer expression: but we have also seen how it must be linked to that anti-historicism which, in order to be fully understood, needs to be placed in opposition to the naturalistic historicism of the libertines. We can conclude: by virtue of anti-historicism, the philosophy that allowed him to arrive at the unity of science and wisdom acted on the original distinction, of Thomist origin and rethought in a Molinistic way, between natural and supernatural, with the result of changing it into separation; while, on the other hand, he was able to maintain even in the last period the conviction of the apologetic character of his thought because the original Molinism did not allow him to notice the worldliness of the position he was assuming.

The political thoughts that are found especially in the letters of the last years to Elisabeth and Chanut (Descartes addresses the problem of the relationship between man and society in parallel with that of the union of the soul and the body) show how his anti-historicism has nothing in common with ius naturalism and the Enlightenment. It does not so much mean abandonment of the historical perspective, as radical denial of the philosophy of history, in the broadest sense that this term can receive; with the consequence of the illusory nature of wanting to oppose reason to historical reality in the manner of an ideal model, hence his traditionalist attitude.

The most important work of the last years, Les passions de l’âme, represents the meeting of Cartesian morality and medicine: with it another modern type enters history, that of the psychophysiological counselor. Descartes clearly separates his point of view from that of the previous moralists, by saying that he wants to treat them not as an “orator” or a “moral philosopher”, but “en physicien”. That is, the previous moralists have ignored the naturalness of the passions, omitting to consider the fact of the interaction of the soul and the body. They have therefore fantasized about a freedom from the passions, while the task of moral research is to teach how to be free with them. In other words, Les passions is a treatise on morality founded on the principle that the struggle is not between a superior part and a inferior part of the soul, but between the soul and the body: hence the need for psychophysiological consideration. Having defined the passions as “perceptions or feelings or emotions of the soul, which refer particularly to it, and which are produced, preserved and corroborated by means of some movement of the animal spirits” (article 27) and described these movements, Descartes passes to the classification that must be made in relation to the diversity of our reactions to the perturbations of objects. He distinguishes six simple or primitive passions: admiration, love, hate, desire, joy and sadness, of which all the others are composed. Only to one point do we draw attention here, on the form in which the idea of ​​freedom is present in this book (passion receiving its name in opposition to a free thought, to which Descartes wants to teach the art of governing and directing it): in the virtue of generosity (articles 152-54), that is, in the feeling that each one has of his own free will, united in the resolution never to fail us. This definition of the type of the généreux, whose analogy with the Cornelian hero has rightly been shown, also has a biographical significance: because if one considers that freedom is the soul of the method and of meditation, Descartes’ life appears as that of someone who, in the specific historical circumstances that made the problem of certainty urgent, realised to the extreme limit the obligation that derives from this type.

This study, which has tempted few historians, would lead, if I am not mistaken, to the following observations:

First, that there really is a doctrine of Port-Royal; not an official and closed doctrine: — “We do not form a party, by the grace of God”, repeats Arnauld; “It is only charity that unites us, and which does not take away from us the freedom to follow each one’s own light and the movements of his conscience”, — but a set of conceptions on free will, grace and predestination on the one hand, on the regulation of morals, the Sacraments and the constitution of the Church on the other hand, which form a kind of system, and on which, despite some divergences or variations in detail, the theologians who call themselves Disciples of Saint Augustine, and who have been in various ways the inspirers, the masters or the friends of Port-Royal, — Saint-Cyran, Arnauld, Barcos, Guillebert, Hermant, Bourzeis, Bourgeois, Saint-Amour, Duhamel, Sainte-Beuve, Desmares, Feydeau, Saci, Rebours, Nicole, Girard, Lalane, Le Roy, Varet, Sainte-Marthe, Gerberon, Duguet, Quesnel, and others still, without forgetting “those of Louvain”, from Jansenius and Fromond to Sinnich, Havermans, Huyghens and Neercassel, — have constantly found themselves in agreement as to the essentials: Arnauld offering, it seems, the most complete and most considered expression of the common thought.

Then, that, for the establishment of the said system, the Port-Royalists are unanimous in rejecting the scholastic method, insofar as it tries to subject theology to human reasoning, that they trust in the sole authority of Tradition, considered as the guardian and the infallible interpreter of the Revelation of Christ; that, if they preferentially attach themselves to Saint Augustine (from whom they do not consent to separate Saint Thomas), it is because Saint Augustine, by the approval he received from all the Fathers, the Popes, and the Councils, can be considered, in matters of grace, the faithful representative of Tradition, “the language of the Church”; that thus, far from thinking of introducing “particular” or “new” opinions, they have never had any other aim than to restore in its integral content, against both Protestantism and Molinism — opposing errors, both condemned by Tradition of which both equally, although differently, ignore some part — Catholic Truth.

This Catholic Truth, according to the Bible, has at its center a very traditional notion, certainly, since it forms the basis of the teaching of Saint Paul, no less than of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas, of the real nature of grace, conceived as the all-powerful operation of God in the innermost being of the soul, or rather as the transfusion—resulting in a union closer than that of soul and body, and comparable to the union of the two natures in the person of the Incarnate Word—of the divine will into the human will, in short, as the momentary participation of certain men in the life of God. This is what is evoked by the scholastic expression of grace efficacious in itself. And the defense of efficacious grace has always been, aside from quarrels over words and personal disputes, the only doctrinal point at issue in the so-called Jansenist controversies. “To defend efficacious grace”, that is to say: on the one hand, to explain why the gift of such grace is necessary to human nature, and how it accords either with the free will of the creature or with the justice and goodness of the Creator; on the other hand, to determine what the moral life of the Christian and the conduct of Christian Society can and should be under the action of such grace; this is the entire program of the Theology of Port-Royal.

In order to live well, man needs a grace that is effective in itself, which makes his will act instead of being subject to it, because man, by reason of original sin, is no longer in his normal condition.

His normal condition, given that he is a being endowed with reason and, by extension, capable of conceiving the Universal Good and incapable of finding, in any particular good, the satisfaction of his desires, would be to tend toward God with all his powers, and to take him as the ultimate end of all his movements, seeing in creatures only means to rise to this end; in other words (in the strong sense of the term love, according to which quod non propter se amatur, non amatur) to love God and to love only him. It is true that an infinite object, alone proportionate to the aspirations of a rational being, is necessarily disproportionate to the forces of a finite creature. It was therefore fitting that God should not abandon to its mediocre resources a nature whose law is to surpass itself, but should put it, by supernatural immunities and aids, in a position to accomplish, if it pleased him, its sublime destiny. Such is the state of rectitude and integrity in which Adam was constituted.

But Scripture teaches us that he fell from it through his own fault. What fault? Pride, which drove him, according to the Serpent’s words, to no longer want to depend on anything but himself, and to put himself in God’s place, eritis sicut Dii; pride, under the spur of which the will changed its ultimate goal, and, while created for God, it should have rendered everything to Him, decided to no longer take as its goal anything but itself and its own good.

Therein lies the essence of Adam’s fall. The higher this fall took place, the more serious the consequences must have been. God willed that the fault committed by a free will perfectly the master of its own choice, without any of the ignorance or training that would have made it excusable, should become its own punishment. He ordained that the will, for having once turned away from its true Good, should remain fixed in the false position spontaneously adopted, and that the deviation of an instant should be changed into nature: Vitium pro natura inolevit. Whoever says nature says heredity. Consequently, this habitual depravation of the will, this aversio mentis a Deo, is not only in Adam, but has taken root in all of Adam’s posterity. Each of us is born with a quasi-natural disposition to seek oneself in all things and not God, a disposition essentially bad since it implies, by the preference of the Creature to the Creator, the reversal of the first principle of the eternal Order. From this arises cupidity or concupiscence, which is nothing other than a disorder of our appetites, both spiritual and sensible, and which, in its three forms (libido sentiendi, libido sciendi, libido excellendi), consists in seeking created goods, food, for example, or honors, or knowledge, in order to enjoy them and not simply to use them, that is to say, to pursue in them the satisfaction of our self-love, and not simply the means of uniting ourselves with the Supreme Good. Concupiscence, in its turn, engenders ignorance: in the sense that, dominating attention, it causes the mind, in all matters where self-love is at stake, consequently first and foremost in moral matters, not to fail to blind itself and to go astray. And, finally, from ignorance and concupiscence, born of the depravity of the will, and which increase it, is formed an inability to do good which, though voluntary and not physical, is nonetheless invincible. Not that free will in fallen man is destroyed; but he has lost that equal flexibility to good and evil which characterized the state of innocence. The power to do good which remains in him is chained in such a way that it is no longer effectively exercised except in the sense of delight which attracts him towards creatures, that is to say, in the plane of evil. It certainly happens to him — the example of the Pagan Sages proves it — to move towards objects good in themselves, to accomplish acts of courage, temperance, justice. But these acts, materially in conformity with the Law, he does only out of self-interest, vain glory, or any other motive taken from concupiscence, and never for the sole motive which would make them morally good, namely for the love of God. Thus, through the lack of intention, he remains, even in the apparent practice of the virtues, condemned not to commit this or that sin, but to sin whatever he does. And this slavery is no excuse for him, since it comes down to the constant and obstinate resolution to sin.

It goes without saying that man cannot free himself from it by effort and will alone. Is not the will in him precisely what must be cured? It will never recover on the side of God, unless there is supernatural help from this God from whom it has strayed. But this help cannot consist, like ordinary remedies, in a help whose use is left to the discretion of the sick person. It cannot consist, like the revelation of the Law in the Old Covenant, in simple lights provided to the intelligence, nor, like the versatile grace offered to the innocent man (and which corresponds to the sufficient grace of the Molinists), in pious movements aroused in the will itself, but which would solicit it without determining it. For, to adhere to the known good, or simply to acquiesce to the attraction of this good, would already be a good action of which corrupted free will, by itself, is incapable. Any help given to the disposition of this free will will be for it, as the Law was for the Jews, only an occasion for new prevarications. The only truly sufficient grace is that which is interior; not only to the soul, but to the will; not only to the will, but to that higher part of the will (apex voluntatis) from which consent proceeds. — Such is the medicinal grace of Christ, which can be defined as the inspiration of charity, or of the love of God, inspiratio dilectionis qua cognita sancto amore faciamus. This grace is not necessitous: for he “who is more intimate to us than we are to ourselves”, does not move us in the manner of a foreign principle; by spreading his love in the will, he makes it move of its own accord to what it prefers, and makes it feel all the freer in its movement the more this preference determines it. But it is always effective: for although the divine motion does not always lead us to act, and it happens, according to its degree of strength, sometimes to dominate concupiscence, and sometimes to be dominated by it, it does not fail, in one case as in the other, to infallibly obtain the precise result, a good work or simple desire for good, which has been fixed by the decree of the Almighty.

It follows from this that there can be no question of a grace of Christ common to all men. Since all grace is efficacious, those have no grace who have, neither in the form of acts nor in the form of desires, no will to good. Since all grace is an inspiration of love from God, those receive no grace who have not first received, through the Faith of Christ, the knowledge of the true God. Fides prima datur. Grace is proper to Christians. — Truly, Christ, who has merited grace for us, “sheds his blood for all men”; and the Father, who distributes it to us, “wills that all men be saved”: no one can dream of rising up against the words of Saint Paul. But if the treasure of grace acquired by the sacrifice of Christ has in itself enough to redeem all men; if, in this sense, Redemption is proposed to all, each one being able to receive the benefit of it, were it not for the obstacle placed therein by his corrupt will, and which God alone removes from whomever he pleases; if of no man, as long as he is alive, whatever his condition, whatever his present impiety, we are authorized to think that he will not have part in Redemption, — so that, practically, we are obliged to behave towards all as if it were to be applied to them, working, as far as it depends on us, to make them all benefit from it, — nevertheless it is necessary to agree, unless we deny Divine Sovereignty, that the salvific intention of the Son, nor that of the Father, which does not differ from it, cannot have been the same towards those who attain salvation, and towards the others. In view of this intention, it will be said that Christ died for all men without exception, as to the sufficiency of the price he paid for the ransom of the human race; that he died both sufficiently and effectively for all those to whom he resolved to dispense, even if only for a time, the grace, fruit of his redemption, that is to say, for all Christians; and that he died finally in a very particular way for those among Christians to whom he resolved to continue until the end this salutary influence, that is to say, for the elect. — As to knowing why some are elected, others reprobate, the question is insoluble to man. All that can be affirmed is that all humanity having rendered itself, in the person of Adam, worthy of the wrath of God and of punishment, the men whom God left in the mass of damnation, giving them no grace or only temporary grace, have the fate that is due to them; and the men whom God delivers from the mass, opening to them by his grace access to glory, deserve in some way this glory by the result of their good works: but as they could accomplish good works only insofar as they were infallibly moved thereto by the help of efficacious grace, they obviously could not merit the persevering gift of this grace, a gift which supposes on the part of God the absolute will to save them. To go back to the principle, it must therefore be admitted that, as the reprobation of the damned is of strict justice, the predestination of the elect is of pure mercy. The choice is gratuitous. This does not mean that it is done at random, by a stroke of arbitrariness or blind caprice. But it does mean that the reasons for it should not be sought in man — quis te discernit? — they are hidden in the abyss of supreme Wisdom, unfathomable to our small wisdom, and before which the only suitable word is that of the apostle: O altitudo!

From this conception of grace, we can deduce a morality; or, rather, we can deduce the true way of understanding and practicing Christian morality, which is entirely contained in these two points: putting off the old man and putting on the new.

What is chiefly corrupted in man is the will. And the will is corrupted in that, instead of tending toward God as the ultimate to which it relates all things, it places its ultimate in the creature. Man will never be “right” as long as the axis of his will, by a movement in the opposite direction, which is what is called “conversion”, has not oriented itself toward his true Sovereign Good. To make a thing one’s Sovereign Good is to love it above all else. It follows from this that the love of God or the charity of which Christ speaks to us is certainly not a matter of counsel, but rather of rigorous obligation. Only it is clear that what is prescribed for us by this cannot be that affective love which the mystics describe, a sort of sensible emotion of the soul, accompanied by impulses, raptures and transports with which God favors the Saints in Heaven and certain just people on Earth, but which, by its passive and exceptional character, is not susceptible of command. Nor can we reduce the love of God to the effective love which the Jesuits imagine, reabsorbing the first and greatest precept of the Law in the simple observation of all the others, and believing to have loved God opere et veritatebecause they act externally in the same way as those whose hearts are his. True charity is neither an ecstasy nor an attitude. It is an interior disposition of the will: it consists in the firm and constant resolution to conform ourselves in everything to the commandments of God because they come from Him, or, which is the same thing, God being absolute justice, because they are just. — Understood in this way, as the disinterested love of Justice, charity is truly “the fulfillment of the Law.” For, on the one hand, outside of it, the works of the Law result only in a legal and pharisaical virtue, a counterfeit of virtue. And, on the other hand, wherever there is charity, the Law is obeyed as much as is possible for man, since the sincere intention to act is never separated from the act except by obstacles independent of the will. This is to say that charity does not go without an exact application to fulfill the smallest prescriptions of the Law. And whoever seeks the source of all the relaxations that a certain Casuistry wants to introduce into the rule of morals, will find it in the lack of charity. Lax Casuistry, or Probabilism, is based on a large number of errors concerning grace, notably on a false conception of the sins of ignorance and the imputability of human actions, but its essential spring is the supposed right attributed to man to choose, between two paths deemed permissible, the one which, even if it is the least probable and the least certain, best suits his convenience, his honor, his interest, that is to say, his concupiscence. Such casuistry has been well defined: “the art of quarreling with God.” Charity, however, does not quarrel; it does not bargain over its effort. Being above all good will, if it does not always achieve the most perfect, it always does its best relative to the degree of its present strength. Aspiring only to please God, it goes straight away towards what it judges to have the greatest chance of being pleasing to Him. The Christian it inspires may well sometimes find himself embarrassed by cases of conscience. But these cases—which will arise for him from the conflict between several duties (and not from the conflict between a duty and a human interest), from the need to know what he must do (and not what he can allow himself)—he will not resolve them by resorting to general rules taken from books, whose generality makes them ill-proportioned to the concrete difficulty that must be resolved: the instinct of his charity, — enlightened by prayer, and, if necessary, by the advice of a director experienced in unraveling the secret movements of souls, — will be, for a heart purified of the concerns of the world, the best of guides: Ama et fac quod vis. — Does this mean that the Christian is obliged to leave the world entirely? In no way. The love of God is perfectly compatible with the love of creatures, provided that the love of creatures is subordinated to the love of God. “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” We have the right and the duty to be devoted to our friends, to honor our parents, to cultivate knowledge, to seek even temporal goods, provided that we do so in view of God, and in order to satisfy his will. There is therefore a legitimate use for all these things. It is only true that, in this practice, we must remain “without anxiety and without attachment,” and keep ourselves constantly ready to sacrifice them, if God so requests. It is also true that this separation “in spirit” is hardly possible without some beginning of effective separation: and this is what mortifications, almsgiving, retreats, and various forms of asceticism, which make the life of the Christian a “perpetual penance,” correspond to. This life, however, is sorrowful only in appearance. Deep down, no sacrifice is sorrowful to one who makes it out of love. And is it not the privilege of the children of the New Covenant, unlike the Jews of the Old, to act by grace, that is, by “an inspiration of love which makes one do with holy pleasure what God commands”? As little as one advances in charity, the taste for divine things growing with it, one no longer feels the yoke of Christ, and one ends up finding joy in the renunciation even of what the world calls by that name. Without doubt, this joy, in the “traveling” man, is not unmixed, since it is constantly troubled by the apprehension of losing the charity that causes it. Since grace is not common to all, and the gift of perseverance is a special gift that no one, unless by a particular revelation, can promise to have until the end, the most saintly are obliged to work out their salvation with “trembling.” This does not prevent this “chaste fear,” born of love, from finding in love a counterbalance, which is hope. Who does not know that we would never love God, if he himself did not love us first by anticipating us with his grace? The more sincere, therefore, and the more lasting our charity, the more reason we have to suppose in God for us that preference which is the foundation of his election. Charity, or the good life which is its consequence, thus becomes a mark — the only mark accessible to man — of Predestination. Not an infallible mark, certainly, but probable enough to give the fervent Christian true confidence. From this alliance of confidence and fear is made the peace, humble and vigilant, equally far removed from presumption and scruples, which Christ came to bring to the world, and thanks to which the incomparable happiness of the soul united to Christ begins even here below.

