SOURCE: “Religion & Idealism, as Presented by Giovanni Gentile,” in The Hibbert Journal, Vol. XIX, No. 2, January, 1921, pp. 249-62.

[In the following essay, Murri discusses Gentile's ideas about religion in modern Italy as outlined in his Discorsi di religione.]

The great modern nationalities sprang up, in the course of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, out of a religious revolution. But Italy's religious revolution is yet to come; and attention to this fact will go far towards explaining the vacillations, the weaknesses, and the internal contradictions that afflict her and so strangely encumber her path.

There is more. Throughout the Middle Ages and on into the Renascence the attitude of Italians towards the Papacy and the Church of Rome showed a marked independence of judgment; and fresh springs of the religious life often rose from the bosom of the popular consciousness independently of any direct ecclesiastical impulse. We have only to think of Francis of Assisi, of Catherine of Siena, of Dante, or of Savonarola. But on the other hand, subsequently to the great religious movement of separation initiated by Luther, Catholic Italy was forced with ever-increasing stringency to carry the weight of the papal interests and the spirit of the counter-reformation, till gradually every flicker of spiritual freedom was quenched. It was not till the time of the Napoleonic hurricane, and just after it, that the temporary collapse of the anciennes régimes left the country open without further obstacle to the influx of ideas from abroad, under which the religious life recovered a certain initiative, contemporaneously with the movement for national independence and unity.

Mazzini is, first and foremost, a spiritual prophet and a religious reformer. The scrupulously Catholic Manzoni lifts the standard of a Christianity of gentleness, goodness, and renunciation. Gioberti's and Rosmini's unsparing exposures, keen polemics, and projects for practical reform lashed the abuses of the Church, but at the same time stirred in her bosom a fresh impulse to philosophical speculation. Yet, broadly speaking, all interests of a purely religious character were subordinate to the overmastering demand for political independence and unity. It was this that determined Cavour, whose example was followed by all the non-revolutionary liberals, to treat the internal freedom of the Church and of the Papacy with a scrupulous respect that kept pace with his zeal in stripping off their temporal powers so as to exclude them from direct influence upon politics. This went so far that, on the passage of the Law of the Guarantees,¹ Bettino Ricasoli (twice President of the Council, after Cavour) could declare that the New Italy was sacrificing and slaying, as the price of peace with the Papacy, that very religious liberty which it had seemed to be her mission to establish. Meanwhile the Left and the Mazzinians, overtaken by the rising stream of a frankly materialistic trend of thought, lost all feeling for religious questions and surrendered to a dogmatically atheistic movement which still further impoverished the already feeble Italian spirituality.

It is not till we come to the very last years of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth that we can note, in Christian Democracy and Modernism, any stirrings of a fresh awakening. And even the Christian Democrats contemplated from the first a political objective beyond their primary cultural mission; for they hoped to reintroduce the Catholics into the currents of the civic thought and life of the country, from which they had withdrawn in sullen isolation, under the impression that their political abstention and negation might serve the cause of the political and temporal revindication of the Papacy. But when the hostility of the Papacy itself, though at first doubtful, had become pronounced, and had repudiated and condemned the movement in its leading characteristic (its affirmation, namely, of the political autonomy of the Italian Catholics), Christian Democracy was driven back upon the original impulse of its idealistic aspirations and was transformed into Modernism, that is to say, the critical re-examination of the values of historical Catholicism. The feebler and more timid of the Christian Democrats returned to the orthodox fold, and the rest broke up to carry into all the varied cultural and political movements of the time the ferment and leaven of spiritual renovation.

Meanwhile, in this first decade of the century, there was spreading a new movement of philosophical idealism. It was but of recent origin, and it found its expression in the works of Benedetto Croce (now a Senator, and the Minister of Public Instruction) and of his contemporary and colleague in the review La Critica, Giovanni Gentile. Their teaching was labelled as a form of neo-Hegelianism, and such indeed it was. But it attached itself more immediately to Italian thinkers who had brought rich powers of originality to bear on their task of interpreting the German transcendental philosophy—a Rosmini, a Gioberti, and still more a Bertrando Spaventa. Indeed, it went still further back, behind Hegel and Kant, to the divinations of that great Italian student, Giambattista Vico.

When Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile found themselves in the presence of Italian Modernism and had to reckon with it, their first judgment was harsh and sympathetic. These Moderns were a guileless folk, wavering between Catholic orthodoxy and free criticism, with a taste for provisional reconciliations that paid little heed to logic, and who tried to put on the drag by picking up and reserving suggestions that had already run their full and fruitful course in the channels of modern culture with no assistance from Catholicism.

But gradually Modernism came to clearer consciousness of itself; and the two philosophers, on their side, were developing their philosophy in the direction of reaching out beyond concepts, in their diversity or unity, and beyond the dialectic of categories and oppositions, into the living movement of the spirit itself. And so it came about that Croce and Gentile modified their first judgment and began to speak of religion and of Christianity with more lively sympathy and understanding. To the two thinkers moving along differing lines of approach, religion came to be seen no longer as a mere philosophia inferior, but as the expression and the designation of a perennial factor of spiritual impulse, the “will for the universal,” or the “ethical will”;—so Croce called it, declaring that the moral doctrine of Idealism found marvellous expression in the eternal symbols of the Gospel, and that since the advent of Christ it had been impossible for the morality of the civilised world to be other than Christian in the ground tissue of its ethical life, as related to the essence of the Gospel. Giovanni Gentile, too, dated from the rise of Christianity the birth of that concrete idealism which he regards as the full and consistent revindication of the moral life and the freedom of the spirit, asserting itself against the abstract idealism of Plato and of the Greek philosophy.

Gentile has gone on to develop his conception of religion with progressively increasing clarity and precision in his Sommario di pedagogia, his Lo spirito come atto puro, and finally in the Discorsi di religione, published in the current year,² to which this brief study is more immediately directed.

If we accept the conception of religion that has hitherto prevailed and regard it as a relation of the soul to God—a God already fully and completely there, as the sum of unmovable reality, inaccessible to the finite spirit of man; and if again we are to regard the spirit of man itself as a concrete thing, or existence, an object amongst objects; and if, finally, we are to regard religious truth as a revelation that comes to the human spirit from without, conveyed to it by physical means, and demanding passive acceptance, then Gentile must declare that “actual idealism” (which is the name he gives to his system) is frankly unreligious, and even, in the orthodox use of the word, atheistic.

But then he will at once bid us note that we have only defined the religious attitude of the spirit, or religion itself, in terms of a certain philosophy and as one of its functionings. We have made confession not of a religious faith but of a philosophical system, and that system pre-critical, naturalistic, based on the principle of attraction.³ Now, neither this Aristotelian God (the immobile first mover, already full and complete in himself, without internal movement or development, external to the human spirit and separated from it by an infinite distance), nor the supreme Good (that Platonic celestial idea, from which the soul is exiled, but of which it retains an obscure impression, and to which it must win its way back, so as to contemplate it at last in its beatific fulness), really pertains to spirit at all, but rather to objective nature, that is to say, to the other-than-ourselves, wholly diverse from us, complete and accomplished in itself, external to our thought, and such that our thought can never be it—that is to say, can never grasp it, make it truly its own, know it. And this soul—which in its turn is a being, a thing, a reality distinct by its very constitution from other realities—itself again pertains to objective nature; that is to say, is something external to the act of thought, coming from we know not where. Thought struggles in vain to grasp it, since it belongs by definition and essence to that region of “otherness” which exists in itself and not in me, the unknowable, the ungraspable, that which precedes thought and is external to it. And just as the “thought” which presupposes a reality external to itself (complete and made up in itself before thought comes upon the scene), so that thought must confine itself to passively reflecting it, is in truth no thought of anything that really is—nay, since the real existence lies outside it, does not truly exist at all,—just so the moral act which has to follow a law given from without, and has to actualise a Good already there in its full integrity, which no finite act can either add anything to or take anything from, is not really moral at all, that is to say, free. For it has its model outside itself, and by hypothesis is only good in so far as it conforms to that model, that is to say, to a goodness which is not intrinsic to itself, or established by itself, but which comes from without, and consists in conformity to an external model, which model alone is truly good,—and yet, after all, we must likewise exclude goodness from it too, since it is in itself the whole made-up sum of reality, the totality of absolute necessity, objective nature, not spirit.

