MACHIAVELLI’S GOD
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MACHIAVELLI’S GOD
MAURIZIO VIROLI Translated by ANTONY SHUGAAR
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire ox20 1tw press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Viroli, Maurizio. [Dio di Machiavelli e il problema morale dell’Italia. English] Machiavelli’s god / Maurizio Viroli ; translated by Antony Shugaar. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-12414-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469–1527. 2. Political ethics—Italy. 3. Religion and politics. I. Shugaar, Antony. II. Title. JC143.M4V5213 2010 172—dc22 2010001767 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS Segretariato Europeo per le Pubblicazioni Scientifiche
Via Val d’Aposa 7 – 40123 Bologna – Italy
[email protected] – www.seps.it This book has been composed in Adobe Jenson Pro Light Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For Ezra Suleiman
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CONTENTS
foreword
ix
preface xi
INTRODUCTION
1
1. The Republican Religion 2 2. Machiavelli the Puritan 11 3. Machiavelli’s Prophecy 20 chapter one
HIS GOD
27
1. The Soul and the Fatherland 27 2. Republican Christianity 43 3. Machiavelli and the Religion of Virtue 61 4. Moral and Religious Reform 75 chapter two
THE POWER OF WORDS
89
1. Rhetoric and Civil Religion 89 2. Machiavelli, Orator 99 3. Creator of Myths 109 4. His Finest Piece of Oratory 122 5. Republican Eloquence and Wisdom 134
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chapter three
THE REPUBLIC AND ITS RELIGION
154
1. Republican Government and Religion 154 2. The Religion of Liberty 170 3. Customs and Religion 177 4. Religion, War, and Social Conflict 185 5. The Reform of Orders and the Reform of Customs 198 chapter four
MACHIAVELLI AND THE RELIGIOUS AND MORAL REFORMATION OF ITALY 208 1. Heresy and Aspirations for Religious Reform 211 2. The Difficulties of Survival in Counter-Reformation Italy 232 3. The Redemption of Italy and the Idea of Moral Reform in the Writers of the Eighteenth Century 247 4. The Risorgimento and the Religion of Liberty 263
index
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FOREWORD
The idea of seeking out Machiavelli’s God came to me as I read the writings of the political philosophers, the historians, and the poets who have reflected on the weakness of the civil and moral conscience of the Italians. Nearly all of them pointed to a bad religious education as the chief culprit and expressed their appreciation of Machiavelli as a supporter of a different religion, a full-fledged religion of liberty, capable of assisting in the rebirth of a republican fatherland. I therefore set out to identify Machiavelli’s God, convinced that it is in that God that lies the secret, and the cure, for Italy’s moral problem. I am not entirely sure that I have found that God. I still believe, however, that Machiavelli had a God, and that around this God of his he developed a religion of liberty that played an important historical role in Italian political culture. The excavation that I undertook around Machiavelli’s God allowed me to bring to light the historic and ideal bond that links the civil religion that flourished in particular in America and the republican Christianity that was born in Florence and in the other free republics of Italy. To the best of my knowledge this theme has not yet been studied with the attention that it deserves, and it may be a direction for new studies. The history of Machiavelli’s God also invites us to think in new terms about the relationship between Christian religion and republican political thought, a theme that has been entirely—or almost entirely—overlooked, despite the fact that it is clearly evident that republican liberty was born and has prospered always with the aid of a particular interpretation of Christianity. Can that liberty survive, one is naturally prompted to wonder, without religion? I must thank, and it is an agreeable duty, the friends who read the manuscript—in full or in part—and who helped me with their criticisms and suggestions; in particular, Quentin Skinner, Emanuele Cutinelli-Rèndina,
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and Corrado Vivanti. I would also like to thank the Italian Biblioteca del Senato, and Doctor Sandro Bulgarelli, the Biblioteca Casanatense of Rome, the Biblioteca Aurelio Saffi of Forlì, and the Biblioteca Malatestiana of Cesena, which allowed me do my research in the best conditions I could have asked for. This book came into existence thanks to the generous and unstinting support of Princeton University; to that school I extend my sincere gratitude. I also wish to sincerely thank Ian Malcolm of Princeton University Press for his support to make this English edition possible and to Antony Shugaar for his splendid translation. I ideally dedicate this book to Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, emeritus president of the Italian Republic, advocate for the values of a civil Italy
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Since this book appeared in Italian in 2005, a number of studies have been published that discuss the main interpretive points that I have proposed. I believe I must examine at least the most challenging of them. As readers will notice, I claim in this work that Machiavelli not only asserted that republican liberty needs a religion that instills and supports devotion to the common good but also that Christian religion properly interpreted is apt to serve such a civic task. Against these views, Gennaro Sasso, without explicitly mentioning my book, has raised a set of powerful objections. Focusing his attention on a well-known passage from Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy, I 12, 10–14, where Machiavelli writes that “if such religion had been maintained by the princes of the Christian republic as was ordered by its giver the Christian states and republics would be more united, much happier than they are,” Sasso emphasizes that this sentence contains a subversive political and historical thesis that Machiavelli expressed in the language of ambiguity. And the subversive meaning would be that Christ was the authentic and genuine founder of a religion that, even without the negative distortions produced by his inadequate and corrupt successors, contained in itself the worst possible political “vice” (“il peggior ‘vizio’ politico”). If one carefully reads the passage under examination, Sasso remarks, one cannot fail to perceive that Machiavelli’s recognition of Christ’s purity and religiosity revolves around the assertion that precisely Christ’s purity and religiosity concealed the roots of the unhappiness of Christian republics. From this assumption Sasso also draws the conclusion that we should not take seriously Machiavelli’s equally well-known statement, again in the Discourses on Livy, that if men “considered how [our religion] permits us the exaltation and defense of the fatherland, they would see that it wishes us to love and honor it and to prepare ourselves to be such that we can defend it” (II 2, 36). What Machiavelli really meant to teach us was that the Christian sect was radically
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and irredeemably a “negation of politics.” Of all the interpreters, regardless of their purposes, Sasso concludes, the Jesuits were surely right in denouncing Machiavelli as the enemy of Christian religion, just as Francis Bacon was right when he wrote that “one of the doctors of Italy, Nicholas Machiavel, had the confidence to put in writing, almost in plain terms, that the Christian faith had given up good men in prey to these that are tyrannical and unjust.” I find Sasso’s argument fascinating for its interpretive finesse and superb scholarship, hallmarks of his work. It fails, however, to fully convince me. To accept it we have to dispose of a whole sentence of the Discourses on Livy, the one that reads that if men “considered how [our religion] permits us the exaltation and defense of the fatherland, they would see that it wishes us to love and honor it and to prepare ourselves to be such that we can defend it.” Why would Machiavelli have written this sentence if he meant exactly the contrary, namely that Christian religion correctly interpreted is a religion of idleness that makes the world easy prey for wicked men? I am in general inclined not to accept interpretations that require parts of the text to be discarded. In this case I am even less inclined because the opposite interpretation that I defend in this book—namely that Machiavelli believed that Christian religion interpreted according to idleness and not according to virtue was the cause of the infelicity of Christian republics—has solid textual support. When Machiavelli writes in the Discourses on Livy that in the “province of Germany” there was still great “goodness” and “religion” and that because of that goodness of customs, and that good religion, those peoples lived securely and in freedom, he surely knew that their religion was Christian religion interpreted according to virtue. Similarly, when he openly praised the Florentine magistrates who conducted the war against Pope Gregory XI between 1375 and 1378 with impeccable devotion to the common good and were called for this the “Eight Saints,” Machiavelli was citing an example of Christianity that was not at all in contrast with republican liberty but indeed expressed strong support for it. Last, it seems to me that Machiavelli openly indicated in the unfinished poem, The Golden Ass, that what modern peoples, and Italy in particular, needed was to rediscover a Christian religion of virtue to replace a Christian religion of idleness: To think that without you for you God fights, While you are on your knees and nothing do, Has ruined many kingdoms, many states. Gennaro Sasso, “Su un passo di Machiavelli Discorsi I 12, 10–14,” in Discorsi di Palazzo Filomarino, Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, Naples 2008, pp. 187–206.
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Prayers are necessary as a rule, And he who from his people snatches rites And orisons is utterly a fool. Perfect control and union they keep, And if you have all this, it is quite true You will good fortune ultimately reap. Religion is for Machiavelli utterly necessary to found, preserve, and reform good political orders. He stated this view in the most unequivocal manner. At the same time he knew very well that the only available religion was the Christian. Had he believed and argued that Christian religion was in its essence and hopelessly inimical to good political orders and above all to republican liberty he would have been compelled to also believe and argue that good political orders and republican liberty were impossible for the moderns in general and for the Italians in particular, a conclusion that he never entertained. Instead, he believed in, and suggested, the possibility of a civic interpretation of Christianity similar to the one that he knew existed in his Florence. On the fundamental and difficult issue of Machiavelli’s inner religious beliefs, Francesco Bausi has reopened the discussion with a very courageous and radical assertion. Commenting on the Exhortation to Penitence, a text that Machiavelli surely composed toward the end of his life at the instance of a lay confraternity he probably belonged to, Bausi affirms that in this very religious, indeed profoundly devout work, Machiavelli at last takes off the mask he had been using all his life and reveals to us his real face, the face of a true Christian. In this book I have sustained a similar, though less categorical thesis, namely that Machiavelli “thought of himself as a Christian: a Christian sui generis, certainly not a Christian in full compliance with the church of Rome; with a God all his own, but not a God that he invented out of whole cloth; in other words, a God that had a great deal in common with the God that existed in the religious consciousness of the Florence of his time.” In view of Bausi’s remark, I have reconsidered the whole matter and I am inclined to qualify my interpretation in a way that makes it quite distant from Bausi’s view. I think that the Christian God did not occupy the central place in Machiavelli’s soul. His own spiritual food, the one that was giving him true life as he understood it, was love of country: a complex sentiment that encompassed love of beauty and greatness, fascination for great men with great souls, love of liberty, longing for immortality in this world. God is the subject of his thoughts when he reflects on the universe, or when he uses the Old
Francesco Bausi, Machiavelli, Salerno Editrice, Rome 2005, pp. 319–20.
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Testament to write about founders and redeemers, but the nourishment that is amply sufficient to emancipate him from human miseries and even fear of death is not God’s or Christ’s word but a wholly human love that is only similar, not identical, with Christian caritas. Another body of scholarship that has recently put forth an interpretation of Machiavelli’s political ideas that challenges the opinions I have defended in this work deals with the issue of Machiavelli’s republicanism. According to the late Mario Martelli and Francesco Bausi, the idea that Machiavelli was a republican political thinker, indeed the founder of modern republicanism, so popular in the Anglo-Saxon world, must be utterly dismissed as a mere myth. At least since 1512, when the Medici returned to Florence and then instituted their regime over the city, Machiavelli was a straight Medicean. To sustain this claim Martelli had invited us to consider that Machiavelli was freed from prison, where he had been put in February 1523 under the charge of conspiracy against the Medici, thanks to the support of the leaders of the Medicean sect, Paolo and Francesco Vettori, and the help of Giuliano de’ Medici himself. This fact is documented by a letter to Francesco Vettori that Machiavelli composed on the very day of his liberation, or the day after. Yet, in a letter of 26 June to his nephew Giovanni Vernacci, Machiavelli presents the story of his liberation from prison in different terms: “My very dear Giovanni, I have received several letters from you, most recently one from last April in which, among other things, you complain that you have not received any letters from me. My answer is that since your departure I have had so much trouble that it is no wonder I have not written to you. In fact, if anything, it is a miracle that I am alive, because my post was taken from me and I was about to lose my life, which God and my innocence have preserved for me.” Why with Vernacci, with whom he used to speak frankly, does Machiavelli not mention Paolo and Francesco Vettori or Giuliano de’ Medici? I think that Machiavelli was set free not because he was a Medicean (if he was a Medicean since September 1512 why had the Medici imprisoned him
See the famous letter of Machiavelli to Vettori of 10 December 1513. This letter is dated 13 March 1512: “I got out of prison, amid this city’s universal rejoicing, despite the fact that I had hoped for it because of action by Paolo and you—for which I thank you (English translation: Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence, translated by James Atkinson and David Sices, Northern Illinois University Press, Dekalb, Illinois, 1996, p. 221). Just a few days later, he wrote once again to Francesco Vettori: “I can say that all that is left to me of my life I owe to the Magnificent Giuliano and your Paolo” (English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 222). Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 239.
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in February 1513, in the first place?) but because nothing emerged against him that justified his imprisonment or his death. If the story of his incarceration does not lend sufficient evidence to claim that Machiavelli was a supporter of the Medici, his writings do unequivocally indicate that he was a republican. To be a republican meant for him to stand for the greatness of Florence and to believe that true civic greatness can only be achieved in freedom and through freedom. Machiavelli asserts this principle with words that leave no room whatsoever for doubt: And truly it is a marvelous thing to consider how much greatness Athens arrived at in the space of a hundred years after it was freed from the tyranny of Pisistratus. But above all it is very marvelous to consider how much greatness Rome arrived at after it was freed from its kings. The reason is easy to understand, for it is not the particular good but the common good that makes cities great. And without doubt this common good is not observed if not in republics, since all that is for that purpose is executed, and although it may turn out to harm this or that private individual, those for whom the aforesaid does good are so many that they can go ahead with it against the disposition of the few crushed by it. The contrary happens when there is a prince, in which case what suits him usually offends the city and what suits the city offends him. In this mode, as soon as a tyranny arises after a free way of life, the least evil that results for those cities is not to go ahead further nor to grow more in power or riches, but usually—or rather always—it happens that they go backward. To be a republican in sixteenth-century Florence meant to be committed to the principle of the rule of law, in the sense that laws must be stronger than individual citizens. Machiavelli asserts this political ideal in the clearest possible terms: “A city,” he writes, “cannot call itself free where there was a citizen who was feared by the magistrates.” It also meant that public honors must be distributed only on the basis of virtue. On this account too Machiavelli emerges as a genuine republican: “A free way of life proffers honors and rewards through certain honest and determinate causes, and outside these it neither rewards nor honors anyone.” The Medici Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, II, 2, in Opere, vol. I, edited by Corrado Vivanti, Einaudi-Gallimard, Turin 1997. English translation: Discourses on Livy, by Niccolò Machiavelli, translated by Harvey Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1996, p. 129–30. See, for instance ibid., I.29; English translation: Mansfield and Tarkov, Discourses, p. 66–67. Ibid., I.16. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 45.
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regime openly contradicted all these principles: the interest of the family was above the common good, the laws and public offices were almost entirely under the control of the regime, honors and benefits were distributed having in view the individuals’ loyalty and their willingness to serve. The whole Medicean system of power was based on the so called “politics of friends,” that is, a large network of citizens that depended on the Medici for their status, wealth, and often their immunity from the law. For Machiavelli such a regime could not attain civic greatness but was bound to cause the city’s decay. He writes it explicitly in The Prince, a work dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici: “Friendships that are acquired at a price and not with greatness and nobility of spirit are bought, but they are not owned, and when the time comes they cannot be spent.” In the Discourses on Livy he is even more explicit in his condemnation of the private means of attaining honors and status. There are two ways to attain reputation, he writes, the public ways and the private ways: public ways are when a citizen “by counseling well, by working better in the common benefit, acquires reputation”; private ways are “doing benefit to this and to that other private individual—by lending him money, marrying his daughters for him, defending him from the magistrates, and doing for him small private favors that make men partisans to oneself and give spirit to whoever is so favored to be able to corrupt the public and to breach the laws.” A well-ordered republic, Machiavelli concludes, must “open the ways, as was said, to whoever seeks support through public ways and close them to whoever seeks it through private ways.” In the Florentine Histories, at the outset of the book in which he speaks of the period of Cosimo de’ Medici hegemony over the city, he asserts: It is true that some divisions are harmful to republics and some are helpful. Those are harmful that are accompanied by sects and partisans; those are helpful that are maintained without sects and partisans. Thus, since a founder of a republic cannot provide that there be no enmities in it, he has to provide at least that there not be sects. And therefore it is to be known that citizens in cities acquire reputation in two modes: either by public ways or by private modes. One acquires it publicly by winning a battle, acquiring a town, carrying out a mission with care and prudence, advising the republic wisely and prosperously. One acquires it in private modes by benefiting this or that other citizen, defending him from the magistrates, helping him with money, getting him unmerited honors, and ingratiating
Harvey Mansfield, The Prince, 2d ed., Chicago, University of Chicago 1998, p. 66. Mansfield and Tarkov, Discourses, pp. 277–78.
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oneself with the plebs with games and public gifts. From this latter mode of proceeding, sects and partisans arise, and the reputation thus earned offends as much as reputation helps when it is not mixed with sects, because that reputation is founded on a common good, not on a private good. And although even among citizens so made one cannot provide by any mode that there will not be very great hatreds, nonetheless, having no partisans who follow them for they own utility, they cannot harm the republic; on the contrary, they must help it, because to pass their tests it is necessary for them to attempt to exalt the republic and to watch each other particularly so that civil bounds are not transgressed. If we want to understand well how distant Machiavelli’s ideas were from those of the true Mediceans, let’s compare them with the views of one of the most trusted among the advisors of the Medici, Goro Gheri, from Pistoia. In 1519, in a confidential memorandum, Gheri explained that the true foundation of Cosimo the Elder’s regime in the fifteenth century was the network of loyal friends whose fortune wholly depended on the Medici’s power, and that the new regime established in 1513 should follow the same path, namely to protect, honor, and benefit the “friends” using for this purpose public institutions and wealth. When has Machiavelli ever sustained a politics of this kind that constituted, it is worth repeating, the core of the Medici’s politics? Another equally compelling evidence of Machiavelli’s republicanism is his proposal for a constitutional reform in Florence that he composed in 1521 at Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici’s request. In this text Machiavelli openly counsels the powerful cardinal to gradually restore the republican government. Because of its tradition of equality, Machiavelli explains, Florence cannot endure a principality. To impose it at all costs would be a cruel and blameworthy action. In that city one cannot have a stable republic without satisfying the people, and the only way to satisfy the people is to “reopen the hall,” that is, to restore the republic. It is hard to imagine a more explicit republican position, a position all the more important because Machiavelli advocates it in a text addressed to a Medici cardinal who was the de facto ruler of Florence. Just as it is wrong to read Machiavelli as a philosopher, it is equally wrong to read him a political thinker who composed his works having in view a close, visible political purpose. His most important pages are written to indicate the ways to attain distant and difficult, almost impossible,
See the excellent analysis of John M. Najemi, A History of Florence, 1200–1575, Blackwell, Malden, MA 2008, p. 437. Quote from Mansfield and Banfield, Florentine Histories, 276–77. See F. Bausi, Machiavelli, pp. 15–19.
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political goals, like liberating Italy from foreign domination, instituting a well-ordered republican government, eradicating corruption, resuscitating ancient military valor, not to mention his longing for a moral and religious regeneration of Italy. In all his major works he explicitly reveals to readers that he is writing for another time. “And truly,” —he stresses in the preface to the second book of the Discourses on Livy— if the virtue that then used to reign and the vice that now reigns were not clearer than the sun, I would go on speaking with more restraint, fearing falling into this deception of which I accuse some. But since the thing is so manifest that everyone sees it, I will be spirited in saying manifestly that which I may understand of the former and of the latter times, so that the spirits of youths who may read these writings of mine can flee the latter and prepare themselves to imitate the former at whatever time fortune may give them opportunity for it. For it is the duty of a good man to teach others the good that you could not work because of the malignity of the times and of fortune, so that when many are capable of it, someone of them more loved by heaven may be able to work it. Drawing to a close The Art of War he openly confesses: And I complain against nature, which either should not have made me a knower of this or should have given me the ability to be able to execute it. [246] Nor do I think that now, since I am old, I can have any opportunity for it. And because of this I have been liberal toward you. If the things said by me please you, in due time you, being young and qualified, could help and counsel your princes to their benefit. [247] I do not want you to be afraid or distrustful of this, for this province seems born to resuscitate dead things, as has been seen in poetry, painting, and sculpture. [248] But I am distrustful of how much may be expected from me as [I am] getting on in years. Machiavelli was a realist of a very special kind, a refined realist who displayed all his life some intellectual features that are normally associated with political idealism and political prophecy. He regarded knowledge of political reality as the most necessary requisite for effective political action; he explained in the clearest possible manner that in all times and all places political leaders are judged on the basis of the effective results of their actions; finally he insisted on the necessity for any state to have a strong
Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses on Livy, 125. Art of War, translated by Christopher Lynch. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2003, p. 164.
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and reliable military power. All these elements do situate him at the center of the tradition of political realism. Yet we also find in his political thought, and in his judgments on specific matters, a strong inclination to make use of political imagination, in the sense that he was able to imagine political possibilities that were very remote from reality. Not only did he believe that they could indeed become true, but he was prepared to work to make them happen. For him, political reality was made of many elements: passions, power, interests, intentions, ability to simulate and dissimulate. More than a system of facts, it was a world of uncertain and ambivalent signs, words and gestures, accessible, only in part, through a work of interpretation. He was not at all the champion of the view that politics is knowledge of reality and adaptation to it, but a writer who knew that political reality is just not there to be observed. He believed that the true realist, and the true political leader, is a person who is able to imagine grand ideals, and to work, with prudence, to make them real. To live for great political and moral ideals in spite of the most disenchanted awareness of the cruelty, misery, and baseness of the human world: this was the conception of life that Niccolò Machiavelli practiced more than preached, this was his religion.
See the excellent considerations of Corrado Vivanti in Machiavelli. I tempi della politica, Donzelli, Rome 2008, p. xx.
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MACHIAVELLI’S GOD
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INTRODUCTION
Fifteen years ago, the late, lamented Sebastian de Grazia gave me his Machiavelli in Hell, which had just won the Pulitzer Prize. He inscribed my copy of the book “to a fellow worker in the same vineyard.” Since then, I have continued to labor in Machiavelli’s vineyard, and the more I labor, the more I realize that de Grazia was right when he pointed out that, scattered throughout the works of Machiavelli, “like poppies in a field of chick peas, are many references to God.” Niccolò’s God is “the creator, the master deity, providential, real, universal, one of many names, personal, invocable, thankable, to be revered, a judge, just and forgiving, rewarding and punishing, awesome, a force transcendent, separate from but operative in the world.” He is a God that loves justice, that orders us to love our homeland, and who wants men to be strong so that they can defend that homeland. This God was, for Niccolò, the true Christian God, in contrast with the God who wishes men to be humble, willing to accept not only the suffering that is the inevitable accompaniment of the human condition, but also the other suffering, eminently avoidable, that the weak endure through the cruelty and ambition of evil men. He is a God that loves the same Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1989. Even before de Grazia, in my view, Luigi Russo was right when he wrote, in his book, Machiavelli, 3d ed., Laterza, Bari 1949, pp. 222–23, that “Machiavelli is a religious man, typically Christian in his religiosity”; I would also point to the observations of Roberto Ridolfi, Vita di Niccolò Machiavelli, 2 vols., Sansoni, Florence 1969, in particular pp. 561–63, where he referred to the Florentine Secretary’s religious and Christian conscience and emphasized that he “was anticlerical, not an atheist.” In contrast, Felice Alderisio, in Machiavelli. L’arte dello Stato nell’azione e negli scritti, Bocca, Turin 1930, goes too far. Also see the review by Benedetto Croce, Conversazioni critiche, 4th Series, Laterza, Bari 1932, pp. 14–17. It is also essential, in my view, to read Emanuele Cutinelli-Rèndina, Introduzione a Machiavelli, Laterza, Rome-Bari 1999, pp. 77–111; Alberto Tenenti, “La religione di Machiavelli” [1969], in Credenze, ideologie, libertinismi tra Medio Evo ed età moderna, Il Mulino, Bologna 1978, pp. 175–219; Pierre Jodogne, Il Cristianesimo di Machiavelli, Atti del Convegno di Nimega su letteratura italiana e ispirazione cristiana (15–19 October 1979), edited by Carlo Ballerini, Pàtron, Bologna 1980, pp. 249–74.
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things that Machiavelli loves: the fatherland, the rule of law, living in freedom, and those men who, through their virtue, succeed in creating and preserving these precious and fragile treasures.
