Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, granted an increasingly large place to Italy as his philosophy of science yielded in importance to the establishment of a new religion. Granted, the religious idea, the only one capable of disciplining progress by means of order, was never absent from his system. In the organization of his church, he had first considered giving preeminence to the Germanic nations (after France, that is), where Protestantism and the free examination of conscience had favored the rise of rational thought. The Great Priest of Humanity would have his seat in Paris, assisted by a college composed of eight Frenchmen, seven Englishmen, six Germans, five Italians, and four Spaniards. The Italians would represent, respectively, Piedmont, Lombardy, Tuscany, the Roman Republic, and the Neapolitan region.
He invokes that plan in the first volume of
Système de politique positive (
System of Positive Polity), published in 1851. It had been written in the preceding months: for Comte, the writing process was immediately followed by publication; he meditated for a long time, then wrote in one sitting and never reread what he had written. The book was composed, therefore, on the eve of Cavour’s coming to power. After that, however, Comte announced a different plan. In the fourth and last volume, published in 1854, he explains that, though Protestantism had played a role in the birth of Enlightenment philosophy, it had kept that philosophy from advancing past the stage of metaphysical thought. In the political order, moreover, Protestantism, unable by its very essence to give rise to a spiritual power, placed religion under the control of temporal power: for example, in England with the Anglican Church and in Germany with the Protestant states.
In Comte’s eyes, by contrast, the separation of the two powers, the spiritual and the temporal, had been the major success of medieval Catholicism, and the first task of the Religion of Humanity would be to reinstate it. In that respect, the nations of Western Europe that had been shielded from Protestantism and that best preserved “the felicitous moral culture of the Middle Ages” would also be best able to reconstitute the ideal of temporally independent nations “linked spiritually, however, through a freely-agreed-upon aggregation.”
In the historical evolution of the West, the stage of Protestant negativism, at which Germany and England were arrested, and that of Voltairean deism, which had replaced it in France, were not at all inevitable. Italy and even Spain could easily skip them, just as France had skipped Calvinism. To make up for their apparent delay, southern Europeans would proceed directly from Catholicism to positivism. The Religion of Humanity, liberated from the theological frame of mind and the belief in revelation, would be a new “Catholicism,” in the etymological sense of an aspiration to universality.
As a result, the order of precedence among nations changed. France remained the central nation, but Italy was second, followed by Spain and Great Britain, with Germany in last place. With the Pontiff of Humanity at the center, each country would be represented by a national Superior; three others (not initially foreseen) would represent “the West’s colonial expansions.”
Essentially, Italy was to have priority over Spain because its military inferiority, resulting from its lack of concentrated political power, kept it pure of all colonization: “often oppressed, the Italian people were never the oppressor.” Conversely, the Iberian nations had retained from their colonialist past oppressive tendencies that, Comte feared, would disturb the harmony of the Western world.
The lack of concentrated political power was all to the advantage of the Italians. Comte said he was convinced that aspirations for national unity, so strong in that nineteenth-century environment, were confined to the literati—to intellectuals, we would now say—and did not have roots in the common people. Positivism would liberate Italy from the Austrian yoke but, once that goal was achieved, the country would not heed “those spiritual guides of the population who have never ceased to yearn for its ancient domination and even to dream of its universal return.” More than a century in advance, then, Comte foresaw what the future consequences of an intensification of national feeling could be in Italy and Spain. He had seen it in France during his lifetime, the Napoleonic dictatorship having arisen from the nationalist fervor of the Revolution.
In Italy, national unity would be a reactionary yearning, even worse than the artificial aggregations visible in the country at the time (1850, let us not forget), “especially the one whose multiple names indicate sufficiently its heterogeneity, primarily in the jumbled group that assembles five incompatible states in the north.”
Comte is in fact deeply hostile to the states. He sees them as the products of a martial Old Regime that, prior to the advent of positive science, “could not undertake the conquest of a world that seemed as invincible as it was inexplicable, and where every partial association strove above all to subjugate the others.”
The new religion would of course need intermediate bodies, which could be called homelands, to intervene between these families and humanity. Comte conceives of them as free and lasting associations much smaller than states, founded on respect for local diversities, each one a spontaneous gathering of the rural populations around a dominant city. That was the situation prevailing in the Middle Ages, the one that Italy, better than other places, had been able to preserve.
France would set an example for the other countries. It would initiate its own dismemberment, breaking up into seventeen small republics. Western Europe would have seventy and the world as a whole five hundred, each composed on average of three hundred thousand families, on the same order of magnitude, therefore, as Tuscany, Sicily, and Sardinia. Was Comte prophetic? We now see here and there, in Europe and the rest of the world, minorities rising up to demand their rights, an aggravation of particularism that, in certain cases at least, has already led to the dismemberment of states.