It remains to be seen how the Christian should go about acquiring and increasing charity within himself.

Charity, certainly, is a gift of grace. But although this gift is purely gratuitous, and God could well, if He wished, grant it to us all at once in its ultimate perfection, it pleased God, to better emphasize the extent to which Christ is the obligatory intermediary between Him and men, to subordinate the distribution of His graces to the use of means instituted by Christ, the principal of which are, with prayer, or rather representing the most eminent form of prayer, the Sacraments of the Church.

The Sacraments are instrumental causes of grace, in the sense that, by themselves—meaning because of the link established by God between his grace and these sensible rites—they produce in those who receive them an infusion of justice and holiness. But just as it would be impious to reduce these rites to bare and empty signs, with no other value than that of symbols or seals of the Faith, just as it would be disastrous to see in them mechanical processes for giving birth and progressing in us the life of grace independently of the state of the heart of those who receive them. How can we not mock those people who, behaving otherwise like frank pagans, flatter themselves that because they continually wear a rosary, or from time to time pronounce an ejaculatory prayer to the Virgin, they escape damnation? It is through a similar superstition that so many Christians imagine they lead a pious life, because they go every Saturday evening to confess to a priest the same sins eternally repeated, and because every Sunday morning, after a few Ave Marias recited by way of satisfaction, they go to receive the Holy of Holies on lips still completely soiled. All this amounts to “separating religion from morality.” In reality, however, the most lax confessors would not dare openly proclaim that, in order to approach the Sacraments, no moral disposition is required. Now we know that there is no truly moral disposition without grace, that is to say, without the movement of charity which God alone can inspire in man. Although the Sacraments contain within them a marvelous virtue of sanctification, charity, which alone uses both supernatural and natural goods properly — Charitas sola legitime utitur — is alone capable of drawing benefit from them. Communion does nothing without the spiritual hunger of the soul which, cleansed by a more or less long and more or less painful expiation of the last traces of its faults, is dominated only by the desire to unite itself with Christ. Absolution does nothing without contrition, of which the fear of hell may well be the prelude, but not the essence, and by which the soul, little by little converted, in the midst of the exercises of penance, from creature to Creator, ends by detesting its sins, not because of the harm they entail for it, but because they offend God. And the Priest, charged by Christ with dispensing the Sacraments, and who must do so as a faithful dispenser, cannot allow access to them, nor regulate attendance, except according to the degree of charity recognized in hearts; a degree which is measured, not by the protests of the mouth, nor by the superficial movements of a mind which often ignores its own depths, but by the importance of satisfactory works and the renewal of life.

The sacraments are inseparable from the Church. Besides the fact that the Church alone administers them validly, the first fruit of the sacraments, beginning with Baptism, is to make us participate, more and more completely, in that “communion” — in which, in fact, we meditate, pray, and think together — which defines the Catholic Church. The Church is not a simple assembly of particular persons professing the same opinions, observing the same ceremonies, and subject to the same government. She is a “solidary” whole, a body - “the Body of Jesus Christ spread throughout the earth” - and a “mystical person”. She is one, with a unity which is expressed externally by the visible bonds of the hierarchy, of which the Pope is the head, but which supposes within an invisible principle of union. What principle? As the living body draws its unity from the soul that vivifies it, the Church, which is the Body of Christ, draws its unity from the Spirit of Jesus Christ, which is the Holy Spirit, or Charity. By virtue of this charity, by which each Christian loves Christ, and other men in Christ and for Christ, each Christian is one with the others, and all together are one with Christ. Unity, founded on charity, is thus the first characteristic of the Church, that by which it is divine. It follows that, to separate oneself from the Church, to rebel against the authority of its representatives, to set up altar against altar, is literally to abandon Jesus Christ, and to renounce the name of Christian: Prescindse unitatis nulla est justa necessitas; but also, that no one can be cut off against his will from the Church, by any external force, by any sentence of excommunication, as long as he keeps charity. It also follows that a Christian cannot constitute himself, alone and independently of the Church, judge of his own faith and guide of his own conduct, there being no morals or revealed dogmas other than those of Tradition, in which the agreement of all ages and all parts of the Church is expressed; but also, that the rule of Tradition is imposed no less on the highest members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy than on the simple faithful, and that no minister of the Church, even if he were the Pope, can define or command anything in the name of his personal authority, but only in the name of unity, of which the Fathers say that it is this which baptizes, and that it is this which remits sins, because the Holy Spirit, who works all these things, works them only insofar as he dwells in the whole body of Jesus Christ. It finally follows that ecclesiastical government, being the government of Christ, does not resemble earthly governments, vos autem non sic, and that it excludes domination, both because the power of the superior, at each degree of jurisdiction, is limited by the Canons or constitutions accepted by the universal Church, and because this power, even in its legitimate sphere, fears to command, except for the particular good of those under its jurisdiction, and there again, uses gentleness and tolerance, never constraint: Rex nolentibus prœest, Episcopus volentibus; but also that, for their part, subordinates, although far removed from a blind obedience which would expose them in certain cases to violating the law of God in order to follow that of men, must, in the face of abuses of power by superiors, not hesitate to sacrifice something of their interests and their rights, to avoid scandal, and lower themselves to all submissions which are not incompatible with their duty, the reciprocal condescension of superiors and subordinates, born of that humility which is imposed on both, being able alone to ensure Christian peace, unity in charity.

We see: in all its parts, dogma and morality, the Augustinian Doctrine rests on the notion of charity identified with that mysterious union of God and man, which is called grace.

Is this dogma? — Original sin, and the corruption that follows from it, consists solely in the substitution, — at the bottom of the will and the source of our reflective actions, — of love of the creature for the love of God for which nature was made. The remedy that cures nature is nothing other than an inspiration of love from God, which makes us want what it makes us love. — And this love itself is, according to the formulas of the Fathers, only the repercussions of the love of predilection that God bears to certain men “in whom he loves himself” to the exclusion of others.

Is it morality? — Virtue has as its necessary and sufficient condition the love of God; and this love, if it is sincere, contains within itself, along with the virtual fulfillment of all our duties, the rule by which we are capable of discerning its meaning and measure. The sacraments, the use of which already requires some love, are only a privileged means, instituted by Jesus Christ, of increasing love in us. And the entire organization of the Church serves only to establish among Christians, instead of the governments of terror that are the governments of this world, a paternal government, where neither superiors command nor inferiors obey except out of love, the whole of society having no other bond than the mutual love of its members.

It is therefore to charity that everything can be reduced. — And it is through charity that everything is reconciled. It is because it is love of good that grace places in the will an inclination both free and invincible to do good. It is because it is love of justice determined by the Law that the Spirit of the Law accords with the Letter. It is because it is love of souls that ecclesiastical authority respects the freedom of consciences or, better said, tends to ensure it.

Arnauld was not wrong when, in opposition to Protestantism, which values ​​only faith, and Jesuitism, which knows only obedience, he claimed for the Disciples of Saint Augustine the honor of having understood, better than any other theological school, this idea of ​​charity or love, “which constitutes the essence of the Christian Religion” — and, he added, “its beauty.”

The problem of Descartes’ mathematicism involves that of the evolution of his method from the Regulae to the Discourse. It is important to establish the following theses in this regard.

1. In the Discourse the search for the enunciation of that science of order according to which thought must be unfolded in order to reach the truth is concluded, which in the Regulae had taken the form of the ideal of the mathesis universalis. The process of generalization has led to the removal of the mathematical integumentum, since order can concern every kind of relationship; fulfilling in this a requirement already expressed in the Regulae.

2. There is no doubt that all the laborious work of the Regulae leads to the four very simple “precepts” of the Discourse (evidence-analysis-synthesis-complete enumeration) and that no other idea can be found in them that can be put to value. The Regulae are literally a rough copy of the Discourse; and a rough copy because the method has not until then been considered in relation to the metaphysics that later reflection has made explicit.

3. For centuries there has been the impression that the four rules of the Discourse are empty and generic, almost banal. Many Cartesians were already disappointed and persuaded that the master had wanted to keep the secret of his true method. This, like all anti-Cartesian criticisms, found its canonization in Leibniz.

4. But in relation to what requests does this impression arise? Evidently Descartes is required to make progress in formal logic in the sense of Leibniz’s ars combinatoria, with all the metaphysical presuppositions that it contains and which are precisely those that he excludes.

5. The Cartesian rules must instead be appreciated from the point of view of the criticism of logical formalism, that is, in relation to the unity of the Cartesian theories of intuition and attention. And intuition (intuitus) means immediate contact with present reality, simple nature; which thus becomes the object of an “incontestable experience”, whose name is evidence. The visual metaphors that Descartes uses here are clarifying. Thinking is reaching an incontestable experience, not determined by the psychophysical nature of man; it is reduced in all its forms to seeing. It is in this sense that the reduction of deduction to intuition is meant: to a continuous chain of intuitus “continuum et nullibi interruptum cogitationis motum singula perspicue intuentis” (Regulae, 3). The capacity to intuit is called by Descartes “lumière naturelle” or “raison naturelle” or “pure lumière de la raison” or “bon sens”. The idea of ​​knowing as seeing coincides with the radical passivity of the human spirit in knowledge, this passivity expressing the fact that the human mind finds truths already constituted. It is the sign of the finiteness of the human mind. When we try to represent the infinite mind we cannot therefore try to understand it other than as characterized by the primacy of that which is the active power in us, that is, by the primacy of the will over the intellect.

6. Consequently, method does not mean the application of procedures that necessarily lead vi formae to certain results, but “acquisition of the habit of containing the affirmation within the limits of what is seen, that is, of realizing in true judgment the unity of intellect and will”. The very title of Regulae ad directionem ingenii shows how this thesis is constant in Descartes (ingenium means that by which certain men apply the “lumière naturelle” better than others). With the definition of the rules of the method as habits of attention we are brought back to the theory of freedom as the soul of the method itself. From this point of view, one can understand the non-vicious character of the circle of method and metaphysics. If in fact one sees in the method the condition of metaphysics, what is the foundation of its absolute value? If one then tries to place between method and metaphysics a relationship similar to that between hypothesis and thesis in experimental research, do we not run the risk of considering the application of the method to metaphysics invalid precisely for this reason? But perhaps the difficulty can be removed if we reflect that the theory of freedom represents the uniting trait between metaphysics and method, and that the method’s being without proof depends on the fact that without proof it must be a philosophy of freedom, under penalty of turning into a philosophy of necessity.

One may now ask in what sense mathematics provides the example of method. From what has already been said it appears clear that Cartesian mathematicism does not mean that the only knowledge is that which can be translated into mathematical terms, but rather that the true method has been followed up to now in mathematics alone. Why is this? Because up to now the abandonment of logical formalism has been achieved by mathematicians alone. The type of the “mathematician” is in other words contrasted with the type of the “dialectician”, just as in the dream the type of the poet was contrasted with that of the rhetorician. The concept that mediates between mathematics and philosophy in Descartes is that of simple nature, stated in the Regulae. For Descartes, drawing inspiration from mathematics means precisely substituting the simple for the universal. In this way we can understood how the condition for things to be known is that of allowing themselves to be decomposed into simple natures, objects of direct intuition and which are linked (the “longues chaînes des raisons” according to an expression that is particularly dear to Descartes) by means of bonds that are themselves reducible to directly intuited relationships (metaphysical meditation obeys mathematicism insofar as it obeys the method of decomposition). Simple nature differs from the universal because it lacks the consideration of extension; its simplicity means that it cannot be considered as a genus. The mathematician naturally follows the method of simple natures, insofar as he is not concerned with classifying figures, but rather with explaining them (knowing, for example, the triangle, and knowing the relationship of the angles between them, etc., not defining it through the proximate genus and the specific difference). From this we understand the difference between Cartesian deduction and syllogistic: the former occurs through the composition and not the subordination of natures.

In my opinion the interpretation of history as a process of secularisation and de-mythologisation and the idea of modernity as a value (man having become an adult!)—in short, progressivism—in the moment of their full practical triumph and their fullest theoretical expression, give rise to a necessary process that leads to “the most oppressive conservatism that history has ever known”, to the total destruction of the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity and their secular versions (this, in fact, is nihilism). It is only the awakening of the traditional spirit, when it is understood in its true meaning, and when it can be thought of as truth (those who profess to be traditionalists today normally base their discourse on its consequences; that is, traditionalism is undermined and infected by its greatest adversary, pragmatism, and in this condition it cannot help but give in, or at most mask the defeat in the form of a continuous retreat) which today is entrusted with the fate of the two greatest practical ideals, freedom and justice.

By “traditional spirit” we do not mean the defense of a certain past, even the most noble one, even the one in which the eternal principles seem to have been embodied best and in such a way as to merge with the common sense of the time. This is the reactionary deviation of the exact meaning of the term, even if it is a temptation to which exceptionally noble spirits have succumbed, with a lesser or greater degree of awareness, and even if to this day it is difficult to find a traditional thinker in whom some no trace of this temptation can be seen. Today’s traditionalist must therefore always repeat to himself Valéry’s phrase, that all civilizations are mortal. Brought therefore to its pure state, the traditional spirit signifies the primacy of being, the primacy of the immutable, the primacy of intellectual intuition, or the affirmation of the ontological value of the principle of identity: that is, the idea of the total meta-historicity of truths. We must refer to the presence in the human spirit of the idea of perfect being as a principle of the hierarchical order of reality, of what, in a language that today risks being totally misunderstood, used to be called the eternal, universal, necessary, meta-historical truths, which allow man to live the eternal in time, and that as eternal can be handed over (“tradition”, to be transmitted) from generation to generation (or, better, what is handed over is the sensitive sign that serves to recall them).

The theory of recollection in the Platonic sense? In a broad and profound sense, yes; it is a knowledge that man has forgotten, even if in some way he has continued to possess it, albeit unconsciously. Such knowledge reawakens, not without great difficulty and effort, in the presence of the sensible world; since the like makes us remember the like and the opposite the opposite, by association. This theory loses its character of myth when the meaning of sensible world is understood in the most general sense, including the historical world.

Consequently: 1) philosophy conforming to the traditional spirit is inseparable from the idea of a fall, of an original sin; 2) philosophy for the traditional spirit is inseparable from theology, or indeed from the idea of a primitive revelation; 3) from the point of view of traditional thought, but only from it, it makes perfect sense to talk about the eclipse of ideals, an expression which cannot have any meaning in the progressive position.

In my opinion, neither the spirit of science nor its practical consequences have caused or are causing today the “irrevocable sunset” of traditional values. On the contrary, it was the “eclipse” of traditional values, resulting from an incorrect interpretation of the “ethical-political” aspect of contemporary history – and this error has very deep roots, so much so as to implicate the general interpretation of the history of the whole of modern thought – that has led to the hubris of science as a new ideal that arises and asserts itself in a revolutionary way compared to the past, establishing itself as an absolute value.