1. The Republican Religion De Grazia saw all this clearly, and he expressed it even better in his writing. And yet he failed to see that Machiavelli found his God in the tradition of republican Christianity that he experienced in Florence. That tradition was based on the principle that a true Christian is a good citizen who serves the common good and liberty in order to implement the divine plan on earth. God participates in human history, loves free republics, supports and rewards those who govern justly, created men in his own image, and wishes them to become like him with their virtue, working to make the earthly city comparable to the heavenly city. Christ and Cicero, the Apostles and the republican heroes of Rome all coexisted for the Florentines, side by side. The saints were not those ascetics who renounced the world, nor were they those devout men and women who obeyed the commandments of the church. Rather the saints were the citizens who placed liberty and the homeland before all other things. This interpretation of Christianity instilled a radical aversion to the corruption of the Catholic Church, and it stimulated a need for renovatio, a religious and moral reformation capable of triggering a rebirth of charity and justice. Both renovatio and charity were also fundamental elements of Machiavelli’s religious and political vision, to a greater degree than de Grazia realized. When Machiavelli writes that the Christian religion “permits us the exaltation and defense of the fatherland” and “wishes us to love and honor it and to prepare ourselves to be such that we can defend it,” he is expressing a profound religious conviction and he is echoing the interpretation of Christianity that he experienced in the Florence of his own time. To identify the religious beliefs of a man like Machiavelli, who concealed his thoughts and feelings, is perhaps an impossible undertaking, but his writings and the intellectual milieu within which he was working combine to encourage us to entertain as perfectly reasonable the hypothesis that he thought of himself as a Christian: a Christian sui generis, certainly not a Christian in full compliance with the church of Rome; with a God all his
For a differing interpretation, see Gennaro Sasso, Niccolò Machiavelli. Storia del suo pensiero politico, Il Mulino, Bologna 1980, p. 512 and pp. 555–57. Machiavelli, Discorsi, II, 2. English translation: Mansfied and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 132.
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own, but not a God that he invented out of whole cloth; in other words, a God that had a great deal in common with the God that existed in the religious consciousness of the Florence of his time. We know that he loved his fatherland more than his own soul, but to love the fatherland more than his soul was, for him, and for many Florentines, the true way of being Christians, of practicing the supreme value of charity and thus following the true path to eternal salvation. Once the true path had been found, all the rest—saying confession, hearing mass, fasting, theological quibbles, hell, heaven, devils, and the Lord’s prayer—meant relatively little. Many respected political writers have claimed that he was an atheist, but is there a sentence, or even a single line of text, in which Machiavelli states or even hints that God does not exist? I have not succeeded in finding one, but I have found—as the reader will soon see—numerous documents that attest the reverse. Along with the interpretation of Machiavelli the atheist, we may also discard the view of Machiavelli the pagan. Isaiah Berlin was the respected proponent of this view, long ago (though he had not been the first to advocate it). According to Berlin, when Machiavelli writes that the Christian religion “permits us the exaltation and defense of the fatherland” and “wishes us to love and honor it and to prepare ourselves to be such that we can defend it,” he is simply performing an act of formal obeisance to forestall criticism and persecution. His words mean only that if the church had developed a militant attitude comparable to the virtus of the ancient Romans and had made men strong and devoted to the common interest, its teachings would have had a more desirable effect on society. According to Berlin, Machiavelli may not have separated ethics from politics, but he did separate two incompatible ideals of life and two codes of morals, pagan morality and Christian morality. Pagan morality teaches courage, vigor, and the strength to withstand adversities, loyalty to the republic, order, discipline, the pursuit of happiness, justice, and selfaffirmation. Christian morality, in contrast, preaches as supreme values charity, mercy, self-sacrifice, love for God, forgiveness toward one’s enemies, scorn for the delights of this world, faith in eternal life and salvation of the soul. Machiavelli is truly original, Berlin emphasizes, when he places pagan morality above Christian morality and when he states that Christian values conflict irremediably with the kind of society that he would
The problem that I explore for Machiavelli is closely related to the issue that Lucien Febvre explored for Rabelais. See Lucien Febvre, Le problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle. La religion de Rabelais, Editions Albin Michel, Paris 1968. English translation: The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, translated by Beatrice Gottlieb, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1982.
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like to see reborn, modeled on the society of ancient Rome. That is why his ideas especially offended those who were unwilling to give up Christian or humanistic values. Let us leave aside the obvious considerations that Machiavelli was not the sort to pull his verbal punches and that he had no reason to fear ecclesiastical condemnation and persecution for a work that he never published; the fact remains that those who possessed a sincere Christian faith were in no wise offended by Machiavelli’s words, and indeed found them to be consistent with the true teachings of Christ, as I explain in chapter 4. The values that Berlin identifies as pagan—courage, strength, justice, self affirmation, and especially the ideal of virtue—were in Machiavelli’s mind also Christian values. At the same time, Machiavelli praised charity, clemency, forgiveness toward one’s enemies (private enemies, that is, not public enemies), and exhorted his listeners to seek eternal life in the true Christian manner, that is, by loving one’s fatherland. When Machiavelli wrote to Francesco Vettori, and not to Francesco Guicciardini as Berlin believed, “I love my fatherland more than my own soul,” he was not setting forth a pagan principle but rather a Christian principle that had deep roots in the history of Florence. The eight Florentine magistrates who showed with their deeds, during the war against the Papal States under Gregory XI, that they loved their fatherland more than their own souls, were popularly dubbed “Saints,” because they were considered Christian saints, not pagan heroes (and that war is remembered as the War of the Eight Saints). Similarly, an idea that Berlin considered pagan—that it is an intrinsic quality of man to attempt to become similar to God and to imitate the aspirations to true glory of the ancient founders of states and religions—had a long history and deep roots within the Christian tradition. The idea of a God who loves above all others those who pursue the best interests of their fatherland is in Berlin’s view very distant from the God of the New Testament. In fact, Machiavelli, and many others of his time Isaiah Berlin, The Originality of Machiavelli, in Studies on Machiavelli, edited by Myron P. Gilmore, Sansoni, Florence 1970, pp. 168–70, 172–74 and 198. Also Meinecke considers Machiavelli to be unaffected by the religious impulses of the Renaissance, basically pagan and the proponent of a complete break with the dualistic Christian ethic that spiritualized man. See Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’ètat and Its Place in Modern History, translated from the German by Douglas Scott. Praeger, New York 1965. Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, Lettere, edited by Franco Gaeta. Utet, Turin 1984, p. 629. Berlin, The Originality of Machiavelli, in Studies on Machiavelli, p. 179. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 416. Berlin, The Originality of Machiavelli, in Studies on Machiavelli, p. 195. Ibid., p. 202, n.102.
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and of the centuries that followed, believed that a God who commands us to love our fatherland was in no way separate from the teachings of Christ and the Apostles, and that the interests of the republic were entirely compatible with the will of God. Furthermore, there was no need for a rebirth of paganism in order to bring about a resurrection of civic virtue. Not a pagan, then, but a supporter of an instrumental conception of religion? This interpretation, too, has a long history. Gennaro Sasso produced a particularly sophisticated discussion of it. In his view, Machiavelli saw religion as a fundamental element of a “well ordered” state, “like the state that, in fact, makes possible good morals, good orders, and good arms. But, at its roots, and also at its summit, it unfailingly presupposes the presence of an attentive and virtuous legislator, who knows how to modulate its power and apply its effects accordingly with the conditions of the times and the winds of fortune.” Religion, therefore, takes on a twofold meaning: it is “instrumentum regni, the medium through which, in the name of God, an intelligent legislator can carry out great, even extraordinary achievements. But it is also the profound life of the people, the good and not extrinsic morals, its political and moral ‘education’: thus the concept immediately loses the extrinsically utilitarian character that marked it in the first case, and tends to render it obsolete.” The concept of religion, Sasso points out, is no longer merely an instrument of dominion, but also takes on a “constructive significance.” Sasso is quite right when he emphasizes that Machiavelli’s religious thought is miles away from that of the political writers of the CounterReformation, and the reader can see further confirmation of this by reading chapter 4. The authors of the Counter-Reformation were calling for a Catholicism that was little more than a formal, external participation in worship, obedience to the church, and a school for humility; Machiavelli instead called for a religion that was intrinsic “to the soul of the people,” Gennaro Sasso, Niccolò Machiavelli. Storia del suo pensiero politico, pp. 510–12. Before Sasso, Giuliano Procacci had pointed out that Machiavelli considered religion to be a powerful force in favor of social cohesion in his Introduction to Il Principe e Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, Feltrinelli, Milan 1960, pp. lix–lxi. Also read what Ernst Cassirer has to say in The Myth of the State, Yale University Press, New Haven 1946, pp. 138–39. Among the (less perceptive) supporters of the idea that Machiavelli held a purely utilitarian view of religion are J. Samuel Preus, “Machiavelli’s Functional Analysis of Religion: Context and Object,” Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979), pp. 171–90. For further bibliographic references, see Marcia L. Colish, “Republicanism, Religion, and Machiavelli’s Savonarolan Moment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60 (1999), p. 598, n.3. Also William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defence of Republican Liberty, University of California Press, Berkeley-Los Angeles 1968, p. 38, claims that Machiavelli had a political conception of religion.
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that would translate into a sense of civic duty and a true goodness of soul: not an instrumentum regni, but rather an instrumentum libertatis. Religion, then, as means and end. A love of liberty and the good morals for which religion is a tool are themselves goals that the Christian religion, properly understood, and therefore God, call for. It is God that loves justice and wishes great men to found good political orders. The upright Christian religion educates good citizens, but one must be a good citizen in order to be a good Christian. For that reason, too, Machiavelli sets the chiefs and the founders of religions above the founders of states: if religion’s only value was as a tool of political purpose, he would not have placed those who create the tool on a higher plane than those who identify and implement the ultimate goal. Machiavelli sketched out a religion based on virtue, capable of correcting the bad religious education of the Catholic Church. He did not set himself up to preach a new theology, but rather saw himself as a proponent of a new way of life. Francesco De Sanctis (1817–83) wrote that Machiavelli was the Martin Luther of Italy, because he chose to substitute science for theology. In reality, he chose to replace a religion that preached docility, and made men weak, with a religion that would teach a love for liberty and virtue. Savonarola had told the Florentines that a true Christian must live as a good citizen, and he had called for a religious reformation that would restore to life the simplicity and purity of early Christianity. Machiavelli too was advocating a religious reform, but not like the one that Savonarola attempted so unsuccessfully. In Machiavelli’s view, the evil that undermines kingdoms and republics is neither usury nor “the occasional carnal sin,” and little is gained through fasting, charity, or prayer, and least of all is gained by an idle reliance on the assistance of God. The true evil that a reformation might uproot is the religion of idleness that teaches people to believe that “without you for you God fights, / While you are on your knees and nothing do.” Machiavelli felt no need for tiresome,
Concerning religion as a tool of political liberty in Machiavelli, see Quentin Skinner, “Machiavelli on Virtù and the Maintenance of Liberty,” in Visions of Politics, Renaissance Virtues, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2002, vol. 2, pp. 160–85. On the other hand, Jeffrey Stout is mistaken in his excellent study Democracy and Tradition, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2004, when he likens Machiavelli to Burke and attributes to him a conservative conception of religion (p. 26). As the reader can see, Machiavelli instead envisions a religion that is capable of subverting the prevailing political order, that is, the order of principalities and monarchies, replacing it with the order of republics. Niccolò Machiavelli, L’Asino [The Golden Ass], in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, Scritti letterari, edited by Luigi Blasucci, with the collaboration of Alberto Casadei, Utet, Turin 1989, pp. 382–83. Concerning anticlericalism during the time of Machiavelli, see Ottavia Niccoli, Rinascimento anticlericale. Infamia, propaganda e satira in Italia tra Quattro e Cinquecento, Laterza, Rome-Bari 2005.
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gloomy, intolerant saints, nor was he interested in mumblers of prayers, always eager to bend a knee before the powerful. Instead, he aspired to a religion that would teach men that their first duty to God, and the sole path to salvation, is to be strong citizens. His reformation was not the reform of Savonarola nor the reform of Luther: it was a much wiser reformation than either of the two. Machiavelli did not bother to explain that his idea of reformation was in keeping with the Holy Scriptures. He wrote his political works with the intent of fostering, through the persuasive power of words, morals that were similar to those of the ancients, morals that survived, though they were barely eking out an existence, in Florence, and that were flourishing greatly in the free cities of Germany. In contrast with the full-blown anachronism that scholars have perpetuated countless times, Machiavelli did not write his works in the style of the scientist or the chilly preceptor who attempts to persuade his listeners with the power of facts alone, and with the rigor of his reasoning. He did rely on facts and was (almost always) rigorous in his reasoning, but he wrote in the style of an orator and a prophet in an attempt to move his audience to action, to sway passions and imagination, and to encourage the birth of a new moral and political world. He wrote to teach what is good, as was the duty of a “good man”: and who was the good man who showed the right way, if not the true orator depicted by classical theorists of rhetoric? This aspect of Machiavelli’s intellectual physiognomy also shows his link to the Florentine context. In his Florence, eloquence was the queen of political and religious life and animated the civil religion that fused together republican principles and Christian faith. With the power of words, and with prophetic language, Savonarola had persuaded the Florentines to establish a republican government, and he had urged them to return to a true Christian and civil way of life. Yet neither powerful words nor prophetic language were enough to preserve Savonarola from death or to defend the republican government from its enemies. Machiavelli interprets the defeat of the unarmed prophet, Savonarola, in contrast with the victory of the armed prophet, Moses, and comes to the conclusion that “all armed prophets have conquered, and the unarmed ones have been destroyed.” He knows that the power of words is not sufficient to found political orders and to preserve them, but he also knows that without that power, free republics are not born, they do not survive, and they cannot defend themselves against moral corruption. This belief was the source of inspiration in all his political writings. In
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, VI.
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The Prince he refers to the story of Exodus in order to sketch in dramatic hues a portrait of the redeemer who will succeed in putting Italy back on its feet; in the Discourses on Livy he comments on Livy’s Ab urbe condita because he wants men to rediscover their ancient virtue; he writes the Florentine Histories in order to teach his fellow citizens to avoid the errors of the past and to imitate their ancestors, who placed their fatherland above their own souls; he writes The Art of War in order to revive the ageold orders and the ancient military discipline, and precisely in this work he reveals in a single phrase the hope for a rebirth that inspired his own life, as well as his writings: “This province seems made to revive the dead things of the past.” The religion that Machiavelli advocated and attempted to bring back to life was a religion of liberty that taught that one could live without serving or dominating others, that one should be strong-minded in order to defend the common liberty, that one should obey only the laws and those who govern justly, and that one should feel an internal sense of shame for violating one’s duties. Without that religion and without that God, a people cannot live in freedom. Machiavelli stated with the greatest possible clarity that republics have greater need of this religion than do monarchies. If we fail to keep in mind this essential element of his political thought, we cannot understand the true meaning of his republican theory and of republican theory in general. The religion of virtue that Machiavelli had defended, and the idea of a religious and moral reformation to be achieved through a return to the genuine principles of the Christian religion, inspired and fascinated those in Italy who sincerely believed in the need for a religion and a moral life capable of regenerating and supporting true political liberty. Sixteenthcentury heretics and reformers read his books, and Italians who had immigrated to Basel in search of religious liberty translated The Prince into Latin and published it. In the same years, the political thinkers closest to the Catholic Church directly attacked Machiavelli’s religion of virtue, claiming that it already existed within the church, as shown by the victories of Catholic armies, or that it was merely an impossible dream. The determination and the virulence of that attack derived from the belief that Machiavelli was not one of the many critics of the church’s corruption or
Niccolò Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra, in Opere, vol. I, p. 689. Concerning the exemplary nature of the critiques of Machiavelli’s ideas on religion, see Adriano Prosperi, I tribunali della coscienza: inquisitori, confessori, missionari, Einaudi, Turin 1996, pp. xix–xx. In the Protestant world, respected authors based on Holy Scripture the idea of the Christian as a good citizen. See Piero Adamo, “Cittadini e santi. Immaginario politico e cultura protestante dalla Riforma alla Rivoluzione Americana,” in Filosofia Politica 14 (2000), pp. 35–51, p. 39.
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the misdeeds of priests, but a theorist of a Christian religion of virtue that was an alternative to the teachings of the Vatican. Despite the obstinacy of Catholic writers, others—most notably Giordano Bruno—discovered at the end of the sixteenth century Machiavelli’s religion of virtue and wrote eloquent pages on the need for a religious reformation to combat the corruption of the world. At any rate, it was in the eighteenth century that the belief took firm root that, without a moral reformation inspired by the religion of virtue, Italy would never be emancipated from its condition of political decadence. Vittorio Alfieri, to mention just one exemplary name, harked back to Machiavelli’s God and set it forth as an ideal of moral and political redemption. At the end of the eighteenth century, Italian Jacobins preferred the civil religion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau over Machiavelli’s God: not a reinterpreted Christianity, but a completely new religion, with a new deity, new symbols, and new rites. It was an unfortunate choice that did great harm to the republics that sprang up in the wake of the French armies, and inhibited the turmoil of religious reformation. After the decline of the Jacobin republics, Vincenzo Cuoco understood better than anyone else that Italy’s greatest weakness was the lack of public spirit. He derived from Machiavelli the belief that Italy, in order to win a lasting liberty, must emancipate itself from the religion of idleness, find true religion, and with it the God that commands us to emulate the ancient virtues. In the same years, Ugo Foscolo quoted Machiavelli’s words (the philosopher who was “undeservedly proscribed” by the Catholics) to explain that without a true religion, Italy would never become free, and that the only religion that could assist the laborious conquest of liberty would be a Christianity that had returned to its roots. Giacomo Leopardi came to a similar conclusion in his commentary on passages from Machiavelli, whom he saw as a great and tragic figure; the passages that he chose concerned the renewal of political bodies and religions through a return to first principles. If humanity is to avoid extinction, it must free itself from the corruption of civilization and return to its true nature, rediscover the ancient virtues and the love of the fatherland that flourished in the ancient republics filled with a religion that taught the populace to cherish the public interest and to seek true glory. The moral rebirth of the human race will not take place—if it ever occurs—through a return to paganism, but through a renewed Christianity that teaches the political virtue of antiquity. The Italian Risorgimento, especially the sermons of Mazzini, went well beyond Machiavelli in the awareness that the political emancipation of a people demands faith in ideals and sacrifices. For Mazzini, the great
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achievements of freedom were the product of a religious yearning to achieve moral ideals on earth and the interior elevation of the individual to a sense of duty. Mazzini, however, accepted the profound meaning of his intuitions on the subject of religion. Thanks to Mazzini, and the other apostles of the national unification, many of whom were sincere Christians, Italy’s aptitude to bring back to life the dead things of the past, which Machiavelli wanted to believe was true, actually did become true in the Risorgimento, when a love of liberty and a love of the fatherland were both reborn. An aspiration to a moral and political renovatio that sank its roots in Italian humanism seemed, at least in part, to be coming true. The most surprising—and even moving—chapter in the long account of the presence of Machiavelli’s ideas on religion in Italian history, however, comes in the 1920s and 1930s, concomitant with the birth of that concept of the religion of liberty that assisted the finer consciences in their resistance during the years of the Fascist regime. Benedetto Croce, in his History of Europe, developed and popularized the concept; but Piero Gobetti had already rediscovered it, as he meditated on the words that Alfieri had written about Machiavelli. Gobetti sensed in Alfieri the presence of a religion based on Christ—a Christ, however, no longer considered as a teacher of humility, but rather as a creator of political liberty: a genuine civil religion that takes as its fundamental principles moral and political liberty. The prophet of the true religion of liberty was not, in Gobetti’s view, the “peasant Luther,” but rather Machiavelli, the Florentine citizen. Italy had need of this religion, and of a religious reformation that was not dogmatic but rather, essentially moral, in order to be reborn out of Fascist slavery. In this book, I end the history of Machiavelli’s impact on the aspirations for religious and moral reformation in Italy with the words that Luigi Russo wrote in 1945 in his book Machiavelli, dedicated to Nello Rosselli and Leone Ginzburg. Italian history, Russo wrote, has vindicated not the Machiavelli who writes coldly about the art of statesmanship, but rather the Machiavelli who writes with prophetic and religious pathos because he knows that “without prophetic pathos, without a moral renewal, without a civil conscience,” republics can neither come into existence nor can they survive. I know full well that my account is incomplete, but I have decided to tell it all the same because it casts light on the true Italian evil: the low wickedness that springs out of an unhealthy religious education and long years of living in servitude. Machiavelli formulated an impeccable diagnosis of the disease and prescribed a remedy for it in a religious and moral renewal that might lead to a rediscovery of the principles of charity
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and justice. His diagnosis remains just as valid as ever, and it shows Italy the way to become a people of truly free citizens.
2. Machiavelli the Puritan Outside of Italy, there were many who clearly understood what Machiavelli wrote about religion. Fervent puritans rejected the idea that the Christian religion made men weak and proudly proclaimed the ideal of the soldier who fought in God’s name and took strength from his faith. Alexander Leighton (1568–1649) writes in his Speculum belli sacri (1624) that Moses was a great king, a great commander, and also a “servant of God,” not only because of his authority and his loyalty, but also because of his piety. In order to triumph, it is not enough to have authority and a good cause; it is also necessary to be good. For that reason, Machiavelli’s advice that the prince, or any great man, must attempt to appear religious rather than actually being religious, deserves to be condemned to hell, whence it certainly emerged. To make such a statement is tantamount to “to mock[ing] God” and to being hypocrites worthy of the sternest reprobation. Likewise, the idea that in soldiers pagan religion is preferable to true Christian religion can only be rejected as blasphemous. It is moreover counter to all reason to deny—as Machiavelli does—the power of the Christian religion. A soldier who knows that God is on his side will become magnanimous and courageous because he is convinced in his conscience that he will not lose his soul while fighting for his country, for the glory of God, and in the defense of his religion. Equally stern in his condemnation of Machiavelli was Richard Bernard, another eloquent voice of the English puritan universe. Only those who have religion, Bernard explains, are willing to sacrifice their lives. Those who believe that God is on their side “will fight with their hands and pray with their heart”; they are courageous and ready to give their lives for a just cause, certain that death will open the gates of eternal life for them. It is therefore necessary not to allow the “Machiavellian Atheists” to mock God and to maintain that the Christian religion is incapable of training good soldiers. See Mario Praz, Machiavelli in Inghilterra, Tumminelli, Rome 1943; Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli: A Changing Interpretation (1500–1700), Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1964. Alexander Leighton, Speculum belli sacri: Or the Looking-glasse of the Holy War, Amsterdam 1624, pp. 25–28. Richard Bernard, The Bible-Battles, or The Sacred Art Military for the Rightly Waging of War According to the Holy Writ, London 1629, pp. 79–80.
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These puritans, clearly, were not familiar with the pages of the Discourses on Livy and The Art of War in which Machiavelli points out that, without religion, it is impossible to assemble armies that can fight courageously and respect the rules of war. They also overlooked the fact that Machiavelli blamed the decline of military virtue not on the Christian religion per se, but on the Christian religion interpreted as a form of idleness. In any case, it is true that the puritan armies of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and Oliver Cromwell were “Protestant and national,” rather than civil and classical. But it is equally true that the puritan warrior, who fights with the comfort and reassurance of the chaplain’s sermons, singing sacred hymns as he marches into battle, is very similar to the citizen soldier that Machiavelli wanted to see in place of mercenaries. Machiavelli never imagined a soldier who fought to establish the rule of God on earth; but he did imagine, and attempted himself to forge, a Christian soldier who would fight for his fatherland, supported by his faith. Alongside the puritans who failed to realize that Machiavelli had actually laid the groundwork for the citizen soldier who fights for his fatherland with the encouragement of religion, there were others who judged him to be a full-fledged puritan. James Harrington (1611–77), an eminent Christian and republican reformer, considers Machiavelli to be the only modern political writer to have rediscovered the “ancient prudence” revealed to humanity “by God himself ” in order to establish and preserve governments founded on the common interest and the rule of law. Like the humanists of fifteenth-century Florence, Harrington believes that the republic is the kingdom of Christ and the true manifestation of divinity on earth. In this context, he unites Machiavelli’s ideas with Christian Providence and merges into a single concept the ideal of the good citizen derived from Roman political thought and the ideal of the good Christian, See in this connection, what Michael Walzer writes in The Revolution of the Saints: A Study of the Origins of Radical Politics, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 1965, pp. 268–99, in particular pp. 289–90. James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, in The Political Works of James Harrington, edited by John G.A. Pocock, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1977, pp. 161, 178. “Now if you add unto the propagation of civil liberty, what is so natural unto this commonwealth that it cannot be omitted, the propagation of the liberty of conscience, this empire, this patronage of the world, is the kingdom of Christ. For as the kingdom of God the Father was a commonwealth, so shall be the kingdom of God the Son; the people shall be willing in the day of his power”; Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, in The Political Works of James Harrington, p. 332, italics in original. John Pocock writes that Harrington, to whom the adjective “messianist or millennial” is well suited, comes close to asserting a political heresy according to which civil virtue “is identified with the condition of salvation and the vivere civile with the civitas Dei”; ibid., p. 70.