It was precisely because, in about 1850, Italy still lived under a system of political decomposition that it was closer to the normal state of human societies. Provided it would consent to give precedence to intellectual and moral development over political unrest, Italy, more than the northern nations, would be able to proceed directly from Catholicism to positivism and to fulfill all the conditions proper to medieval society.
These conditions, Comte continues, belonged more to the realm of sentiment than to that of reason, given that they were primarily moral in nature. And it was in the area of sentiment and morality that the genius of Italy asserted its preeminence. Comte praises Italy for having always placed art before science. He all but worships the man he consistently calls “the incomparable Dante,” in part, no doubt, for personal reasons: in his eyes, the Platonic love he felt for Clotilde de Vaux, whom he made the Madonna of positivist religion after her premature death, reproduced across the span of centuries Dante’s love for Beatrice, Petrarch’s love for Laura: “It is through women that positivism must penetrate into Italy and Spain.”
For the last seven years, he wrote in 1853 (hence since 1846, the year of Clotilde’s death), he had read a canto of Dante every evening. Since the pontificate of the Religion of Humanity would have its seat in France, the other states would have to give up national possession of noble remains: Dante’s coffin, already stolen from Florence by Ravenna, would be “better honored in the principal seat of the universal religion” and would thus be transferred to Paris.
For the positive religion to extend to the entire planet, a common language would have to be bestowed on it, a language necessarily developed by the common people—not an artificial language but an already-existing language that would meet with unanimous approval. What language could fulfill that requirement if not Italian, the most cultured language of poetry and music, the one fashioned by the most peaceful and the most aesthetic population, the only one pure of all colonization?
Positivism would thus merge the five Western languages—French, English, German, Spanish, and Italian—“under the presidency of the most musical one.” The language of Dante and Ariosto, first rendered sacred for the needs of the Religion of Humanity, would be the universal language. In short, if Comte had achieved his ends, at international assemblies you would hear nothing but Italian rather than American English.
With its language, Italy would make its contribution to the new world order. Then, too, that language alone would be able to provide an aesthetic complement to the concrete Religion of Humanity. It would fall to an Italian of genius who had converted to positivism to compose an epic, a great poem that would celebrate the outcome of the Western revolution “just as Dante’s incomparable composition instituted its beginning.”
This poem, titled
Humanity, which Comte confesses he is incapable of writing, would nevertheless be inspired by the “cerebral crisis” he suffered in his youth. The result would represent decisive progress vis-à-vis Dante’s work, which, as a mere excursion from one world to another, appears static: it renders a
vision. Comte, by contrast, would provide the material for a
lived experience. During his period of madness, he followed a course opposite to that which humanity had traveled over the course of history: he regressed from the positive stage to the metaphysical stage, then to the polytheistic stage, and finally to the fetishistic stage. After that descent, which lasted three months, he gradually climbed back up over five months’ time. That dynamic opposition would dictate the poem’s structure. The poem would consist of thirteen cantos: a preliminary one would idealize cerebral unity; the next three would be devoted to mental decline, from the relative to the absolute, “always yearning for complete harmony without ever being able to achieve it.” The following eight cantos would show the heart and mind gradually rising toward positive unity, and the thirteenth would idealize an existence that had returned to normal.
Through that work, the Italian genius would fulfill its mission, both psychological and social. The positive religion highlights the character of that genius, more poetic than philosophical, a synthesis that “the most aesthetic of all populations” would be called upon to realize.
The preeminent place given to Italy, to its arts and language, sheds light on one of the most significant aspects of Comte’s thought. He conceived progress as three phases leading humanity successively from the theological state to the metaphysical state, and finally, to the positive state. In his thinking, however, no phase abolishes the one that precedes it. Even while making a decisive leap forward, each phase, and especially the last one, rehabilitates and takes control of what constituted the richness of the previous state(s).
It was because Italy and, to a lesser degree, Spain had preserved archaic traits that they would place in the service of the positive state an emotional richness that could not have been produced on its own. Comte goes even further, proclaiming that, once science has been liberated from all anthropomorphism, the poetic and aesthetic resources of human thought at its beginnings, which would now pose no danger for science, could be reintegrated into collective beliefs and practices.
Humanity, having attained the positive state, would not turn its back on the fetishism of the early ages (the primitive mentality, we would now call it). On the contrary, it would be able once more to make a place for fetishism, as Dante had done: his work establishes not an opposition between the two historical ways of representing heaven (as the seat of astrological influences, a pagan heritage; and as the providence of a supreme God, as in Christianity) but rather a harmony.
