Rosmini: Life and Teaching
Chapter 1
Rosmini's Life (1)
ANTONIO Rosmini-Serbati was born on March 24th, 1797, at Rovereto, a prosperous town in the Tyrol, then part of the Austro-Hungarian dominions in northern Italy. His father, Pier Modesto, was an upright, conservative head of a wealthy family that included Giovanna, Antonio's mother, a woman of great piety and sensitivity, Gioseffa Margherita, Rosmini's sister, about three years older than himself, and later Giuseppe, his younger brother. A warm relationship between Antonio and his sister, who would die as a Daughter of Charity of Canossa at the age of 39, was noticeably different from that between him and Giuseppe, whose unstable character was to cause his brother considerable concern later in life.
The great influences on the young Antonio were his mother, his bachelor uncle Ambrogio, a noted artist who also formed part of the Rosmini household, and Don Piero Orsi, a local priest who guided the adolescent's philosophical studies. But everyone in the household seems to have contributed to developing the extraordinary balance that was so marked a feature of Rosmini's life as a child and as a young man. It was in the family that he first experienced the practical Christianity of a closely knit community: Rosmini's nurse and his earliest tutor, for example, formed part of that 'community' until their death. Here, too, he felt the general aversion to the excesses of the French Revolution that remained with him all his life. The 'domestic society', as he would later call it, also proved the perfect foil for the exuberant enthusiasm that marked Rosmini's early life.
It was typical of the civic spirit of the family that Rosmini's education should be entrusted for ten years to the public academy in Rovereto. Having learnt to read at home from the Bible and religious books, he began school as a seven-year-old, completed the normal course, and simultaneously educated himself as a polymath in his uncle's library. There seems little doubt that at the age of sixteen, the foundations of immense erudition had been laid and that Rosmini had formulated for himself a rigorous method of study which precluded the waste of a single instant (2). At the same time, he was genuinely popular with his peers.
Rosmini's last two years at school gave him the opportunity of a philosophical grounding which developed to an extraordinary extent in the additional classes held for himself and other youngsters of well-to-do families. He was able to write to a friend in 1816 defining philosophy as 'the great, first and fundamental study, the principle and key to all the others' (3). The young man's higher studies were completed in the theology and canon law faculties of the university of Padua, where he also studied medicine in some depth. His long-desired ordination to the priesthood took place in 1821, the same year in which he gained clear insight into the principle or rule which was to govern all his future activity. To explain this, however, we have to retrace our steps a little.
Until this moment, Rosmini's life although noted for application to studies, was also remarkable for spiritual intensity and a desire to love God and his neighbour which had found an outlet in immense projects characteristic of his great breadth of mind. His attempt to found a publishing house destined to produce a Christian Encyclopaedia rivalling the French Encyclopaedia of the previous century was wholly consistent with his intellectual and spiritual aims. His projected Society of Friends (4) was another massive, world-wide undertaking that he had at heart. More practical was his attempt to found in the Rosmini home a library that would serve the intelligentsia of the whole town.
But all these plans came to nothing, and Rosmini was compelled to ask himself whether they sprang more from his subjective desire to do good than from a desire to do the will of God. He concluded that true wisdom dictated immediate attention to his own holiness, but acceptance of good works only when it became obvious that this was the will of God for him. He called this his 'principle of passivity', a principle that would simultaneously offer him the opportunity of uniting a deeply prayerful life with readiness to undertake whatever work for his neighbour should be placed in his path by Providence.
From 1821 to 1828 Rosmini was led by this principle to devote himself to study first at Rovereto, where he had inherited the considerable family fortune on the death of his father, and later at Milan where he was able to take advantage of the facilities provided by the great libraries in the city. Here he prepared his first great philosophical work on the origin of ideas, and undertook a thorough examination of the rules of religious orders throughout the history of the Church.
In 1823, Rosmini went for the first time to Rome where he met Cardinal Castiglione, later Pius VIII, and Cardinal Cappellari, later Gregory XVI, and could have embarked on a prestigious ecclesiastical career. But his most enduring memory of the journey was the encouragement he received from Pius VII to persevere in his philosophical studies. The Pope's words were an assurance for Rosmini that these studies truly formed part of God's calling for him, and he returned to the north of Italy determined to pursue them. At the time of his third visit to Rome (1830) he was already well known in Italian literary circles. Manzoni (5) and Tommaseo (6) in particular were outstanding friends of his.
Rosmini's study of religious life in the Church had been prompted in part by an invitation, which he did not pursue, to collaborate in the foundation of a religious order of men. This was intended to correspond to one for women instituted by Maddalena di Canossa, a formidable and holy descendant of the redoubtable Matilda di Canossa. But his work did come to fruition in a practical sense when he took the opportunity provided by Providence to leave the comfort of Milan in 1828 for an isolated sanctuary at Domodossola, a singularly unattractive Piedmontese town near the Italo-Swiss border. Here in solitude he wrote Constitutiones Societatis a Caritate nuncupatae (7) a remarkable work that incorporated his own 'principle of passivity' (8) and his intimate knowledge of the experience provided by the continuing development of religious life throughout the history of the Church. The Institute of Charity, which grew as companions joined Rosmini at Domodossola and which he governed until his death, looks to these Constitutions as the written basis of its spiritual existence.