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taken from the Bible. He considers Machiavelli to be a thinker who follows in the footsteps of Moses and judges the words of The Art of War in which Machiavelli explains the importance of religion in raising good armies to be a “goodly sermon.” These ideas of Harrington’s attracted the sarcasm of Richard Baxter, who accused him of making Machiavelli into a puritan. There is no question that Niccolò was no puritan, at least not in the narrowest sense of the term. And yet the fact remains that for a republican and puritan thinker like Harrington, Machiavelli was one, and not only because of his political ideas, but also because of his ideas about the Christian religion. The impact that Machiavelli’s ideas on religion had on the political thinking of the English republicans is even more evident in the case of Henry Neville, who published in 1675 an English edition of Machiavelli’s works. He added, as a sort of foreword, a clearly apocryphal letter from Machiavelli to Zanobi Buondelmonti, dated 1 April 1537. The letter is a truly exemplary document of how an English puritan interpreted Machiavelli’s religious thought. In this text, “Machiavelli” declares that democracy, founded on good orders, is the best and most excellent form of government, and that anyone who reads carefully the historical accounts of the Old Testament will find that God himself established only one kind of government for men, and that this government was the republic. He Mark Goldie, “The Civil Religion of James Harrington,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, edited by Anthony Pagden, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1990, pp. 197–222, 109, and 203. See also Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, edited by Perez Zagorin, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London 1980. “We have the books of Moses, those of the Greeks and of the Romans, not to omit Machiavel, all for it,” James Harrington, “The Prerogative of Popular Government,” in The Political Works of James Harrington, pp. 391–93. “The puritans of the 1650s,” writes Blair Worden, “were, moreover, like Harrington, as deeply imbued with classical republican ideas as with Hebraic and Apocalyptic ones, with Machiavelli as well as Moses,” Blair Worden, “Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution,” in History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H.R. Trevor Roper, edited by Hugh Lloyd Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Blair Worden, Duckworth, London 1981. Harrington, “The Prerogative of Popular Government,” in The Political Works of James Harrington, pp. 444–45. “I know Mr. Harrington is here involved (as he speaks) by Machiavel. No wonder. But if Machiavel be become a Puritan to him, what is Mr. Harrington to us?” Richard Baxter, A Holy Commonwealth, London 1659, p. 235. For the influence of the Lettera di Machiavelli, see Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli, pp. 219–20. Also see Two English Republican Tracts, edited by Caroline Robbins, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1969, p. 15. Nicholas Machiavel’s LETTER to Zanobius Buondelmontius in VINDICATION Of Himself and His WRITINGS. From The WORKS of the Famous Nicolas Machiavel, Citizen and Secretary of FLORENCE. Written Originally in ITALIAN, and from thence Newly and
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defends himself from the charges that he is an irreligious man and proclaims that he has lived as a good Christian, and that as such, he was an enemy of the papacy that completely disfigured the Christian religion, ultimately rendering it entirely worldly and atheist, corrupting the governments of Europe, and destroying all the good principles and the morality that it had inherited from the pagans. He hopes that one day God will decide to inspire the princes of Christendom to strike down the power of the priests, restore the original Christian faith, and bring about the rebirth of true humanity and a true civil community. “Machiavelli” proclaims that God sent his son into the world to teach us a new truth, “to restore true Religion,” “regenerate our Hearts,” and show us examples of virtue, goodness, and obedience. He does not claim to be a theologian, and he admits that his real interest is politics; but he states confidently that Christ taught that his kingdom is not of this world, and that his greatest disciples must be—not powerful men—but humble servants. He boasts that he had foreseen the scourge that struck the church in the form of the Reformation, and proclaims what was also the real Machiavelli’s true credo, that is, that men who act well gain “immortal honor in this life, and eternal glory.” And even though he thinks of himself as a Christian, last of all, he defends the holiness and the worth of the pagans, paragons of “good policy” and dedicated supporters of the principle that the pursuit of virtue is crowned with honor on earth and glory in heaven. Neville insisted on the portrayal of Machiavelli as a puritan in his Plato redivivus (1681) as well, in which he presents him as the finest and most honest of modern political writers, a victim of priests and know-nothings, a champion of the idea that the Christian religion cannot be imposed with the force of law, but only taught in words and practiced with a pure heart. He ends the treatise with a motto that is the most complete synthesis of Faithfully Translated into ENGLISH, printed for John Starkey at the Miter in Fleetstreet, near Temple-Bar, London 1675. Ibid. “I am charged then, in the second place, with impiety, in vilifying the Church, and so to make way for Atheism. I do not deny but that I have very frequently in my Writings, laid the blame upon the Church of Rome, not only for all the misgovernment of Christendom; but even for the depravation and almost total destruction of Christian Religion it self in this Province; but that this discourse of mine doth, or can tend to teach men impiety; or to make way for Atheism, I peremptorily deny: and although for proof of my innocence herein, I need but refer you and all others to my Papers themselves, as they are now published,” Ibid. Henry Neville, “Plato Redivivus,” in Two English Republican Tracts, pp. 168 and 154–55. Neville also quotes “the divine Machiavel” in reference to the analogy between the ills of political bodies and the ills of natural bodies; ibid., p. 81.
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Machiavelli’s thinking on religion: “Nullum numen abest, si sit prudentia” (“No heavenly powers will lack where wisdom is”). Another major republican political writer, Walter Moyle (1672–1721), developed Machiavelli’s ideas on the religion of the Romans in his Essay upon the Constitution of the Roman Government (ca. 1699). He describes Numa’s achievement as an improvement on Romulus’s institutions and singles him out as an example of the methods of all great lawgivers who, in order to win the people’s credence and ensure their obedience to the laws, pretend to speak through divine inspiration. He emphasized that Numa’s religion was in Rome “the foundation of justice, of love of country, and the valor of the armies.” He praises Machiavelli for deriving from Cicero the principle that republics cannot survive unless they are frequently renewed by their magistrates, either by reviving the fear and reverence of the laws, or by restoring the ancient virtue and discipline, and by a reformation of those corruptions and disorders brought about by bad government and the depravity of human nature. In the same year that Moyle wrote his Essay, Algernon Sidney (1623– 83) published his Discourses concerning Government, in London. In that book he criticized Machiavelli’s idea about the reformation of political constitutions through a return to original principles. The political writers who have supported this idea, Sidney comments, should first of all examine whether the principles in question are good or bad. Since no political constitution is so perfect that it is in no need of change, the argument that the only salutary changes are those which restore political bodies back to their origins would oblige humanity to remain a prisoner of the errors of past generations and renounce the benefits of wisdom, industry, experience, and the proper use of reason. Despite these criticisms, Sidney follows in Neville also adds the English translation: “If prudence be present, no divine power is absent,” ibid., p. 200. Walter Moyle, “An Essay upon the Constitution of the Roman Government,” in Two English Republican Tracts, pp. 210–13. “Cicero, and from him Machiavel, and other modern writers of politics lay down for a certain maxim, that commonwealths cannot subsist, unless they are frequently renewed by their magistrates, either by reviving the reverence and terror of the laws, or by restoring the ancient virtue and discipline, or by a thorough reformation of those corruptions and disorders, which length of time, a loose administration, and the depravity of human nature will introduce into the soundest and firmest constitutions of government. This Machiavel styles resuming the commonwealth and reducing it to its first principles, of which there are many memorable instances in the rise of popular government,” ibid., pp. 253–54 and 259. Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, edited by Thomas G. West, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis 1996, p. 462. In the opinion of Alan C. Houston, Sidney dedicates no attention to the Machiavellian idea of civil religion. See Alan C. Houston, Algernon Sidney and
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Machiavelli’s footsteps in reinforcing the religious content of republicanism. Machiavelli, Sidney notes, believed that a man endowed with reason could never wish to be Caesar rather than Scipio, or to imitate the deeds of such bad princes as Nabis, Phalaris, and Dionysius, rather than those of good princes, such as Agesilaus, Timoleon, or Dion. He adds that history shows us many instances of knowledgeable men of good judgment falling into the error of imitating bad princes instead of good princes, to their infinite harm and disgrace. A good prince, who rules with justice and clemency, can obtain satisfaction for his soul, count on “the blessing of God” on his just and virtuous deeds, and obtain the love and praise of his fellow men, living safely and happily among safe and happy subjects; the bad prince who falls into barbarity, evil, and tyranny draws on himself “the displeasure of God” and the hatred of his fellow men. Machiavelli in the Discourses on Livy speaks of neither the blessing nor the displeasure of God. With this addition, Sidney not only reiterates that tyranny is hateful to God and that the good prince is a friend to God, but he also arrays Machiavelli among the supporters of a republican Christianity. Sidney adopts a similar procedure when he defends the principle, which Machiavelli had set forth with particular authority and efficacy, that the virtue and the power of the Romans began and ended with their liberty. He points out that it is ridiculous to attribute to fortune, which is inconstant and capricious, the remarkable greatness that the Romans achieved in the period of just over three hundred years that followed their conquest of liberty from their kings. That greatness was the result not only of virtue, as Machiavelli had written, but also—and this idea does not appear in Machiavelli—of a secret design by God. When God wishes to help a people, he endows it with extraordinary virtue, and when he wishes to destroy a people he strips it of virtue and wisdom. In another chapter, he first quotes Augustine in order to reiterate that God does not fail to reward men who act well, and then quotes Machiavelli to explain that virtue is necessary to win and keep liberty. In this fundamental work of seventeenth-century republican political thought, Machiavelli therefore emerges as a proponent of a religion that is on the side of republican liberty. A similar contrast in the interpretations of Machiavelli’s religious ideas also developed within Dutch political thought. Like their English counterthe Republican Heritage in England and America, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1991, p. 165. Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, p. 283. Ibid., pp. 144–45. Ibid., pp. 134–35.
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parts, the Protestants of the United Provinces accused Machiavelli of using religion for political ends. An anonymous author of political pamphlets wrote that Machiavelli, following the ideas of the pagan Polybius, theorized that religion was a form of sacred fraud. Another author lambasted him for having actually advised the rulers of the Republic of Holland not to respect the official state religion and instead to allow other religious cults, to the great detriment of civil peace. In the translation of the Discourses on Livy that was published in 1704, we read, instead, that Machiavelli was a god-fearing man. Without waiting for the new edition, Pieter de la Court, one of the most influential figures of republicanism, had borrowed freely from Machiavelli’s ideas on religion and on the relationship between the Catholic Church and everyday morality in his Politike Discoursen (1662). To the anonymous author of Machiavel républicain, published in Amsterdam in 1741, lastly, the Florentine Secretary was not irreligious at all, and his ideas deserved full support for his correct criticism of the corruption of the church of Rome. In Holland, too, the men who advocated political and religious liberty sensed an affinity of beliefs in the pages of Machiavelli. It is true that Machiavelli never theorized religious freedom, but read the Bible on his own and was convinced that he read it intelligently. Moreover, he was a determined defender of the full right to free speech in public assemblies and scorned the claims of the church to teach religion with the sword. For that matter, one of Machiavelli’s closest readers in Holland was none other than Baruch Spinoza, the great theorist of religious freedom. In his Tractatus politicus (Political Treatise), which was first published in the Opus Posthumus (1677), Spinoza praised Machiavelli as a “most ingenious” and “far-seeing” man who had written on political matters with much better results than the philosophers, especially those who “conceive of men, not as they are, but as they themselves would like them to be; Whence it has come to pass that, instead of ethics, they have generally written satire, and Eco Haitsma Mulier, “A Controversial Republican: Dutch Views on Machiavelli in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, edited by Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1990, pp. 248–263. Present in Dutch republican thought is the idea, which we also find in Savonarola, that monarchy is an enemy to Christ, and that only a free republic is Christian; see The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republic of Holland Written by John De Witt and Other Great Men in Holland, London 1702, pp. 6, 39–40, 58–65, 377–88, 482–83. Martin van Gelderen differs, see “The Machiavellian Moment and the Dutch Revolt,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, p. 218. Benedictus de Spinoza, Tractatus politicus, V.7 and I.2. Spinoza read Machiavelli in Italian. See in this connection the excellent study by Vittorio Morfino, Il tempo e l’occasione. L’incontro Spinoza Machiavelli, LED, Milan 2002, p. 21.
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that they have never conceived a theory of politics, which could be turned to use, but such as might be taken for a chimera, or might have been formed in Utopia, or in that golden age of the poets when, to be sure, there was least need of it.” In his Tractatus theologico-politicus (Theologico-political Treatise), published anonymously in Amsterdam in 1670, Spinoza summarized in a passage on Moses Machiavelli’s idea of the lawgiver as a man who, thanks to his extraordinary virtue, brings to the state the religion that arouses in men a sense of duty, encourages good morals, and gives bravery to the soldiery. In the same years, French freethinkers set up an image of Machiavelli as an atheist and a radical critic of religious superstition. The anonymous author of the Theophrastus redivivus (1659), an emblematic work of seventeenth-century atheistic and materialist thought, describes Machiavelli as the thinker who denounced Moses and Christ as impostors who used fakery to pass themselves off as gods, and who showed that all lawgiver princes are frauds and impostors (“deceptores et simulatores”), and that religion was nothing more than a gimmick and deception in the pursuit of power. With an ingenious interpolation between two passages of chapter 12 of the Discourses on Livy, the author attributes to Machiavelli the idea that all religions take their authority and their force from some stratagem, and that their foundations lie in a superstitious faith in oracles, fortune-tellers, and haruspices. The Treatise of the Three Impostors: The Life and Spirit of Master Benedict de Spinosa (Traité des trois imposteurs), one of the most important clandestine texts of the late seventeenth century, also takes its inspiration, directly or indirectly, from Machiavelli when it claims that “all ancient legislators, wishing to reinforce, consolidate, and establish good foundations for the laws that they were giving to their peoples, were unable to come up with anything better than to render public and claim, with all the skills they possessed, that they had received them directly from some deity or other.” It then goes on to quote explicitly from Machiavelli to illustrate, with the example of Savonarola, that lawgivers claim to be inspired by God, and it notes that force is needed to found a new religion. In reality, Machiavelli
Spinoza, Tractatus politicus, I.1. Benedictus de Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, V. Tullio Gregory, Theophrastus redivivus. Erudizione e ateismo nel Seicento, Morano, Naples 1979, p. 201. Ibid., pp. 199 and 208, in particular, see the Appendix with the quotes from Machiavelli. Trattato dei tre impostori. La vita e lo spirito del Signor Benedetto de Spinoza [Traité des trois imposteurs or Treatise of the Three Impostors: The Life and Spirit of Master Benedetto de Spinosa], edited by Silvia Berti, Einaudi, Turin 1994, chap. 17.
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had stated that force is needed to found political orders, not to found a new religion. The most evident deformation, also found in other texts by freethinkers, is the fact that, while the Traité des trois imposteurs considers the founders of religions to be so many deceivers who exploit the ignorance of the people, Machiavelli places them among men worthy of the highest praise. Much closer to Machiavelli’s thought are the considerations concerning religion that Montesquieu sets forth in the Spirit of the Laws. Montesquieu explains with clear reference to Machiavelli (whom he calls a “great man”) that “most of the ancients lived under governments that had virtue for their principle,” and their religion imposed no conflict between duties to the fatherland and duties toward the gods. In contrast with the ideas of Pierre Bayle, who claimed that Christianity is not suited to preserve a republic because it takes into consideration only the afterlife, Montesquieu writes that “[true Christians] being infinitely enlightened with respect to the various duties of life, and having the warmest zeal to fulfil them, must be perfectly sensible of the rights of natural defence. The more they believe themselves indebted to religion, the more they would think due to their country. The principles of Christianity, deeply engraved on the heart, would be infinitely more powerful than the false honour of monarchies, than the humane virtues of republics, or the servile fear of despotic states.” There is nothing more absurd than to call for peoples or princes without religion. What is in contrast with the republican spirit, Montesquieu concludes, in full agreement with Machiavelli, is the Catholic religion, not the Christian religion, especially the religion of the Reformation. Concerning the relationship between Machiavelli and seventeenth-century libertinism, see Lorenzo Bianchi, Rinascimento e libertinismo. Studi su Gabriel Naudé, Bibliopolis, Naples 1996, in particular, pp. 33 and 122–26, where the author points out that both in the Theophrastus redivivus and in the Considérations politiques Naudé uses Machiavelli to support an interpretation of religion as a pure instrument of power. See also the Trattato dei tre impostori [Traité des trois imposteurs or Treatise of the Three Impostors], in particular chapters 16 and 17, where there is a clear appreciation of Machiavelli, and Giorgio Spini, Ricerca dei libertini. La teoria dell’impostura delle religioni nel Seicento italiano, Editrice “Universale di Roma,” Florence 1950, p. 171. Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, VI.5 and IV.4, in Oeuvres complètes, edited by Roger Caillois, Gallimard, Paris 1951. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, XXIV.6. Ibid., XXIV.2. Ibid., XXIV.5. See also the entry Christianisme in the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences des Arts et de Métiers, vol. III, facsimile ed. 1751–1780, Fromann Verlag, StuttgartBad Cannstatt 1966, pp. 384–86.
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The other great work of eighteenth-century republican political thought, Rousseau’s Social Contract, also borrows from Machiavelli’s ideas that religion and republican liberty are necessarily linked, but it extends them in the opposite direction from that taken by Montesquieu. Rousseau recognizes that the true lawgiver must put the rules of civil life into God’s mouth “in order to constrain by divine authority those whom human prudence could not move” and reiterates that only great-hearted men can persuade their listeners that they have been inspired by God and thus establish lasting laws. Yet he eliminates the Machiavellian distinction between the Christian religion interpreted according to idleness and the Christian religion interpreted according to virtue, and he formulates a condemnation that admits neither appeal nor review: “So far from binding the hearts of the citizens to the State,” the Christian religion “has the effect of taking them away from all earthly things. I know of nothing more contrary to the social spirit.” Christianity, Rousseau concludes, “preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favourable to tyranny that it always profits by such a régime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not much mind: this short life counts for too little in their eyes.” With perfect consistency, Rousseau concludes that the religion of the republic must be an entirely new religion, a civil religion based not on dogmas, but on sentiments of sociability to be instituted not with the force of words, but by the force of laws.
3. Machiavelli’s Prophecy The patriots who founded the republic of the United States were followers of Montesquieu rather than Rousseau. Instead of attempting to invent and popularize a new religion, they interpreted and taught Christianity as a religion of virtue. To certain American writers, in the years of the republic’s founding, Machiavelli was a figure of considerable importance because of the pages he wrote about republican liberty, and especially because of his doctrine of the renewal of constitutions through a return to fundamental principles. Nathaniel Chipman (1752–1843), for instance, praised
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat Social [Social Contract], in Œuvres Complètes, edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Gallimard, Paris 1964, vol. III, pp. 456–66. Concerning the issue of religious devotion for the classical political authors, see Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1969, p. 50; Eric Cochrane, Machiavelli in America, in Il pensiero politico di Machiavelli e la sua fortuna nel mondo, Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, Florence 1972, pp. 133–50. See also Giorgio Spini, “Sulla storiografia puritana nella Nuova Inghilterra,” in
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Machiavelli for having theorized a plan of reform that would allow “the people to return periodically and peaceably to fundamental principles.” Joseph Perry, pastor of the First Church of Christ, explained in a sermon to the General Assembly of the Colony of Connecticut (11 May 1775), that Machiavelli and Sidney both taught that all constitutions are subject to corruption and death, unless they are renewed “by reducing them to their first principles.” When the patriots began to explore the problem of educating the Americans to civic virtues, they found a solid foundation in the religion that the pastors preached and practiced. That religion was a Christianity that taught its adherents to love liberty, to strengthen civic virtues, and to cultivate a love for the fatherland. Samuel Kendall (1753–1814), for instance, held that religion, and the moral and social virtues that derive from it, are, under God, “the life and the security of a free people.” Since the Creator established that men must live under a civil government, any government that has ends that diverge from the public good or the common interest fails to comply with the design of Heaven and does not deserve the respect of men. Religious faith fosters the morality necessary for the good order and best interests of society, and is therefore the basic foundation of good government. That is why the wise men of antiquity inculcated in the people a reverence for the gods and always considered it a grave error to undermine the power of religion, even though many of them knew that what were being venerated were not real gods. The most eloquent example, Kendall notes, is that of the Romans, for whom oaths were the true safeguard of duty. Christianity not only offers a clear vision of one’s duties, but also Rivista storica italiana 72 (1960), pp. 415–44; Spini, “Riforma italiana e mediazioni ginevrine nella Nuova Inghilterra puritana,” in Ginevra e l’Italia, edited by Delio Cantimori, Sansoni, Florence 1959. Nathaniel Chipman, Sketches of the Principles of Government, Rutland, VT 1793, pp. 289– 90 and 291–92. Joseph Perry, A Sermon Preached before the General Assembly of the Colony of Connecticut at Hartford, printed by Eben. Watson, Near the Great Bridge, Hartford 1775. For a reference to Machiavelli as the teacher of free states and free peoples, see “The Tribune,” I (1766), p. 94; and concerning Machiavelli as the theorist of the reform of constitutions through a return to original principles, see Anonymous, Four Letters on Interesting Subjects, ibid., p. 389. Samuel Kendall, “Religion the Only Sure Basis of Free Government” (Boston 1804), in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1760–1805, 2 vols., edited by Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz, Liberty Press, Indianapolis 1983, vol. 2, p. 1243. In the rhetoric of the American patriots, we find both the idea of God who wishes the liberty of the peoples, and the idea that the rulers are deputy regents for God and that they must imitate his perfection and defend America as the refuge of liberty. See American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1760–1805, pp. 257–80 and 562–63. See in this connection Maria Teresa Picchetto, “La ‘Respublica Hebraeorum’ nella Rivoluzione Americana,” Il Pensiero Politico 35 (2002), pp. 481– 500; and Tiziano Bonazzi, Il sacro esperimento, Il Mulino, Bologna 1970.
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provides strong motivations to adhere to virtues; it presents our liberty and our happiness as the subjects of divine concern, it exhibits extraordinary examples of benevolence, it prohibits the indulgence in selfish passions and admonishes that honoring men is tantamount to dishonoring God. Phillips Payson, in a sermon from 1778, stated in his turn that alongside the liberty in the heavenly Jerusalem, there is the liberty that the sons of God, heirs to his glory, possess in this life when they free themselves from the slavery of corruption and from the tyranny of bad passions. Religious or spiritual liberty is the greatest form of happiness that man can enjoy in the private sphere, but we must also consider civil liberty as “the greatest of all human blessings.” Both the voice of reason and the voice of God teach that the goal of civil government is the public good. A free, just government derives from the people, and a republican government is one that better than any other defends the rights and the liberties of individuals and achieves the public interest. Love of country, or public virtue, is an indispensable support of good government and liberty. Equally important, Payson emphasizes, is religion, because it preserves the feeling of moral obligation and gives value to oaths, an indispensable instrument of government. The fear of God acts as a powerful brake on the minds of men, and religious worship educates the manners and customs of the people. The corruption of worship, especially when it drives worshippers away from the original simplicity of the Gospel, inevitably entails grave consequences for a free government. For that reason, the wisest men advise us to consider with respect religious cults and to take care lest they be corrupted. The duty of a Christian, Tunis Wortman admonished in a sermon in 1800, is to defend the integrity and independence of the church, keep religion separate from politics, prevent the unification of church and state; but also to defend liberty and the constitution: “You have a religion which deserves your pious solicitude; but need I to remind you that you likewise have a country!” The duties of a good Christian are in no way in contrast with the sacred duties of a citizen. Religion is of inestimable worth and deserves great care; but the civil constitution is also invaluable: “Your obligations to your children, to your country, and to heaven, command you to defend that constitution.” With equal force, the speaker concludes, you must protect both your faith and your liberty.
Kendall, Religion the Only Sure Basis of Free Government, pp. 1244–48. Phillips Payson, A Sermon (Boston 1778), in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1760–1805, vol. 1, p. 524. Ibid., p. 528. Ibid., p. 529. Tunis Wortman, “A Solemn Address, to True Christians and Patriots, upon the Approaching Election of a President of the United States” (New York, 1800), in Political Sermons of the
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Richard Price, last of all, in a speech that he delivered in London on the anniversary of the Glorious Revolution, explains that Christ did not exhort the love of country because in his day that would have caused more harm than good. His words would have driven the Jews to insurrection and made the Romans even fiercer in their opposition to the peace and happiness of mankind. By preaching love for all men and the virtue of charity, Christ and the apostles achieved much more, and established a genuine “Religion of Benevolence,” different from all other religions. With his example, Christ nonetheless taught that he loved his Jerusalem with a special fondness, even if it was an ungrateful homeland. In one of his last trips to Jerusalem, Christ wept for the city: “If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace!” (Luke 19: 42). Jerusalem rejected Christ’s love, but he responded with words of sadness: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!” (Luke 13: 34). St. Paul went so far as to say that, for the love of his compatriots, he would be willing to be “accursed from Christ,” that is, he would be happy to suffer the calamities that were about to strike the Jews, if his sacrifice would help to save them (Rom. 9: 3). The fatherland, Price concludes, needs our service to defend our common liberty and to protect our interests. But even if all our efforts were in vain, we would still have the satisfaction of our consciences and we could foster the hope that we might soon become citizens of the heavenly fatherland. This survey, however summary it may be, shows us that the religion that helped the Americans to found and preserve their republic was, in the final analysis, quite similar to the religion that developed four centuries earlier in Florence, a religion that Machiavelli helped to preserve and hand down to later republican political thinkers. Did that religion not proclaim that a good Christian must be a good citizen and love his earthly fatherland with all his might, in order to prepare himself for the heavenly fatherland? That God loves free republics and that he was a friend to those who govern in the public interest? That it is the citizen’s duty to cultivate the moral strength that will allow him to defend liberty effectively? Even though they did not derive it directly from Machiavelli, the religion of the Americans was the very religion that Machiavelli would have most liked American Founding Era, 1730–1805, edited by Ellis Sandoz, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis 1990, pp. 1482–84. Richard Price, “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country” (4 November 1789), in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era 1730–1805, p. 1011. Ibid., pp. 125–27.