These conclusions are logical developments of the fundamental conception of Gentile's philosophy, according to which thought presupposes no datum, or reality external to itself, whether you call it space or nature, but knows just in so far as it precipitates out of itself the object of its knowledge. For, since it cannot pass out of itself (and it is unthinkable that it should), it contains transcendentally everything in itself, and the thought is no other than the act of that which thinks, regarded as object, distinguished from the subject and set over against it in the act of thought, though in reality identical with it. But note what we are to understand by “thinking” an action that is also a becoming, i.e. auto-consciousness which can be equated with autoktisis—a favourite word of Gentile's, this last, and one pre-eminently expressive of his thought.

And note again that thought is essentially identical with will, notwithstanding that the vulgar opinion makes the will an activity distinct from thought, devoted to alienating the spirit from itself, transforming it from ego into an ego, from subject into object; and, notwithstanding, that the naturalistic philosophy (which, as we have seen, includes every system which distinguishes between thought and reality) regards the will as engaged in making something which is already made, which already exists, and in virtue of its accomplished existence defies, in its absolute immobility, the possibility of being anything but what it is.

This is the central point of Gentile's philosophy, which we must grasp and hold firm if we are to understand all the logical deductions from it. He drives it home by a penetrating analysis that reveals all philosophy as nothing else, in its perennial principle, than an attempt to resolve reality into thought. He shows that no philosophy, even though it start from a naturalistic presupposition and thesis, can really help announcing itself, in the very act of its emergence, as a veritable and complete resolution of actuality into the very thought which envisages it as distinct from itself, though in truth it is, all the time, of its own precipitated intellectum, and only so can be said to be acquired and secured by it. Even scepticism, in declaring reality to be unknowable, posits so much knowledge of reality as is involved in declaring it to be unknowlable, and thereby affirms its existence as the unknowability—which it knows! In possession of this existence, as its stock in trade, scepticism goes on to build up a world of its own, wherein, after the first belying of a thought which, in the very act of denying, it affirms, it goes on to a second, by annexing will and action. For is not action based on the practical certainty of a correspondence between the internal and the external reality, between the subject and the object?

It was only with Descartes that philosophy began to disentangle itself from the inextricable contradictions by which the object, though constituted by the subject in the actual moment of philosophising, proceeded to detach itself therefrom and to shut itself up in impenetrability and incomprehensibility. And even Descartes, though his cogito ergo sum makes thought the starting-point of being and resolves being ideally into it, yet himself immediately falls back into dogmatism by referring the evidence for this primal, original, and creative act of thought to a something outside itself, which it neither constitutes nor does nor creates. Thus thought falls back upon itself, as a form without content, with no reality left to it. The demand reasserted itself successively in Leibniz and Spinoza, who were feeling for a complete and absolute rationalising of the real; and with Berkeley, though he too, for all his essc est percipi, still leaves the reality of objective nature, opaque and obscure, outside the percipere. Kant made a further advance by reducing the real, together with space and time, to a priori categories in the spirit, and, in his a priori synthesis of the spirit, affirming the identity of thought and reality; but then he let reality escape him again, by emptying the categories themselves of the noumenon which lay within and behind phenomena. In like manner reality evades Fichte, whose transcendental ego never succeeds in drawing the non ego into itself. It evades Hegel, who posits Space and Nature antecedently to actual thought, and so falls into the hands of anyone who chooses to assert that before and outside actual thought, or thought in action (thought, that is, which is just the coincidence of being and making, and nothing more), there is some kind of reality, or necessity and factor of reality, which cannot be resolved in its totality and without residuum into the actual thought itself, as an interior logical factor, ever denied and ever reaffirmed in the process of becoming or making.