In 1830 Rosmini, already well known through various philosophical writings of an occasional nature, principally on happiness and the unity of education, published his Nuovo saggio sull'origine delle idee (New Essay on the Origin of Ideas) (9). This was followed by a torrent of philosophical and theological works which continued in full flood until his death in 1855.
The last twenty-five years of Rosmini's life were marked not only by his literary activity and the government of his religious Institute, but by a crescendo of opposition from political and religious adversaries. The intense criticism to which he was subject made itself felt in the difficulties raised about the pontifical approval of his Congregation, in the problems caused for him by the Austrian government, in the furious polemic aroused by his Trattato sulla coscienza morale (10), and in his rejection by Pius IX, at whose request Rosmini had accompanied the Pope on his flight from Rome to Gaeta after the assassination in 1848 of Pellegrino Rossi, prime minister of the Papal States.
During this period, opinions about Rosmini varied from those expressed in a quasi-epitaph written by Gregory XVI in the document of approbation of the Institute of Charity (11) to the accusations levelled at him by his opponents. For the Pope, he was a priest 'endowed with lofty and surpassing genius, adorned with extraordinary gifts of soul, renowned in the highest degree for his knowledge of things human and divine, distinguished for his remarkable piety' (12); for others he was 'a hypocrite, disloyal, a Jansenist wolf, a teacher of hellish doctrine, a traitor to the Church, and of such human and diabolical evil that it would be difficult to go further' (13).
To the world at large, Rosmini remained a centre of controversy until his death in 1855, and for many years afterwards. His devotion to the Church brought him to accept without difficulty, but with immense pain, the listing (1849) of his Delle cinque piaghe della santa chiesa (14) and his La Costituzione civile secondo la giustizia sociale (15) on the Index of Forbidden Books (16). On the other hand an extensive examination by a papal commission instituted for the purpose declared in 1854, one year before Rosmini's death, that all his works should be dismissed without censure of any kind (17).
While the controversy raged, Rosmini continued to study and write. Almost his last published work was Sulla liberta' dell'insegnamento (18) (Freedom to Teach), written in defence of threatened liberty in the schools of Piedmont. But many of his interesting and important writings remained unpublished at his death. These will be detailed in the examination to which we must now subject the major propositions of what Rosmini called 'the system of truth'.
Notes
(1) Cf. Vita di Antonio Rosmini, by a priest of the Institute of Charity, revised and updated by Guido Rossi, 2 vols., Rovereto 1959; Claude Leetham, Rosmini, Priest and Philosopher, New York 1982.
(2) Rosmini's use of time is one of the most striking external features of his life, and remains something of a mystery even today. His phenomenal literary output numbers more than 80 volumes on every aspect of philosophy and theology, and his edited correspondence (about two-thirds of all his letters, part of which form treatises on their own) runs to 13 volumes of about 700 pages each (Epistolario completo, vols I-XIII, Casale Monferrato 1887). By necessity a great traveller in northern and central Italy, he also founded a religious congregation, the Institute of Charity, was endlessly engaged in the great questions of the day, carried out his spiritual duties as priest and as director of hundreds of souls, and was noted for his hospitality.
(3) To Giovanni Fedrigotti at Vienna (EC, vol. 1, p. 157).
(4) The name could be misleading in an English-speaking context. No reference is intended to Quaker assemblies.
(5) The author of Italy's most famous novel, I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed).
(6) The great lexicographer, compiler of Dizionario della lingua italiana (Turin 1865), 'perhaps the only truly worthy monument to Italian unity' (Gianfranco Folena in his Introduction to the Dictionary, 1977)
(7) [London, 1875]; translated as The Constitutions of the Society of Charity, Durham 1988.
(8) Rosmini's basic teaching on the spiritual life will be found in his Maxims of Perfection [1830] (Cf. Rosminian Spirituality, An Anthology, Cardiff 1977, pp. 171-199. However, translations of MP in the present work are made directly from the critical edition, Stresa 1981).
(9) Nuovo Saggio sull'origine delle idee [1830], 3 vols., EN, Rome 1934; second volume translated under the title, The Origin of Thought, Durham 1988, third volume translated as Certainty, Durham 1992.
(10) [1839], translated under the title Conscience, Durham 1989.
(11) In Sublimi [1839], published with an accompanying Italian translation, Turin 1894.
(12) Ibid. p. 78.
(13) The language, although fairly typical of that used in philosophical controversy at the time, does no honour to its author.
(14) Delle cinque piaghe della santa Chiesa [1846], translated under the title, The Five Wounds of the Church, Durham 1986.
(15) La Costituzione civile secondo la giustizia sociale [1848], Milan 1952.
(16) see chap. 3, `Controversies'.
(17) see chap. 3, `Controversies', for a brief description of posthumous difficulties.
(18) [1854] L'Aquila-Rome 1987.