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to see flourish, taking the place of the corrupt Catholic religion that led souls away from virtue and, thus, made the foundation of free republics impossible. We find no trace of any of this in John G. A. Pocock’s monumental reconstruction, though it may fairly be given credit for having documented the links between Florentine republicanism and Anglo-Saxon republicanism. We find no trace because Pocock believes that the Aristotelian ideal of the citizen that was reborn in Florence in the early modern age set itself “in a paradoxical, though not explicitly contentious, relationship with the Christian assertion that man is homo religiosus, formed to live in a transcendent and eternal communion, dubbed however with a sinisterly political name: civitas Dei.” The ancient ideal of homo politicus, Pocock explains, asserts its nature and its virtue through political action; the human type that is closest to it is homo rhetor, while the most antithetical human type is homo credens. Working from these assumptions, Pocock states that for Machiavelli “the civil goals of political life (including the virtue of political participation) no longer have anything to do with the ultimate aims of otherworldly redemption.” In Pocock’s view, this is the most subversive idea set forth by the Discourses on Livy, even more subversive than the ideas of The Prince. He believes that for Machiavelli “Christian virtues and civil virtues could never meet,” with the consequence that “the implications of civil life are progressively resolved in a pagan, secular direction, entirely within the temporal dimension. In other words, civil life is best implemented where there is no such religion as Christianity, but only the practice of oracular fortunetelling, and where there are no transcendent values conflicting with the values of life on earth.” The truth is, instead, that Machiavelli wrote very clearly that the Christian God loves those redeemers who possess virtue and is their friend, and he stated with equal clarity that civil life prospers most where there is true Christianity, the one that is closest to authentic Christianity. In contrast with what Pocock claims, civil humanism and Machiavelli proclaimed that there is no conflict between the citizen and the Christian believer, and that if you are a true Christian you must be a good citizen. Because of this error in interpretation, Pocock failed to see that the strongest ideological and historical link between Florentine political thought
John G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1975. Ibid., p. 462. Ibid., p. 530. Ibid., pp. 193–94 and 213–14.
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and the Atlantic tradition is the republican religion. Sheldon Wolin, instead, did notice it, and in his study of Alexis de Tocqueville he points out that American Christianity can be considered “a Machiavellian civil religion.” The religion that Tocqueville observed in America set forth rigorously republican and democratic principles, and had succeeded in instilling in the souls of the citizens the belief that Christianity and liberty are inseparable and that a true Christian loves his fatherland. Separate from political power, the religion of the Americans was capable of educating the morals of the people and moderating the most dangerous passions. And it exhorted its followers to consider the commitment to the common interest and for the liberty of all peoples as a religious duty. For these reasons, the religion that developed on American soil played an essential role in republican life. It was precisely the religion that Machiavelli had hoped to see blossom in Italy, at least in its moral and civil content. Without intending to, and through the power of his imagination, Machiavelli had formulated, not a hope, but a prophecy. As Hannah Arendt rightly notes, Machiavelli’s republican Christianity is an essential component of the theory of political revolution that inspired the birth of modern republics. In her view, Machiavelli is “the spiritual father of revolution in the modern sense” because he possesses “that conscious and passionate yearning to revive the spirit and the institution of Roman antiquity which later became so characteristic of the political thought of the eighteenth century.” The protagonists of the revolutionary experiments justified and supported revolution as a return to the true principles of the political community. Great modern revolutions originated as “restorations or renewals” in the Machiavellian meaning of renovations that return the body politic to its origins and thus save it from corruption and death. In the thought of the founders of the American republic, Hannah Arendt has pointed out, Machiavelli’s idea of the rebirth of the ideals and virtues of antiquity had a very powerful influence: “From a historical point of view, it was as if the rebirth of antiquity that had taken place during the Renaissance, and had come to a sudden end with the advent of the modern age, had suddenly found a new lease on life; as if the republican fervor of the Italian city-states in their brief existence—already condemned, as Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2001, pp. 297–98. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amerique, Gallimard, Paris 1951, vol. I, p. 31: “Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but corresponded in many points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories.” English transl. from Democracy in America, Knopf, New York 1945, vol. 1, p. 32. Ibid., pp. 304–308. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, Viking Press, New York, 1963, pp. 30–32.
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Machiavelli knew full well, by the advent of the nation-state—had only been sleeping, so that it could give the nations of Europe the time to grow, as it were, under the tutelage of absolute monarchs and enlightened despots.” The men of the revolutions turned to classical antiquity for inspiration and guidance, and took as their model “the Roman republic and the grandeur of its history.” The success of America was determined at the very moment that the Constitution began to be venerated. Machiavelli therefore contributed to revolutionary theory precisely with his thoughts on the role of religion in the foundation of new political orders. The birth of a new political order, demands, alongside violence, religion; alongside power, authority: the force of arms and the force of words. “Machiavelli,” wrote Hannah Arendt, “the sworn enemy of religious considerations in political affairs, was driven to ask for divine assistance and even inspiration in legislators—just like the ‘enlightened’ men of the eighteenth century, John Adams and Robespierre for example.” Among those enlightened men who were the political and intellectual leaders of the democratic revolutions, it was in any case the founding fathers of the American Revolution who made the best use of Machiavelli’s intuition that the Christian religion, and not a new religion, invented out of whole cloth, was especially necessary for a sovereign people. The history of republicanism should be reconsidered, in order to give to the religious theme the importance that it had historically. It is entirely legitimate to theorize the republican idea of liberty as liberty from domination, without mentioning that many important republican political writers considered political liberty a gift from God, and the duty to defend it a religious duty. But only an incomplete interpretation would fail to cast light on one of the essential aspects of republican political thought, and Machiavelli’s thought in particular, thus transforming republicanism into a theory poorly suited to teach the true way of conquering and preserving liberty.
Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., p. 203. Ibid., p. 32. Another writer who deplores the scanty attention paid by scholars to the religious dimension of republicanism is Jonathan Scott, “Classical Republicanism in Seventeenth-Century England and the Netherlands,” in Republicanism, a Shared European Heritage, edited by Quentin Skinner and Martin van Gelderen, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2002, vol. 1, p. 61. In the same book, two other studies focus on the theme of religion within the context of republicanism: Lea Campos Boralevi, De Republica Hebraeorum (The Jewish Commonwealth), vol. 1, pp. 247–61; and Simone Zurbuchen, “Republicanism and Toleration,” vol. 2, pp. 47–72. See the essay, by Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1998.
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CHAPTER ONE
HIS GOD
1. The Soul and the Fatherland Not a single word written by Niccolò Machiavelli has survived to show he had the slightest concern for the salvation of his immortal soul. He scoffed at the idea of hell: “But then on the other hand, the worst that can happen to you is to die and go off to Hell! How many others have died! And how many excellent men have gone to Hell! Why should you be ashamed to go there, too?” he has Ligurio say in The Mandrake (La Mandragola). On his deathbed, apparently, he even said that he would prefer to go to hell, to spend eternity with the great men of antiquity, rather than to heaven, where he would share the boring company of saints and the blessed. He made fun of those who believed in purgatory, in church-issued indulgences, and in masses performed on behalf of the souls of the dead. This exchange between a woman and the corrupt Fra Timoteo in The Mandrake is far more eloquent than any treatise.
Niccolò Machiavelli, La Mandragola [The Mandrake], Act IV, Scene I, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, Scritti letterari, edited by Luigi Blasucci, with the assistance of Alberto Casadei, Utet, Turin 1989, pp. 147–48. English translation: David Sices and James B. Atkinson, The Comedies of Machiavelli, University Press of New England, Hannover 1985, p. 231. See also the saying that Machiavelli attributes to Castruccio Castracani, though it is in fact a reelaboration of a phrase from Diogenes Laertius; see Vita di Castruccio Castracani [The Life of Castruccio Castracani], in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. II, Istorie fiorentine e altre opere storiche e politiche, edited by Alessandro Montevecchi, Utet, Turin 1971, p. 271. Gennaro Sasso, “Il ‘celebrato sogno’ di Machiavelli,” in Machiavelli e gli antichi e altri saggi, Ricciardi, Milan-Naples, 1988, vol. III, pp. 211–94; and Sasso, Paralipomeni al “sogno” di Machiavelli, Ibid., vol. IV, pp. 325–60. Machiavelli, La Mandragola [The Mandrake], Act III, Scene III, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 137.
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woman: Take this florin, then, and you’re to say the requiem mass every Monday for two months, for the soul of my late husband. Even though he was a terrible man, still, flesh is flesh; I can’t help feeling that whenever I remember him. But do you think he is really in Purgatory? timoteo: Absolutely! The chosen targets of his scorn were the pious souls who spent hours in prayer and were constantly bustling off to mass or to church service. The virtuous Lucrezia in The Mandrake, who “insists on stringing out prayers for hours on end, down on her knees, before she’ll get into bed” is “a real horse when it comes to standing the cold.” Nicomaco in the Clizia mocks his wife Sofronia who goes to mass during Carnival: “Imagine what you will do during Lent!” Even worse than a woman is an old man, Nicia states, who “sticks his head into every church he passes, and he goes and mumbles an ‘Our Father’ at every altar.” He was even harder on confession and other religious practices. In his Rules for an Elegant Social Circle (Capitoli per una compagnia di piacere) he prescribes that “No gentleman or lady of the circle may go to confession except during Holy Week,” and that “a blind confessor ought to be chosen, and if he is hard of hearing, too, even better.” In the same work, he orders, as a punishment for anyone breaking the rules of the company: “Every lady and gentleman must attend every single feast, church fête, and pardoning in the city.” His vision of history is cyclical; he does not expect the final triumph of good over evil. He believes that human affairs are linked to the movement of the heavens: “Observe the stars above, the moon, and those / Companion planets wandering high or low, / With no rest ever, without any pause.” Nations and people are subject to cycles marked by the alternating influence of virtue and vice: Valor it is that quiets regions down: And then from quiet, laziness derives, Ibid., Act II, Scene VI, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 132. English translation: Sices and Atkinson, The Comedies, p. 231. Niccolò Machiavelli, Clizia, Act II, Scene III, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, pp. 190–91; English translation: Sices and Atkinson, The Comedies, p. 231. Ibid., Act I, Scene I, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 182. English translation: Sices and Atkinson, The Comedies, p. 231. Niccolò Machiavelli, Capitoli per una compagnia di piacere, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, pp. 250–51. English translation: Peter Constantine, “Rules for an Elegant Social Circle,” in The Essential Writings of Machiavelli, Modern Library, New York 2007, pp. 382–83. Niccolò Machiavelli, L’Asino [The Golden Ass], 3, 88–90, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 373. English translation: Joseph Tusiani, Lust and Liberty, the Poems of Machiavelli, Ivan Obolensky, New York 1963, p. 67.
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And laziness soon burns both land and town. Then, once a nation has long had its share Of disorder and war, valor again Is born and back it goes to dwell right there. This is the way Order is told to run By Him who governs us, so that no thing May ever find a pause beneath the sun. And it is, and always will be, and was Always so: evil follows good; good, evil; And each is of the other the sole cause. God gave man free will; otherwise he would have stripped him of the possibility of achieving glory. Still, his actions are affected by the influence of the heavens: “Hence peace and war down here are born, with all / The hatred that divides and tears apart / Those who in one home live, within one wall.” In the First Decennale (Decennale primo), the verse account of events in Italy from 1494 to 1504, he writes: “The struggle I shall sing of Italy, / Which happened in the last five years and five, / Beneath the stars that schemed her tragedy.” In the dedicatory letter to Alamanno Salviati, he reiterates that Italy’s disasters were necessarily caused by fate, whose power cannot be resisted. The heavens exert either benign or malignant influence over individuals as well. In The Golden Ass (L’Asino) Circe’s good handmaiden explains to the unfortunate protagonist of the story, who is none other than Machiavelli, that: Heaven has not yet changed—it never will— Its hostile mind against you, till the Fates Will not abandon their desire to kill. And those old humors which have been against You all this time and have waged war on you— Ah, they are not yet, they are not yet cleansed. But as soon as their roots dry up and die, Ibid., V, 94–105, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 382. English translation: Tusiani, Lust and Liberty, p. 67. Ibid., III, 94–96, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 373. English translation: Tusiani, Lust and Liberty, p. 67. Free will was in Dante’s view the greatest gift that God gave to mankind: “The greatest gift of God’s largesse when He / created all, most prized by Him, and best, / as most akin to His own quality, / Was the will’s freedom, crown of all the rest, / Whereof all creatures made intelligent, / They all, they only, were and are possessed”; Paradiso, V, 19–24. English translation: Dante Alighieri, The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, the Florentine, edited by Dorothy Leigh Sayers, Barbara Reynolds, Penguin Classics, Penguin Books Harmondsworth, Middlesex 1957, pp. 90–91. Niccolò Machiavelli, Decennale primo [First Decennale], 1–3, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 295. English translation: Tusiani, Lust and Liberty, p. 152. Ibid., vol. IV, p. 292.
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And heaven shows its mercy once again, Your happy hour will come, I prophesy. Machiavelli believed in the existence of occult and intelligent presences that inhabit the air and help men to foresee events to come in the future. Everyone was well aware, he wrote, that Savonarola foretold “the coming of King Charles VIII of France into Italy.” He was keenly interested in astrological and celestial signs. In June 1509, before allowing the Florentine commissioners to enter Pisa to take possession of the city, he consulted an astrologer and obtained a detailed reading of the stars. In November 1526, when he sensed looming tragedy for Italy, in Modena he consulted a soothsayer. If it was a matter of special assistance, he wasn’t picky about the difference between the Christian God and the pagan gods: “And if God does not help us out in the south, as He has already done in the north, then there are few remedies left to us. For, just as He interfered with the reinforcements from the Germans for the northerners [the lansquenets who were marching south upon Rome] with the destruction of Hungary, so He will have to interfere with the reinforcements from Spain with the destruction of the fleet; hence we shall be in need of Juno to go and pray Aeolus on our behalf and promise him the countess and every lady Florence has, so that he might set loose the winds in our behalf.” Machiavelli’s cosmos was densely populated. There were the heavens, Fortuna, and God. Each and every power played a role of its own, though not a narrowly defined one. The heavens (cieli) governed the regular movements of the cosmos: the cycles of decay and progress, death and rebirth, corruption and regeneration. “Heaven” ordered in a general manner the progress of everything on earth, especially the “mixed bodies,” that is, re Machiavelli, L’Asino [The Golden Ass], III, 100–108, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, pp. 373–74. English translation: Tusiani, Lust and Liberty, p. 68. “Yet it could be, as some philosopher would have it, that since this air is full of intelligences that foresee future things by their natural virtues, and they have compassion for men, they warn them with like signs so that they can prepare themselves for defense”; Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 56; English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 114; see Elide Casali, Le spie dal cielo. Oroscopi, lunari e almanacchi nell’Italia moderna, Einaudi, Turin 2003. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 56; English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 113. Lattanzio Tedaldi to Niccolò Machiavelli, 5 June 1509, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, Lettere, edited by Franco Gaeta, Utet, Turin 1984, pp. 305–6. Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Guicciardini, 5 November 1526, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, p. 622. Niccolò Machiavelli to Bartolomeo Cavalcanti, 6 October 1526, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, p. 616. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 405.
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publics and religious sects; heaven also caused periodic purifications of the nations by means of plagues, famines, and floods: For as in simple bodies, when very much superfluous matter has gathered together there, nature many times moves by itself and produces a purge that is the health of that body, so it happens in this mixed body of the human race that when all provinces are filled with inhabitants (so that they can neither live there nor go elsewhere since all places are occupied and filled) and human astuteness and malignity have gone as far as they can go, the world must of necessity be purged by one of the three modes, so that men, through having become few and beaten, may live more advantageously and become better. While the heavens governed orderly and necessary movements, Fortuna was the mistress of happenstance, chance, and contingent events. Fortuna exerted her immense power over terrestrial affairs in an arbitrary manner, “mercilessly, with neither law nor reason.” And “beneath her feet she often keeps the just, / And raises the unjust; and if she makes / a promise, she forgets it, as she must.” And she was happy especially when striking down great-hearted men, as in the case of Antonio Giacomini Tebalducci, one of the few valorous military commanders serving the Florentine Republic: For the sake of his land he bravely fought, And with great justice a long time he kept The prestige of your army very high. Eager of honors, lavish with his gold, He lived so noble and so good a life As to deserve much more than this my praise. Yet now, neglected and despised, he lies In his own home, a poor and blind old man: So much does Fortune fight one who does good! Fortuna was as ferocious as she was discerning. She clearly distinguished between the good—whom she punished with servitude, infamy, Machiavelli, Discorsi, III, 1 and II, 5. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 140. Anthony Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1992, pp. 63–67. Niccolò Machiavelli, Di fortuna, 39, 27–30, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 311. English translation: English translation: Tusiani, Lust and Liberty, p. 112. Niccolò Machiavelli, Decennale secondo [Second Decennale], 37–45, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 320. English translation: Tusiani, Lust and Liberty, p. 173.
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and sickness—and the wicked, whom she rewarded with power, honor, and wealth. Not even the strong and daring could escape from her yoke. To triumph against her, men had to learn to shape their actions to fit the times and the order of events. “And truly, anyone wise enough to adapt to and understand the times and the pattern of events would always have good fortune or would always keep himself from bad fortune; and it would come to be true that the wise man could control the stars and the Fates.” He adds, however, “But such wise men do not exist: in the first place, men are shortsighted; in the second place, they are unable to master their own natures; thus it follows that Fortune is fickle, controlling men and keeping them under her yoke.” When Fortuna wishes to come to the aid of great undertakings, she selects a man capable of seizing the chance that she proffers; but when she wishes to send a nation or a republic into ruin, she supports ambitious men. If there is someone who might be able to hinder her plans, either she kills him or she deprives him of all faculties of being able to work anything well.” Machiavelli concludes, “Men can second fortune but not oppose her, that they can weave her warp but not break her. They should indeed never give up for, since they do not know her end and she proceeds by oblique and unknown ways, they have always to hope and, since they hope, not to give up in whatever fortune and in whatever travail they may find themselves.” Machiavelli acknowledges God as the creator of the universe; but he does not rule out entirely the pagan idea of the eternity of the world. He also hints at an occult power concealed in the heavens: Hardly had God created stars and light, Heaven and elements and man (the one He made lord over all such beauties bright); And hardly had He thrown out of His home Proud Angels, out of Eden impious Adam Who with his mate had dared to taste the pome; Than ah (it was the time Abel and Cain Lived with their father from their daily work, Happy indeed in their poor home’s domain), A hidden power which up above is nurtured, Among the stars rotating in the sky, Niccolò Machiavelli to Giovan Battista Soderini, 13–21 September 1506, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, p. 244. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 135. Machiavelli, Discorsi, 2, 29. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 198, 199. Ibid., 2, 5. See in this connection Machiavelli e gli antichi e altri saggi, vol. I, pp. 167–376.
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And is not friendly to the human nature, To give us war and strip us of sweet peace, To take all happiness and calm away, Unleashed two furies down to dwell with us. A God that allows the presence of an occult force in heaven with such great power over the events on earth, and who allows a capricious and furious Fortuna to torment mortals, is a very different God from the Christian God that governs nature and the human world through divine providence; that God is just as different from the heterodox God of Giovanni Pontano, Lucio Bellanti, and to a certain degree, Pietro Pomponazzi. Their God governs nature and the human world by means of the heavens and by Fortuna. Machiavelli’s God seems to compete with the heavens and with Fortuna for the honor of influencing the events of the worlds, rather than making use of the heavens and Fortuna. In the Florentine Histories, for instance, God intervenes on behalf of Florence: “But God, who in such extremities has always had a particular care for it, made an un-hopedfor accident arise that gave the king, the pope, and the Venetians something greater to think about than Tuscany.” In the same book, Machiavelli attributes a similar intervention in human affairs to the heavens: “Since the heavens willed that things prepare for future evil, he [the Duke of Athens] arrived in Florence precisely at the time when the campaign at Lucca had been lost completely.” In yet another passage, he chooses to cite Fortuna: “And although the nobility had been destroyed, nonetheless fortune did not lack for ways to revive new trials through new divisions.” And if all this were not enough, we have letters that reveal in an unequivocal manner that Machiavelli was indifferent to the salvation of his eternal soul, not at all concerned as any respectful child of the church ought to be. The first of these letters, written by Francesco Guicciardini, governor of Modena on behalf of the pope, dates from the spring of 1521. Machiavelli, who was older than fifty, was working with the Minorite Friars of Carpi, carrying out the difficult mission of finding a preacher and resolving a thorny issue of jurisdiction over monasteries. Niccolò Machiavelli, Dell’ambizione [Of Ambition], 16–30, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 347. English translation: Tusiani, Lust and Liberty, pp. 120–21. Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos, pp. 54–59. Niccolò Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, VIII, 19, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. 2, edited by Alessandro Montevecchi, Utet, Turin 1986, p. 730. English translation: Florentine Histories, Laura Banfield and Harvey Mansfield, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. 1988, p. 341. Ibid., 2, 33, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. 2, p. 391. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 90. Ibid., 2, 42, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. 2, p. 411. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 104.
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“My very dear Machiavelli,” wrote Guicciardini. “It was certainly good judgment on the part of our reverend consuls of the Wool Guild to have entrusted you with the duty of selecting a preacher, not otherwise than if the task had been given to Pacchierotto, while he was still alive, or to Ser Sano to find a beautiful and graceful wife for a friend. I believe you will serve them according to the expectations they have of you and as is required by your honor, which would be stained if at this age you started to think about your soul, because, since you have always lived in a contrary belief, it would be attributed rather to senility than to goodness.” According to Guicciardini, who knew him well, then, Machiavelli always lived in a manner “contrary” to the manner of living of those who “think about their souls.” In view of the manifest absurdity of the very idea, Machiavelli does not ever respond to the insinuation that he might be in the process of turning into a devout and practicing Christian, surrounded as he is by so many friars. What he responds to, on the other hand, is his friend’s reference to the fact that he was still in the service of the Florentine Republic, however small the mission, however minor the matter at hand: “And because never did I disappoint that republic whenever I was able to help her out—if not with deeds, then with words; if not with words, then with signs—I have no intention of disappointing her now.” Two different weights, two different measurements: he wastes not even a word concerning the reference to his soul; as for the allusion to his fatherland, he responds with grave, almost resentful words. The second exchange of letters that shows us clearly and directly how little Machiavelli was concerned with his soul and the religious practices required for its salvation culminates with the renowned letter Machiavelli wrote on 10 December 1513. In a letter dated 23 November 1513, Francesco Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, pp. 518–19. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 335, 17 May 1521. Guicciardini’s irony was well founded, even though finding good preachers for Lent was a serious matter for both townships and guilds. See Francesco Bruni, La città divisa. Le parti e il bene comune da Dante a Guicciardini, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2003. Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, pp. 519–20. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 336. Machiavelli expresses his love of the fatherland as well in the opening to his A Dialogue on Language [Discorso o dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua], in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 261: “Whenever I have had an opportunity of honouring my country, even if this involved me in trouble and danger, I have done it willingly, for a man is under no greater obligation than to his country; he owes his very existence, and later, all the benefits that nature, and fortune offer him, to her. And the nobler one’s country, the greater one’s obligation. In fact he who shows himself by thought and deed an enemy of his country deserves the name of parricide, even if he has a legitimate grievance.” English translation: The Literary Works of Machiavelli,with Selections from the Private Correspondence, edited and translated by J. R. Hale, Oxford University Press, New York 1961, p. 175.