How did this come about? I have tried elsewhere to determine the ethical-political genesis of today’s “negative millenarian” attitude: millenarianism suppresses the pessimism intrinsic to the fall of ideals, while negativism eliminates the messianic hopes typical of millenarianism.1 This negativism, however, does not involve what by its nature is “anaxiological” (that is, what cannot “directly” found values, even if it assumes value indirectly): “science” and, in another respect, “vitality”. Hence the two different idols of the present time, to which a revolutionary function is erroneously attributed: science & technology, and sex; idols that come together in the “purely” technological society.

This way of seeing things is so linked to the whole of my thought that nothing would remain of it if it were proven incorrect, or if even just one comma were changed.

Can a Catholic be a liberal? and a liberal a Catholic? I mean, when he wants to reach a complete awareness of his political and religious position, not to remain in a situation of divided conscience. The old problem was reopened last year in the Città Liberta of October 11 and resolved in opposite ways by Alessandro Passerin d’Entreves (Liberalism and secularism – the true religious spirit of liberal thought is manifested in the fight against intolerance) and da Gabriele Pepe (State and Church – one cannot be liberal and Catholic at the same time, but only conservative and faithful). In support of Pepe’s thesis, Croce intervened (Liberalism and Catholicism in Città Liberta, October 25); while the opposite thesis was reiterated with great vigor by Giusseppe Capograssi in the Meridiano of November 1. After all, the idea that a Catholic could not fail to have ​​a maximally Guelph and theocratic program if he wanted to remain consistent with his idea of ​​truth, even if today political expedience pushes him to keep it hidden with every care and even if historicist thought that he has contracted in modern life may have made him unaware of the ultimate implications of his spiritual position, is extremely widespread among intellectuals; in how many articles of the Nuovo Europa is it not presupposed? If one looks closely, it is an idea that has its foundation not only in philosophical arguments, but in the memory of the actual political–cultural orientations of the Catholics of the last century. It is therefore no wonder that it finds easy consensus in political circles, giving rise to the widespread tendency to reject the Christian Democratic party as being on the right, as a defender of the past, of tradition, of the past values ​​of Western civilization; even if it seems to have a more advanced social–economic program than the liberals. Thus Salvatorelli, sketching the outlines of a “Party of Democracy”, puts Christian Democracy on the right in antithesis with the orientation towards the future of the Communist party; thus the liberals in the Consulta have placed the representatives of this party on their right.

It is clear, however, that the appearance of historical confirmation is not enough to resolve the question. It must rightly be addressed in rigorously logical terms. It is known that the opposition as “between opposing religious faiths” had its last principled formulation in Croce’s History of Europe. However, we must agree that its rationale appears to be very poor. No necessary connection can be made between Croce’s interpretation of history as the history of freedom and political liberalism, for the simple reason that history in the historicist vision is always justifying and never acting. If freedom is the law of history no one will be able to rebel against it; even the worst tyrant will be a servant of freedom in his own way. And if it is a law against which I can rebel, a kind of transcendence of the Spirit by finite spirits arises and the link between philosophical immanentism and liberal politics seems to be shaken. The freedom of which political liberalism speaks cannot but be a threatened freedom, otherwise what need can there be to claim and defend it? Conversely, from what can the threat to freedom as referred to the absolute Spirit come from? In the “religion of liberty” in the Crocean sense, we must see not the philosophic awareness, or at least not the only possible philosophical awareness, of political liberalism, but the further theologization of a political movement that has different origins.

If, therefore, there does not seem to be any connection of necessity between the immanentistic conception of life and history and liberal political practice, can it be said that there is such a connection between Catholic thought and theocratic politics? We do not want to deny now that many Catholics think so, that they still configure the task of the state not as the defense of the spiritual freedom of every individual, but of truth and objective values ​​of which the Church is the custodian, and accept the liberal order only from considerations of historical expediency; or that this has been seen in Italy, in the attitude of a large part of the clergy towards Fascism, at least until its alliance with Nazism, due to the assumption of a real positive content in this movement, certainly not Christian in its origin and signifying one of the last convulsions of the sinful modern age, which would have dissolved itself with the function of negating liberalism and socialism. But in the meantime this negating function would have fulfilled it and would have thus cleared the ground for a theocratic revival. It was not good for the Catholic to participate directly in this work exercised by a non-Christian force, but he had, in consideration of the ultimate consequences and the need for a civilization begun with a form of impiety to dissolve with another form of impiety, to allow it without condemning it. That this mentality seems to us today, at the distance of only a few years, almost prehistoric, is certain; but we have a good recollection of it, as expressed also by people of intelligence and customs that are anything but vulgar. And these people are certainly not substantially changed today, and have only changed their opinion on Fascism. There are still many Catholics for whom the defense of freedom is not the defense of its ideal universal principle, but of the freedom of the Church. For whom freedom is not felt as a value, but as a method which cannot be done without in the present historical conditions; to want one’s own spiritual freedom today is also to want the spiritual freedom of all; the experience of the totalitarian regimes has shown that even Catholics end up losing their freedom in them. But it is obvious that between this acceptance of freedom as a necessity and the love of freedom there is an abyss; is this the leap that separates Catholics and liberals? Or only certain Catholics, for whom the contrast is not between opposite religious faiths, but between the principle of freedom and the resistance of certain habits?

From the question of fact we must therefore pass to the question of truth. Is the medieval theocratic ideal the absolute and eternal ideal of Catholic politics, or is it not instead the form it took in that historical period? Does it not reduce to what Maritain calls a “concrete historical ideal”, that is, to a relative image signifying the specific type of civilization towards which a certain historical age tended? One can think of its absoluteness only in one way: by necessarily deriving it from the position of truth as given, as revealed truth. In this perspective we reason: if the truth is given, how can we speak of a freedom that does not reduce to a freedom for error and evil? If the truth is revealed, the supreme power must belong to the Church as its custodian and the temporal power must be an instrument of spiritual power, the force at the service of God. The autonomy of temporal power is therefore configured only as the autonomy of the field in which it performs its functions: that is, political activity does not have its own values ​​to defend but defends values ​​that are proposed by the hierarchically superior activity. Certainly no one wants to deny that there have been in the last century or that there are now Catholics who are also true liberals. But the examples, as always, do not solve anything. It is, as Croce says (History of Europe, p. 30), a “penetration of the adversary into the very circle of the faithful”. It would not even be fair to say that these are souls in pain; simply, of men who could not fail to contract the historicist and liberal habits of modern man and who practically resolved Christianity in its human substance; but who leave the old Catholicism to subsist alongside this secular Christianity simply because they have never made it a problem. These are consciences that it is not good to disturb by suggesting problems that have not spontaneously arisen. But obviously this problematic deficiency of theirs cannot be reversed into proof of an ideal compatibility.

This way of thinking, however, seems to disregard a central idea of ​​Catholic Christianity, the idea of ​​the person: as a universe of a spiritual nature which therefore constitutes an independent whole in relation to the world; endowed with a freedom that God himself respects, soliciting it without forcing it in the action of grace. The Catholic theology of grace itself therefore seems to show a congruity between Catholicism and liberalism. But then, if we place in the personalistic ideal the true absolute ideal of Catholic politics, how can we explain the medieval theocratic ideal and its survivals in the form of intolerance in so much modern Catholicism? Should we contrast a true modern Catholicism with medieval Catholicism, with the well-known modernistic fate of these oppositions? I do not think so at all. The political ideal of medieval Christianity does not represent the absolute ideal of Christian politics, nor does it contradict the personalist ideal. It simply represents its determination in relation to a historically given spiritual problem. One cannot understand it outside the spiritual situation of the middle ages: characterized not only by the historical fact of unity of faith, but by the far more important ideal fact of the non-problematization of faith as truth. Reflecting on this we understand how the personalistic ideal at that time had to be specified as a theocratic ideal; but also how this specification must be considered as definitively exceeded and no longer represents for today’s Catholic a sort of maximum program whose realization is, and perhaps even indefinitely, only suspended.

Let us also start from the most elementary considerations on the differentiating characteristics of medieval civilization and ours. The historical function of the middle ages was in the justification of rational and cultural values ​​in the unity of faith. The subsequent investigation of them leads to the consideration, totally absent from medieval thought, of their historicity. The consequence of this is the problematization of the very act of adhering to the truths of faith as truth; a problematization that is not in itself a declaration of a crisis, as too many Catholics continue to think, but a deepening. Once the historicity of civilizations has been understood, I not only can, but must, in order to live my faith in its purity, so as not to reduce it to a historical given of the civilization in which I was born, and to vindicate its value as absolute truth, propose to myself the problem of the justification of my act of adhesion. In other words, the problem of modern spirituality is put in these terms: in what sense can I adhere to truth as truth. The problem of truth is replaced by that of the form of adherence to truth; the problem of the true idea by that of the true person. We can say in a summary formula: the middle ages considered spirituality as the deepening of a truth already possessed; the modern age considers the truth as it becomes my truth. The change in political ideology is correlative to this change in problematic. And freedom is required by the modern spiritual problematic for the spirit to access truth as truth; the truth that one wants to impose by force, overturning itself into force, decays from its being truth to become a political instrument (is the lesson of the Baroque age not persuasive in this regard? The express aim of the politics of absolutism was the reconstitution of religious unity; its result was the consideration of religion as being at the service of national unity). The personalist ideal therefore can only, in the modern spiritual problematic, be specified as an ideal of freedom; and not only as a request for the freedom of the Church, but as a defense of the spiritual freedom of each individual. Because of the ideal from which they start, Catholics today cannot consider freedom only as a necessity required by the plurality of faiths. Even if religious unity were reconstituted, the value of freedom would not lose its meaning because it would be a reconstitution carried out precisely by freedom; a reconstitution that is subsequent to that problematization of religious truth as truth in which we found the origin of the concept of freedom.

I would say that the current moment – and one of the most remarkable books of recent years, Maritain’s Integral Humanism, is proof of this – is the moment of awareness by Catholics of the liberal implication of their thought. From this can come not only the closure of a centuries-old controversy, but also an enrichment of the liberal ideology. I will mention an example, without being able to follow it up adequately now. There is much discussion today about the dissociation of political and economic liberalism. But it is also true that the ideas are necessarily linked in the naturalistic and Enlightenment foundation of liberalism, which is the foundation of current liberalism. For it, a link is established between liberalism and an optimistic appraisal of human nature; one has faith in the marvelous fruits that the liberation of human nature from all external bonds will bring. On this basis a dissociation of political and economic liberalism is clearly impossible. It becomes possible only if the concept of freedom is deduced not from optimism about nature, but from the consideration of the connection between truth and the person. In the same way that I think a Catholic awareness of the liberal implication of Catholic thought is necessary, I also think that a revival of liberalism is not possible without an awareness of its Christian foundation. And I still consider sterile an opposition on the political level between secular Christianity (for which see the well-known essay by Croce, Why we cannot not call ourselves Christians) and Catholic Christianity.

For the thesis of the opposition between the Catholic ideal and the liberal ideal see especially the works of Croce: Ethics and Politics; History of Europe in Nineteenth Century; History as Thought and as Action; The Character of Modern Philosophy. In the same vein see also De Ruggiero’s work on The History of European Liberalism.

For the opposite thesis, the best work is the one already mentioned by Maritain, Integral Humanism. Also by the same author, Religion and Culture; Freedom in the Modern World; Christianity and Democracy.

The infinite is disproportionate to the finite, it is a reality to which the fundamental principles of our logic do not apply, it is by nature incomprehensible to our limited intellect. By clarifying how understanding is limiting, and distinguishing between knowing and understanding, Descartes told us the reason. Since the infinite is that whose limits we cannot determine, we have no right to say that it is this and nothing else; in the infinite being it is this but it is also the other, it is this, but it is also the opposite, although the opposite does not designate a simple privation. Therefore, if the finite spirit wants to penetrate the infinite, it gets lost in the multitude of contrary thoughts, forgetting that indivisible unity, whereby all the attributes merge into the absolute identity of the being which purely and simply is. Therefore we cannot represent this coincidence of perfections in God which is the very essence of God. Lacking a similar intuition we are forced to consider God from different angles corresponding to the different perfections of which creatures offer us an image and which seem to belong fully to the Creator: therefore we speak of God by artificially decomposing, so to speak, his absolute simplicity into a multiplicity of respectively infinite attributes (God as good, as powerful, as wise). This is permissible for us, but on the condition that we do not mistake what are simple distinctions of reason for real distinctions. If, however, we detach the attributes from their real identity, we are subsequently faced with the impossibility of bringing them together in a notion of a whole, and with the constraint of expressing ourselves through anthropologies: this is precisely what happened to Malebranche who coherently went so far as to write that “the wisdom” of God makes him “powerless” to do everything that his goodness would want. Which is equivalent to denying that he is infinitely merciful and infinitely powerful, that is, denying God. Much more rightly Descartes says that “God cannot be distinctly known by those who try to embrace him whole and all together in thought”. The very certain and very clear knowledge that we can acquire about him is such on the condition that it remains abstract; it cannot be applied to the concrete being of God. This exchange of the abstract with the concrete leads to all the insoluble difficulties that characterize the way of thinking which is typical, we would say today, of speculative theodicies. Vice versa, this concrete being of God is that which is the object of dogma, and accounts for the fact that human intelligence finds, in seeking its meaning, contradictions that it cannot resolve. It also accounts for the usual proposition that choice is the essence of heresy. If we consider the birth of the heretical sects, we find in fact that the initial error of every heresiarch consisted not in forming false opinions, but in considering too exclusively certain indisputably revealed and Catholic truths, rejecting everything in Scripture and in tradition which seemed to him incompatible with them. Hence that rationalistic prejudice which is the foundation of heresy, while the enlightened Christian sees nothing in the apparent contradictions that is not in conformity with the nature of dogmas. In Arnauld, in the same way as in Pascal, Port-Royalist thought is a radical criticism of rationalism, even of that which underlies Protestant existentialism.

It is depending on this that we must understand how Christ wanted to reveal the truth to the humble and hide it from the proud, to enlighten the good and blind the wicked. And this is why faith is a virtue. It certainly would not be “reasonable” if it implied blind submission to opinions without evidence, but it would have no merit if it were reduced to recording, on the testimony of a true God, perfectly intelligible notions. And, again, at this point we really understand why dogmas are called mysteries. It is the metaphysical meditation on the divine infinity that leads us to humility in relation to the impenetrable abysses of God’s wisdom, and to agreement with piety in the recognition that the apparent contradictions of certain articles of faith are signs of truth rather than falsehood, and the seal of divine Revelation.

Let us summarize the difference: for Petau there is in freedom, even in its highest degree, a positive potestas ad opposita; this power would instead seem to be lacking for Descartes when there is evidence. And now, how can Descartes respond that absolutely speaking, we retain this power even in the highest degree of freedom? Molinism, or the thesis according to which, even if the arbitration of reason has proposed one of the parties as preferable to the other, the will can move to either of the two, without being in any way determined in a necessary manner? Or Thomism, according to which the will always follows the final practical judgment, so that the choice follows the party that we judge to be the best at that moment? There are many texts that confirm that Descartes never abandoned the Thomistic thesis. But above all this is, in Laporte’s opinion, decisive for showing how Descartes has enucleated, maintaining in the Thomistic doctrine what was positive and acceptable by it, the thesis affirmed by Petau: “but, because the nature of the soul is to be attentive only for a moment to the same thing, as soon as our attention moves away from the reasons that make us know that this thing is proper to us, and we only retain in our memory that it has appeared desirable, we can represent to our spirit some other reason that makes us doubt it, and thus suspend our judgment and perhaps even form a contrary one…”.1 No difference from the Thomistic theory of libertas judicii; from the thesis according to which our actions depend on our judgments but our actions on our attention, and according to which we are masters of our judgments, because we are masters of our attention.

This is not at all a circumstantial reminder because on the contrary it is the theme that allows us to fully realize the Cartesian evidence. The idealistic interpretation’s dissociation between the cogito and the theory of freedom has made the doctrine of the method and the principle of clear and distinct ideas appear insignificant. In reality, Cartesian evidence is conditioned by freedom as attention and it is therefore clear how one can always suspend judgment even in the face of an evident perception by ceasing to consider the reasons that make it evident. Thus the cogito is effectively insignificant if it is not seen in relation to the process of doubt. It follows, therefore, and it is a thesis already affirmed in the Regulae, that the only cogent evidence is present evidence, because it presupposes attention; but attention is mobile, and it is by bringing this mobility into play that we come to doubt the most manifest truths. As is also understood the need for the appeal to the guarantee of divine truthfulness (even if the thesis of divine truthfulness is not resolved purely in a guarantee of evidence as an object of memory).

The meaning of the letters to Father Mesland is therefore not in enunciating new ideas, but in uniting and connecting theses that Descartes had already affirmed.