Comte is still thinking of Dante in his last work, Synthèse subjective (Subjective Synthesis), only one volume of which was written and published before his death. In it he articulates the rules that, in this last state of his thought, apply both to philosophical and poetic works and are inspired by a concrete arithmetic attributing a symbolic value to prime numbers: “Since the stanzas or groups now have seven lines, their structure and succession will combine the two modes proper to Italian epic, joining the unity of the octave and the continuity of the tercet, through cross rhymes and linkages between strophes. The first line of a stanza always rhymes with the last line of the previous one [actually the next-to-last line, it appears], whose final consonance is thus tripled like the other two.”
Although in 1854 Comte felt incapable of composing on his own the poem Humanity, for which he aspired only to supply the material to an Italian of genius, a new Dante, twelve years later he believed it possible to give a poetic form to his philosophical thought and even to merge poetry and philosophy. The first volume of Synthèse subjective, which has nearly eight hundred pages, is a gigantic composition that follows the rules of metrics. Every sentence has a maximum of 250 letters. The book is divided into seven chapters, each composed of three parts, themselves divided into seven sections comprising seven groups of sentences. One has only to replace the sentence as basic element with the poetic line to discover cantos divided into stanzas, as practiced by “the most aesthetic population.” Here again the reference is to Dante.
As an equivalent to rhyme, Comte invented an incredibly complicated play of assonance. Every paragraph has, as a catchword of sorts, a word borrowed from one of the five Western languages, plus Latin and possibly Greek. The letters of the catchword provide, in order, the initial letters (which themselves have other catchwords) of each sentence. The entire work thus rests on a combination of emblematic words, initial letters, and phonetic correspondences in the manner—Comte himself makes the comparison—of simple, double, triple, quadruple, and even quintuple acrostics, which were in vogue among the Renaissance poets.
But what Comte does not seem to see is that this procedure, when distended over eight hundred pages, tens of thousands of lines, and hundreds of thousands of words, loses all its appeal. The reader no longer perceives any link between content and form. More precisely, since the content of a philosophical work consists of abstract ideas, everything in it is reduced to form. Comte is obscurely aware of this when he reserves the aesthetic enjoyment of his construct for an elite of initiates: “I would therefore be surprised,” he writes, “if it were sensed immediately by any but a few all-round positivists, that is, by the religious, to whom it offers a universal and permanent application of their sacred formula, by combining love with order for progress.”
In that sense we can say that Comte, often a prophet but in this case in spite of himself, prefigures what has become a common illusion among many contemporary artists. Whether in poetry, painting, or especially music, it consists of believing that, because every work capable of eliciting an aesthetic emotion has a structure, one need only invent and set in motion a structure for an aesthetic emotion to result. We may marvel at Comte’s ingenuity, but the work of the intelligence does not create an aesthetic emotion unless it has its starting point in sensibility.
Comte’s admiration for Italy and for Dante was not without reservation. Dante’s art, like that of the Renaissance painters who followed, suffers from having been born at a time when the feudal order and the ambition for universality—which had made for the greatness of medieval Catholicism—were already drawing to a close: “Art therefore had to idealize beliefs and mores, whose perceived decline kept the poet and the public from attaining the intimate convictions demanded by any great aesthetic impression.”
And Comte continues: “Dante’s incomparable composition is characterized by the extraordinary coincidence between two contrary impulses. That anti-aesthetic situation, at a time when everything was being transformed and even distorted before it could be idealized, obliged art to open up to an artificial solution by seeking in memories of the ancient type those fixed and pronounced mores it could not find around itself.”
In thus judging the spirit of the Italian Renaissance at its beginnings, Comte, as always, proved to be a forceful analyst and a great philosopher of history. But he had no artistic education, which no doubt explains why he felt uncomfortable when confronted with the wealth and overabundance of works produced at that time. In some sense, he saw them as a pathological phenomenon, an effect of vain efforts to overcome contradictions. “The admirable Italian culture,” he wrote, “has until now often been regarded as excessive because it failed to find its true destiny.”
Even if he had converted Italy to positivism and thus given its art “its true destiny,” we may doubt whether he would have known to propose something other than the bizarre apparatus of rules in the form of riddles, bout-rimés, and alliterations by which what he imagined to be his poetic faculties were exercised on the eve of his death. Curiously, that illusion made Comte a precursor of the eccentric avant-garde that flourished at the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth, rather than the worthy successor of Dante, though he believed that one of the missions assigned to his own genius was to receive and perpetuate Dante’s legacy. But did not Italy also produce Futurism?