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Vettori had written: “On holidays I hear mass; I do not do as you, who sometimes do not bother.” Once again, Machiavelli failed even to respond to the thinly veiled criticism that he was insufficiently devout, and that he thought too little of eternal life and the salvation of his soul. The letter from 1513 and the letter from 1521 belong to two different and distant moments from Machiavelli’s life. And yet, in response to two friends who make reference to his soul, he answers in exactly the same manner: he is glad to let others worry about their souls and the ceremonies that are designed to ensure the eternal salvation of the soul. He was concerned, on the other hand, and deeply so, about his fatherland. He wrote, a few months before dying, in a letter from Forlì, dated 16 April 1527: “I love my patria [fatherland] more than my own soul.” Or perhaps we should say, he may have written those words, since in the text copied by Giuliano de’ Ricci, after the phrase, “I love my native city more,” there is an emphatic erasure. It is a reasonable conjecture that the words that were blotted out were “than my own soul.” All of the editors of Machiavelli’s letters have accepted that conjecture. “To love one’s native city, or fatherland, more than one’s soul” —Amare la patria più dell’anima—was a very common manner of speech in Florence. Machiavelli himself had quoted the expression in the Florentine Histories, when he described the war between Florence and Pope Gregory XI. If Giuliano de’ Ricci really did read “I love my native city more than my own soul,” that is, a common and innocuous expression that Machiavelli had already written in the Florentine Histories, which were published with the authorization of Pope Clement VII in 1525, why on earth would he have furiously canceled out the words “than my own soul”? Giuliano worked hard to produce a new “expurgated” edition of the works of his great forebear, who had been placed on the Papal Index of Prohibited Books in 1559. Since he was keenly aware that times had changed since the reign of Pope Clement VII, it is entirely understandable that he had censored a phrase that would have caused no scandal just a
Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, p. 422. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 261. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine [Florentine Histories], III, 7, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. 2, pp. 424–25. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 416. In his translation into the vernacular of the Istoria by Poggio Bracciolini, Iacopo Bracciolini explains that when they stood up to Pope Gregory XI the Florentines were obliged to choose between “the charity of the fatherland” and “the fear of religion,” and as it was just that they should do inasmuch as they were good citizens and good Christians, they placed the charity of the fatherland above and ahead of all other obligations, ties, or considerations; Iacopo Bracciolini, Istoria di M. Poggio Fiorentino: tradotta di latino in volgare da Iacopo suo figliuolo, Filippo Giunti, Florence 1598, p. 35.
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few decades earlier. And yet it is possible that the word that was eliminated was of a nature to make the phrase far more heterodox or scandalous. Giorgio Inglese, who has closely examined the transcript, wrote that “with a great deal of effort, one can just make out the letters ‘st.’ On the basis of this piece of flimsy evidence, in the spirit of conjecture, we might venture to guess that the canceled word was ‘Christ,’ and that Machiavelli had therefore written, ‘I love my native city more than Christ.’” Conjectures aside, the phrase “I love my fatherland more than my own soul” is a crucial element in our search for Machiavelli’s God. For Machiavelli, “to love my fatherland more than my own soul” has two different meanings. In the first meaning, it expressed the idea of placing the good of the fatherland above the practices of religious worship; in the second meaning, it referred to the love for a common good (the fatherland) above an individual good (the soul). An example of the first meaning is the praise of the Florentine magistrates known as the “Eight Saints” who managed the war against Pope Gregory XI, with no view other than the best interests of their city: “The war lasted three years and did not end before the death of the pontiff. It was administered with such virtue and with such universal satisfaction that the magistracy was extended to the Eight every year; and they were called Saints even though they had little regard for censures, had despoiled the churches of their goods, and had compelled the clergy to celebrate the offices—so much more did those citizens then esteem their fatherland than their souls.” An example of the second meaning is the praise of Cosimo Rucellai at the beginning of the first book of The Art of War. In that context, “the soul” is a reference to an individual’s greatest and most precious personal value: “I do not know what possession was so much his (not excepting, to go no further, his soul) that for his friends he would not willingly have spent it; I do not know of any under
Niccolò Machiavelli, Lettere a Francesco Vettori e a Francesco Guicciardini, edited by Giorgio Inglese, Rizzoli, Milan 1989, p. 384, n.9. See in this connection the fine commentary by Hannah Arendt: “We, who no longer take for granted the immortality of the soul, are apt to overlook the poignancy of Machiavelli’s credo. At the time he wrote, the expression [to love one’s native city more than one’s own soul] was no cliché but meant literally that one was prepared to forfeit an everlasting life or to risk the punishments of hell for the sake of one’s city. The question, as Machiavelli saw it, was not whether one loved God more than the world, but whether one was capable of loving the world more than one’s own self. And this decision indeed has always been the crucial decision for all who devoted their lives to politics. Most of Machiavelli’s arguments against religion are directed against those who love themselves, namely their own salvation, more than the world; they are not directed against those who really love God more than they love either the world or themselves.” On Revolution, Viking Press, New York, 1963, pp. 289–90. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, III, 7, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. 2, pp. 424–25. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 114.
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taking that would have frightened him, if in it he had perceived the good of his fatherland.” Whether the reference is to the soul in the context of religious practice and worship, or the soul in the sense of a person’s greatest and most intimate possession, to place the fatherland above one’s own soul, as Machiavelli does, means elevating service to the fatherland to a principle of faith and redemption. When he writes about the fatherland and for the fatherland, Machiavelli respects a ritual all his own. “When evening comes,” after changing, “on the threshold,” out of “my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt,” he enters his little study, and from there into an even more sacred place: the “venerable courts,” where “the ancients” receive him “solicitously.” In that location, he nourishes himself on “that food” that belongs to him alone, that is the only food that has the power to free him from his troubles and his fears of poverty and death. And what kind of spiritual or moral food was it, exactly? As Machiavelli’s words indicate, it was dialogue with the great men of antiquity who were, like him, lovers of the fatherland and of immortality. We can gain an understanding of just how vital that food of the word of Christ was to men like Vettori (and others) from the letter that Machiavelli wrote to Guicciardini from Carpi on 19 May 1521: “As for the preacher, I do not expect any honor from this affair because the fellow is on the fence. The Father in charge says that he is pledged to others, so I think I am going to return in disgrace; I am not at all happy about all this because I do not know how I shall show up before Francesco Vettori and Filippo Strozzi, who wrote me privately about this matter, begging me to do my utmost so that during this Lenten season they might dine on some spiritual food that would be to their advantage.” Machiavelli was concerned about his honor and the reactions of his friends, in part because on other, previous occasions he had failed to perform a task of the same kind successfully: And they will be sure to point out that everything I do for them is cast in the same mold: one Saturday evening last winter I was with them at Giovan Francesco Ridolfi’s house in the country, and they assigned me the task of locating the priest for the next morning’s mass. Sure enough, it turned out that that blessed priest arrived after Niccolò Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra [The Art of War] in Opere, edited by Corrado Vivanti, Einaudi-Gallimard, Turin 1997, vol. I, p. 532. English translation: Allan Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, Duke University Press, Chapel Hill, NC 1989, p. 568. Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, pp. 423–28. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, pp. 262–65. See also Christian Bec, Cultura e società a Firenze nell’età della rinascenza, Salerno Editrice, Rome 1981, pp. 228–44.
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they had eaten so that the entire household was turned topsy-turvy and I experienced everyone’s ill will because of it. If now in this second commission I set up another disaster, imagine what crazy faces they will make at me. So I am counting on you to write them a couple of lines and to get me out of this mess as best you can. In contrast with his illustrious friends, Machiavelli was in no way troubled by the lack of the “spiritual food” that Catholic masses procured, chiefly because the food for which his soul truly hungered was of a different variety, as he revealed to Vettori—and to us—with his letter dated 10 December 1513. When he goes back into his house and steps into his study, he finds himself again: he is reborn and morally redeemed, elevating his mind from abject thoughts and occupations that do not suit him to the great thoughts and occupations of the fatherland—and these are his true life. The same principle applies to him as to religions and states: rebirth comes only by returning to the beginnings and rediscovering—at the cost of great effort—one’s own true nature. Machiavelli, who loves his fatherland more than his own soul, seeks, and finds, his redemption in the process of reasoning about great political acts. The great men of antiquity who welcome him and answer his questions live on, in some place. They were successful in winning eternity, in triumphing over death. Why should it be impossible for Machiavelli to follow in their footsteps? Without any reference to God, or Christ, or religion, Machiavelli knows a way to become similar to God and live eternally. It is surely a different path from that offered by the church, since it does not involve confessions, processions, special prayers, fasting, or penitence. Is it different from the true path that God and Christ showed men? In order to answer this question, it is crucial to examine the theme of the yearning for immortality and man’s desire to become godlike, in the Florentine religious and philosophical tradition. In particular, Marsilio Ficino (1433?–99) explored these themes; Machiavelli called Ficino the “second father of Platonic philosophy.” A lover, wrote Ficino, often “wishes to transfer himself into the person he loves,” and in this act, yearns to “be Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Guicciardini, 19 May 1521, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, pp. 527–28. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, pp. 341–42. In the letter to Vettori, Stella Larosa has written, there is an atmosphere of “sacral rituality”; “Autobiografia e tradizione letteraria nella ‘giornata’ di Niccolò Machiavelli,” Interpres XXII (2003), p. 251. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, VII, 6, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. II, p. 651. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 283.
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come God.” Love wishes to contemplate and create beauty; it is both death and resurrection. It instills in man the love of virtue and through virtue links man again to God: “But when God infused his own light into the soul, He adapted the light above all to this: that it might lead men to bliss, which consists in the possession of Him. To this we are led by four virtues: Prudence, Courage, Justice, and Temperance.” God places His spark in the souls of men and some, “thanks to this gift, undergo dangers and death with a brave heart, for the worship of God, for integrity, or for fatherland.” “What restores us to heaven is not knowledge of God, but love.” Humans can grasp true beauty, and savor celestial viands, only through love. The true lover, Ficino concludes, helps the fatherland to attain a happy and honest life, like Socrates who, “devoted to this [the fatherland] through love,” conversed with young people on an equal footing and defended them from false lovers. Love is the desire for immortality (“Amor est immortalitatis desiderium”). The best men, such as founders of states and legislators, Diotima of Mantinea explains, do all that they do “because they love immortality.” Those who are “pregnant in their souls” turn out of love of immortality to procreation through wisdom, and of all the forms of wisdom, political wisdom is superior to all others. The creations of the soul, like the works that Lycurgus left Sparta and Solon left Athens, engender greater glory than natural procreation. Out of love of immortality, Machiavelli sought out the company of men who had become gods and immortals because they were able to achieve great things for the fatherland. He absorbed himself “into them completely” and he fed on the same spiritual food that those great men had consumed. Since he is a “true lover,” he loves his native city more than his Commento di Marsilio Ficini Fiorentino sopra ‘l Convitto di Platone, in Florence, per Filippo Giunti, 1594, pp. 37–38. See also Marsilio Ficino, El libro dell’amore, edited by Sandra Niccoli, Olschki, Florence 1987, pp. 34–35. Concerning Marsilio Ficino see the entry by Cesare Vasoli in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 1997, vol. 47, pp. 378–95. Commento di Marsilio Ficini Fiorentino sopra ‘l Convitto di Platone, p. 45. English translation: Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, by Marsilio Ficino, translated by Sears Jayne, Spring Publications, Woodstock, CT 1985, p. 77, originally University of Missouri 1944. Ibid., p. 75. English translation: Jayne, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, p. 77. Ibid., p. 76. English translation: Jayne, Commentary, p. 79. Ibid., pp. 112–13. Ibid., pp. 246–49. Platonis opera, Marsilio Ficino interprete, Venice, 1517, p. clxxvi; Italian translation, Plato, (Symposium) Simposio 207a, in Dialoghi filosofici, edited by Giuseppe Cambiano, Utet, Turin 1978–1981, vol. II, p. 130. Ibid.; Italian translation Simposio 208c–e, in Dialoghi filosofici, pp. 131–32. Ibid.; Italian translation Simposio 209a–e, in Dialoghi filosofici, pp. 132–33.
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own soul, and he writes his political works in order to teach the young to work well on behalf of the fatherland, in a never-ending effort of moral and political generation and regeneration. He cultivates that idea that the love of immortality and beauty is the passion that inspired the great founders of states and great legislators. He would like to be the creator of political orderings himself, and he wishes that there were men, in his own time and in the future, who harbored a profound passion to give origin to political orderings, astonishing in their order and beauty, capable of surviving through the ages. In order to conquer the misery of the human condition and in order to win immortality, Machiavelli has no need of God the creator or even of the God that puts an end to human history, endowing the good with eternal life. Even if the history of the world has neither beginning nor end—an eternal alternation between good and evil—those who are “true lovers” can find salvation by becoming gods. Nonetheless, in Machiavelli’s intellectual and spiritual horizon, alongside or above the man who becomes a god there is also the God who constitutes the last hope of the derelict and the poverty-stricken. In the last chapter of The Prince, he writes that Italy “prays God to send her someone to redeem her from these barbarous cruelties and insults.” In the Florentine Histories, discussing the religious wars that roiled Africa during the reigns of Arcadius and Honorius, he observed: “Living thus, among so many persecutions, men bore the terror of their spirit written in their eyes, because, aside from the infinite evils they endured, for a good part of them the possibility of seeking refuge in God, in whom all the miserable are wont to hope, was lacking. Therefore, as the greater part of them were uncertain as to which God they ought to turn to, they died miserably, deprived of all help and all hope.” An image that was “too vivid and colorful to have been true,” as one critic wrote. Too colorful, and unnecessary for the purposes of the narrative. The source, in all likelihood Flavio Biondo, mentions religious conflict only in passing. Machiavelli, on the other hand, felt the need to write that in times of war and religious conflict, the unfortunate are denied even the last, scanty consolation of asking God for help, because they do not
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, XXVI. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, I, 5, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. II, pp. 290–91. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 15. Corrado Vivanti has written that what is striking about this passage “is the irony with which the discords internal to the ‘Christian religion’ are treated”; Introduction to Niccolò Machiavelli, Opere, vol. III, Einaudi, Turin 2005, p. xl. Ibid., p. 291, n.6. Flavio Biondo, Le decadi, Italian translation by Achille Crespi, L, II.
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know to which God they should direct their prayers. For that matter, on his deathbed even Machiavelli had confessed his sins to the friar Andrea Alamanni, cousin of Luigi Alamanni, to whom Machiavelli’s Vita di Castruccio Castracani (The Life of Castruccio Castracani) was dedicated; and that friar always afterward “had only a world of good to say” concerning Machiavelli. In his private letters, Machiavelli speaks of God saving the innocent from the wickedness of men. On 26 June 1513, a few months after being released from prison, he confided a noteworthy thought to his nephew Giovanni Vernacci: I have received several letters from you, most recently one from last April in which, among other things, you complain that you have not received any letters from me. My answer is that since your departure I have had so much trouble that it is no wonder I have not written to you. In fact, if anything, it is a miracle that I am alive, because my post was taken from me and I was about to lose my life, which God and my innocence have preserved for me. I have had to endure all sorts of other evils, both prison and other kinds. But, by the grace of God, I am well and I manage to live as I can—and so I shall strive to do, until the heavens show themselves to be more kind. Equally revealing are the words that Machiavelli’s son Ludovico wrote to him in his letter dated 22 May 1527: “God help me. I send you my regards as always. God keep you always from ill. Give my regards to Madonna Marietta and tell her to pray God for me; greet the entire family.” Would Ludovico ever have written those words to an atheist father? In his dramatic letter dated 17 May 1526, Machiavelli calls on God three times in order to persuade Guicciardini (and the pope) to wage a straightforward, open war against the horde of lansquenets that have crossed over the Alps: “For the love of God, let us not lose this opportunity”; “For the love of God, see to it now with such measures that His Holiness does not fall back into these same perils”; “Now God has brought things to such a pass that, if this moment is not lost, the pope is in time to take the emperor.” He again invokes God, twice, in his last letter, written to Vettori, and dated 18 April 1527: “And for the love of God, since this treaty cannot be made, if indeed you are unable to make it, break the negotiations off immediately”; “But
See Giuliano Procacci, “Frate Andrea Alamanni confessore del Machiavelli?” in Machiavelli nella cultura europea dell’età moderna, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1995, pp. 423–31. Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, pp. 387–88. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 239; see also the letters dated 18 August 1515, 19 November 1515, and 15 February 1516.
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whoever profits from war, as these soldiers do, would be crazy to extol peace. Yet God will grant them more war than we would like.” Perhaps they are only rhetorical statements; or perhaps Machiavelli, in his moments of despair and sadness, at times when he feels a need to confide the contents of his heart, in the midst of the tragedy sweeping over his fatherland, turns to God because he believes in a God who is the last hope of the just. I cannot quite imagine a Machiavelli who utters prayers out of obedience to the church and to tradition. But I can certainly imagine a Machiavelli who invokes God to lend aid to the fatherland, a Machiavelli who thanks God for having succored the fatherland in a time of danger. Who but God could help the fatherland when the efforts of humans prove futile? And if Machiavelli were to fail to thank him, he would be guilty of ingratitude, the sin that he detested above all others. He speaks of Christ rarely. In letters to his family he sometimes writes “May Christ watch over you,” or “May Christ watch over you all as he should”; “May Christ watch over you all.” In the First Decennale he begins with a reference to Christ who came to earth and shed his blood in order to free men from sin: “One thousand and four hundred ninetyfour . . . / Since the time Jesus visited our towns / And with the blood He shed extinguished all / The diabolical, most evil sparks.” Cesare Borgia, “as a rebel to Christ,” deserved his grim end. He certainly never mistakes Christ for the saints: “Make sure you’re good with Jesus, and thumb your nose at the saints,” he has Nicomaco say in the Clizia. In his most important political work, the Discourses on Livy, he acknowledges in an unambiguous manner Christ as the founder of the Christian religion and emphasizes that, had that religion remained faithful to the teachings of its founder, the republics of Christendom would have benefited greatly thereby. Christ, then, is not responsible for that religion of lazy idleness that so corrupted the world and led to the downfall of the republics. Even the earthly glory that makes men immortal, while it may be a human creation, is not isolated from God. Machiavelli credits the “heavens,” or God, for giving men the opportunity to achieve immortality: “Heaven Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, pp. 587–88 and 631–32. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence, pp. 386–87, 417–18. See, for instance, the letters dated 5 January 1518, 31 August 1523, and 2 April 1527, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, pp. 500, 537, and 626. Machiavelli, Decennale primo [First Decennale], in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 295. English translation: Tusiani, Lust and Liberty, p. 152. Ibid., p. 314. English translation: Tusiani, Lust and Liberty, p. 169. Machiavelli, Clizia, Act III, Scene VI, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 205 English translation: Sices and Atkinson, The Comedies, p. 341. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 12 and II, 2; English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses.
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cannot give a man a greater gift than this or point him a more glorious way,” he writes to Giulio de’ Medici, exhorting him to restore a republican government in Florence. He adds that “amid all the happiness that God has given your house and your Holiness personally, this is the greatest: the gift of the power and the occasion to make yourself immortal.” And so God loves those men who garner great glory on earth; and immortality on earth, when it springs from true glory, paves the way to immortality in the heavens. The references to a God that comforts the afflicted, redeems the oppressed, brings salvation to the innocent, and encourages and acknowledges earthly glory might very well be mannered phrases or bits of rhetorical artifice. But they might equally well be signs that he believed in a God who was not all that different from the Christian God, even if God was not that important for him.
2. Republican Christianity The concept of a man whose love of fatherland and glory makes him godlike, and who takes on a certain divine nature, is present in a venerable tradition of political and religious thought. Francesco Petrarca, one of Machiavelli’s favorite poets, emphasizes that nature itself instilled a thirst for glory in humanity. Earthly glory is a goal that men can pursue with a view to eternal salvation, and there was no reason to renounce the former in exchange for the latter. Other humanists, such as Coluccio Salutati, chancellor of the Florentine Republic from 1375 until his death in 1406, roundly condemned the love of worldly glory as unworthy of a Christian. The sole concern of a good Christian should be the true glory that God alone can provide. God operates through us, and all glory and honor should be attributed to Him. True glory springs from loving God and one’s Niccolò Machiavelli, Discursus florentinarum rerum post mortem iunioris Laurentii Medices, in Opere, vol. I, p. 744. English translation: Machiavelli, History of Florence and Other Selections, translated by Judith Rawson, edited by Myron Gilmore, Twayne Books, New York 1970, 27. Machiavelli’s God is first and foremost the God of generals, of princes, of lawgivers, and of the strong. Castruccio Castracani frequently said, and Machiavelli subscribed to these words, “Men ought to try everything, not to be afraid of anything; and that God is a lover of strong men, because we see that he always punishes the powerless by means of the powerful”; Niccolò Machiavelli, Vita di Castruccio Castracani [The Life of Castruccio Castracani], in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. II, p. 267. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 555. Petrarch, Prose, edited by Guido Martellotti, Pier Giorgio Ricci, Enrico Carrara, Enrico Bianchi, Ricciardi, Milan-Naples 1955, part III, pp. 198 and 204. Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, 4 vols., edited by Francesco Novati, Istituto Storico Italiano, Rome 1891–1911, vol. II, p. 407. Ibid., vol. I, p. 424.
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neighbor, from faith translated into worthy works, and from purity of behavior and life. The other form of glory, which springs from power and the praise of other men, is vain, offers no true happiness, and leads directly to eternal damnation. A true Christian should pursue Christian glory, leaving pagan glory to the pagans. He should not run the risk that on Judgment Day God might say to him: for your works “you have already received your reward.” He should work on behalf of good without seeking or desiring earthly rewards. The prevailing notion among Italian humanists was, nonetheless, that those who pursue virtue have a right to an earthly reward as well. Giovanni Conversano (or Conversino) of Ravenna (1343–1408), in a lengthy letter to Salutati, points out that the desire for glory moves men to acts of virtue and opens the path of happiness in the heavens. The apostle Paul himself wrote: “Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same” (“Fac bonum et habebis laudem ex eo,” Rom. 13:3) and the prophet said, “They go from strength to strength” (“ibunt de virtute in virtutem,” Psalm 83: 8). A thirst for glory has made great things possible in human history, and it has driven many men to perform good acts who do not love true virtue. The perfection of virtue is caritas, but the first step toward it can certainly be the love of glory. Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) too stated that glory is virtue’s reward and that the love of glory drives men to perform good deeds, though it must not endanger eternal salvation. While the pagans sought only worldly glory, and glory here on earth, Christians can pursue earthly glory as a preparation for eternal glory. Far more determined to defend earthly glory was Flavio Biondo, the historian from Forlì who was one of Machiavelli’s sources for his Florentine Histories. Human renown and glory, he wrote, are in no way at odds with the religion of the Holy Fathers. A few years later, the Bolognese notary Sabbadino degli Arienti reiterated that the love of glory and the love of God can coexist perfectly well, and that one only helps the other. Every human being, and more than everyone else, princes and eminent citizens, want to win “worthy fame on earth” by “acting in a glorious manner,” and to live in heaven. The one in the dialogue who uttered these words was the Dominican Giambattista Spagnuoli. Even clearer was the conclu
Ibid., vol. III, pp. 62–64. Ibid., vol. III, p. 471. Ibid., vol. IV, pp. 325–26. Concerning Giovanni Conversino see the entry by Benjamin G. Kohl, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 1983, vol. 28, pp. 574–78. See Alberto Tenenti, Il senso della morte e l’amore della vita nel Rinascimento (Francia e Italia), Einaudi, Turin 1957, p. 18. Flavio Biondo, Scritti inediti e rari, edited by Bartolomeo Nogara, Rome 1927, p. 184.
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sion of the “secular participants”: “This company concluded that men should endure every effort and trouble on earth in order to win honor, glory, repute, and renown, through whose excellence and blessed virtue in the end, by becoming worthy of heaven, they will enjoy eternal peace.” The Florentine humanists incorporated and reformulated the classical idea of glory as the good repute of good individuals that can be attained through public life. Fame, wrote Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72), for instance, in the Libri della famiglia (1432–34), “crowns those who attend to public affairs, not those who enjoy the leisure of private life.” The quest for glory, Matteo Palmieri (1406–75) adds, is the product of a natural desire found in all men to remain alive on earth through fame. Those who are concerned about the well-being of their soul, guide it toward heaven and try to leave “a memory of it behind for posterity.” Admiration for the virtues and the glory of noble deeds lives on over time. Let it come as a surprise to no one, then, Palmieri concludes, that those who performed great enterprises also seek glory. As these documents indicate, there was a strong Florentine tradition of thought that considered the quest for glory to be worthy of men, acceptable to God, and in keeping with the Christian goal of eternal life. Another distinctive trait of the religious thinking of humanism was the idea of charity. In the classical Latin world the concept of caritas corresponded to the Greek term agàpe and defined—in contrast with amor— a feeling of affection and benevolence without any erotic connotations. The Roman classics offer a broad selection of examples of the distinction between caritas and amor. Closely related to the Latin caritas was dilectio, a word derived from the verb diligere, which described a reasoned affection, as distinct from the Latin verb amare. A further and particularly significant example (because it points up the ideal linkage between classical thought and Christian doctrine) is provided by Augustine, who considered dilectio as one of two possible ways to translate the Greek term agàpe—the other being, of course, caritas. He further stated that the Holy Scriptures make no distinction between love and charity (amor and
See Tenenti, Il senso della morte e l’amore della vita nel Rinascimento, p. 21. See for instance, Cicero, Pro Sestio, 139; Philippics, I, 29; Tusculanae Disputationes, III, 2, 3. Leon Battista Alberti, I libri della famiglia, in Opere volgari, edited by Cecil Grayson, vol. I, Laterza, Bari 1960, pp. 183–84. Matteo Palmieri, La vita di Niccolò Acciaioli, edited by Alessandra Mita Ferraro, Il Mulino, Bologna 2001, p. 3. See in this connection Luigi Pizzolato, L’idea di amicizia nel mondo antico classico e cristiano, Einaudi, Turin 1993, pp. 217 f. See for instance Cicero, Partitiones oratoriae, XVI, 56 and XXV, 88; De oratore II, 206; De finibus V, 65; see also Seneca, De beneficiis, V, 9, 1 and Ad Lucilium, XIV, 1; CXXI, 24.