However, they contain two new observations. The first, moreover already implicit in the IV Meditation, is that the same rule is valid for judgments on the true as for judgments on the good, so that the source of the merit lies in the possibility of “abstaining from following a good that is clearly known”. It is since it is both good and difficult to maintain complete attention to what must be done that the positive moral character of maintaining it, and of ensuring by its means that our will follows the light of our intellect so closely as to never be indifferent, derives. Therefore, in a letter to Mersenne in 1637, Descartes comments on the video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor, saying that it is valid only for weak minds.

More embarrassing is the second: we are always able to refuse our consent both to the truth and to the clearly known good modo tantum cogitemus bonum libertatem arbitri per hoc testari.2

A completely unexpected type seems to appear here in Descartes’ thought, as a new confirmation that all the figures of modern philosophy are prefigured in it, “the rebel”. Until then, attention appeared to be an attitude that tires and from which man is therefore easily distracted. Error and sin were, as in the letter to Mersenne cited above, imputed to the weakness of a spirit. Here instead we have a man who proudly affirms his own freedom before God, who indeed affirms his independence, in the refusal—in the name of his freedom—of what constitutes his nature, as that of a being to whom the truth is “given”. Simply because it is given to him. All this, however, is limited in Descartes to a hint, the possibility of which will be discussed later.

1. The necessity of the Christian’s political commitment results from the fact that no form of human activity must be alienated from religious evaluation, on pain of the religious form declining from being an elevation to God to become a guarantee of merely worldly and human values ​​– a guarantee of interests –; in short, that “serving God” be substituted by “using God” for our human ends.

2. It is this reduction that allows revolutions, that indeed conditions their inevitability, with that anti-Christian character which is essential to every revolution: anti-Christianity and not simply anti-clericalism. This point is not familiar and therefore deserves considerable attention.
The concept of revolution presupposes the ideological foundation of utopia, that is, a radical liberation of the world from evil; this is in contradiction with the Christian concept of original sin. Consider how the two great revolutions of the modern age start from the negation of this idea; the French revolutionary recognized himself in the Rousseauian idea of ​​natural goodness – the Jacobin justified his harshness by feeling invested with the mission of restoring that goodness that was proper to the man of nature, and which had been counterfeited in the social stage. In the Russian revolutionary, the perspective is reversed from the past to the future: it is not a question of a return to a life of natural goodness but of the establishment of a new humanity free from sin. The bourgeois man is the man of sin as the bourgeois regime is exploitation of man by man. The proletariat will be the mediator of the passage from the kingdom of necessity and sin to the kingdom of freedom, as it is pure from this [exploitation], which is the only sin. This purity translates into its epistemological superiority. If, according to the Marxist conception, knowledge is relative to man, only the proletariat, because it is pure, will be able to judge according to the true categories (from which comes the idea of ​​the “dictatorship of the proletariat”).
If there is a contradiction between the concepts of Christianity and revolution, from the Christian point of view, revolutions must be understood as “outbursts of resentment” against the “Christian world” (that is, the civilization and culture that the Christian considers compatible with Christianity understood in its specifically religious and supernatural meaning – or rather, Christianity in its temporal implications), involving Christianity in their negation. A serious problem arises here: how does one pass from resentment against the Christian world to the denial of Christianity? Because the impression arises that there is no value of Christianity to which one can refer for a reform of the Christian world; because the representatives of Christianity, in a specific historical situation, have so welded the values ​​of Christianity to the defense of class interests that dissociation is left impossible (think of the Christian world of France, Russia, Spain, before their revolutions). This leads us to reflect on the immense responsibilities of Christians implicit in revolutions (having allowed Christianity to appear to many consciences as an instrument of human interests). Or, in the form in which this judgment is usually expressed: the function of Christianity was a historical function, of capital importance, but now exhausted. Today we are witnessing its death. That Christianity that seems to survive is no longer a Christianity-as-a-value but a Christianity-as-a-tool. Fighting against it is a moral requirement, as it was for the first Christians to fight against paganism. In other words, the connection made by certain Christians, between historical values ​​destined to disappear, having now fulfilled their historical function, and Christianity, a connection presented as a requirement of Christianity itself, leads, as a backlash, to the denial of the eternal value of Christianity, and to the infidelity of the Christian world to Christianity, with the inversion of the subordination of values [to a historical situation]. The Christian judgment on revolutions will therefore not be, as according to the reactionary interpretation, simply seeing in them a diabolical manifestation, to be eradicated with iron (which would basically be a Manichean interpretation; there is a link, which it would be useful to study, between the mentality of pure restoration and the Manichean mentality) and neither, as according to the interpretation of red and messianic Catholicism, which is now more fashionable (also by virtue of the Hegelian historiographical habit, unconsciously absorbed by Catholics, for which everything that has succeeded in history is good because it “had to be”), seeing in them a resumption of heroic Christianity, the struggle for man, “child of God”, against slavery; but rather, seeing a call to an examination of conscience. The attitude of St. Philip Neri, the feeling of being responsible for the sins of others, perfectly defines the position that is a duty for the Christian; we must recognize in revolutions their sinful nature, but also the values ​​they bear; and to feel the tragedy by which these values ​​did not want to affirm themselves except by involving this atmosphere of sin; the sins of the revolution, indeed that sin which is the revolution in itself, are a continuation of the sins of the representatives of the Christian world, in that they closed it to values ​​which could only be affirmed against it.

3. The concept of the Christian’s political commitment denies that interpretation of Christianity, widespread especially in the Eastern world, whereby it would be liberation from the world and not liberation of the world. An idea that is already condemned in the very simple formula of the Christian faith, which calls Christ the Savior of the world, Salvator mundi(John IV, 42). And to come to a more strictly political argument, it denies the dualistic conception that was proper to eighteenth-century Christianity (even if not of all of it). For this conception the truth and the divine life concern only a limited part of the Christian’s existence (worship, interior life); beyond it, social, economic, political life are subject to their own laws, which have nothing to do with religious evaluation. Politics is not religion. Pure separatism. Many remember how here in Italy this conception, as a mental habit independent of any awareness of philosophical foundation, was expressed in Giolitti’s thesis of religion and politics being “parallel” (in the sense of never meeting).
In this separatism converged an abstract dualistic spiritualism of Cartesian origin, for which religious life begins with disdain and abandonment of the world, and a realism of Machiavellian origin that alienated the political sphere as that which has its own laws independent from religious judgments, and sometimes opposed to religious principles.

Real distinction in the unity of political activity and religious activity

4. However, the critique of separatism does not want to conclude with the pure identity (in the sense of continuation; the possibility of deducing from Christianity, as a religion, a political position) of political activity and religious activity. It limits itself to saying this and nothing else: political activity is subject to religious evaluation. But being subject does not imply that its object – the earthly good of our life down here – is not as such distinct from the religious sphere, or that it is not of the natural order and only of the natural order.
In other words, truths of the natural order cannot be drawn as pure consequences from the truths of the gospel either in the scientific, philosophical, or political fields. Otherwise, if it were a matter of pure and mechanical deduction, how easy the Christian’s life would be! Under the often repeated phrases of evangelical politics etc., when they are literally interpreted, hides in reality the laziness of the Christian. Each of these fields has its own problem that specifies it: religious truth can only exercise negative control over its solutions. The link between religious activity and political activity, not being able therefore to be configured as that of principle and consequence, must be understood as a relationship of internal compatibility: the truths of the political order (as well as of the philosophical order) must be capable of organizing themselves together with religious truths, so that the religious man can feel the fulfillment of his political duty as required by his religious life. (Unlike the external compatibility of separatism; for which, as these are separate activities, it makes no sense to speak of a Christian’s political commitment).
Nor would it be correct to believe that a political position could be deduced from the eternal truths of Christian metaphysics. The eternity of these truths must not be understood as an eternity of death, against history; they are eternal in the sense that it is thought that they must be “eternally rediscovered” starting from the concrete political-philosophical problem, which is always presented in a historical and unrepeatable form to man, as an individual situation in which he is engaged.
These warnings are of cardinal importance, to avoid two errors in which political Christians usually get entangled: that of confessionality, clearly resulting from the prejudice of being able to draw political truths from the gospel, and that of medievalism, seeing the theocratic ideal as essential to Christian politics.

5. Before beginning the discussion of these two errors and above all the criticism of the judgments they give rise to and which are usually accepted in Catholic circles without thinking of their initial premises, risking therefore the danger of habits which are the worse because against them logic will not avail, I propose the following definition of a Christian party that seems to me the only acceptable one, one that reconciles the autonomy of the object of politics with the need for religious evaluation: “a party in which a Christian can participate without mental restrictions”.
The only acceptable one, because any other would lead to the idea of ​​a confessional party, with the eviction of the proper object of politics. For example, let us say that the Christian Democratic party is “that party that wants to bring the truths of the Gospel into the field of social relations”; to say this, if it is meant in the literal sense, and as far as it is clear, is to say nonsense.
Or one says “for there to be a Christian party it must be formed only by Christians determined to subordinate all political measures to Christian judgment” – if by Christians we mean those who profess those values ​​of the natural order that we will specify later (freedom, non-violence, etc.), and which are Christian in the double sense of being integrated with Christian revelation and intelligible only in the Christian conception of life, then either the proposition remains tautological (ending by saying: the party must be formed only by those who profess the principles) or it means a moral warning only to accept those for whom these values ​​are really values, such that they are ready to commit their existence for them. – Or if by Christians we mean those who profess Catholic theology (and this is the current meaning of the definition), then the specificity of the political order is lost sight of.
Let us take an example from philosophy: there are Protestant and Jewish scholars who profess a spiritualism compatible with Catholic revelation without however adhering to it. The Catholic scholar of philosophy certainly has no reason for sadness. Why shouldn’t the same happen in the field of politics? And would it be charitable to exclude from a Christian party people who profess Christian values ​​in the political order? Nor would it make any sense to expect a conversion to Catholicism in order to be accepted. This would bring a dilemma to this conscience: either not to live sincerely one’s own religious crisis, and simulate its solution, with a certain disrespectful act towards religion, or to renounce to defend on the political level those values ​​that it and those who propose the dilemma think essential. How unreligious all this would be! It is objected to me: the participation of non-Catholics in the party can certainly be admitted; but it must be avoided that they occupy executive posts; these are to be reserved only for fervent Catholics.
But the quality of a leader can be decided only in the participation in the life of the party; therefore wanting them to participate, but without them being leaders, means avoiding any effective participation. Unless we think that political capacity (albeit in the sense of intuition of values) is correlative to religious fervor. But it is too evident that this is not the case and that religious fervor cannot in itself make good politicians any more than good philosophers or scientists or artists; and so it must be because otherwise religious fervor would be reduced to a fecundating principle of “secular” virtues (that is, it would not have a value per se). The loyally professed concept of non-confessionalism therefore matters so that e.g. even a Protestant may be among the leaders of a Christian party formed, as here in Italy, for the most part by Catholics.

6. However, this does not mean that the mistrust of non-confessionality does not have a certain basis. Those who distrust it believe that the statement of non-confessionality is in solidarity with the point of view of external compatibility. In this system, for compatibility to exist, politics must not be an affirmation of values ​​but be reduced to a simple administrative technique; moreover, freedom becomes a method that experience has proved to be the best for human coexistence in modern times. Politics transports itself to a completely mercantile plane. The ideal ceases to be, as in heroic politics, “to elevate all to the life of persons”; but “the greater well-being of the greater number”. Now in what sense can a party like this – as was the Popular party [i.e. the Italian People’s Party], in part, in the attitude of somebody (certainly not in the mind of its leader) – be called Christian? According as it represents the interests of generally Christian classes (petite bourgeoisie, peasants).
Of course, if the Christian party we are hoping for resolves itself in this, a hundred thousand times better a small confessional party made up of intransigent Catholics! But the party we are proposing here is something else entirely. The objection that non-confessionalism means allowing men to enter who want to make Christianity an instrument is not valid because it is a party that affirms values. Acceptance in it is conditional on believing that they are people willing to testify in their lives for these values.

The concept of freedom and the hierocratic error

7. Let us now pass to the other dangerous form of error, involving and conditioning the first which is nothing but its attenuated form, the hierocratic idea. I prefer the term hierocracy to theocracy, because strictly speaking if we want to designate by the theocratic idea that God is the first and absolute value, that for the Christian the principle “quaerite primum regnum Dei” applies, then it is certain that the theocratic idea is essential to Christianity. By hierocracy, on the other hand, I mean the interpretation of this kingdom of God as a political reality. How the hierocratic idea is still alive in current Christian thought can be seen from the current judgment according to which the absolute ideal of Christian politics would have been realized in the Middle Ages (at least in the medieval idea of ​​this politics, if not in the Middle Ages as a historical reality). The reason for its spread is in the simplicity and apparent irreproachability of these judgments: man redeems himself from his natural being – he becomes a person, therefore subject to rights – by his openness to the truth. Truth is what makes man a person, it is the first absolute value. The truth is Catholic truth. Therefore the supreme power must belong to the Church as the custodian of this truth, and the temporal power must therefore be an instrument of spiritual power, the force in the service of God. The autonomy of temporal power is therefore configured only as autonomy of the field in which it carries out its functions: that is, political activity has no values ​​of its own to defend, but it defends values ​​that are proposed to it by the hierarchically superior activity. If it were otherwise, the subjective hierarchy of values ​​for the Christian would not be a [generally applicable] hierarchy of values; and it would therefore not be a hierarchy of values, but an order of individual preferences (religion is a purely subjective question). Is it not said, and not only by Catholics, but by theocratic anti-Catholics such as Mazzini, that the formula “a free Church in a free State” is irreligious and atheistic? The persistence of the persuasion that the absolute ideal of Christian politics is medieval theocracy has meant that in modern times Christian politics has posed itself as a politics of compromise (and therefore as a politics of interests and not as heroic politics).
If the realization of the Sacrum Imperium manifests itself in the current historical conditions as impossible, if the temporal power today rejects its instrumental function, let us at least try to ensure that it does not harm the interests of the Church, that it does not forbid the possibility of educating consciences in values, which for now the Church will have to limit itself to supporting in the moral field, and in the future, hopefully can support in the political field. Thus we have, in its best sense, clericalism. In this defense of the function of the Church it will be a question of allying with classes which by education or interests are linked to Christianity. Thus we have absolutist Catholicism and then reactionary Catholicism (alliance with the nobility), more recently a certain way of understanding Christian Democracy (alliance with the petite bourgeoisie and with the peasants). The task of these political formations will be to defend the freedom of the Church, as long as the opposing forces prevail, those less willing to subordinate themselves to the ecclesiastical power; to attempt the conquest of power and to prepare, if implementation is not possible immediately, the conditions for the hierocratic restoration.
Another form of clericalism is what we could call Machiavellian clericalism. It is then a question of an alliance with forces whose non-Christian character is recognized, but which must serve as an instrument for overthrowing other non-Christian forces; that their function in history would be purely negative, and that after having fulfilled it they must dissolve to make way for the Catholic restoration, seems confirmed by the poverty of their positive content.
We have known a similar form in Italy in the attitude of a large part of the clergy towards Fascism, until at least its 1938 alliance with Nazism. Due to the absence of a real positive content, this movement, certainly not Christian in its origin, and signifying one of the last convulsions of the sinful modern age, would have dissolved into its function of negating liberalism and socialism. But in the meantime this negating function would have fulfilled it and thus cleared the ground for a theocratic revival. It was not good for the Catholic to participate directly in this work, exercised by a still non-Christian force, but he had, in considering its ultimate consequences and in consideration of the need for a civilization begun with one form of injustice to dissolve with another form of injustice, to allow it without condemning it. That this form of mentality seems to us today, after a distance of only a few years, almost prehistoric, is certain; but we have a good memory of it, as also expressed by people of intelligence and manners that are anything but vulgar. For clericalism the defense of freedom in a non-Catholic regime is a defense not of the principle of freedom, but of the existence of the Church. [For them] the phrase that Veuillot addressed to the liberals is valid: “when you rule, we claim freedom in the name of your principles; when we rule, we take it away from you in the name of ours”. This persuasion is very alive in Catholic circles and the Christian Democrats themselves find it hard to recognize freedom per se as a value. I read in a recent manifesto of theirs: “The myriad experience of the world in the last 150 years has led to the conclusion that the method most suited to the present conditions of human coexistence is the method of freedom”. Now the character of a value is precisely to be a priori, not to require confirmation from experience. If to found it one feels the need to question it, it means that one does not feel it as a value, but as an instrument for something else; for education, for social coexistence in the historical climate in which we live, freedom is needed, and indispensable, etc.; which does not mean that it will retain this function in a future historical climate. If we wanted to understand this proposition in its literal sense it would not be possible to speak of liberalism.
The truth is that if freedom as a lived reality is so dear to everyone and especially today, its philosophical foundation is anything but easy. (But is it really so dear to everyone? Most truly love their own freedom rather than the universal principle of freedom, the freedom of others. Today’s struggle against Fascism has become a totalitarian movement, so to speak, solely because Fascism had compressed the “freedom” of most Italians. And could we really guarantee that Churchill and Roosevelt love the freedom of other peoples? The “insular” character of English liberalism has often been denounced, and it is not yet said to be a thing of the past. It must be confessed that today there are very few true liberals in Italy, at least as rare as true Christians; and not many in the world. And remember that liberalism does require a moral aristocracy.)
And in particular for the Catholic cultural climate: if the truth is given as revealed truth, how can we still speak of freedom? Will not freedom be freedom for error or for evil? This is why most people think that liberalism and Catholicism are, in their ideal essence, irreconcilable. This is why, especially in the second half of the last century (but also not many years ago in Italy with Rensi), liberalism seemed to be correlative of a skeptical or agnostic philosophical position. It is for this reason that Croce too considers liberalism to be a political correlative of historicism and opposes the “religion of freedom” to every transcendent position and above all to the Catholic religion.
The problem in its bare philosophical terms is certainly anything but easy. Rejecting, as a Catholic, the Crocean solution while wanting to save the liberalism in which I see a maximal affirmation of Christian civilization, I believe that an exhaustive solution to the problem cannot be given except through a new investigation into the concept of eternal truths, highlighting potentialities implicit, but only implicit, in the concept that the great Christian philosophers had; so that eternal truth does not mean truth already given once and for all as indubitable, but “eternally recoverable truths”. An exhaustive philosophical elucidation of this point would however lead to extremely difficult developments far from the topic of the present essay. I will try to briefly illustrate here my concept of political freedom.