But how does religion emerge from this doctrine, and what place has it therein?

Note, before proceeding further, the wonderful resemblance, nay rather complete identity, between what Gentile says of his pure act and what the Schoolmen, treading in the footprints of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, say of that pure act which is none other than God.⁴ To Gentile and the Schoolmen alike “pure actuality” is the absolute totality, originality, and creativity, unconditioned itself by the time and space which it posits as the modes of existence of concrete and empirical individuality. It knows no past or future, save as internal oppositions, relations, and gradations within the actuality itself, pullulating there in infinite alternations. In a word, it is just—absolute actuality.

The difference between the one and the other pure actuality lies just here:—The scholastic pure actuality is conceived as ultramundane and supramundane, external to the finite thought (which nevertheless is actually thinking it), interminabilis vitœ tota simul et perfecta possessio,⁵ immobile in its absoluteness, pure being and infinite negation of becoming; whereas the things which it creates, external to itself, are bound in by their finiteness, are multiplex, are closed up by their very existence as individuals against any real possibility of union. Gentile's pure actuality, on the contrary, is not absolute being but absolute becoming. It is a process, a relation continuously reestablishing itself as the unity of things distinguished and the synthesis of things opposite. Things and nature and concrete empirical individualities are not outside it but in it, are itself in its perennial self-making. Its being is this very self-making itself, and is embraced, absolutely without mediation, in the act of thought itself, the primary and transcendent actuality, autoconsciousness and autoktisis. Thus, all that we think and see to exist has its reality in the reality of that which thinks, and which is, because it makes, the universe—and that universe its own.

And just because this act is not a station but a process, not pure subject nor pure object, but subject-object, spirit objectifying itself (whence nature), and reality spiritualising itself (whence consciousness), and just because this process is included in the very act of constituting subject and object alike, as factors in all concrete becoming, distinguishing them but reuniting them in the auto-consciousness wherein philosophy consists, just for this very reason, I say, we can understand how religion rises in the life of the spirit, and what is its function there.

When the spirit conceives itself as subject and transfuses itself into things, endowing them with its conscious presence and making them its own expressions of itself, this is art. It is pure subjectivity and lyrical expression. But the spirit, in the very act of feeling itself as subject, particularising itself, entering completely into the individual and expressing itself in it, becomes aware of its own limitation, and longs to escape from itself, from the factor of the particular moment in which the original infinity is individualised, and which was originally infinite though individualised, but which has now all at once become a throttling sense of the pressure of limitations. So then it seeks to escape from itself again in the reverse direction, posits and affirms itself as an object, but asserts the absolute objectivity, the totality of things, as something not its own and not itself, transcending it and every other particular factor of existence, infinite, eternal, unmovable. And under pressure of this sense of the limits of the subject and the unlimitedness of the object, the spirit bows down and surrenders itself, and would fain cancel and lose itself and vanish away. Here then we have the factor of mysticism, which Gentile, with a few felicitous examples and citations, sets forth as characteristic of religion, and specifically of Christian religion, exemplified in Paul and the great mystics.

But if this were all, and if the spirit really obliterated itself in this affirmation of objectivity and lost consciousness of itself therein, then religion would mean neither life nor morality, but rather the negation of both. For morality is free activity, the making of good; and therefore it involves the affirmation of the worth of the subject as capable of acting freely and creating good. So if the various factors of the spirit should come to be understood statically, and not in their dynamic movement—the reciprocity by which each factor, as soon as constituted, loses and at the same time realises itself in the other, to which it is united by a relation at once transcendent and immanent,—then we should have to rule out the religious factor in the name of philosophy. But it is not so. For philosophy has her being in the unity of opposites, in subject-objectivity and object-subjectivity, in synthesis, in actuality which continually asserts itself in the alternation of subject, object, and the synthesis of the two.