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caritas). Roman authors use the terms caritas or pietas to indicate love of fatherland, and they emphasize that this bond of affection extends to include parents, relatives, friends, and fellow citizens, and pushes us to perform acts of service (officium) and care (cultus). According to the Christian conception, charity is a form of love that does not expect to be returned. It should be extended to everyone, even to one’s (private) enemies; it is obligatory; it has no need of the presence of others; it may even demand the supreme sacrifice; it favors the needy, victims, and the weak. Eros in contrast is a love of enjoyment (a love that is returned or expects to be returned). It is selective, spontaneous, and demands the presence of the other; it can be extinguished through a change in worth or a lack of utility; it appeals to subjects that possess similar qualities. While love remains a passion of selfish desire that never breaks away from cupiditas, or concupiscence, charitable love falls at the far end of that scale, as a disinterested affection. For political thinkers of the Middle Ages and humanism—all of them solidly of the Christian faith—the common good was a divine good, and the love of the fatherland, although it was not identical to perfect charity, was nonetheless a form of charitable love. In his commentary on a passage from the Nicomachean Ethics (1094b) in which Aristotle writes that the good of the city is finer and more godlike (“melius vero et divinius”) than the good of the individual, Thomas Aquinas points out that the definition of the common good of the city and of all peoples as a finer and more godlike good is based on the similarity with God, inasmuch as God is a universal cause of all goods. His pupil Remigio de’ Girolami (1235–19), who was the prior of the church of Santa Maria Novella, writes in De bono pacis that charity does not seek its own good, but rather places the common
St. Augustine, De civitate Dei, XIV, 7. See for instance Cicero, De inventione, II, 53, 161; De Officiis, I, 17; Livy, Ab urbe condita, VII, 40. Anders Nygren, Eros e agàpe. La nozione cristiana dell’amore e le sue trasformazioni, Il Mulino, Bologna 1971; Hélène Pétré, “Caritas. Étude sur le vocabulaire latin de la charité chrétienne,” Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense (1948). Sancti Thomae de Aquino, Sententia libri ethicorum, in Opera Omnia, cura et studio fratrum predicatorum, Rome 1969, vol. I, p. 9. In his exposition of the Nicomachean Ethics, Donato Acciaiuoli writes that the “civitatis summum bonum” is considered more beautiful and divine (“divinius et pulcrius”) than the good of the individual because it is assimilated to the first cause that works universally for the good of all; Donato Acciaiuoli, Expositio libri ethicorum Aristotelis, Sanctum Iacobum de Ripoli, Florence 1478, p. 9. Acciaiuoli’s book came into the hands of Niccolò’s father: “I here note that on the 20th of February I received from Piero Gualterotti and through him from Bartolomeo Tucci the bookseller, the commentary by Donato Acciaiuoli upon Ari[stotle]’s Ethics, unbound, to see and purchase if I liked it”; Bernardo Machiavelli, Libro di ricordi, edited by Cesare Olschki, Le Monnier, Florence 1954, p. 141.
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good before the good of the individual. In De bono communi he identifies charity as the foundation of civil life and emphasizes that love of the fatherland is a Christian duty in keeping with the right and natural inclination of man and with the love of God. Since the common good, as Aristotle points out in the Nicomachean Ethics, is the finest and most godlike good, whoever loves the common good is that much closer to God. Another pupil of Thomas Aquinas, Tolomeo da Lucca, in his De regimine principum, reiterates that love of the fatherland is a charitable love of the common good which strengthens the soul, and is entirely in keeping with a love of God, and indeed is a necessary consequence of that love. In contrast with Augustine, Tolomeo sees no difference between the caritas patriae of the pagans and the caritas patriae of the Christians. He places charity on the highest level in the hierarchy of virtues and assigns the same rank to the love of the fatherland. In the most influential texts of medieval political thought, the love of the fatherland then takes on the significance of a charitable love of the common good that brings man closer to God and as such is entirely compatible with Christian doctrine. After setting forth the nature of charity, Tolomeo emphasizes its political and moral effects: charity for the fatherland inspired the Romans to govern well (“ad bene regendum”) and for that reason, they deserved to become masters of the world. He also explained that, of the three virtues that give origin to good government—the love of the fatherland, a zeal for justice, and civil benevolence—charity for the fatherland was a sufficient justification for the conquest of world domination. He adds a further specification that is deserving of close attention; he states that the love of the fatherland in a certain sense partakes of divine nature (“partecipabant quandam naturam divinam”): just as God is the universal cause of all things, likewise the love of the fatherland addresses the
“caritas non quaerit quae sua sunt, quod hoc sit est intelligendum, quia caritas communia propriis anteponit”; Remigio de’ Girolami, De bono pacis, in Maria Consiglia De Matteis, La “teologia politica comunale” di Remigio de’ Girolami, Pàtron, Bologna 1977, pp. 56–57. See also Charles T. Davis, “An Early Florentine Political Theorist: Fra Remigio de’ Girolami,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society LIV (1960), pp. 662–76. Remigio de’ Girolami, De bono communi, in De Matteis, La “teologia politica comunale” di Remigio de’ Girolami, p. 43. See in this connection Charles T. Davis, “Remigio de’ Girolami and Dante: a Comparison of Their Conceptions of Peace, Studi Danteschi 36 (1959), pp. 105–36, and Davis, “An Early Florentine Political Theorist.” “amor patriae in radice charitatis fundatur, quae communia propriis, non propria communibus anteponit”; Tolomeo da Lucca, De regimine principum, in Divi Thomae Aquinatis Opuscula Philosophice, edited by Raimondo Spiazzi, Marietti, Turin 1954, p. 299. St. Augustine condemns the love of the fatherland of the ancients in De civitate Dei, V, 12; see also Charles T. Davis, “Ptolemy of Lucca, and the Roman Republic,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 118 (1974), pp. 30–50.
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community and the good of the people. To document his view that charity of the fatherland has a divine character because it desires the common good, Tolomeo cites the classical episodes of Marcus Curtius, who leapt on horseback into the fissure; Attilius Regulus, who chose the safety of the fatherland over his own life; and Fabricius, who refused to be corrupted by gold. Those who truly love the fatherland and diligently pursue the common good become vicars of God, and partake of the divine nature (“in zelando rem communem assimilat sibi naturam divinam, in quantum vice Dei diligentem circa multitudinem adhibet curam”); they obey the commandment to love God and their neighbor with all their heart, all their soul, and all their strength. The religion of the Romans and the Christian religion teach that anyone who loves the common good and pursues it with all their might and all their diligence becomes godlike and makes themselves worthy of God’s friendship. The concept of love of the fatherland as a love that makes man godlike is found again in Dante’s The Banquet (Convivio, IV, V, 13–14). For Dante, charity for the fatherland is a love that God infuses in certain men, making them divine: If we consider, then, [Rome’s] Adolescence, when it was emancipated from the regal tutorship by Brutus, the first Consul, even to Caesar, its first supreme Prince, we shall find it exalted, not with human, but with Divine citizens, into whom, not human, but Divine love was inspired in loving Rome; and this neither could be nor ought to be, except for an especial end intended by God through such infusion of a heavenly spirit. And who will say that there was no Divine inspiration in Fabricius when he rejected an almost infinite amount of gold because he was unwilling to abandon his country? or in Curius, whom the Samnites attempted to corrupt, who said, when refusing a very large quantity of gold for love of his country, that the Roman citizens did not desire to possess gold, but the possessors of the gold? Who will say there was no Divine inspiration in Mutius burning his own hand because it had failed in the blow wherewith he had thought to deliver Rome? Who will say of Torquatus, who sentenced his own son to death from love for the Public Good, that he could have endured this without a Divine Helper? Dante Alighieri, Opere minori, book I, part II, edited by Cesare Vasoli and Domenico De Robertis, Ricciardi, Milan–Naples 1979–84, pp. 571–73. English translation: Gutenberg, Translated by Elizabeth Price Sayer, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12867/12867-8.txt. Petrarch considered on the other hand the love (charity) of the fatherland among the ancients to be an imperfect love and did not admit a specific Christian patriotism. See Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, Constable, London
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Florentine historians and politicians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries continued to speak of the love of fatherland as a charitable love that rendered man godlike and was acceptable to God. Coluccio Salutati emphasized repeatedly that a good Christian had a duty to serve his fatherland with all his power and explained that charity for the fatherland must be placed above and must subsume any and all other affections, bonds, and interests. Caritas is the foundation of patriotism and, therefore, is the basis of the ideal Christian citizen. In his younger years, Salutati writes about charity without theological implications or significance; during his years as chancellor of the republic, on the other hand, charity took on a marked religious significance. If we agree that all men have a natural inclination to live in society, it is therefore contrary to human nature for a man to do harm to other men or refuse to lend them aid. It is the duty of Christians to love their neighbor as themselves and even to love their enemies. That duty by no means excludes the fact that our strongest ties are to our family and to our compatriots. Christ Himself felt a love of fatherland, and his example teaches us that Christians have a greater obligation to the common good than do other men. To Salutati, a Christian love of fatherland is even superior to the much celebrated love of the fatherland of the ancients. They were unfamiliar with the true charity (“vera caritas”) that springs from a love of Christ and for Christ and that commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves. Christ does not command the impossible. A society of true friends, which would have been impossible for the ancients, can instead exist among true Christians. Christian ethics were, in his view, a perfection of the Ciceronian ideal of civic virtue. Those who live in the world and meet their duties to their families and fatherlands live in a more Christian manner than the anchorites who seek salvation of the soul in solitude. The good citizen who serves his fatherland operates as divine Providence and with divine Providence—because it acts for the good of the universe, and desires the good of civil communities. The true Christian who serves the fatherland 1970, vol. 1, pp. 37–38. In De vita solitaria he maintained nonetheless that nothing is more worthy of a man and nothing renders a man more godlike than acting on behalf of the common good: “quid aut homine dignius aut similius Deo est, quam servare et adiuvare quam plurimos?,” in Prose, edited by Guido Martellotti, Ricciardi, Milan-Naples 1955, pp. 322, 328. “Nulla enim caritas est qui sit cum caritate patrie comparanda; parentes, filii, fratres, amici, agnati, affines et cetere necessitudines, quedam singula sunt et simul omnia collata minus habent ipsa republica”: Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, vol. I, p. 21; “caritas, que maior quam erga patriam esse non debet in terris”: Ibid., vol. II, p. 87; “patriam . . . cuius caritas non solum omnes necessitudines amplexa est, sed preterit et excedit”: ibid., vol. III, p. 638. Ibid., vol. I, pp. 253–54, 318. Ibid., vol. IV, p. 20. Ibid., vol. III, pp. 285–308.
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is therefore an instrument of Providence, and in this manner becomes an imago dei: he is transformed from a man to a god. The Christian religion is the path of virtue, and it does not contrast with, but rather contributes to, the vision of the world as a struggle, where man engages his determination to obtain good. Precisely because he is “religious, with a profound and austere faith, experienced wholeheartedly,” Salutati considered it his duty as a Christian and as a citizen to put first and foremost, in all cases, the struggle for liberty: “What should we not do for liberty? It alone, in our view, makes even war legitimate.” The religiosity of Salutati, and of others in early-fifteenth-century Florence, was one in which Cicero, Seneca, and the Gospels all speak the same moral language and the moral and political wisdom of the ancients takes on, in the light of the Christian faith, a new and more powerful splendor. When he attempts to become similar to his creator, man is obeying the divine will. Salutati begins with the premise that the purpose of man is not to know God, but rather to obtain eternal beatitude through good deeds performed on earth. A reliable and secure guide to doing good are the laws. Laws encourage use to live in accordance with virtue; they guide us toward earthly happiness and at the same time toward eternal beatitude. With good laws, legislators make political happiness (“politica felicitas”) possible here on earth, and that happiness progresses in an unbroken line toward eternal bliss. To obey the laws and serve the common good is a duty toward God; and the way in which a man acts in which God has infused in him the sentiment of caritas. Founders of states and legislators are not only beloved of God, but through their virtue they win His friendship: “Do we find it written about anyone else, aside from the lawgiver Moses, that they spoke to God face to face, as a man with his friend?”
Eugenio Garin, “I trattati morali di Coluccio Salutati,” Atti e memorie dell’Accademia fiorentina di scienze morali ‘La Colombaria’ N.S. 1 (1943–1946), Le Monnier, Florence 1947, pp. 54–88, quotation on p. 62; see also Eugenio Garin, “I cancellieri umanisti della Repubblica Fiorentina da Coluccio Salutati a Bartolomeo Scala,” in La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano, Sansoni, Florence 1961, p. 11. Garin, La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano, p. 128. Concerning the development of Salutati’s thought from stoicism to Christianity, see Ronald Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works and Thought of Coluccio Salutati, Durham, NC 1983, pp. 355–67. Coluccio Salutati, De nobilitate legum et medicinae, edited by Eugenio Garin, Vallecchi, Florence 1947, pp. 98 and 166. In order to clarify this essential aspect of his Christian conception of the law and the ideals of the Christian citizen, Salutati quotes Proverbs 29:18 “He that keepeth the law, happy is he,” and comments: “Happy in this life through hope; happy in reality when he has lived according to the law”: Ibid., pp. 166–67. Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads, pp. 342–43. “loquetur ad eum Deus facie ad faciem, sicut homo ad amicum suum”; Salutati, De nobilitate legum et medicinae, p. 55.
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Likewise, for Leonardo Bruni, who served as the chancellor of the Florentine Republic between 1410 and 1411 and again from 1427 until his death in 1444, a good Christian should be a good citizen, ready to serve the fatherland. The word of Christ does not clash at all with ancient wisdom or with the love of the fatherland. Leon Battista Alberti, in turn, presents in the Libri della famiglia the care and love of the fatherland as a difficult and demanding duty that a good citizen should, nonetheless, accept in order to prevent the arrogant from dominating a republic and enslaving the others. He also explains that serving the public good, even when that good demands stern severity, is a “sacred deed” and acceptable to God. The same concepts are also found in that full-fledged compendium of civic humanism, Matteo Palmieri’s Vita civile. The passion that drove the heroes of republican Rome to sacrifice their lives for the liberty of the collective, the author explains, was their “piety of the fatherland” or “civil piety.” To take care of the health of the fatherland, preserve the city, and maintain the unity and concord of the “well assembled multitudes,” is the most meritorious of all human activities. Justice is the highest of all virtues, and it is so acceptable to “almighty God” that “throughout the corpus of Holy Scripture no distinction is made by God, calling the blessed just and the just blessed.” Not only the Holy Scriptures, but all laws, human and divine, and the common utility, demand a respect for justice. Those governing the republics who defend justice perform works “that are more acceptable to God than anything else that can be done on earth.” For that reason, the just rulers must receive in heaven eternal beatitude as a reward for their efforts. Men can become divine and eternal by means of a quest for perfection in all the arts and in all their works. In this quest, man attains his own true nature, lives in conformity with the will of God, and wins glory on earth. The authentic Christian religion demands that each performs his or her task in life without shirking dangers or effort. Giannozzo Manetti, a
See Vespasiano da Bisticci, Vite di uomini illustri del secolo XV, Rinascimento del Libro, Florence 1938, p. 456. Leon Battista Alberti, I libri della famiglia, in Opere volgari, vol. I, pp. 182–84. “It remains true that on earth nothing dearer or more acceptable to God can be done than to rule and govern with justice the congregations and multitudes of men, assembled with justice: for that reason God promises the just rulers of cities, and preservers of the fatherland, a special place in heaven, in which they will live blessed for eternity with His saints”; Matteo Palmieri, Della vita civile, edited by Felice Battaglia, Zanichelli, Bologna 1944, p. 45. Ibid., p. 168. Ibid. Ibid.
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man of profound faith, explains in his oration Della dignità e dell’eccellenza dell’uomo (1451–52) that Socrates, Cato, and Cleombrotus “were led to hold life in contempt not by any motives stemming from human misfortunes but rather only by their hope of immortality.” He emphasizes that “to flee what is toilsome is not the mark of the brave and magnanimous but rather of the effeminate and weak.” We cannot “leave the watch of life without the order of the commander-in-chief, that is God.” Not wisdom alone, but also faith commands us to take on with virtue the efforts, struggles, and torments that trouble the terrestrial city. Because he is profoundly Christian, Manetti exalts the virtue that allows men to act with strength and magnanimity in civil life, that virtue that is beloved body and soul, and that makes men who practice it godlike: “Love virtue with your whole mind and soul; give your heart to it, embrace it; it is by practicing it without remission or neglect that you will prosper and know peace—nay, you will be made like to the immortal God.” All the same, it was Lorenzo Valla (1405–57) who first established a solid philological foundation for the idea of Christianity as a religion of virtue—understood, in the manner of the ancients, as strength. He too began from the basis that the underlying principle of Christianity is charity, which he defined as “love for God and for one’s neighbor” (“amoris in Deum et proximum”). Charity is the mistress of all the virtues (“magistrae omnium virtutum”) and gives men strength. Strength, Valla explains, is a kind of affection. Isn’t a person who truly loves especially strong in his resistance against those who try to deprive him of the person he loves? When the apostles received the Holy Spirit, which is the charity of the Father and the Son, they became strong in spreading the word of God. The idea of virtue in the sense of power and strength, not of honesty, can be found—according to Valla—in the Gospels themselves. Not only did Valla interpret virtue as strength in the face of danger and suffering, but he also understood this idea of virtue as the true Christian virtue. If charity gives strength, and strength is virtue, it necessarily follows that Christianity cannot be the religion of weakness and humility, but must Giannozzo Manetti, De dignitate et excellentia hominis, in Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, edited by Eugenio Garin, Ricciardi, Milan-Naples 1952, pp. 459 and 485–87. Two Views of Man: Pope Innocent III on the Misery of Man. Giannozzo Manetti on the Dignity of Man, translated with an introduction by Bernard Murchland, Ungar, NY 1966, pp. 85, 102–3. Lorenzo Valla, Scritti filosofici e religiosi, edited by Giorgio Radetti, Sansoni, Florence 1953, p. 195. Lorenzo Valla, Collatio Novi Testamenti, edited by Alessandro Perosa, Sansoni, Florence 1970, pp. 38, 235, and 240. The first edition of the work, written between 1442 and 1444 (pp. xlviii–xlix), was printed in Paris in 1505 at the behest of Erasmus (p. ix).
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be the religion of virtue. The belief that the true Christianity is Christianity interpreted in terms of virtue, a thesis that Machiavelli sets forth and defends in a fundamental passage of Discourses on Livy, is therefore already present in the work of one of the most authoritative thinkers of Humanism. Christian religion and political virtue went hand in hand for Bartolomeo Sacchi (or Platina) as well. He was a fervent support of the Christian religion as the moral foundation of republics. He first of all reiterated the classical idea that virtue, in particular, the virtue of those guiding the republic, made men godlike and opened the path to true glory. The people, he explained, love and worship as demigods men who excel in virtue. A good citizen who leads a city must bear a terrible burden. The reward that awaits him is the true and perfect glory (“vera ac integra gloria”) that God provides. Similarly, Aurelio Brandolini (1449–1497), a pupil and protégé of Platina at the court of Pope Sixtus IV, developed the theme of charity as a fundamental concept of the Christian religion. The virtue that Christ taught above all others was that of charity, which demands that we forgive those who offend us and that we love our enemies. It was out of charity toward humanity that Christ sacrificed Himself, and before drawing His last breath, he said: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Charity does not accept being divided, and therefore one cannot love God without loving men. Charity has no restrictions based on difference of languages or customs, and it encourages us to treat other men as if we were all part of the same heaven, the same world, and the same city. Like other humanists, Brandolini cites the Romans as well as Christ as examples of charity, and thus allows his readers to understand that there was no contrast between Roman morality and Christian morality. Both the former and the latter teach that if we wish to become godlike (“Deo proximi ac simillimi”), we must pursue charity with all our strength. The theme of charity is a fundamental principle of living as a true Christian, more than any acts of penitence, vigils, or flagellations; we find it as well in sermons delivered in the presence of the pope in solemn masses “Neque vero sine causa a veteribus fortitudo proprie nomine virtutis appellata, quasi haec aut sola aut vere virtus esset”: Repastinatio dialecticae et philosophiae libri tres, in Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness, vol. I, p. 385. Bartolomeo Sacchi (il Platina), De optimo cive, edited by Felice Battaglia, Zanichelli, Bologna 1944, p. 206. Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness, p. 449. “uno caelo uno orbe quasi una civitate”: ibid., p. 450. Brandolini however writes that exalting heroic men means lowering God: ibid., pp. 317–18.
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held in the Vatican. Even Brandolini in his Christiana paradoxa, and in a sermon on the Passion of Christ, delivered on 1 April 1496, insisted on the duty of a Christian to practice toward others the same charity that God gave to all men. Giovanni Antonio Campano, to cite another example, explained in a sermon on the Holy Spirit published in 1495 that when man practices charity, he obeys a divine impulse at work within him. The orators summoned to deliver sermons in the Vatican often praised a commitment to the public good and emphasized the affinity of that impulse to Christian charity. Domenico de’ Domenichi, in the Oratio pro pace Italiae that he delivered on Ascension Day in 1468, stated that if men who do good to other men deserve praise and honor, much greater praise is deserved by those who serve the public good, because man was not born for himself alone, but also for the fatherland. Marsilio Ficino too stated that religion “is a gift and a virtue belonging to one and all,” and that religion teaches civil virtues and commands a love of the fatherland. Marsilio Ficino dedicated Della religione to Bernardo del Nero, “an ardent lover of our fatherland” and a “most diligent observer of civil virtue as philosophy and religion command.” This virtue, he further clarifies, “according to our Plato, consists of four elements, that the citizen should be prudent in discerning in the city, with a view to preserving the common good, both matters present and foreseeing matters future, and that he should employ justice in distributing to each according to their deserts and merits. Strong in winning over fear that prevents one from accomplishing virtuous deeds. And temperate in his appetites.” The Christian religion commands that we exercise “virtues ardently, and not toward ends of human ambition or pleasure or rest: but only toward the ends of God and in order to attain the world beyond; he scorns all in this world.” An example of the divine idea of virtues was Christ, who “showed us the true justice that owns nothing of its own and renders unto See John W. O’Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of Papal Court, c. 1450–1521, Duke University Press, Durham, NC 1979, pp. 165–66. Ibid., pp. 169–71. Concerning the religiosity of Marsilio Ficino as “the doctrine and the Pauline practice of charitas, a faith and an experience of divine love, beyond all reason of separation and disagreement,” see Cesare Vasoli, “Dalla pace religiosa alla ‘prisca theologia,’” in Firenze e il Concilio del 1439. Convegno di Studi, Firenze, 29 novembre–2 dicembre 1989, edited by Paolo Viti, Olschki, Florence 1994, vol. 1, pp. 3–25. See also Arnaldo Della Torre, Storia dell’Accademia Platonica di Firenze, Tipografia G. Carnesecchi e Figli, Florence 1902, p. 610. Libro di Marsilio Ficino Florentino della Cristiana Religione ad Bernardo del Nero Clarissimo Cittadino Fiorentino, no date, no place, Preface. Ibid., chap. VIII.
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God what belongs to God and to men what belongs to men, the magnanimity that desires nothing on earth as great and holds nothing as difficult, singular temperance and mildness, with which it wards off pride, pestilence of humanity.” Ficino’s ideal of a religion entirely bound up in caritas, which in the name of caritas commands its followers to love and serve the fatherland, was also widespread among the secular confraternities at the end of the fifteenth century. One demonstration of this can be found in the orations of Giovanni Nesi, one of the most typical representatives of a “popular” Platonism, with marked republican aspirations. In the Oratio de caritate that he delivered on 25 February 1478, Nesi emphasized that “deus caritas est et caritas est deus” (‘God is charity and charity is God’) and that charity was the reason that “God descended to earth from heaven, that God became a man, from immortal became a mortal, from lord to servant,” just as charity alone “lifted man from earth to heaven, and where he was mortal before endowed him with perpetual life; and where he was a man, made him a god.” Charity renders us “similar to our creator,” to the degree that human nature can be approximated to divine nature; it commands us to love our neighbor and it gives us strength with which to obey its commands: “It braves all dangers, it subjects itself to all efforts, it spares no ordeal, it shirks no difficulties.” It is thanks to charity that cities enjoy peace and unity. It deserves, therefore, to be called the “mother of all virtues” and “the form of all virtues,” and as such it deserves to be honored and pursued with all our strength. A religion based on charity prevents its adherents from seeking salvation in contemplation and solitude, and demands instead that they serve the public good wisely and courageously. In the words of Nesi, who served on many occasions in the highest magistracies of Florence, religious faith was entirely bound up with the ideals of the civic humanism that Salutati, Bruni, and Palmieri had developed at the turn of the century. That the Christian religion, if rightly interpreted, demands that we serve the fatherland is something that Nesi stated, as well, in his Oratio de humilitate, which he delivered to the “Reverend Fathers and beloved Brothers” of the confraternity of the Nativity on 11 April 1476: “The third contemplation [that virtue inspires in us] is when man considers not merely his own utility, but also that of the fatherland, of his relatives, and of all men that have Cesare Vasoli, “Giovanni Nesi tra Donato Acciaiuoli e Girolamo Savonarola. Testi editi e inediti,” in Umanesimo e teologia,” Memorie Domenicane NS 4 (1973), pp. 103–79, p. 110. Ibid., p. 150 Ibid., p. 151.