8. It is certain that the political position of medieval Christianity lay in the concept of force at the service of God and in the consequent eviction from the temporal political order of the affirmation of its own values, its reduction to an instrument, to a secular arm. The question that we must ask ourselves about this is, in its precise terms, the following: whether this is an absolute ideal, a priori: and whether we should therefore always have our eyes turned to it as an ideal while accommodating ourselves to the experience of enduring different types of politics; – or whether it represents a historical determination of the Christian political ideal, relative to a historically given problem; perfectible with the enrichment of the problem. The medieval political solution presupposed the unity of faith. Not only that – and in my opinion this point deserves extreme attention, as a factual condition – but the non-problematization of faith itself as it deserves [to be problematized]. That is, it presupposed the act of adherence to the truth as already completed and therefore did not raise it as a problem (what it considered is rather the act of detachment from the truth, heresy).
Now the historical function of the Middle Ages lay in the justification, which had its fulfillment in Thomistic philosophy, of rational and cultural values within the unity of faith. The subsequent investigation of these values leads with humanism and then with modern civilization to the consideration of their historicity, a consideration totally absent from medieval philosophy. This consideration leads to the problematization of the very act of adhering to the truths of faith as truth. The posing of the problem is not in itself an opening of a crisis, but an investigation. Once the historicity of civilization has been understood, I not only can, but must, propose to myself the problem of the justification of my act of adhesion to faith, in order to live my faith in its purity, so as not to reduce it to a historical fact of the civilization in which I am born, and to claim its value as absolute truth. That is, the problem of modern spirituality is posed in these terms: in what sense can I adhere to truth as truth. The problem of truth is replaced by that of the form of adherence to truth; the problem of the true idea with that of the true person. Catholics often denounced as a crisis the modern age that began with the discovery of man in humanism and with the breakup of the Christian unity in the reformation. And undoubtedly the modern age has, from a Catholic point of view, the character of a crisis, in that its values were affirmed largely against Catholicism; but as long as we limit ourselves to the characteristics that I mentioned above, that is to its problematic, there is no trace of a character of crisis; it is a deepening and sharpening, in itself valuable, of the idea of truth. The modern age, that is, does not have an anti-Catholic character in so far as it merely poses the problem of the subject; it has this character only when it replaces the subject as a problem with the subject as a solution; that is, when it affirms a subjectivist or immanent or stoic or historicist metaphysics against the metaphysics of the object; when it is opposed to Catholic theology as theology. The fault for this transition lies in part with Catholics themselves; in their desire to bring modern cultural problems back to medieval problems, or in wanting to solve new problems by simple deduction of solutions reached in the Middle Ages. Returning now to the expressly political problem. After the end of the Middle Ages, Catholic politicians did not see the new problem posed by that cultural progress initially promoted by Catholic thought itself (by Thomism), but they saw the rupture of that religious unity of faith that conditioned the ideal of the Sacrum Imperium. And the problem became that

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Development of the idea of freedom

9. We have therefore founded the idea of ​​freedom on the very concept of truth, that is, on the possibility that it becomes truth for man. Freedom thus assumes a content (the idea of ​​the person as being for the truth) and is therefore distinguished from the formal and agnostic freedom of a certain liberalism or better still of the liberalism of the usual criticisms.
Leaving aside the superficiality of these criticisms, however, it is certain that the limit of freedom in the prefascist current of liberalism was marked by the physical existence of the other subject (the state as a guarantee of the coexistence of subjects). But after what has been said, it is clear that such a liberalism is contradictory. Man as physically existing has no particular rights. Such liberalism renounced the idea of ​​freedom as a value and became a simple administrative method for well-being. And it is clear that then one could ask the question, soluble only empirically, whether this method of freedom was the best or whether order and discipline were not preferable for the purposes of well-being. Thus we pass to fascism, eventually losing well-being too. But since the question of the choice of methods is soluble only empirically, if even now after the fascist disappointment the sympathy goes towards freedom (but is this really so? Do not many bourgeois, indeed, in this sense, above all the bourgeois, also expect wonders from the communist “method”?), it cannot be said in absolute terms whether the method of freedom is better for well-being than that of authority, but simply that it is better than a “certain” authoritarian method. So it is very easy for the authoritarian method to rise again in another form.
Returning to the value of freedom as we have outlined it above, it, having as its content the idea of ​​person, excludes two freedoms: the freedom to become a slave and the freedom to make others slaves. The consideration of the first point leads to the politics of mores, on which we will not stop; the second to social policy.
The exclusion of these two freedoms leads to the concept of force (or of authority as a defense of freedom); while the ideal of freedom totally excludes the idea of ​​violence (persecution of ideas). We will further analyze this concept of violence and its radical irreducibility to that of force, as would be the claim of revolutionary tendencies. But in the meantime from this first clarification it appears that the liberal (and the Christian) cannot place any limit on the freedom of ideas. The field of authority is precisely the opposite; it must intervene only to prevent the persecution of ideas. This all seems extremely simple. And also the idea of ​​formal and agnostic liberalism in fact risks being involved in the bad luck of this now that the “new liberals” (I am not talking about those of the Liberal party, but those of the Action [i.e., progressive] party) “synthesize”, they say, the concepts of authority and freedom; and some of them would like to “defend” the “idea of ​​freedom” with a kind of Inquisition, if not a new Fascism, in the name of this idea. At this point we must observe that defense only concerns real and concrete freedoms; human persons who will also try to defend against the defenders of the “idea of ​​freedom”. But the idea of ​​freedom as such cannot count on any defense and any protective system; it is recommended only to “persuasion”. All this might even appear obvious, if there were not now a poignant problem; we ask ourselves: will you tomorrow, in virtue of your liberalism and your Christianity, allow the Fascists to call themselves such, or even, if they want, to reconstitute their party? Certainly. I am told: since they are violent, they will try at the first opportunity to regain power by violence.
This objection is childish and demonstrates the extreme confusion of ideas that reigns today: it is believed that liberalism means allowing everyone to live as he believes and to propagandize as he wants. Let the Fascists also support their idea of ​​violence if they so wish; we will fight them with arguments, and the task will not really be too difficult; what we must forbid them is the propaganda of “truncheon arguments”, and this will truly be the death of Fascism.
Moreover, does anti-fascism make sense if there is no fascist who can answer? We would thus return to the style of the newspapers during the Forty-Five Days [after the arrest of Mussolini in 1943], which had moved every spiritually educated person to nausea not because the things said were not true, but because there was no possibility of a response from the fascists.
After the struggle, due to the natural death of Fascism, we pass to the historical judgment which is also [partial] justification and understanding; but if, on the contrary, one wants to extinguish the struggle, asking for the non-existence of the adversary, it happens that in the passage from an artificially extinguished position of struggle to the historical judgment, this takes the form of doubt about the betrayed intentions, about the interrupted work, about misunderstanding of the people etc.; the first discomfort that the Italian people encounter – which they will inevitably encounter, in the work of reconstruction – will suffice; the first collision with the will to dominate of the winning [i.e. Allied] powers, and this too cannot be avoided; the first moral deficiency of some component of the new ruling class, because it gives rise to the “Mussolini legend” (of the one who wanted the liberties of Italy in the world; to carry out the action of the Risorgimento with the claim of an effective autonomy; but who was not understood and was betrayed. As Alberto Sorel with a genius and a rare competence tried to show the defensive character of all the Napoleonic wars, tomorrow we [may] tend to see Mussolini’s constant will for peace, to think that his choreographic imperialism was nothing but a propaganda tool which he used because he had no others; it will be said, exhuming his first speeches, that even the dictatorship was forced by the inability of the Italian parliamentary class, and, highlighting effectively all the errors of the Aventine Secession, of the incomprehension that the opposition had of its tasks; it will be asserted that the Fascist regime was never really harsh and that it almost never came to effective persecution, that is, deprivation of the means of subsistence of its opponents; or if at times it got there it was without the knowledge and against the will of Mussolini, and that indeed this contributed to its collapse; that his will to relieve the poor classes was real, and that the corporative order was not successful because it was sabotaged by the industrialists; that his view of foreign policy was substantially correct; that nations really exist and therefore rich nations and poor nations; and that the ends of nationalisms, justice, freedom, etc are propaganda tools of the rich nations, etc; that in short, Mussolini’s mistake was in having said this too soon and ours in having understood it too late); this legend, which relies on certain unilateral aspects of truth – and the prohibition on pronouncing it makes it [seem] true – this is the eternal origin of such myths – will circulate underground for ten, twenty years, the time is unpredictable; but it will eventually find a way to make itself public and will not be able to fail to carry its political consequences. And that it is already in gestation: does not the interest with which the articles of Concetto Pettinato are followed, the only fascist polemicist (and not only of the time of republican fascism) who has found a “way” to be heard, show this? Anti-fascism will end up creating a posthumous fortune for fascism that it did not have in real life where it was constantly tolerated as a lesser evil, even if it does not end up giving it a real life, which it however can have. On the other hand, even assuming, even if in my opinion it is not the case, that the integral defascismization that we want is more effective using the manner of elimination, of violence, [then] return to reasoning on values: freedom precisely because it is an ultimate value cannot be limited; which it cannot be except through its opposite, by violence; but then, being opposites, it will not be limited, but denied, killed. Wanting limited freedom means denying some the right to be persons, ultimately wanting the “proprietary freedom” of a certain group of other people that will inevitably shrink more and more. That is, the request for a current limitation of freedom is made by those who in reality more or less consciously think of a new dictatorship, which will always be dictatorship even if it is called the ‘proletariat’ or [if is through an] an intellectual class that can better “guard” (but recall what I wrote above on the defense of freedom), because it [allegedly] understands freedom.
Once liberty has been removed from the fascists, it must then be taken away from those who deplore this provision, as, it may be said, “impregnated with residual fascist mentality”, and representatives of the social classes that caused fascism (unless they limit themselves, as they say, to a “reasonable opposition”, which is what Mussolini would have wanted; a “reasonable opposition”, that is, which allows itself to be won “reasonably”, that is, a non-opposition, or a mask of opposition over complicity with the dictatorship); and then to those who deplore this second provision; and then to those who deplore etc.; to restrict freedom to that of the dominant category. The beauty is that (and necessarily), in the supporters of these theses, with the difference of a re-, the fascist terminology reoccurs; in our work of re-construction, in the re-education of the Italian youth, “we cannot tolerate hindrances”. To this objection they reply that unlike Fascism it is a reconstruction promoted by honest people; but here too it is a question of Fascist language. They appeal to their example of honesty and say “we will know how to distinguish the honest from the dishonest”. Instead, with your criterion you will not succeed because it is resolved in expecting others to speak and to think exactly like you. And then you get, just like under Fascism, hypocrites or puppets.
However, let us touch upon a very complex question which cannot be solved only with such simple arguments, the problem of the moral (or religious) character of political activity. Two solutions are envisaged: 1. The morality of political activity is reduced to its recognition of itself as a simple political activity, which is exhausted in the defense of freedom as a formal condition for the recognition of values; the Christian-liberal solution. 2. Political activity is identified with that same moral and religious activity, in its aspect of affirming the values recognized as such by the individual conscience. Affirmation as imposition, construction of reality according to those values, in their objectivity.
This [second] solution was already, as we have seen, that of the medieval hierocracy in the form of politics in the service of religion. In modern times it has taken the form of resolving religious activity in politics (“it is not a question of interpreting the world, but of changing it” – Marx), incoherently in theocratic liberalism and contradictorily in Mazzini, coherently in Marx.
It is a question, to put it in a very simple (but certainly also very imprecise) expression, of going [either] from people to institutions, or from institutions or at least from a certain institution (for Mazzini the school) to people. The supporters of the second thesis say or assume that, if it is not the idea that makes people honest, [at least] men recognize themselves in ideas because these signify their reaction to the world. It may also be that a man is unable to recognize the moral meaning of an idea in good faith and fail to distinguish the immoral color of its opposite. In this case, however, he is a fool, so it is not clear if he can exert influence anyway. It will therefore be a question at least in times of emergency like this to remove him from offices where he can exercise influence. However, I observe that it is necessary to distinguish the generative process of an idea and this idea as formulated and expressed and therefore having become part of the world of experience as an object (i.e. the idea of ​​the “master” and the idea of ​​the “disciple”); in its being an object it is no longer just a criterion of evaluation but an object of evaluation which can be anything but moral. In its being incorporated into a subject who has chosen it out of a further criterion of evaluation, it can provoke in others a sense of reaction that can also lead them to an opposite idea. In other words, similar senses of reaction can be formulated in opposite ideas. In short, in the final analysis, ideas are means of expression of men, and it is men and not ideas that make history.
To put it mildly, even if without too much rigor: certainly when there is no allurement, and indeed every allurement points in the opposite direction (that is, when the opposing side dominates), adherence to the idea fought means, as a rule, the same sense of reaction, the same degree of moral consciousness; but things are reversed when our side triumphs. After all, the principle of grading the moral quality of a person from ideas is that of the Inquisition; it fell in the modern age because [the] consideration of truth as an object was replaced by that of the form in which the subject receives it. To the truth of ideas there is the truth of the person. What we have seen is a usual argument for the usefulness (as a method, that as a value freedom does not involve a judgment of authority) of freedom. Commonly it is expressed in this way: you want to impose on men to be moral and you will have hypocrites and puppets; what you should be looking for instead is that there should be no enticement for a man to decide for one idea rather than another. Let us observe, however, that this reasoning, like all those concerning the usefulness of freedom, has a purely empirical origin and cannot therefore claim absolute validity. One can certainly think that at least in certain historical conditions, [there could be] a dictatorship formed by men of such ardent faith that this gives them a moral nose for distinguishing between honest and dishonest. And that instead of the creation of hypocrites a communication of faith would take place. So only afterwards, from the consideration of the results, could we know whether the method of freedom or dictatorship is preferable. We have said that a dictatorship can solve problems or even that it alone can solve them in given historical circumstances. Further on I will try to show how in the given historical circumstances now in Italy no dictatorship (and therefore I will consider the communist dictatorship which is the only non-contradictory form of dictatorship) could solve any problem; as well as that the only non-contradictory dictatorship, which therefore has a certain possibility in certain historical conditions to solve problems, is the communist. So we will arrive at the apparently paradoxical demonstration that today a dictatorship exercised by non-communist elements, because of its contradictory nature, will be all the worse the more perceptive and intelligent the people who will exercise it will be. This is to counter a judgment that is very current today: the fascist dictatorship had bad results because Mussolini was not honest and basically not very capable. Another dictator etc. It was the system that did not work, apart from Mussolini’s honesty or ability. And as far as the former is concerned, I believe that the current opinion that makes him a sort of devilish being, a devil of the third or fourth order, a sort of Barbaricci [in] the end, but still a devil, should be revised; and as far as the latter is concerned, I do not believe that anyone else could have done better than him in the given system.