Hence religion, a factor of the spirit seen under the light of spiritual dialectic, is a self-losing of the subject in the object from which there arises an ulterior and higher affirmation of the subject. It is the mediating intervention of the particular in the universal, wherein the soul loses itself to find itself again. Or, in less technical language, it is the sense of reverence and devout humility and dedication that our empirical and ephemeral personality, conscious of its limitations and its penury, feels for reality and life and absolute spiritual values considered as full and complete in themselves, as eternally and infinitely valid, worthy to claim that every particularised interest or volition or form of being should accept them as divine truth and transcendent and unchallengeable will, should annual itself before them, should deny itself in its concrete particular, to affirm and glorify them to infinity. In this act of glorifying, the ego, yea the individual and empirical ego, reaffirms itself, but only so far as it feels itself one with that absolute and eternal ego which it began by venerating as transcendent.

Gentile, then, has every right to declare that his actual idealism “does not deny religion, but only the interpretation which religion⁶ gives of herself, or rather of her object. It looks to a conception of reality on which the mind may rest with the same faith in which it abandons itself to God in its sincerest religious experiences.” The difference between idealism and dogmatism lies in the philosophical connotation, conceptual and verbal alike, of reality; their identity, in the act and value of religion itself.

But perhaps all this may look like mere philosophical subtlety, appealing only to speculative students trying to give themselves a distinct account of life and religion. Sincerely and practically religious souls may well look with suspicion on this idealism, and may challenge it as to its true relation to religion on another line. “Do you really believe,” they may ask, “that this doctrine of yours is capable of inspiring a line of practical conduct, a vital spirit of action, corresponding to that which religion at large, in its purest inspirations, and Christianity in especial, prompts and imposes on its followers? Can it, for instance, say with full conviction: ‘Consider your neighbour as you would consider yourself’? In other words, can your principles yield a moral norm, a religious training? If so, let us have them and let us see what we are to think of them.” It is precisely this challenge that Gentile takes up in the third of his Discorsi di religione, which I regard as his most interesting and novel contribution to philosophy, and of which a very free epitome here follows.

I need hardly premise that the main objections which idealism has to meet are two. Firstly, there is the idea that it resolves into thought the reality of nature and of the “external” world, of sensation and perception, and in general of all reality save the ego, which it leaves in solitary possession of its realm of shadows. Where is there room in it, we are asked, for right and for morality, which consist in relations to some other, whether God, our neighbour, or nature? And secondly, there is the suspicion that, by transferring goodness, morality, and religion to the transcendental field (that is to say, by transforming them into absolute categories realised by the spirit in its dialectic movement, just because it is spirit, or consciousness of subject, consciousness of object, consciousness of subject-object), you simply obliterate moral good and evil. For does not moral good—so runs the protest—mean something that man can do but so often fails to do, the will for good with which he sets about correcting the determinism of nature and instinct, by grafting on them a higher principle of life—one act of love, as Pascal put it, being mightier than all nature? Is it not the ideal that has to be realised and can only be realised by free, that is, contingent action, by the determination and the will of man? And surely there is no room or raison d'être for these things in your system. Or at any rate they are something far other than what you have now been talking about. For, by your very assumption of a transcendental interpretation of religion, that to which you give the name is a factor of every form of human activity, since all alike consist of the mediation of the particular in the universal, the final and immanent resolution of the subject in the object and the object in the subject, and the synthesis of the two terms in the ego. According to this, the act of the spirit will never be anything else than making the universal concrete by limiting it, evil will be no other than a dialectic factor of good, and the “ought to be” of the ideal no other than the “is” envisaged as a “becoming.”