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ever been born, as not only Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero write, but also as the wise Lord commands us on more than one occasion.” God not only gave man the possibility of elevating himself with the strength and force of his soul to the level of the divine or to depths of brutality, writes Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in his oration De dignitate hominis (Oration on the Dignity of Man, 1486), the “manifesto of the Renaissance.” It is his duty to elevate himself through virtue until he is imitating his Creator. In the years in which Machiavelli was preparing to enter political life, Savonarola was exhorting the Florentines to cultivate a religion of virtue. In his third Predica sopra Aggeo (Sermon On Haggai), for instance, he explained that charity “makes man powerful and vigorous to undertake Ibid., p. 142. The religion of charity put down roots as well in other republican settings. In Vicenza, for instance, the myth of Athens, and of Vicenza as a latter-day Athens, kept alive in the most advanced intellectual circles and in the populace at large the ideal of political liberty linked to the ideal of religious liberty. Cicero and the Bible coexisted without difficulties. The religion of the caritas set forth first by Ficino, and later by Erasmus and Martin Luther, was accepted as a valid alternative to the teachings of the Catholic Church. In this context, the yearning for an internal reform flourished, understood as a necessary condition for a Christian way of life and as a prerequisite to the practice of the art of successfully governing the city. See Achille Olivieri, Riforma ed eresia a Vicenza nel Cinquecento, Herder Editrice e Libreria, Rome 1992, pp. 13, 37; see also Silvana Seidel Menchi, Erasmo in Italia 1520–1580, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 1987. In the view of Marc’Antonio Sabellico (1436? –1506), for instance, who taught eloquence in Udine and in Venice, charity is a sentiment of the soul that gives richness to one’s inner life, translates into the custom of “tolerantia,” inspires the behavior of a citizen who suffers at the destruction of political liberty and intellectual liberty, and who wishes to act in the defense of both. The symbol of charity is Hercules, a pagan hero, who slays monsters, defeats abuse and overweening pride, wards off dangers from the world of men, and gives new life to the hope for immortality; his opposite is Democritus, the philosopher who laughs at the evils of the world and does nothing to alleviate them; Marc’Antonio Sabellico, “Exemplorum,” in M. Antonii Coccii Sabellici Opera omnia, ab infinitis quibus scatebant mendis, repurgata & castigate . . . in Tomos quatuor digesta: . . . per Caelium Secundum Curionem, non sine magno labore iudicioque confecta, per Ioannem Hervagium, Basel 1509, vol. 4, col. 87. See also col. 86 : “Christus rex, Deus idem & homo docuit humanum genus charitatem esse omnium virtutum maximam,” and col. 84: “Charitas ut ea sublata nulla constare possit virtus homini.” See Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate, edited by Eugenio Garin, Vallecchi, Florence 1942, pp. 106–7. See in this connection Donald Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1970, pp. 324–33. Weinstein emphasizes the presence of “a characteristically civic set of religious modalities arising out of the special experience of Italian communal life”; Weinstein, “Critical Issues in the Study of Civic Religion in Renaissance Florence,” in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, edited by Charles Trinkaus and Heiko Oberman, Leiden 1974, p. 265. See also David S. Peterson, “Religion, Politics, and the Church in Fifteenth-Century Florence,” in Girolamo Savonarola: Piety, Prophecy and Politics in Renaissance Florence, edited by Donald Weinstein and Valerie R. Hotchkiss, Bridwell Library, Dallas, TX 1994, pp. 75–83; Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, edited by Timothy Verdon and John Henderson, Syracuse, NY 1990.
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great deeds out of love of God,” and in order to magnify the power of charity he repeated almost to the letter the words of Saint Paul: “Pay no mind to persecutions, nor to dishonors, nor to scourges, fear not death; charity fears nothing; charity is stronger than death; charity separates man from all the things of the world more than does death; death takes the things of the world from you by force; charity takes them away from you through your own will, nor could the entire world triumph over charity.” Men, he never tired of repeating, must do good works “to honor God and also out of zeal toward the fatherland and for the common good,” and he even went so far as to say that “if you have no charity you are not a true Christian.” Love of God is a love of friendship and therefore the citizens of Florence must serve the common good and the fatherland, if they wish to enjoy the friendship of God. But a love of the common good is not a love of concupiscence, or lust and greed: “The love of lust is what deceives selfrespect, and when you desire and wish to have what is held in common in particular and you would like to have it for yourself. This self-respect is dislodged when anyone can have what is the common possession of everyone and you are contented that everyone should have their part, and in this way every good citizen is obliged to love the common good.” Charity brings together the people and the church, just as mortar “bonds and joins stones together,” and if it is to be true charity it must be free of selfesteem. For that reason, Savonarola emphasized with specific polemical intent, there was no charity among the ancient Romans, because, “although they might have done outstanding things, they did all those things for their own reputation and out of self-esteem.” Another important principle of the religion of virtue is the idea that God loves civil government above all others because it is the one most in keeping with liberty and the best suited to encourage Christian living. “But, through the prayers of the good men and women who inhabit the city, the council and civil government,” he writes, “framed [in Florence] not
Prediche sopra Aggeo con il Trattato circa el reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, edited by Luigi Firpo, Belardetti, Rome 1965, p. 51. Ibid., pp. 102 and 245. See, in this connection, Lorenzo Polizzotto, The Elect Nation: The Savonarolan Movement in Florence (1494–1545), Clarendon Press, Oxford 1994. Concerning the “civil” religiosity of the Florentines and concerning charity as “the first and most powerful moral imperative that obliges a man of the city to extend beyond the narrow circle of the consorteria, the crafts guild, and of the city’s political society,” see Arnaldo D’Addario, Aspetti della Controriforma a Firenze, Pubblicazioni degli Archivi di Stato, Rome 1972, p. 3. Girolamo Savonarola, “Prediche sopra Aggeo,” Prediche sopra Aggeo con il Trattato circa el reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, pp. 274, 111. Ibid., pp. 205–6.
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by men but by God himself, have been the instruments of divine power in maintaining its liberty.” The love of the common good, along with the fear of God, “natural charity,” and a rigorous respect for justice, makes cities great and multiplies the “spiritual and temporal goods” of the citizens. Like the political writers of humanism, Savonarola points to the example of the ancient Romans who “greatly cherished the common welfare of the city.” He also reiterated the fact that magistrates who govern on behalf of the common good of the city will win from God both glory and a great reward in eternal life. Last of all, and it is a point that deserves our close attention, Savonarola reiterated that God loves especially those who govern for the common good because He sees them as similar to Him: Like loves like, and the more it is loved by it, the more it becomes assimilated to it; since, then, creatures are similar to God, all are loved by Him, but because some are more like Him than others, these are also loved by Him more. Insamuch then as the one who governs is much more similar to God than the one who is governed, it logically follows that if he governs justly, he is loved and rewarded by God more than for the personal actions [he performs] when he is not governing, especially since the one who governs is in greater danger and expends greater efforts of mind and body than the one who does not govern; therefore he merits greater reward. This republican Christianity began to collapse at the beginning of the 1520s, when the Medici regime was well established in Florence. One piece of evidence to this effect is the Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze (Dialogue on the Government of Florence) that Francesco Guicciardini wrote in 1521, but kept unpublished in his desk drawer for the rest of his life. In contrast with the common view that to serve the fatherland was the one true way of complying with the will of God and winning His friendship, Guicciardini explained that those who truly wish to serve the fatherland must be ready and willing to abandon God and break his commands. After mentioning Gino Capponi’s statement that rulers must love their fatherland more than their soul, a genuine synthesis of Florentine civil religion, Guicciardini has Bernardo del Nero say that it is impossible to live with a Christian conscience and also work for the good of the fatherland:
Girolamo Savonarola, “Trattato circa el reggimento e governo della città di Firenze,” in Prediche sopra Aggeo con il Trattato circa el reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, I.3, p. 449. Savonarola quotes directly from De regimine principum in his fourteenth Predica sopra Aggeo [Sermon on Haggai], p. 245. Savonarola, “Trattato circa el reggimento e governo della città di Firenze,” in Prediche sopra Aggeo con il Trattato circa el reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, III.3, p. 483. Ibid., p. 484.
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How can one, according to conscience, wage war from a lust to expand one’s territory, in which one commits so many killings, so many sackings, so many violations of women, so many burnings of houses and churches, and an infinite number of other evils? Nevertheless, if someone stood up in a senate and argued, for this reason and for this reason alone, against undertaking some entirely feasible and useful enterprise, he would be repudiated by everyone. Let’s take this further. How could you, according to conscience, accept a war in order to defend even the lands you already possess? . . . If one thinks about it carefully, all states are illegitimate; and excepting republics, inside their own city walls, and not beyond them, there is no power whatsoever that is legitimate, even less that of the Emperor, who enjoys such authority that he administers justice to others. Nor do I exempt priests from this rule, for their rule is doubly illegitimate, since to keep us under they use spiritual weapons as well as temporal ones. Guicciardini drew from these considerations the conclusion that one had to live either according to the reason of states or else according to the law of God: You see the position to which someone who wanted to govern states strictly according to conscience would be reduced. Therefore when I talked of murdering or keeping the Pisans imprisoned, I didn’t perhaps talk as a Christian: I talked according to the reason and practice of states. Nor will anyone be more of a Christian who rejects such cruelty but recommends doing everything possible to take Pisa, since this means in effect being the cause of infinite evils to occupy something that doesn’t according to conscience belong to you. . . . I wanted to say this not to pronounce a verdict on these difficulties, which are immense, since anyone who wants to live totally according to God’s will can ill afford not to remove himself totally from the affairs of this world, and it is difficult to live in the world without offending God. Guicciardini’s criticism does not apply to the principle that it is in keeping with a Christian way of life to love and to defend one’s fatherland; it applies rather to unjust domains and the wars unleashed to conquer them,
Francesco Guicciardini, “Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze,” in Opere di Francesco Guicciardini, edited by Emanuella Lugnani Scarano, Utet, Turin 1983, vol. I, p. 464. English translation: Dialogue on the Government of Florence, translated by Alison Brown, Cambridge University Press, New York 1994, pp. 158–59. Ibid., p. 465. English translation: Dialogue on the Government of Florence, pp. 158–59.
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as was the case with the wars that Florence had waged to retake Pisa, a possession that Florence had lost in 1494. The Florentine religion of the fatherland, in any case, justified even unjust wars. The prophet of that religion, Girolamo Savonarola (1452–98), had proclaimed this in unequivocal words: “Pisa is yours and you shall have her back, because God wants Pisa to be yours and for you to hold her, and you have rightful title to her and may take her without troubling your conscience; and if he who holds her will not yield her out of love, he will be made to do so by force and will be obliged to be your friend. Trust to God to do it, He knows well how he will do.” While Savonarola preached countless times that God is a friend to the just, Guicciardini pointed out that this faith in divine aid has absolutely no basis, even if it can give us strength. Guicciardini calls into doubt not only the idea that God helps the just, but that He involves Himself in any way in the affairs of men with rewards or chastisements. The justice of God exists, but it is not the portion of men to understand divine judgments. As the republican experiment was coming to an end, the criticisms of republican Christianity inspired by Savonarola became increasingly harsh, as is shown by the dialogue between Francesco Capponi and Piero Vettori composed by Francesco Guicciardini’s brother Luigi Guicciardini in 1530. In this dialogue, Francesco Capponi reiterated the traditional components of republican Christianity, first and foremost the conviction that in the presence of extreme danger, Florence will not be left without divine aid, because its liberty is “welcome to the one and Almighty LORD GOD.” He then went on to emphasize that in order to defend liberty, it was necessary “to put up happily with all forms of harm, and anyone who believes otherwise, can neither be a good citizen, nor a true Christian.” In response to these words from Francesco Capponi, Piero Vettori shot back that, concerning events placed “within the will of the almighty GOD, we have no way of knowing whether they will occur or not.” Experience shows that hopes of divine aid have frequently been disappointed in the past. True liberty unquestionably deserves to be defended, Vettori added, but the liberty proclaimed by the republican government founded in 1527 was only a simulacrum, designed to conceal a tyrannical power. Girolamo Savonarola, Prediche sopra i Salmi, edited by Vincenzo Romano, Belardetti, Rome 1974, vol. II, p. 124. See also Enrico Gusberti, “Il Savonarola del Guicciardini,” Nuova Rivista Storica 54–55 (1971), pp. 581–622, 21–89. Francesco Guicciardini, Ricordi, C 147, in Opere di Francesco Guicciardini, vol. I, p. 770. Ibid., C 92; see also Ibid., C 33 [A 40-B 65], in Opere di Francesco Guicciardini, vol. I, pp. 754 and 737–38. Luigi Guicciardini, “Dialogo,” in Rudolf von Albertini, Firenze dalla repubblica al principato. Storia e coscienza politica, with a preface by Federico Chabod, Einaudi, Turin 1970, pp. 28–32.
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In Machiavelli’s historical context we can discern, then, a long tradition of thinkers who believe in a God that rewards those men who become godlike through charity and virtue and who loves free republics because, better than any other forms of government, they achieve justice and the common good; a tradition that considers the love of true glory entirely in keeping with the teachings of Christ, and sees the love of the fatherland as the duty of a good Christian. Also present in the same intellectual context, however, are thinkers who focus on the contrast between living in a Christian manner and loving one’s native city more than one’s own soul, and who were convinced that it is a vain illusion to believe that God is ready to rescue republics.
3. Machiavelli and the Religion of Virtue Machiavelli’s God is the God of Florentine republican Christianity. Even if he was unfamiliar with many of the texts that I have cited, Machiavelli accepted the humanistic ideal of man who became godlike through virtue and obtained God’s friendship. Machiavelli’s true hero was Moses. God speaks with him as His friend: “And the LORD spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend” (Exod. 33: 11). With clear reference to this passage from Exodus, Machiavelli placed Moses foremost among the “rare and marvelous” men to whom God was a friend. God gave His friendship to Moses as a grace and a favor, and it was in virtue of that grace received that Moses was able to speak with God: “And although one should not reason about Moses, as he was a mere executor of things that had been ordered for him by God, nonetheless he should be admired if only for that grace which made him deserving of speaking with God.” Before God chose him as His friend, Moses had shown his charity and his strength when he “spied an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his brethren” and killed him, and when he helped the daughters of the priest of Midian when the shepherds came and drove them away. Machiavelli is clearly thinking about these episodes from Exodus when he writes that God will be a friend to anyone who feels compassion for Italy, which is “more enslaved than the Hebrews, more servile than the Persians, more
See in this connection Alison Brown, “Savonarola, Machiavelli, and Moses: A Changing Model,” in Florence and Italy. Renaissance Studies in Honour of Nicolai Rubinstein, edited by Peter Denley and Caroline Elam, Committee for Medieval Studies, Westfield College, University of London, London 1988, pp. 57–72. The Prince, VI. English translation: The Prince, Harvey Mansfield, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1985, pp. 103, 22. See Luigi Cacciabue, La carità soprannaturale come amicizia con Dio, Morcelliana, Brescia 1972.
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dispersed than the Athenians” and is willing to help to redeem her, just as God was a friend to Moses when he became a redeemer of his people. God, then, gives His friendship to those who are similar to him, because he detests injustice and cruelty, and is capable of loving in accordance with charity. Machiavelli interpreted the friendship of God in the context of republican Christianity. He explained, first of all, that the friendship of God ensured the success of an undertaking. The Jews reached the promised land where milk and honey gurgled like brooks. From slaves, the Jews became a people. They were obliged to stand on their own two legs, to learn to defend themselves, and to take on full responsibility. God was unwilling to do everything on their behalf, but His aid was decisive in assuring that, under the leadership of Moses, they would attain redemption. Machiavelli insists on the same concept when he talks about the redemption of Italy: the friendship of God allowed the Jews to overcome obstacles that might otherwise have defeated them: “The sea has opened; a cloud has escorted you along the way; the stone has poured forth water; here manna has rained.” The most glorious deed of emancipation, as described in Exodus, was carried out by Moses, the redeemer who—more than any other—had the friendship of God. In exceptional cases, the Christian God is willing to admit into the ranks of the blessed souls even rulers of pagan states. In his Allocuzione fatta ad un magistrato (Allocution or Address to a Magistrate), Machiavelli narrates the legend according to which God, at the intercession of Saint Gregory, placed the Roman emperor Trajan on the list of “his chosen souls,” even though he was a pagan, in order to reward him for his extraordinary justice and his political virtues. In the Exhortation to Penitence (Esortazione alla penitenza), he wrote—this time in reference to David and the apostle Peter—that God “honored them among the highest of those chosen in heaven.” Peter was an apostle, but David, like Trajan, was above all a political hero, “a man very excellent in arms, in learning, in judgment,” who slew the giant Goliath with his weapons, and taught with his example the principle on which Machiavelli insisted for his entire life, that is, that in order to preserve liberty, neither mercenary arms nor auxiliary arms are sufficient, but only one’s own arms. Even “fair souls,” which are
Niccolò Machiavelli, Allocuzione fatta ad un magistrato, in Opere, vol. I, pp. 714–15. Niccolò Machiavelli, Esortazione alla penitenza, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 286. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 174; Discorsi, II, 2. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 52.
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a good and humble example, can rise “direct to heaven,” Machiavelli assures us in his play Clizia. Like the God of the humanists, Machiavelli’s God loves justice and peace and hates pride and arrogance. While he was on a mission to Pisa, Machiavelli wrote on the back of a letter that the Ten sent him, dated 28 May 1512, these verses about San Torpè or Torpezio (Saint Torpes): “Silence. You now hear and shall hear more / of how God views with displeasure all acts of overweening pride; / you will see the heavens destroy all that / Nero accomplished through pride and glory; / aside from this you will see Saint Torpes / go willingly and swiftly to his martyrdom / and, after many miracles and celestial signs, rejoice, / rejoice in bliss in heaven’s kingdom.” But Machiavelli knew well that in order to serve the fatherland, to found states, and to redeem peoples it is often necessary to act “contrary to religion,” break one’s word, perpetrate cruelty, lie and dissemble. His answer to this problem is that God forgives and gives His friendship even to those founders of states, redeemers of peoples, and rulers who are obliged to be bad in order to achieve their goals. There is consequently no need to choose between God and the world, as Guicciardini had claimed, since God himself wants us to work in the world in order to achieve his plans, even at the cost of committing evil. Evidence of this truth can be found in the Bible. Moses had God as his “teacher,” he was “deserving of speaking with God,” and he was “a mere executor of things that had been ordered for him by God.” And yet, Machiavelli comments in Discourses on Livy, in order to impose on the people of Israel a respect for the laws that God had entrusted to him and for his political orderings, he was forced “to kill infinite men who, moved by nothing other than envy, were opposed to his plans.” Machiavelli was referring to the passage of Exodus (32:27–28) in which we read that Moses punished the Israelites who had set up a golden calf as their God, and issued the terrible commandment: “Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.” The children of Levi, according to the biblical account, “did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.” Machiavelli, Clizia, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 228. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 864. In Opere, vol. III, pp. 738–39. Machiavelli, The Prince, XVIII. Machiavelli, Discorsi, III, 30. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, p. 280.
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Machiavelli notes the cruelty of that summary and indiscriminate punishment. Probably he also noted the cunning ploy used by Moses. Moses said: “Thus saith the LORD God of Israel.” But God did not impart that commandment to Moses, or at least there is no trace of such a commandment in the biblical text. Moses’s behavior is a perfect example of a cruelty used well. “Those who observe the first mode [cruelties well used] can have some remedy for their state with God and with men.” To have some remedy with God means that God will be able to excuse them and welcome them into the heavenly community, just as He welcomed Moses, who was cruel and who feigned the truth. In order to resolve this conflict between two fundamental principles of republican Christianity—one principle affirming the duty to serve the fatherland, the other principle emphasizing respect for justice—Machiavelli chooses to provide a new definition, with the help of the Bible, of the idea of God. Aside from the redeemers of peoples and founders of states whom God chose as his friends, other commanders and princes appear similar to God in the eyes of men because of their remarkable qualities. Hannibal, as a result of his “inhuman cruelty,” managed to hold together and discipline a vast army, “made up of countless nations,” and was “venerable and awe-inspiring” to his soldiers. Likewise, Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus, who succeeded in overcoming great dangers with their virtues, were “venerated,” as well. To venerate is to recognize the superiority of a person and at the same time feel admiration for them, be fascinated by them. Victors are venerated, but in particular God is venerated, with His “the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory,” as the Bible states (“magnificentia, et potentia, et gloria, atque victoria,” 1 Chron. 29:11). Another quality proper to God is that of being terrible. Terrible is the quality of striking terror because one can perform vast and unprecedented acts. Moses calls God, “glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders” (“terribilis atque laudabilis et faciens mirabilia” —Exod. 15:11). Terrible, or fearful, because he does things that no one has ever seen before: “before all thy people I will do marvels, such as have not been done in all
Machiavelli, The Prince, VIII. English translation: Mansfield, The Prince, p. 38. This interpretation of the friendship of God corrects the doctrine that proclaimed that a prince becomes godlike, and worthy of God’s friendship, through clemency, generosity, and respect for religion. See Giovanni Pontano, De Principe, edited by Guido M. Cappelli, Salerno Editrice, Rome 2003, pp. 5–7. In his excellent introduction, Cappelli emphasizes the profoundly secular nature of De Principe. See also the Platina (Bartolomeo Sacchi), De Principe, edited by Giacomo Ferraù, Il Vespro, Messina 1979, p. 121; and Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro del Cortigiano [Book of the Courtier], IV, 22; I quote from the edition edited by Walter Barberis, Einaudi, Turin 1998, pp. 379–80.
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the earth, nor in any nation” (“signa faciam quae nunquam visa sunt super terram, nec in ullius gentibus” —Exod. 34:10). Terrible in his might and grandeur (“Deus magnus et terribilis”; “a mighty God and terribile” — Deut. 7:21). The more that a prince is able to fascinate and strike terror, the more his power will be like that of God, and the more he himself will appear godlike. Beneath God, and beneath the full-fledged friends of God, Machiavelli placed a group of men who appear to have divine qualities but have not won the friendship of God. Those who obtain the friendship of God and eternal glory are not men like Hannibal and Cesare Borgia, but men like Moses, Scipio, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus. It is God who extends His friendship to those men who become similar to Him through the exercise of charity, and it is God who commands us to love the fatherland and to live according to virtue. If men “considered how [our religion] permits us the exaltation and defense of the fatherland, they would see that it wishes us to love and honor it and to prepare ourselves to be such that we can defend it,” he writes in Discourses on Livy (II.2). God cannot wish the impossible. He must therefore be willing to forgive those who are forced to commit evil in order to defend the fatherland, that is, if He does not wish those great men whom He loves above all others to fail in their undertakings and for the weak to be oppressed as a result. As a product of his idea of God, Machiavelli succeeds in resolving the conflict between Christian religion and love of the fatherland, thus keeping alive the religion of virtue that was such an essential part of the Florentine republican experience. The intellectual bond with Florentine republican Christianity, and the intention to defend and reinforce it, also emerges in his interpretation of glory. Machiavelli explicitly states that a love of glory is the worthiest of all human passions. If they were wise, he writes, men would not allow themselves to be deceived “by a false good and a false glory,” but would instead follow the way that “after death renders them glorious”; they would likewise eschew the way that leads to a “sempiternal infamy.” He makes a distinction between fame and glory, and includes goodness as a necessary prerequisite for true glory: “Pompey and Caesar and almost all the Roman generals after the last Carthaginian war gained fame as brave men but not as good ones, while those who lived before them gained fame as brave and good.” He praises the pagan religion because it “did not beatify men if
Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 10. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 31, 33. Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra [The Art of War], in Opere, vol. I, p. 539. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 575.