10. We often talk about faith in freedom. And liberalism would be characterized precisely by this faith. It is convenient with this proposition to dispel a misunderstanding. Quite often by faith in freedom is meant faith in its results. Thus it is said that freedom heals the evils to which it can give rise. This interpretation goes back to much of the eighteenth-century optimism that crept into liberalism (cf. e.g. the Enlightenment origins of economic libertarianism, its faith in “economic harmonies”, etc.). Of a deism that had no sense of sin and for which the natural forces were theologically ordered, that it was enough to restore man to his nature for evil to eventually disappear from history. This is certainly very different from the liberalism that a Christian can profess, as indeed from the sense of more modern liberalism. This liberalism precisely because freedom can turn both to good and to evil is the most complete rejection of any utopian form. It recognizes that in history there will always be crises and revolutions, that human history will always be a struggle, that the kingdom of God is not of this world. And it smiles at the utopian who promises a future heavenly humanity, but in the meantime asks to be able to transform it into a hell, which he will say is yes, provisional, but which is however his only detectable result; he promises man a more perfect freedom that will only be the freedom of good, but in the meantime he asks him to give up what he already has.
This relative liberal Christian pessimism (it is in substance the Christian sense of sin) just because it is relative is in no way reduced to a pessimism of inertia. Freedom is eternally threatened and must be eternally defended. There can be no peace for the Christian, and Christ fights until the end of time.
What ultimately is the difference of the Christian from the liberal and of the liberal from every other position? These others are basically Manichean: evil is in the structure of reality, in an objective sense. And then either we think that, as it is intimately bound to the structure of being, it cannot be eliminated, and go into the pessimism of inertia, which in politics translates into conservatism at any cost; or due to its nature as an object, it can be definitively defeated at once, and then we go into utopianism and revolutionism, which would not be possible if we did not think that the evil will of today’s men is conditioned by certain historical conditions; if they are removed, either man will return to natural goodness or [we will] build a new form of humanity pure from sin. For the Christian and the liberal, evil has its root instead in the evil will of man and therefore will continue until the end of the world, but the struggle against it will continue even until then. Turning to the expression faith in freedom, it is therefore certainly inappropriate, compared to the conception that we propose of it: as regards the value of freedom we have demonstrated it by deducing it from the notion of truth; and as for the value of truth it results from the very definition of man. We can speak of faith only in the sense that freedom is never [simply] a realized reality, but precisely a value, that is, something whose realization in the empirical world depends on us.

Freedom and non-violence

11. The radical opposite of the concept of freedom is that of violence; to which we must pay close attention today, because its supporters try to camouflage it through others of a similar seeming color but whose spiritual structure is quite different: punishment, legitimate defense, force, war. We will first consider violence in its moral character; then in its eventual character of utility, which we exclude from now on (how could its opposite be useful to freedom?); but nevertheless, in order to really exorcise its temptation, we should deal with the particular judgments in which its defense is incarnated. The distinction between the two issues is necessary because, while I dare not say that those who listen to the discussion on violence in its moral character know these things very well (!), the issue right now is about the political usefulness of violence; thus truncating that analysis of the essence of violence which cannot fail to be a question prior to any consideration of its usefulness. By violence we must mean the reduction of the human individual to “being for something else”, or as it is more generally said – but the formula has lost its bite by being overused – to a means and only a means.
When this “other” is an individual or a human group, there is normal violence whose immoral character no one discusses; when instead this other is not something that “is” (has a factual existence) but “must be”, that is, a value, there is political violence, on whose moral character discussion is possible.
We immediately note that if under one aspect (“defense of a value”) political violence can take on moral features, under another it manifests an enormousness that can make it infinitely more serious than normal violence. This strikes a man as a subject of interest; the other, instead, in what a man has most sincerely, in his being a subject of value. In other words, all violence has the common character of striking an innocent person (this does not mean that the affected person cannot be guilty in other respects; but that violence strikes him qua innocent). But political violence has the specific character of striking a person precisely in his being “honest”, in believing in the values ​​he professes, and striking him for his ability to persuade. In this there would be the “danger” for which this individual is struck, a danger to which, if we look closely, this individual is reduced. Hence it is rightly observed that violence “ennobles” the individual who is struck and transforms him into a martyr (and specious in my opinion is the reasoning according to which a martyr would be only those who die for a right idea, that is, for the idea that I believe is right. Each party would thus have its martyrs and this reasoning would lead to the legitimation of the concept of violence. It is in irremediable contradiction with the same immediate perception. As opposed as the ideas of a Catholic are to those of a Giordano Bruno, does a modern Catholic really feel like endorsing his condemnation? So much so that even its defenders, as Cardinal Mercati in a very unfortunate book, try to justify it with other reasons, showing, for example, that Bruno was in his life hardly a saint, etc.). Immediate perception is very rightly drawn to compassion the more obscure the person who dies for his ideas and the weaker these ideas are precisely because, assuming that there is a fault of the ideas, this obscure person is less guilty. In violence, that is, we have the rescission of certain people or groups of people from humanity qua the possibility of persuasion. In this respect, violence is immeasurably more serious, in its essential structure, than ancient slavery; the slave was treated as such due to his nature as an animated instrument; that is, the practical judgment was preceded by an ontological judgment that excluded him from humanity. From a certain point of view, the ancient attitude towards the slave did not lack an analogy with the modern one towards the idiot or the madman; he certainly differed from it because none of us thinks of denying human nature to these unhappy ones; but he was analogous to him in the denial of any possibility of persuasion. In violence, on the other hand, it is not a question of denying the “possibility” of any persuasion to the man who is the object of it, but the possibility of that persuasion [i.e. being persuaded of some particular idea]; that is, it is not a question of an ontological consideration which excludes some from humanity, but of their practical rescission from mankind.
In one respect, violence bears traces of the medieval mentality. This can explain many things: not only how the first success of communism was in Russia, that is, a country with a still medieval mentality, but also to a large extent the movement of Catholic communists and how in certain Catholic circles the word communism arouses less distrust than liberalism. Undoubtedly, the Catholic is horrified by communism qua atheist communism; but as soon as he is told that communism may not even be atheistic, he will tend to prefer this position to liberalism which he too knows is not atheist. “Communism is closer to Christianity, because it proposes a tragic idea of ​​reality, because in communism there is the man of sin, against liberal optimism” (which is a gross confusion between the optimism of the Enlightenment and the relative liberal pessimism; and between the relative Christian pessimism and the millenarian Manichean mentality of communism); “The atheistic image of communism is provisional; and its substantial action will be to create a new universalism that will put an end on the political level to the particularisms that have emerged from Renaissance humanism and Protestant reform and could be the foundation of a restored religious unity”. It is true that communism could lead to a new Middle Ages; but, alas!, anything but religious. The true historical judgment is that the religious aspect of the Middle Ages continues even through crises and misunderstandings in liberal civilization; while in communism continues the expression of strength no longer in the service of God and of universalism, no longer a reality given historically, but which [allegedly] must be imposed.
In common between the medieval mentality and violence is objectivism. The value of man lies in the truth of which he is the bearer; the truth makes him a person, and independently of it a force at the service of truth and error. The aspect of the subjective recognition of the truth, whereby a subject can be said to be in the truth only because of the form in which he receives it, is completely neglected. The struggle is a struggle of values and at their service there are forces that as such do not have a spirituality of their own, but receive it only from the value they bear; if it is [not] a true value, they can be destroyed. With the difference, however, that in the Middle Ages the problem of subjectivity was not denied, as it was only clarified later, it was simply missing; and now it is denied.
So too can a parallel be drawn between the tribunal of the Inquisition and the present revolutionary tribunal, but with a profound difference. The man condemned by the court of the Inquisition still has the appeal to God, he hopes in his last penance, in his salvation; he is not yet completely terminated from the community. The lack of this appeal makes today’s revolutionary tribunal truly violent: death for the one affected by it is a truly definitive death, total definitive termination from humanity. Nor would it be accurate to refer the current justification of violence to the Machiavellian mentality. This is fundamentally antinomian (and therefore I believe that the skeptical interpretation of Machiavelli is more correct than the political interpretation). The formula that the end justifies the means actually denounces a crisis, the split between political reality and ethical-religious conscience. It is not a question of the morality of violence, but the opposite, of the break between political activity and religious activity. The subsequent theorists of reason of state, the true politicians, will try to heal it by attempting the justification of politics in its ultimate consequences: by quantifying the argument, the sacrifice of one can procure the salvation of many, etc. The ethical-religious justification of violence is quite modern, and its coherent expressions are German racism and the Communist doctrine. We will see them later. Meanwhile we want to dissociate the concept of violence from that of revenge, ferocity, and hatred; these last two attitudes can accompany it but not necessarily.
Revenge is revenge for a wrong. That is, it assumes the reality of a violence suffered and the impossibility of obtaining justice or adequate justice from the established authority. It is not therefore a question of saying: violence arises from an atmosphere of rejection; rather, violence introduces itself into history thanks to a pre-existing atmosphere of resentment.
As for ferocity, it is nothing but the satisfaction of an individual in the practical denial of the existence of another. It therefore depends on the subjective disposition of the man who exercises violence, but it does not descend from the essence of violence as such. So too does hatred in the pure case of political violence as hatred of an idea or of a class, which does not apply to the individual affected as such (and for this reason some Christians believe very easily to absolve revolutionary violence today). After what has been said, the radical heterogeneity between the concepts of violence and punishment is very clear. However, some clarification is perhaps appropriate to show how the idea of ​​justice has increasingly diverged from that of violence. In the old exemplarist conception, the guilty truly became an instrument (his punishment as an example for others). He had certainly requested with his act his own condemnation. He had chosen to be an example with a free act. But in the execution of the punishment he became an example, and that is the object of violence. In the modern legal conception, the idea of ​​punishment as requested by the offender himself (understood as a rational being) has increasingly made its way. The thief e.g. is punished not [simply] in consideration of an objective value violated by him, but of a value admitted by him himself: he denies as a universal value a value (property) which he admits per se. If he showed that he did not believe this value, e.g. when having stolen without any good reason, the thief threw away the stolen goods, without any other reason, it would no longer be theft, but kleptomania and the judge would no longer speak, but rather the doctor. Thus, for there to be punishment it is necessary to persuade the guilty party of its justice (at which point he will limit himself to contesting the fact that is attributed to him). This is the essential character that separates punishment from violence.
The distinction between violence and self-defense is also extremely clear. Self-defense is defense of something that is presently possessed; violence of something that is not yet (of a value). And I have already said how a value does not “defend itself”, but “persuades”, and therefore it makes no sense to speak of defense of the idea of ​​freedom, that is, in the sense of leading to that contradiction of liberal dictatorship and liberal “theocracy”. In an elliptical formula: defense is legitimate as a defense of freedom; every act of violence is instead the establishment of a dictatorship of which freedom would then be the result (but from dictatorship to freedom there is no transition, but only “crisis”). The concept of force is one of those to which the Communists are most attached to in order to reduce [into it] that of violence. Revolutionary violence would be identified with force due to its character of depending on an executive power. But this simply proves that violence is not revenge. From the concept of freedom, as the exclusion of the freedom to make oneself or to make slaves, we have deduced the concept of force. But the use of this always implies in whoever undergoes it consent to the value in the name of which it is exerted; and simply the sacrifice of an opinion or an interest. Thus the expropriation of large industries, if it were decided, would not affect the industrialist qua the value that justifies ownership (freedom); but simply qua the opinion that the best way to achieve this is absolute economic freedom; now, with respect to the means of realization, opinions are possible and none of them can be said to be absolutely rationally demonstrable. Therefore the decision is up to the vote, to the majority and once this has been decided I have to subordinate my opinion, even if it seems more correct to me; whereas it would make no sense to say that the majority could decide on a value (it being an absolute). The character of consent therefore removes any possible rapprochement between force and violence. There is an infinite distance to the concept of war and the communists think: the concept of violence is related to that of civil war. Now the

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you that no one can allow the intervention of others in the affairs of their family. In that [is] the relative value of the “theory of blood”. Whoever denies the reality of nations must also consistently deny the reality of other institutions such as the family, founding themselves either on the denial of what is sensed, or on the reduction of what is sensed to ideological facts, therefore susceptible of a merely utilitarian evaluation.
Hence the absurdity of the hopes of many (who did not, at least for a moment? but now it seems that we are on a better path) in the English; what one could honestly hope for from them is the guarantee of the external conditions of existence, bread, work, order; but not freedom, and woe if they take seriously, hypocritically or not, their function as liberators!
Then the old history will repeat itself, the eternal history of the Italian people, that illusion that for this very reason was denounced above all by Italian writers. (In this sense, in these repeated circumstances, we can really say, resuming an old idea of Rensi’s, that in it is the golden thread of the Italian tradition; golden thread, he said, skeptically, but in a realist sense).
We read in Livy the description of the siege of Syracuse: already to him it was very clear that no conquest is described as such, but as liberation or as a fact desired by the conquered themselves, since the conquering state always relies on a faction and [on] those discontented with their country’s regime. “It is very certain that neither the desire to conserve for others the liberty which they love so much in their own country, nor the respect for the common good, as they preached then and afterwards with magnificent words, but the cupidity alone of acquiring dominion…”. (Giucciardini). These are words of historians that refer to facts; and from what generally or even always happened in the past we do not yet have the right to think that it must always happen like this; so that the illusion would perpetually repeat itself.
But it is not a question here of the “wisdom of historians”; that the fact must always be repeated, that the foreign desire for liberation must always be resolved in a “desire only to acquire dominion” can be demonstrated a priori. How in fact could England “elevate” us, as they say, to a free nation? Not otherwise than by taking away that freedom which we already possessed and of which we made “bad use” (it is said: of which we were not worthy). In order to reserve for ourselves only the freedom to do good (in practice to do what England wants – analysis of this reduction [of freedom] to the freedom to do good). In other words, to reduce us to a protectorate; but it will be seen further on, if a protectorate can become a nation (but it is doubtful that it can if not through a crisis such as a revolt against the protector) a nation cannot be reduced to a protectorate, but to a slave nation.
This reasoning may seem too abstract. To overcome this impression let us consider the ways in which England might accomplish such an “elevation”.
Either by assuming directly the government of Italy: but, as we have seen, our national problems can never be solved by foreigners, because they can “see” but not “hear” them.
Or by protecting in Italy a particular “aristocracy of liberty” with the task of “organizing liberty” and educating for it. Now who could this aristocracy be composed of? Either by men whose interests are linked to English capitalism: that part of the industrial bourgeoisie that wants to redeem the origin of its wealth by constituting itself as an aristocracy of “guardians of freedom” (reinterpreting the attitude of the nobility with respect to the Church); legitimated in the affirmation that property is power, and that only it, through the education it can give to its own children (or, it adds, even to the children of others, when it has found the aptitude), can make good use of it. “Liberal paternalism” is not different in essence from other paternalisms in history. Or from intellectuals whose mentality is informed by a cosmopolitan Enlightenment deaf to the specific sensibility of the national problem. Defeated in their address to the Italians, they think the origin of their defeat lies in the fact that they do not know how to understand them. And they demand the monopoly of education. It will be a Jewish Masonic dictatorship against an unprepared Italy. And isn’t that what we are witnessing today, seeing the maneuvers to secure the support of certain liberals on the one hand, and men of the Action Party on the other?
Necessarily by these, not by others. Because England for her protectorate will want to have trustworthy men, more or less consciously, and all the better if unconscious. For on the other hand those who are aware of this national reality and of the mask of the will to liberation will not lend themselves to it.

12. Therefore, any English ambition to dominate Italy could not elevate it to a free nation, but [would] reduce it to a slave nation. This is where the game of Russian politics comes in. A slave nation believes it can redeem its freedom through communist internationalism.

13. There is constant talk of the struggle of values ​​and this war [World War II] has been and is usually interpreted as the struggle of Christianity against barbarism, of freedom against tyranny, of democracy against reaction and the like. Hence it has been said that rather than war one should speak of a European revolution or of the struggle in every country of the people against totalitarian regimes. Let us now try to clarify what is meant by the struggle of values.
Such an expression is strictly speaking nonsense. Value, it has already been said, does not fight but persuades; nor will it tolerate that those who are persuaded of it act for it other than by persuading. If you want an example, think of the awful expression often unfortunately used: defend God, fight for God. God who is helped by men! If this expression is purely metaphorical, we pass on. But unfortunately it is also susceptible of a literal meaning. And then it means: what I defend is not exactly right, nor the belief in God which obviously I cannot arouse by imposition, but the concept of God as the content of experience, the only thing it can actually defend; but as a content of experience it is not a value, but something which is therefore only susceptible of utilitarian evaluation. That is, I am only defending my situation. Or, the expression defending God means my resistance to an imposition of atheism; what I defend is my right to freely profess worship and to inform my life through belief. Let it be clear that the imposition of values ​​actually means the imposition of something else, that is, the will of those who want to impose them.
When in a society there is an imposition of values ​​by the central power, civil war begins, in a latent form that will wait for the first opportunity to manifest itself openly. Civil war in one nation is the only case in which the expression struggle for values ​​really makes sense. From this it follows that the so-called struggle for values ​​is always in reality a struggle for life.