To the first objection Gentile answers that it only rises when idealism is regarded from the point of view of the precritical mentality, that is to say, with the mind fixed on the real as object, datum, nature. For in idealism, rightly understood, the object is every bit as real as the subject, the reality which the thought thinks is as true as the thought itself, and everything is left in the order, hierarchy, and sphere in which it stands to the realist; which order and hierarchy and sphere, however, cannot be, and, truly conceived, never have been, any other than such as thought itself gives to reality; for any other order or gradation which should stand outside thought would ipso facto be unintelligible. So if ethics—the spirit as morality, or freedom—finds its realisation not in the individual man but in human society, in the relations of men to each other, and further in the relations of men themselves to God and nature, this means that the sense of otherness and multiplicity is intrinsic to the dialectic of the spirit itself as it becomes good and feels the command to seek unity in love, and to think of God as being this unity, which unity would be inaccessible were it not already fundamentally present in the very spirit that wills it; would be inaccessible, therefore, if men were, as the old philosophy imagined, completely made up and stereotyped by the very fact of their existence, monads all external to each other, just as the monads of Leibniz would be, were it not for that “pre-established harmony” of his—a supplementary or corrective unity imposed upon thought from outside, and therefore never really entering into thought at all.

If I am bidden to love my neighbour as myself, says Gentile, it is because in reality—in that reality which is my own inmost ego, transcending the superficial and ephemeral multiplicity—that neighbour is my very self. Both in yourself and in your neighbour you are to love humanity; you are to love that self of yours which is absolutely and eternally valid, and which therefore transcends the fluctuating particularisations of time and space and all that finds its place in them. Transcende temetipsum if thou wouldst seek God, said Augustine. But to transcend yourself is an impossibility, it is a mere empty phrase, if that reality in which we are to abide by transcending ourselves is not our self after all, our highest, truest, fullest self. Just as nature is the passage from the one to the manifold, so love is the return from multiplicity to unity, actualised as freedom and morality.

More serious, perhaps, is the second difficulty; for it strikes at the Kantian formalism, and tells, it would seem, still more heavily against the more consistent and complete formalism of actual idealism. Because to Kant the moral category still had a world other than itself and inferior to itself to moralise, to wit, the world of phenomena and of the utilitarian and empirical will. Whereas Gentile's formalism, having nothing else to work upon but the spirit itself, really is the “absolute formalism” which it proclaims itself to be; which means that it definitely rejects the conception of any made-up and established Good which is to be the standard of the goodness we are to develop in ourselves. To Gentile there can be no norma data, antecedent to the free act, to which that act must conform—and by that very fact must itself cease to be free! Still less can there be a reference of the spirit to any shred or form of the concrete and particular which it is the very business of the spirit and of morality to absorb into universality and the consciousness of universality. In any such reference, the norm, the law, the letter may be there, but the essence is gone, and has left behind it—what St Paul means by sin.

We can now formulate more precisely the difficulty of which we have been speaking. If universality is an act, how can it also be a norm? If reality is, transcendentally considered, spirituality, and is at its every moment complete and absolute spiritual actuality, what is the sense and what is the use of saying to us, as Benedetto Croce does,⁷ “Be spirit,” or as Giovanni Gentile does, “Act so that thy actual will may be the universal will”?

I confess that, after carefully reading and pondering over Gentile's writings, I still think that this point deserves further elucidation. But Gentile himself has shown the direction in which we must look for fuller light; for what is wanted is greater precision in determining the relation between the empirical and the transcendental ego, between the unity that lies so deep within but never ceases to be the actuality, and the concrete visible multiplicity not only of men, but of passions, instincts, impulses, promptings of the will, and states of mind that multiply and contend within one and the same individual and all the time bear the flower of his moral personality as their unity and synthesis, never made up but always on the toilsome path of establishing itself, in a conflict which is always on the balance, and in which the victory must be continuous, since opposition springs up from victory itself.

“That,” says Gentile, “is a moral action whose axiom can be regarded not as the law of your phenomenal subject but of your pure ego, that ego whose affirmation and development is the principle of concrete and absolute universality. The phenomenal and particular subject, like all phenomena that alternate and jostle each other in space and time, belongs to the world of multiplicity. But the pure and transcendental subject is unity, and because unity universality.”