14. Coming now to the concept of war, it is first of all necessary to deny two concepts: that of offensive warfare and that of ideological warfare. In warfare it is always only a question of defending the life of a nation. The ideology of war is reduced to a propaganda tool. Now from this denial of the ideological character of war it appears that no citizen is used in it simply as a tool because no one is called to sacrifice one of his values. The only exception would be the case of the so-called conscientious objectors. But only apparently because as one of them rightly proposed, it is possible, without violating their values, to use them as a stretcher-bearer in the front lines. Hence the first radical absurdity of any moral evaluation of war, because it is a vital and [not] ideological phenomenon, a consequence of the sins of peace. Hence the Church perfectly invites us to do everything to avoid wars, to consider them as punishments from God, but not therefore in themselves condemn them. The Pope refuses to take a stand for one or the other of the belligerents as would be his obligation if one were dealing with ideological wars (i.e. if this concept had sense); 2. [the radical absurdity] of the search for those responsible for a war identified in this or that person. We can speak only of responsibility for peace. And here too the search is extremely difficult, because one must not forget that the freedom of a politician is always restricted to extremely small limits; 3. [the radical absurdity] of the current opinion on the purely economic origins of wars. To understand its immeasurable stupidity, just think of what could have been done by allocating the expenses of the two world wars to peace: transform the world into a true garden, at least! The origin of war lies in the irrepressible existence of nations. To support the [thesis of their] purely economic origin, it would be necessary to demonstrate that nations themselves are economic organisms and nothing else. That is, everything that contributes to identifying a nation is nothing other than the reflection of a superabi-

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Does not the Apostle declare, from the beginning of the Epistle to the Romans, against the heathen peoples, that already “the wrath of God is manifested from heaven against all the impiety and injustice of men who hold captive the truth by(the fact of their) injustice”, or more precisely still, according to Lietzmann’s translation, “in the chains of injustice” (I, 18)? The expression therefore supposes, within every man, a struggle between his conscience and the truth of “God making him know clearly what can be known of Him” (v. 19). This tends to utter itself in man, to rise from his heart to his lips, to raise him at the same time to God. The idolater refuses this upward movement; his conscience “holds down”, therefore holds captive, the truth by and in the injustice of this refusal. The rest of the text corroborates this interpretation. Moreover, by insinuating that this struggle presents a double aspect, it prepares us all the better to understand how and why the idolater, once master, also wants to be a man in front of the divine Truth. Here indeed is the explanation given by Paul:

For what is invisible in Him is revealed on reflection, from the creation of the world, by his works, and also his eternal power and his divinity, so that they are inexcusable, since, having known God, they have not recognized Him as God, nor have they given thanks… (v. 20-21).

If we remember that, in the Master-Slave dialectic, recognition of fact ends the fight to the death and inaugurates the servitude of the vanquished, it goes without saying that the claim of the idolater to “hold the truth captive” has as its prior condition his refusal to “recognize God as such”. The two expressions therefore corroborate each other. Moreover, it is expressly in the perspective of such a dialectic that Father Lagrange explains this non-recognition. “The pagans”, writes this exegete, “did not render him the honors due to a Master.”

But the refusal to “give thanks” is no less significant. Because this verb implies the idea of ​​a recognition which is no longer only of fact, nor even of right, but of love. A sense all the more certain here as it emerges from the etymology of the Greek verb ηὐχαρίστησαν, χάρις signifying first of all the grace which charms and attracts... In these few verses, Paul therefore insinuates nothing less than this: the first contact between the truth of God and the conscience of every man is originally — “since the creation of the world” — a loving struggle on the part of God, but a struggle to death on the part of man.

Let us now see how the pagan who believes himself master of the divine truth, also claims on this transcendent plane to become a man. Paul indicates this very precisely, albeit in a shrouded way, in the following verses, even emphasizing twice the link of this new claim to usurped mastery:

Talking as if wise, they became foolish, and they changed the glory of the incorruptible God for a representation, a simple image of corruptible men, birds, quadrupeds and reptiles.

Therefore God delivered them, according to the lusts of their hearts, to impurity, so that they dishonor their own bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and who worshiped the creature in preference to the Creator… ; this is why God delivered them to dishonorable passions; for their wives have exchanged the natural use for that which is against nature; and likewise men, having abandoned the natural use of women, have been consumed with desire for each other, men having an infamous intercourse with men and receiving in their persons the inevitable wages of their misguidance. And since they did not care to know God well, God gave them over to their perverse sense… to do what is not befitting… (vv. 22-29).

Thus, according to Paul, idolatry, the source of all sin, produces in the first place vices against nature. Moreover, as the repetition of the verbs ἤλλαξαν — μετήλλαξαν — μετήλλαξαν attests, the sexual inversion is manifestly, in his eyes, the direct consequence and the specific sign of the earlier idolatrous inversion which, in the pagan, changed into non-cognition the re-cognition due to God. But by what right does the Apostle posit such a relation? And why give such importance to homosexuality? Whereas, ethnology finds it in almost all peoples, experience detects it even among Christians, and materialist science nowadays believes it has been sufficiently explained by attributing it to anomalies of a hormonal constitution or to traumas of psychic development.

To grasp it, one must first understand Paul’s exact point of view at the beginning of his Epistle: desiring to bring out the historical essence of idolatry, he is not directly interested in the individual aspect of homosexuality, even less in its material causes, but he intends to unveil its meaning and its typical value for “society”, let us say better still, for universal history where pagans and Jews are opposed. And there is no doubt that in his eyes its primary origin is neither carnal nor psychic, but spiritual and properly demonic, as his general conception of the fight specific to the Christian supposes:

It is not against adversaries of flesh and blood that we have to fight, but against the Principalities, against the Powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, against the Spirits of Evil who inhabit the celestial spaces (Eph., VI, 12).

Let us also note that, in order to oppose homosexuality in a precise manner to the absolute gratuitousness of God’s Justice, Paul mentions it once again, speaking of Sodom and Gomorrah, at the culminating point of his Epistle and in a context which must give thought. Wanting to show, after “the wrath of God”, the “wealth of his glory towards vessels of mercy”, he first evokes the preaching of Hosea:

Whoever was not my people I will call my people, and beloved she who was not beloved.

Then he quotes the text of Isaiah, announcing that only “the remnant of Israel will be saved, the Lord fulfilling his word to the end and without delay on earth”. Finally comes this last confirmation:

As Isaiah predicted: If the Lord of hosts had not left us a seed (σπέρμα), we would have become like Sodom, assimilated to Gomorrah (IX, 22-29).

Thus, to discover the meaning of the incarnation of the Redeemer Word, Paul assumes on two occasions a male-female relationship between God and humanity, and he mixes in this an allusion to the “word of the Lord”; after which, by contrast with the divine power thus evoked, he recalls the testimony of the Old Testament concerning the punishment deserved by homosexuality.

If we take into account these various relations and oppositions, it is easy to understand by what intermediary Paul’s thought came to link sexual inversion and the inversion proper to idolatry, then to see in one the specific mark of the other.

In his eyes, indeed, God is, in a double capacity, Lord and Master of creation and in particular of humanity: Lord, he is from the beginning as creator of all things; Master, he became because of Adam’s revolt, so that his anger now weighs on enslaved humanity. On the other hand, God is also, in a double way, Man freely loving a humanity which is Woman before him: from the beginning, to man made in his image, he proposed a loving struggle from which should spring the recognition of love; then in history, he freely elected Israel as his beloved, before allowing all nations to benefit from the same loving election, through the “seed” of his Word. However, resulting from the pride of the spirit which pushed the man to want by his own forces “to be like God”, the idolatry which changes into non-cognition the re-cognition awaited by the Creator, induced the pagan from the first to “hold captive the truth” of God. Since the divine initiative aimed from the beginning at a recognition not only of fact and right, but of love analogous to that which the man hopes for from the woman he loves, the idolatrous inversion must also tend to go far in non-cognition. It must therefore provoke the pagan, already master of the Truth, to show himself also to it as a man, that is to say, to claim to exercise with regard to Creation, work and reflection of the divine Goodness, a loving freedom and a virile power, similar to those even of God. A claim whose essence, or principle and end, can nowhere be more clearly marked than in sexual inversion.

Indeed, for Paul, the relationship between man and woman is not only, as for Marx, “immediate, natural and necessary unity due to the double relationship of man to man and of man to nature”; in the same way, it symbolizes a third relationship which supports and encompasses the two previous ones: that of “the unity Man-Nature” with God. How could the pupil of Gamaliel forget the teaching of Genesis?

God created man in his image, in the image of God, He created them male and female. God blessed them and said to them: Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it… God saw all that he had done: it was very good (I, 27-31).

The union of the sexes therefore reflects the extreme Liberality of the Creator, who spreads naturally over all creatures and wants the fertility of man and woman to be the principle of a domination of nature analogous to His own. But, without ceasing to rely on the revelation of the Old Testament, Paul goes beyond it. Indeed, not content with seeing in the fruitful union of the sexes the image of the Creator and his inexhaustible Goodness, he discerns that the very history of the creation of man and woman prohibits putting them on the same rank to merge them into an abstract equality. On the contrary, it manifests between them a hierarchy and a circular interaction, predestining their natural relations to represent the new relations those that the supernatural genesis, revelation and masterpiece of divine Freedom, instituted between God and Humanity. Does not Paul say:

The head of every man is Christ; the head of woman is man; the head of Christ is God… Man is the image and reflection of God; woman is the reflection of man. For man was not taken from woman, but woman from man; and man was not created for woman, but woman for man… Moreover, in the Lord woman is not without man, nor man without woman. For if woman was taken from man, man in turn is born of woman, and everything comes from God (I Cor., XI, 3 and 7-12).

From this, the relation of sexual inversion to idolatrous inversion becomes manifest. Indeed, since it pushes the pagan to go beyond his mastery of the Truth to the point of wanting, like God and by supplanting Him, to use a virile freedom towards creation, this will must apply in the first place to the point of the unity Man-Nature, where the Creator has placed the most explicit mark of his inexhaustible Goodness and his loving Freedom, consequently on the union of the sexes. Now, as this is naturally fruitful, the enterprise of the pagan would fail if he respected its order; and at the same time would not prove the power of the evil Spirit responsible for his idolatry. It is therefore necessary that the virility and the freedom of the pagan be proven by sexual inversion and that this in turn serves to show to what end the inversion goes, which begins by “exchanging the truth of God for the lie”.

The “debasement”, the “dishonor” and the infamy that homosexuality entails, are the first signs that Saint Paul raises. They are indeed the most visible, to such an extent that most ancient legislation rejects it. The most sensitive also to the conscience of the homosexual who never succeeds in silencing, despite what he holds, the judgment of his conscience. In this perversion, Paul seems to distinguish degrees and it is certainly not without reason that he names feminine homosexuality before masculine. Indeed, since he has also established the gradation: God — Christ — man — woman, it is understandable that the inverted woman seems to him the worst perversion. Destined by her sex to be not only the companion, drawn from man and made for him, but also the type of Humanity in the face of the amorous Freedom of God, her inversion reaches, so to speak, the second power: yes, she pretends first of all to do without the man in order to be a woman, then to play herself a virile role with regard to another woman and by this means to exercise a liberating domination vis-à-vis both sexes.

Masculine homosexuality often causes inverts to adopt an effeminate behavior. Judging by these appearances, one might be tempted to define it as a renunciation of virility. This seems to contradict our analysis. In reality, however marked the effeminization of the invert may be, these appearances remain superficial. In men as in women, homosexuality remains fundamentally an aspiration towards an asexual angelism, in which is manifested the refusal of the spirit to adopt, in the face of the transcendent, the feminine attitude, specific to created being.

So what ultimately characterizes all homosexuality in the eyes of Saint Paul is that it leads directly to pride of spirit. Indeed, after having listed a catalog of vices which exegetes struggle to explain the detail, without thinking of relating it to the homosexuality he has just spoken of, Paul describes the final result by returning once more to the fundamental motif: the non-cognition of the verdict of God, however well known, and he insists this time on the inversion of moral judgment: “Not only do they do such actions, but they approve of those who commit them”.

At this point, the link between homosexuality and idolatry must appear in full light. Paul does not stigmatize unnatural vices only because of their carnal aspect and the moral degradation they entail, but beneath their hideous guises, he discerns a spiritual meaning. The extreme outcome of the orientation that Freud himself, unbeliever and materialist as he was, recognized in sexual perversions when he wrote about them: “The omnipotence of love is nowhere shown with more force than in those deviations which are proper to it.” In Paul’s eyes, almighty love is not just an instinct, but God himself. So homosexuality, the only one of these perversions which is properly socializable, becomes for him, in the world which admits and glorifies it as such, the type of the sin of the spirit and against the Spirit. Both effect and cause of the spiritual inversion which is at the heart of idolatry, it leads by the shortest paths to a radical inversion of values ​​where the influence of the Spirit of evil on the pagan world is revealed more clearly than anywhere else.

To justify this analysis and to see its depth, it suffices to consider for a moment the apology offered today by homosexuals.

For the normal man, the sexual, since it is upon the genital, is the verendum, that is to say both the shameful and the sacred. To exonerate himself from the social reprobation which declares his vice “against nature”, the invert begins by appealing to nature: it shows, he says, that in animals the sexual instinct seeks its satisfaction by processes as much abnormal than normal. By this and in the name of objective natural science, the sexual in general is both desecrated and rehabilitated. Then thanks to history, the initial relationship will be reversed, homosexuality becoming sacred and normal sexuality shameful. Indeed, not only does ethnology teach that sexual inversion is found among almost all peoples to varying degrees, but it is a fact that it was especially widespread among the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians and even in the Western Christian world, at the most flourishing periods of their culture. It is also a fact that it is found in politicians, authors and artists of each of these periods and finds a way to express itself in more than one masterpiece. If, therefore, it is “against nature”, it is as a principle of culture. Far from condemning it, society must protect and honor it. After which, to complete his movement of inversion, all that remains for the homosexual is to establish the cult of his heroes and martyrs, to propose the ideal of an inverted “marriage”, and to engage in its practices under the cover of the Gospel by equaling its virtues to those of which Christ gave the example to the world… Thanks to the absolute freedom and the fertility in a supernatural sense of his creative genius, he does not doubt that the “very nature of his temperament” can make of himself “a better man and of this world a better world”. At this point, today’s homosexual joins the idolatrous pagan who holds truth captive and proves his manly freedom in the face of the unity Man-Nature.

At the end of this long analysis, let us take stock. If the dialectic of the Pagan and the Jew unites profane history and religious history, it is not only that these two terms, taken in their most objective sense and without regard to faith, pertain to both as well. It is also that in the presence of the revelation by which the unity Man-Nature (to speak like Marx) is objectified in nature and history, or (to use language that is both Hegelian and Christian) by which God becomes Man so that Man becomes God, this dialectic offers the synthesis of the very principles of natural and historical becoming, contained in the couples master-slave and man-woman. The proof of this is, as we have just seen in detail, that the chosenJew is and wants to be a slave and a woman in the face of the Transcendent God, while the idolatrous pagan, at the very heart of his non-recognition of God, becomes, in place of Him, at the same time master and man.

1) Descartes’ philosophy is a synthesis that intends to replace the Thomistic one, for the same purpose, the agreement of science, metaphysics and religion; this substitution is required by the new science, which however requires a metaphysics, and this metaphysics reaffirms, in a more rigorous way, the same truths of Christian Scholasticism and is like it open to a supernatural revelation.

2) This philosophy initially met with radical rejection. The objectors define Descartes’ isolation both from the scholastic tradition and from the atmosphere of the new science. The only one who is in favor is Arnauld, for the reasons we have seen.

3) Subsequently, shortly after the death of Descartes, we have a general acceptance “ad modum recipientis”, whereby modernization replaces rupture. In this modernization of the past, each of the moments of Cartesian thought receives its own development, separate from the others. Here we find ourselves faced with a problem already noticed by Leibniz, and then generally overlooked: the process of the disintegration of Cartesian thought coincides with the rupture of European spiritual unity, or rather is inserted into this rupture as a decisive moment. National philosophies arise in the Cartesian horizon, and we can say that what characterizes the current moment is that their rupture has reached its maximum.

In fact, what characterizes modern French philosophy is that it was formed, in reference to Descartes, through a process of tapering away: on the one hand the philosophy of solid introspective and metaphysical reflection (philosophy of interiority and freedom), on the other Comtean positivism; or, if you want to put it that way, according to a usage that is now quite current, spiritualistic positivism and scientistic positivism. Now it should be observed that spiritualistic positivism is a rediscovery of Descartes after Leibniz, together with a deepening of the rediscovery of Descartes that Rousseau made in his polemic against the “philosophes”: who in turn had developed the opposite moment of Cartesian thought.

What characterizes English philosophy is the application of Occam’s razor to Cartesianism, that is, the criticism of the distinctio rationis.

German philosophy is situated in the continuation of the Spinozian-Leibnizian overcoming, encountering the Renaissance after the Reformation.

The great tradition of Italian Catholic philosophy, from Vico to Rosmini, develops the humanistic-theocentric motif of Cartesian thought, after the Malebranchian meeting of Augustinianism and Cartesianism had allowed a certain return to Platonism.

1. They are found in two contemporary judgments:

1) Religion is one thing and politics another; absolute purity is sought in religion, while you cannot do politics without getting your hands a little dirty, even if then with casuistry these actions, which may seem religiously not very justifiable, are justified by their end; it is the purity of the end that indirectly gives religious value to political action.

Separation, therefore, between politics and religion. One acts [as follows]: a) In times of peace, by an external accordance [with Christian truth] (political actions, even if they are of an order extraneous to the religious order, must not be contradictory to the values ​​of the latter). b) In times of crisis, somewhat contradictory political actions are also allowed and justified by their end.

Normally one [then] interprets in this separatistic sense a formula which is in itself correct, that politics concerns interests of the natural order and religion of the supernatural order.

2) Alternatively: religious life requires a political commitment precisely in order to be truly religious. So you are not religious and moreover you can also be political; but because I am religious I am also political.

Not that the distinction of the two orders is denied, even in this position; but their connection is understood dynamically (because, by virtue of); where in the former it is understood statically (later, also).

The first position leads to a dualistic form of Christianity; religion engages only a part of human existence; it is confined to the practices of piety, to the “vita interiore”.

But it is at this point that Marxist criticism can bring [arguments] with considerable appearances of rationality. If the social man is outside the religious man, can we not think that it is the social man who explains the religious man? For Marx bourgeois society is an anarchist society in which the individual is subjected to heterogeneous forces; therefore a society in which man cannot fully unfold his essence; consequently the bourgeois man feels an emptiness, a lack of completeness, and seeks in religion the satisfaction of what he lacks.

It therefore seems that: 1) precisely because of the need to take a position in the face of Marxism, which seems to me to be a very notable philosophical, and not just a political, issue, it is necessary to go beyond the position of dualistic Christianity. 2) But therefore it is necessary first of all, having ascertained that the dualistic position was until now the one generally assumed by the Catholics of the modern age, to explain: a) by reason of what presuppositions this was possible, indeed necessary; b) what concrete political forms it gave rise to.

2. To answer a), I believe we must start from the idea that persists in many Catholics and in all secular people, that the medieval theocratic ideal (I am speaking of the ideal and not of the historical realization that it had in the Middle Ages) must be considered as the absolute (and therefore supra-historical, eternal) ideal of Christian politics.

This is the opinion, for example, of Benedetto Croce, who logically deduces the spiritual action of the Catholic church to have exhausted herself in the middle ages “when she preserved much of the legacy of the ancient world and defended the rights of conscience and freedom and spiritual life against barbaric peoples and against the materialistic tyranny of emperors and kings”; while in the modern age “she lost this position, or at least lost the leadership she had exercised in it, and, overwhelmed by the civilization that she had contributed to generating, is restricted to being the guardian of aged and dead forms, of lack of culture, of ignorance, of superstition, of spiritual oppression, and becomes in turn more or less materialistic” (History of Europe, p. 21). In other words, his premises: one cannot, if one wishes to be logical, speak of freedom once the transcendence and eternity of truth have been admitted; [rather] the political ideal of freedom is correlated to the immanentist and historicist conception of reality.

I certainly do not think the objection is true; nevertheless, it cannot be denied that it has some appearance of verisimilitude. Once the eternal truth has been determined, how can one grant the right to disagree with it? How can one admit the right to teach what is not true? How can the heretic be given freedom?

Can it be denied that this anti-liberal position is still that of many Catholics today? That even Fascism was seen by some of them, at least in a certain period, with sympathy, precisely for its anti-liberal function? (I believe that a truly critical justification of the concept of freedom in the Catholic position includes a far-from-simple philosophical inquiry into the concept of eternal truths and the act of adhering with our spirit to truth.)

However: the medieval theocratic ideal was normally conceived by Catholics as the absolute ideal of Christian politics and not as a historical form of this ideal relating to the spiritual situation of the Middle Ages. It is very often thought that the ideal of the Sacrum Imperium is an ideal which must be temporarily suspended, given the historical circumstances, but which still remains as the ultimate historical mirage. Hence three consequences:

1) That most secular scholars thought and think that Catholicism is a spiritual position relating to the Middle Ages, unable to solve modern historical problems. So Croce. On another occasion I will show that Marxists see history from this perspective and therefore believe that by criticizing idealism and liberalism they can ignore Catholicism, a position already superseded by liberalism. I will show that Marxism as a philosophy (which is too little taken into account) and communism as politics are the ultimate and most perfect positions of the modern world, when this is interpreted in opposition to the Catholic world. So I think that the only valid position against communism is Catholicism and Christian politics when the above principles have been restored in it; not liberalism, a spiritual position that generates, we will see how, communism and therefore is an anterior position and surpassed by it.

2) That modern political ideals had to manifest themselves in opposition to Catholicism and not only to a particular form of Christian politics. Thus they themselves took on theocratic and theological form. Liberalism took the form of a secular religion of freedom, in the limit, Freemasonry. Communism simply ignores Catholicism, fighting liberalism as the final historical form, now secularized, of Christianity.

3) That freedom is very often accepted by Catholics not as a value, but as a lesser evil in the given historical situation.

3. Let us now see how from this permanence of the medieval political ideal the dualistic position characteristic of modern Catholic politics is generated in the modern historical climate (from the absolutism of the Baroque age to Christian Democracy).

1) The historical situation in relation to which the medieval theocratic ideal had been thought has changed; but with the interpretation that this was an absolute and not a historical ideal, the following political position arises: such an ideal can no longer be immediately founded on persuasion; it will therefore be a question of thinking about having recourse to a force external to this that will re-establish the historical conditions in which this persuasion is possible. Therefore, alliance with dynastic absolutism, to use the ambitions of the princes for the return of medieval religious-political unity. Introducing Machiavellianism into the Christian theory of politics (reason of state). What is important to note in this position is the dissociation of politics and religion (which I have shown above arises from the recourse in politics to a force external to religious persuasion). I will show further below how it takes the form of dissociation of the end and the means. The Christian party is specified by the end and no longer by the means, [which are] always political, therefore always human and imperfect.

Correlative to this dissociation is – but this will be analyzed in depth only further on – the impossibility of distinguishing whether the ideal is desired due to religious faith or whether religious ideology is a tool, a tactic for realizing a worldly ideal. In fact absolutism was by no means an instrument for religious restoration, but rather religion became a political instrument of absolutism. (It is in this position that the figure of clericalism arises: a political regime uses religion as an instrument; and conversely, Catholics accept a non-Christian regime for the worldly advantages it can offer them). It is in this situation of instrumentalized religion that the revolutions (French and Russian) originate.

2) Once the outwardly religious regime has fallen, we have the position of reactionary Catholicism. Alliance with the forces that want a return to the past regime, a restoration of facts and not of principles. The anticlericalism of the Third French Republic was the practical result and the failure of this position.

3) When one thinks that the return is impossible, a defensive position arises. The new regime and the principle of freedom are accepted and no longer questioned, because this is not possible under the given historical conditions. One intends to defend in this regime the interests of the church and of Catholics. There is therefore an alliance with the classes in which Catholicism is still strong (petite bourgeoisie, peasants, etc.). This position is Christian Democracy or at least a widespread way of understanding it. Hence its flaws:

1) The impossibility of forming a true elite. A true elite is possible only in a party of principles and not in a party of interests (that is, one which defends certain interests, even those of the best part of the nation). The elite is made up of men who will be able to “maneuver”, to obtain the best interests in difficult conditions. That is, as they say, of practical people and not of idealists.

2) The dissociation of ends and means persists. If the Christian Democratic Party is generally a moderate party, this is not because of the fact that it only wants to use means that conform to the Christian conception of man, but because of these other facts: a) That, insofar as it accepts to operate in a given regime, it is a conservative party, even if it is open to a certain progress (and as they say, a party of the center. Which I do not reprove at all; but the center can to be understood as overcoming and mediation or as compromise. And now, precisely because of those defects that we are examining, it is compromise). b) Since it is a party in which men of all classes are represented, it cannot take on the rigid intransigence of classical conservatism.

3) The fact that Christian democracy is often desired as a tactic to make political ideals which have a purely external conformity with Christianity triumph. And therefore the adjective Christian simply means that this democratic party mobilizes its forces above all in the Christian camp, not that Christianity is the party’s food. In fact, if we consider our common experience, we find Giolittians who are also Catholic (but not Giolittians because they are Catholics), reformist socialists, and at the extreme wing, maximalist socialists (the communists had to separate due to their revolutionary position, and form the Christian left; we note, however, that this cannot be valid as a sole exposition of their movement; communist Catholics want to be communists because they are Catholics, and in this overcoming of the dualistic position lies their sympathetic note. Their error lies, we will see, in their philosophical and historical evaluation of communism). And we note that Catholicism means in these men, in a certain way, a weakening of these same ideals. Liberalism is reduced to Giolittism, that is, to liberalism which has become a method of administration. Reformist socialism, which derives from a misinterpretation of Marxism as occurring by way of evolution, loses that hope which defined it, which is postponed to an indeterminate historical limit, and becomes collaborationism under the name of corporatism.

The party therefore seems to be nothing more than an agglomeration of men from other parties who are also Catholic.

4) The Christian Democratic Party as a religious party is a party that brings together men from different social classes. This could, should be its strength. It must be the strength of a truly Christian party. Only then can it succeed in overcoming Marxism. In fact, what is the strength of Marxist reasoning? Every party is inevitably a class party, that is, every man’s ideas are really determined by the class to which he belongs. In order for Marxism to be defeated, it is necessary to know how to constitute a truly super-class, that is, religious party. Otherwise Marxism is already logically victorious, even if its victory may be delayed in time (and Marxism knows how to wait until the historical situation for this victory arises; therefore its guise today of progressive democracy, and we will see what this means in five years if do not know how to truly organize a Christian party. For now we are faced with this fact: communism is gaining ground every day).

But since, in relation to what we have already said, it is a party of interests, this is its contradiction, which will mark its death if it fails to overcome this position: it does not really carry out a super-classist policy but an indecisive and fluctuating classist policy, relying opportunistically, for example, very often on peasants. Exposed to being, as it already was in the form of the Popular Party, continually blackmailed by them, who realized that it needed their vote (and for which it could pose as a class party, smiling very little to the peasant at the idea of ​​becoming, in a communist regime, yes, ideally owner of the land, but in fact an agricultural employee of the state), with the constant threat of secessions (the Peasants’ Party which today curiously reappears in Alba and Asti). Due to this indecision and fluctuation, and not for any other reason, its position cannot be other than that of a center, but of a center not intended as an ideal overcoming, but [rather] as a political practice of indecision and compromise.

What did Marx mean by the term “materialism”[?] … I think that the simplest way to arrive at a clarification of his meaning is to resume the well-known pages in which Max Scheler defines by opposition the type of vision of life inspired by the idea of ​​homo sapiens and that inspired by the idea of ​​homo faber.

Whatever one might think of Scheler’s general philosophy, of the further deepening that his characterization would imply, of the very terms homo sapiens and homo faber, of his insufficient warning about the connection between the conception of homo faber and atheism (so much so that he subsequently posits postulatory atheism as an irreducible type), of the idea of ​​homo sapiens as an invention (in the etymological sense) of the Greeks, and of the conceptual distinction between the idea of ​​man inspired by Judeo-Christian religious faith and that of homo sapiens (even if they have in fact merged), we must agree with him about the thesis of the two irreducible conceptions of human nature, as well as, at least in general terms, the assertion that “it is essential to see clearly that this doctrine of homo sapiens has taken in the eyes of the whole of Europe the most dangerous character that an idea can take: the character of being self-evident, of a thing that goes without saying. Yet reason ... is only an invention of the Greeks! To my knowledge, only two writers have fully recognized this fact: Wilhelm Dilthey and Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche understood that the traditional idea of ​​truth is logically connected with the notion of God and disappears with it ... he posed the radical question of the meaning and value of what is called ‘truth itself’”.1 In fact, the Enlightenment, even in its most naturalistic forms, moves completely within the conception of homo sapiens. Marx himself, who in my opinion begins the opposite view of man, is not fully aware of it, so as to allow the Engelsian exposition, which is precisely the translation of his thought into what is called “speculative philosophy”. The real warning, combined with that of the coincidence between the disappearance of the ancient idea of ​​truth and the passage to the mythical age, is much more in Nietzsche than in Dilthey.

Four qualities define the first conception: “1) man possesses in himself an agent of divine essence which every nature does not contain as a subject (hence the distinction between man and animal). 2) This agent and the power that eternally shapes and organizes the world are ontologically, or at least as to their principle, one and the same thing: hence the aptitude of reason at knowing the world. 3) This agent, as λόγος and as human reason, can, without the cooperation of the inclinations and sensations common to man and animal, demonstrate its power and realize its ideal contents (“power of the spirit”, “force proper to the idea”). 4) This agent remains absolutely the same throughout history, and is identical from one people to another and from one class to another.”2

In short, what defines the vision of the world inspired by the idea of ​​homo sapiens is the theory of participation that dominated in an undisputed form from Plato to Hegel, not even affected by the antithesis of theism and pantheism. Now it happens that in Hegel the fourth thesis that characterizes this theory, that of stability, was criticized and denied. Man must access in a process of becoming the growing consciousness of what he is from eternity, according to his idea; and it is in this process that the eternal divinity becomes aware of itself in man.

In my opinion, Marx’s philosophical work lies in the passage from this negation to that of the three others that specify the idea of ​​participation; the result is precisely the transition to the idea of ​​homo faber.3 First of all, the rejection of the thesis that man is measured by Reason (by the presence of the divine) in favor of that of man as the measure of reason; consequently, after the critique of the Feuerbachian thesis about human nature, the thesis of man who thinks only as a man of a specific historical situation, that is, the thesis of social man, and the correlative one for which thought loses all revelatory character with respect to the Reason which governs the world and becomes an activity that transforms reality, an activity whose objectivity is verified in practice. Moreover, integral materialism, because if thought is the thought of social man, in the sense that has been said, man thinks inasmuch as he is in relation to other beings, inasmuch as he is a living body; and if thought is praxis, that is, human sensitive activity, it is expressive and non-revelatory thought, and it is nothing beyond its sensitive manifestation.

But from this we see the inseparability of the idea of ​​Revolution, in the Marxian sense, from integral materialism, because only in this connection can it have a positive content: the substitution of a civilization dominated by the idea of ​​participation, in the various interpretations which it can assume, by a civilization inspired instead by the opposite idea of ​​homo faber, in the meaning that Marx gives it. If this connection is denied, socialism which has accepted the values ​​of the opposite side lapses by necessity into a form of humanitarian reformism; and revolutionary thought dissociated from it takes the form of anarchic negativism (the revolution of nihilism!) necessarily allying itself with the decadent form of bourgeois thought, irrationalism.

In short, it seems to me that the essential point for understanding Marx’s philosophy is to start from his atheism4, and from there proceed to explain his materialism and not vice versa. So understanding as well as criticizing Marxism must begin with the recognition of two types of philosophy. The first is that for which there is a reason superior to man, no matter whether transcendent or immanent, and man’s task is to understand it and, in practice, to serve it. One understands that materialism, which can be defined in the usual way as a philosophy according to which “there is nothing beyond the sensible”, manifests itself, introduced within this vision of the world, in a position of inferiority, because it cannot explain human reality and the world of history; it therefore must make human consciousness a passive reflection of natural reality. The opposition of idealism and realism must, therefore, according to Marxian thought, come out from within that philosophy which Marxists call speculative or theological (and which I would call the “philosophy of participation”) to change into the opposition between speculative philosophy and philosophy of praxis. In this passage to the thought that today would be called “technical” (“the philosophers have done nothing but interpret the world in various ways; but what matters is to change it”) it would be shown that materialism is real humanism, the philosophy of human autonomy and of its creative capacity, while idealism is a philosophy of activity in the abstract, because it only fits into reality as a form of justification for a historical situation that it did not constitute. The real process of production escapes it, and therefore it cannot understand work.