If, then, to the transcendent subject the good is a category as transcendental as itself, a dialectic factor that absorbs and resolves evil into itself,—absolute creative freedom,—this good must present itself to the empirical ego as the forcing down and conquest and painful transcending of multiplicity, and the evil that has to be overcome will have just so much reality as has this multiplicity itself, as has the flesh, the law, the world. And it is here, in this consciousness of strife, of the subjection of the spirit to the flesh, and the forceful victory that must break it—it is here that we find the seat of that sense of sin and of redemption, and of that opposition between the spirit and the flesh, that makes us sigh for the divine, for the divine unity and freedom and fullness of life. Here is the field of religious experience. And this experience would be vain, unreal, unthinkable, if we chose to regard it as a special faculty of the spirit, a supernatural intuition or consciousness which had for its proper object a divine reality external to the spirit, immobile, infinite, intrinsically inaccessible. Were such an experience and such a God-nature conceivable, there would indeed be an irreparable cleavage between religion and philosophy; for religion would mean total alienation of the concrete and limited human spirit into God, an alienation wholly unconscious and self-contradicting; whereas philosophy can never be anything else than the assumption of reality in thought, the resolution of reality into thought, and the resultant establishment of reality-thought. Such a reality does not transcend the spirit, but is itself the creation of a spirit that transcends all its own concrete forms and factors; whereas the Aristotelian God can never be the God whom John and Paul affirmed, whom the mystics sought insatiably, whom religion promises to man when it promises him the vita eterna, the absolute life beyond which is nothing, and which is itself beyond the time and space which itself has established as its own internal factors. Dii estis. And since there are no Gods but one, Deus estis.

But being, that is, becoming God, is the spiritual tragedy of life. The spirit is the universe, but this its universe is a hierarchy of values, of things transformed into values; and every concrete universe, every human act which is its own universe to itself, is moral, is religious, is subject to that very valuation which it implies and actualises. So the individual, in this act, has to make his own universe, and has to assign its place therein to everything—to past and future, to nature and God, to the loftiest ideal and the least significant requirement of the moment: a responsibility in which his empirical ego is subjected—by its own will, which yet in the very act of willing is recalcitrant—to an infinite and absolute norm of duty, which is the spirit itself, working in it as universality and absoluteness, sacrificing to itself, in itself, every ephemeral and empty particularisation, and determining that sacrificed it shall be. This is the inmost core of the conception of the sacred and of sacrifice (“sacred-making”), in which all religion lives and moves.

The act of the spirit, then, which conceives itself in the light of absolute value is, by definition, a religious act. But this religion is integral to philosophy. It is no adjunct to it but is lost in it—if philosophy is indeed the auto-consciousness in which empiricity and universality, object and subject, the ephemeral and the absolute, fuse themselves together; and in which free action creates the reality of that living unity which is reality indeed, reality absolute.

“And so,” concludes Gentile, “the deathless life may be called a deathless death; not the death in which the weary soul of Lucretius finds repose, but the death in which repose is never to be found; for thus to die is to live, and the death of religion is the life of the spirit that takes up religion into its own life by transcending it, and in transcending it realises the good and accomplishes its eternal mission.”

Notes

1. See Bolton King's History of Italian Unity, vol. ii. pp. 380 seq.

2. Vallecchi, Florence.

3. “Attraction” must here be understood in its widest etymological sense, as any kind of material or immaterial pull to which any kind of conscious or unconscious trend answers. Such trend may manifest itself as the movement, or impeded tendency to movement, of elemental or elementally organised substances, or as the desire, delight, or other “motion” of a consciousness, or as the voluntary physical movements of an animated being, prompted by his desires, etc. But in every case the pull must be exercised by something that is external and objective to the subject in which that trend exists.

4. “Relinquitur quod Deus, qui est actus purus, sit infinitus in sua actualitate” (Aquinas).

5. Boetius. It is the definition of eternity accepted as classic by the Schoolmen; here applied to the eternal Being.

6. Were it not more accurate to say, “the theologians in the name of religion”?

7. In his Filosofia della practica.