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they were not full of worldly glory,” as were “captains of armies and princes of republics” and he criticizes the Christian religion because it “has glorified humble and contemplative more than active men.” This criticism does not concern the Christian religion at all. The Christian God wants men to pursue the glory that is achieved through great undertakings. God, writes Machiavelli, helps the founders of states and redeemers, but He does not want “to do everything” lest He deprive men of “part of the glory” that is due to them. A part of the glory that men achieve when they carry out great works of redemption, however, is always due to God. It is God who inspires them and aids them, not only because He gives them “opportunities for glory,” but also the “power” to achieve immortality through Glory. When men work for true glory, they do something that is more acceptable to the Christian God than anything else. Machiavelli borrows this topos—quite diffuse, as I have pointed out, in Florentine republican Christianity—in various passages of his writing. In the Discursus florentinarum rerum he observes that men who have “reformed republics and kingdoms with laws and institutions” are, after “those who have become gods,” the first to be praised. As to exactly which men “have become gods,” Machiavelli clarifies the point in the chapter of Discourses on Livy in which he defines his own particular hierarchy of glory: “Among all men praised, the most praised are those who have been heads and orderers of religions. Next then, are those who have founded either republics or kingdoms.” The “Gods” in the narrowest sense are the chiefs of religions. The founders and reformers of republics and kingdoms are very similar to them, and close to them in terms of glory. Whatever the degree of resemblance and proximity in the hierarchy of glory, there are men that become “gods” and other men who become very similar to “Gods.” One of these was Scipio Africanus whom Machiavelli—following in the footsteps of Dante, who had referred to him in these terms in The Banquet Machiavelli, Discorsi, II, 2. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 131. Cfr. Russell Price, “The Theme of Gloria in Machiavelli,” Renaissance Quarterly 30 (1977), pp. 588–631. Machiavelli, Discursus florentinarum rerum, in Opere, vol. I, p. 744. God is frequently called glorious and acquires glory when He helps men to redeem themselves. See Exodus 24:16; Numbers 14:21; John 1:14; Acts 6.15. The Somnium Scipionis was one of the books owned by Bernardo Machiavelli; see Bernardo Machiavelli, Libro di ricordi, p. 70. Mario Martelli wrote that the references to God as a friend to redeemers was dictated by the fact that Machiavelli was addressing Lorenzo de’ Medici and Pope Leo X: “It is in the sign of the declared will of God that Machiavelli sets out, both to incite Lorenzo and to admonish Leo”; “La logica provvidenzialistica e il capitolo XXVI del Principe,” Interpres 4 (1981–82), pp. 262–384, in particular pp. 383–84. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 31, I 10.
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—explicitly described as “a divine man” sent “by heaven.” He was a “divine man” because he constantly offered examples of “virtue, strength, integrity at once” and was able on numerous occasions to save his fatherland from drastic ruin. In Machiavelli’s view, Scipio is an unparalleled example: “Among the dead and those who’re still around, / Among the ancient and the modern nations, / Another Scipio cannot be found.” Those who love their fatherland and act on its behalf become godlike, and God honors them with His friendship. Machiavelli criticizes the scorn for worldly glory that is present in the Christian tradition, preferring to it another interpretation that he saw as more genuinely Christian, which existed in the Florentine historical context. Machiavelli’s ties with the tradition of Florentine Christianity, finally, emerges quite clearly when he speaks of charity and the love of the fatherland. In his Exhortation to Penitence he cites St. Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians: “Those who are ungrateful to God—it is impossible that they are not unfriendly to their neighbors. Those are unfriendly to their neighbors who are without charity. This, my Fathers and Brothers, is the only thing that takes our souls to Heaven; this is the only thing that has more worth than all the other virtues of men; this is that of which the Church says at such length that he who does not have charity does not have anything.” The faith of Christ is founded on charity, and it is from charity that we derive the principles of civil ethics. Anyone who lacks charity “must necessarily be unfriendly to his neighbor: he does not aid him, he does not endure his faults, he does not console him in tribulation, he does not teach the ignorant, he does not advise him who errs, he does not help the good, he does not punish the evil.” A man cannot be full of charity, he emphasizes, “who is not full of religion.” Machiavelli composed the Exhortation for some members of a secular or religious confraternity. But when he writes that those who lack charity cannot be a friend to their neighbor, and therefore cannot be a good
Niccolò Machiavelli, Dell’Ingratitudine, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, pp. 340–42. English translation: Tusiani, Lust and Liberty, p. 67. Niccolò Machiavelli, Esortazione alla penitenza, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 285. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 173. See in this connection Emanuele Cutinelli-Rèndina, “Riscrittura e mimesi: il caso dell’ ‘Esortazione alla penitenza,’” in Cultura e scrittura di Machiavelli, Atti del Convegno di Florence-Pisa, 27–30 October 1997, Salerno Editrice, Rome 1998, pp. 413–21; Giovanni Cattani, La vita religiosa nella ‘Esortazione alla penitenza’ e nella ‘Mandragola’ di Niccolò Machiavelli, Lega, Faenza 1973. In reference to the Esortazione alla penitenza, Francesco Bausi wrote that this text documents Machiavelli’s intention of taking off his mask; Machiavelli, Salerno Editrice, Rome 2005, p. 326.
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Christian and a good citizen, he is reiterating concepts that are entirely his own. In The Art of War he writes that those who show contempt for God cannot show reverence for men and that one must “oblige the citizens to love one another.” In his Dell’ingratitudine (Tercets on Ingratitude or Envy), he contrasts, as he does in the Exhortation, charity with ingratitude, which is an enemy to the “life of good service” of the “good citizen.” Charity is, for Machiavelli, as for all the political writers of Christian and classical inspiration, the heart of the love of the fatherland. In the Florentine Histories, for instance, he speaks of citizens who took action to exhort the Signoria to annul “the orders that nourish sects” and to establish new ones that are in keeping with “a free and civil life,” and in his description of the passion that drove them to work for the common good, he emphasizes that they were not moved by “any private passion,” but rather by their “charity for our fatherland.” The concept of charity of the fatherland appears as well in the chapter of Discourses on Livy entitled “That a Good Citizen Ought to Forget Private Injuries for Love of His Fatherland.” The senate, Machiavelli recounts, sent two ambassadors to the consul Fabius to ask him, after setting “private hatreds aside,” to nominate “for the public benefit” Papirius Cursor. Fabius, “moved by charity for his fatherland,” accepted the senate’s request, “even though by being silent and in many other modes he gave sign that such a nomination grieved him.” From the behavior of Fabius, Machiavelli comments, “all those who seek to be held good citizens ought to take example.” Comment and narrative together show Machiavelli’s intent to exalt the charity of the fatherland, since Livy never uses that expression at all, and limits himself to writing that the emissaries of the senate were sent to persuade Quintus Fabius to “lay aside all feeling of enmity for the sake of his country” (“patriae remitteret”), which the consul showed by his silence had cost him great pain: “Showing by his conduct what a painful effort it had cost him” (“insignem dolorem ingenti comprimi animo”). The most eloquent and exhaustive analysis of love of the fatherland as a passion that drives citizens to set aside their private and particular interests in order to serve the public good, nonetheless, is found in the chapter of Discourses on Livy in which Machiavelli describes the death of Manlius Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra [The Art of War], in Opere, vol. I, pp. 687 and 536. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 572. Machiavelli, Dell’ingratitudine [Tercets on Ingratitude or Envy], 37 and 71–72, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, pp. 339–40. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 741, lines 37 and 70. Florentine Histories, Banfield and Mansfield, p. 341. Machiavelli, Discorsi, III, 47. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, p. 307. Livy, Ab urbe condita, IX, 38.
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Capitolinus. Guilty of having incited tumults “against the Senate and against the laws of the fatherland,” Manlius was brought to trial before the people. Although the people of Rome were “very desirous of its own utility and a lover of things that went against the nobility,” that same people, “from defender having become judge, without any respect condemned him to death.” Manlius was a citizen “full of every virtue, who publicly and privately had performed very many praiseworthy works.” To sentence him to death for his acts of sedition against the Senate and against the laws of the republic was a decision that demanded wisdom and courage. The people of Rome, Machiavelli emphasized, found both wisdom and courage because “love of the fatherland was able to do more in all of them than any other respect.” Once again, Machiavelli attributes to the Roman people a love of the fatherland as a principal cause of its wisdom and courage. Livy never speaks of it. In his account, he mentions the tribunes of the plebs who count on the people’s hatred for the monarchy and their love of liberty, and points out that Manlius’s “loathesome hankering after kingly power” made the people forget his merits, and even manage to render those merits detestable. Though he was no saint, Machiavelli always served the fatherland with all his strength, and with absolute honesty he consoled, aided, taught, and advised. He wrote all his great political works to teach, and in those books he explained how to found and preserve political orderings that really could help the good and punish the wicked. During the saddest days of his life, when he learned from Francesco Vettori that there was no hope of his obtaining a position in Rome or in the new Medici regime in Florence, he considered going to “some deserted spot to teach reading to children.” When he was nearing the end of his life, at a time when he had to think day and night about how to halt the onrushing horde of lansquenets descending toward Florence or Rome, he still managed to console his son Guido, afflicted with the fear that he might lose his young mule, with words that only a man capable of true charity could devise. Like the writers and poets of humanism, Machiavelli knew very well that love of the fatherland, inasmuch as it is a form of charity, is different from erotic love, of which he was a refined theorist and a connoisseur. Machiavelli, Discorsi, III, 8. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 237–38. Livy, Ab urbe condita, VI, 19–20. Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori, 14 June 1514, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, pp. 461–62. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 290. Niccolò Machiavelli to Guido Machiavelli, 2 April 1527, Opere, vol. III, pp. 624–26. Sebastian de Grazia has stated that for Machiavelli the love of the fatherland is similar to the love for a woman. Love, explains de Grazia, “is a word [Machiavelli] uses to refer to sentiment
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Erotic love, like love for the great affairs of politics, is a passion that envelops, overwhelms, transforms, and allows one to forget: “I have renounced, then, thoughts about matters great and grave. No longer do I delight in reading about the deeds of the ancients or in discussing those of the moderns: everything has been transformed into tender thoughts, for which I thank Venus and all of Cyprus.” From the first poems that he composed, in all likelihood in the years 1494–98, Machiavelli emphasized the tremendous power of love to inflict suffering, fear, and weeping: I hope, and oh, to hope is to ache more: I weep, and my tears feed my weary heart: I laugh, but there’s no laugh I now can store: I burn, but no one sees my flaming smart: All that I hear and see I most deplore, And everything can a new grief impart: Thus hoping, I do burn and laugh and cry, And am afraid of both my ear and eye. Machiavelli liked to abandon himself to thoughts of love. We have evidence of this in his letter dated 10 December 1513. When his friend dangled images of lightsome and easy loves before his eyes, Machiavelli responded that he reads about the loves of Dante, Petrarch, Tibullus, and Ovid, and that as he reads the works of these poets, he recalls his own loves, and lingers at length in those memories, allowing himself to be swallowed up by the past: “Upon leaving the woods, I go to a spring; from there, to one of the places where I hang my birdnets. I have a book under my arm Dante, Petrarch, or one of the minor poets like Tibullus, Ovid, or some such. I read about their amorous passions and their loves, remember my own, and these reflections make me happy for a while.” When he is suffor country, an ancient usage, transferring the term from concrete persons and things to the abstraction of country”; Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1990; Italian translation Machiavelli all’inferno, Laterza, Rome-Bari 1990, p. 175. Similarly to a love for a woman, the love of the fatherland chains, enslaves, and can even demand the sacrifice of one’s life, experienced not as an imposition but as a joyful and willing gift: “As love can deny nothing to love, so love can deny nothing to country”; Ibid., p. 189. Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori, 3 August 1514, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, pp. 465–66. Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 422. English translation: Joseph Tusiani, Lust and Liberty, the Poems of Machiavelli, Ivan Obolensky, New York 1963, p. 39. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 264. See in this connection Paolo Lorenzetti, “La bellezza e l’amore nei trattati del Cinquecento,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 28 (1922), pp. 1–178, in particular, p. 97.
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fering from the harshness of men’s ingratitude and squalor, he reveals to Vettori that his feelings about love are similar to those of those poets. In another exchange of letters with Vettori, Machiavelli returned to the subject of the irresistible power and sweetness of erotic love. As was the case in late 1513, it was Vettori who brought up the subject with an explicit praise of the delights of carnal love. After describing once again the languor and boredom of his days in Rome, he reveals the way that he wards off melancholy: “Of necessity one must endeavor to think of pleasant things, but I know of nothing that gives more delight to think about and to do than fucking. Every man may philosophize all he wants, but this is the utter truth, which many people understand this way but few will say.” Once again, in the letter of 10 December, Machiavelli responds to his friend with the love of the poets, and becomes a poet himself, imitating Petrarch: The youthful archer many times had tried To wound me in the breast with his arrows; He takes his pleasure thus—spite for all And harm to everyone is his delight. Though no diamond exists that might withstand His arrowheads brutal and keen, Yet now they’ve struck an obstacle so strong It took little account of their power. So, full of rage and anger, in order To demonstrate his consummate skill, He made a change of quiver, bow, and shaft; With such great force he let one fly, That I feel its painful wound still; thus I Confess and recognize his power. A few months earlier, in order to describe the power of love, he had used the metaphor of golden nets. The beauty of the beloved makes the Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, pp. 487–88 English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 311. Ibid., p. 488 English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, pp. 311–12. “Those with which he has bound me are so strong that I am in absolute despair of my liberty and I am unable to conceive of any means of unfettering myself; and even if fate or other human stratagem should open some path for me to get out of them, perhaps I should not wish to go down it; so do I find these fetters—now sweet, now light, now heavy—and they make such a tangle that I believe I cannot live happily without this kind of life”; Niccolò Machiavelli
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chains gentle, and for no reason would the lover wish to free himself: “And even though I may now seem to have entered into great travail, I nevertheless feel so great a sweetness in it, both because of the delight that rare and gentle countenance brings me and because I have laid aside all memory of my sorrows, that not for anything in the world would I desire my freedom—even if I could have it.” In the face of the power of love, one can do nothing but surrender. “As for your love affair,” he writes to Vettori in the summer of 1514, “let me remind you that Love tortures only those who attempt to clip his wings or to fetter him whenever he flies into their laps. Because he is a young, fickle boy, he gouges out the eyes, livers, and hearts of such people. But those who rejoice at his arrival and pamper him, and then let him go whenever he wants to, gladly welcoming his return visits—those he always reveres and cherishes: under his command they triumph. Consequently, my dear friend, do not try to control one who flies or clip someone that grows a thousand feathers for every one lost, and you will be happy.” to Francesco Vettori, 31 January 1515, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, p. 489 English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 312. “I ought to tell you, as you did me, how this love began, how Love ensnared me with his nets, where he spread them, and what they were like; you would realize that, spread among the flowers, these were nets of gold woven by Venus, so soft and gentle that even though an insensitive heart could have severed them, nevertheless I declined to do so. For a while I reveled within them, until their tender threads hardened and locked into indissoluble knots”; Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori, 3 August 1514, ibid., p. 465 English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 293. Ibid. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 293. It is worth noting that Machiavelli had women friends, real or imaginary, which whom he had (or imagined he had) erotic relations. Quite real was Lucrezia, known as La Riccia, a Florentine courtesan, with whom Machiavelli had a lengthy relationship. Lucrezia was at his side in many of the most difficult moments of his life. We know this for certain from a letter written by Vettori: “But you tell me something that astonishes me: you have found so much faith and so much compassion in La Riccia that, I swear to you, I was her supporter for your sake, but now I have become her slave, because most of the time women are wont to love Fortune and not men, and when Fortune changes, they change as well”: ibid., p. 487. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 311. In his reply, Machiavelli called La Riccia “amica” (‘his friend’) and adds that she and Donato del Corno “are the sole havens and refuges for my skiff bereft of rudder and sail because of the unending tempest.” English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 312. In contrast, an imaginary figure was the beautiful handmaiden of Circe who in L’Asino [The Golden Ass] (VI, 22–24) welcomes the poor Niccolò (the poem is openly autobiographical) into her house, shares her supper with him, and then invites him to share a sweet night of love with her. After making love, the maiden and the hero of the story speak at length about many important matters (“Then we began to speak of many things, / just as a friend does with another friend”): Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 308. English translation: Tusiani, Lust and Liberty, p. 83. Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori, 10 June 1514, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, p. 462. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, pp. 290–91.
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And why resist, even if it were possible, an amorous passion for a woman of rare beauty? Vettori writes that he met such a woman but also reveals that he is torn between the desire to abandon himself to this passionate love and the fear of stumbling into “a thousand annoyances.” Machiavelli, in contrast, has no doubts: “I have no response to your letter, except that you should give your love full rein and that whatever pleasure you seize today may not be there for you to seize tomorrow; if things still stand as they did when you wrote, I envy you more than the king of England. I beg you to follow your star; do not let things slide—not even an iota—for anything in the world, because I believe now, I have always believed, and I shall continue to believe that what Boccaccio says is true: it is better to act and to regret it than not to act and to regret it.” Machiavelli was quite familiar with sexual passion, even in its most animalistic forms. He leaves us an unforgettable description in the letter that he wrote to Luigi Guicciardini from Verona on 8 December 1509. Luigi Guicciardini must have sent Machiavelli a description of some amorous exploit of his that had left him “want[ing] another fuck,” eager to “take another turn at it.” With his distinctive taste for paradox and selfdeprecation, Machiavelli answered his friend with a description of having allowed himself to be lured, because he had been “hopelessly horny,” into a horrifying “amorous” assignation with a grotesque old woman. So grotesque that for a good while he was no longer “horny.” He also knew that erotic passion is an essential part of love. He knew it so well that when he realized that he no longer had the vigor to love a woman as she deserved, he resigned himself to abandoning all thoughts of love, as he writes, for the all-too-beautiful and young Barbara Salutati: If worthiness in me Were as immense as my desire, Pity, now still asleep, awake would be. But since desire and strength Do not go well together, Suffer I must the length Of all my woes, my lord. Francesco Vettori to Niccolò Machiavelli, 9 February 1514, in ibid., p. 445. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friend, p. 279. Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori, 25 February 1514, in ibid., p. 450. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 282. Niccolò Machiavelli to Luigi Guicciardini, 8 December 1509, in ibid., pp. 321–22. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 190.
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And you I do not blame— I blame myself for this: Great beauty finds its bliss— I see and I confess— In a much greener age. Love does not live without desire and without yearning. This is a general rule from which derives an admonition that is as harsh as it is ineluctable: How beautiful is love in youthful heart! And how incongruous In one who’s long since passed life’s flowering part. Love’s power parallels declining years, And in our time of bloom evokes esteem, But with old age its honor disappears. And so, ye amorous old men, ’twould seem The better part of valor to leave wooing To ardent youths’ pursuing, For they’re a fitter butt for Cupid’s dart. I have lingered on the idea of love in Machiavelli, and I hope that this has not annoyed the reader; let us agree, it is a fascinating theme, and because I hope that the texts on which I have commented do show that for Machiavelli love of the fatherland and erotic love were different passions. The love of the fatherland lives, when it lives, in both young people and old people. Even though it is a natural sentiment, it does not have the overwhelming and all-encompassing power of erotic love. It can instill sensations of sweetness (Machiavelli speaks of the “sweetness of free life”), but it is less intense than love proper. The love of the fatherland is a passion for a good that belongs to many people, can easily be extinguished, must be educated and stimulated, and never springs up in corrupt souls. Erotic love is always for a single person, it is difficult to extinguish, it is born without any intention or will on the part of the person who is in love, and everyone experiences it. It is true that just as a citizen sacrifices himself for the fatherland that he loves, the lover is ready to sacrifice himself or herself for the person he or she loves, but in the case of the lover, that is often Niccolò Machiavelli, Alla Barbera, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 437. English translation: Tusiani, Lust and Liberty, p. 42. Machiavelli, Clizia, Act II, Scene V, in ibid., p. 197 English translation: Sices and Atkinson, The Comedies, p. 323. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine [Florentine Histories], II, 34. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 92.
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simply a grand declamation. The lover’s sacrifice springs from the power of the amorous passion, the sacrifice of the citizen springs from charity and a sense of duty. Love for a woman envelops Machiavelli in sweetness, allows him to forget the troubles of life, and leads him away from the thought of great things. The love of the fatherland likewise allows him to forget the troubles of life, but it certainly doesn’t lead him away from thoughts of politics, and indeed it gives him the strength to do great things for the common good.
4. Moral and Religious Reform Within the Florentine intellectual milieu there still thrived, even during Machiavelli’s time, a profound and diffuse demand for religious and moral reform. The supporters of that movement harked back to biblical and classical sources. In Latin texts, the words reformatio and regeneratio were equivalent. Ovid, a poet with whom Machiavelli was very familiar, called Jolaus, who is reinvigorated and rejuvenated, now able to fight in battle, “reformatus primos in annos.” Apuleius mentions the witch Pamphilia who transforms herself into an owl, “magicis suis artibus reformatur,” and in describing religious rebirth, he uses the term renatus. The most powerful ancient myth of rebirth, however, was that of the phoenix. Ovid writes in his Metamorphoses that times change, “et nova sunt semper,” and as an example of the capacity to be reborn through one’s own power, he Callimaco, deep in love, in La Mandragola [The Mandrake] is on the verge of dying, first of love and then of despair; but he is on the verge of dying in a comedic manner, as none other than the prosaic Ligurio notes: “What a man this is! Now for happiness, now for sorrow—this fellow wants to die no matter what”; Act IV, Scene II. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 806. See Eugenio Garin, “Desideri di riforma nell’oratoria del Cinquecento,” in Various Authors, Contributi alla storia del Concilio di Trento e della Controriforma, Vallecchi, Florence 1948, in “Quaderni di Belfagor,” pp. 1–11; see also Delio Cantimori, Umanesimo e religione nel Rinascimento, Einaudi, Turin 1975, especially pp. 142–57 and 256–58; Cesare Vasoli, Civitas mundi. Studi sulla cultura del Cinquecento, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome 1996; Vasoli, Le filosofie del Rinascimento, edited by Paolo Costantino Pissavino, Bruno Mondadori, Milan 2002, pp. 154–74. For the biblical sources, see for instance Ezekiel, 11:19 and 36:26: “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh” (“Et dabo eis cor aliud et spiritum novum tribuam in visceribus eorum. Et dabo vobis cor novum et spiritum novum ponam in medio vestro,” Ezekiel, 36:26). Ovid, Metamorphoses, IX, 399. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, III, 21 and XI, 30.
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cites the phoenix. The symbol of resurrection is Christ, but every human soul is also reborn, as is every people that is able to find its way back to the right path of living. In the New Testament, reformari means to transform oneself into the proper form to the Christian ideal. The force, or efficient cause, of this transformation is caritas. In the Vulgate there is an exhortation not to adapt to the corruption of the secular world but to transform, regenerate one’s entire ethical and spiritual life. The text reads: “Et nolite conformari huic saeculo, sed reformamini in novitate sensus vestri, ut probetis, quae sit voluntas Dei” (“be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind,” Rom. 12:2).” The image of rebirth appears as well in Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, with assuming a direct reference to the rebirth of the afterworld. In the Epistle to the Colossians renewal means becoming once again godlike. To be reformed and reborn, in the sense of returning to the authentic form of the Christian religion, and to renew one’s way of life in literal keeping with the Gospels, and in accordance with the example of poverty and charity set by Jesus and the apostles, were the principles of the religious movements of the twelfth century. All the same, it was Dante, in The Banquet, who fully expressed the fundamental principle of the reformatio: “The supreme desire of each thing bestowed by Nature in the first place is to return to its first source.” Rebirth meant returning to the ideal, pure, original form. “Incipit Vita nova”: it is with these words that Dante begins the collection of poems that express the poet’s internal renewal through the spiritualizing and purifying force of love. In the Divine Comedy he explores and reformulates with great expressive power the ideas of rebirth, renewal, and the ideal elevation of man and humanity: “The ages are renewed; / justice and man’s first time on earth return; / from Heaven a new progeny descends,” he writes in Purgatorio (22, 70–72),
Ovid, Metamorphoses, XV, 165, 184, 215, 270, 274, and XV, 391–402. “reformatur qualis fuit ante figura,” De ave Phoenice, V, 105. See Konrad Burdach, Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus. Zwei Abhandlungen über die Grundlage moderner Bildung und Sprachkunst, Wissenschaftlishce Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1963, or Riforma Rinascimento Umanesimo. Due dissertazioni sui fondamenti della cultura e dell’arte della parola moderne completone, Sansoni, Florence, 1935. Burdach Riforma Rinascimento Umanesimo, p. 25. “And be renewed in the spirit of your mind” (“Renovamini autem spiritu mentis vestrae et induite novum hominem”), Ephesians, 4:23; “And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him” (“induentes novum [hominem] eum, qui renovatur . . . secundum imaginem eius, qui creavit illum”), Colossians, 3:10. Worth reading are the pages of Luigi Salvatorelli, Vita di San Francesco d’Assisi, Laterza, Bari 1926, pp. 25–26. Dante Aligheri, Convivio [The Banquet] IV, 12, 14.
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translating Vergil almost to the letter. After Matilda had him drink from the Eunoe, the poet used the following words to express the significance of his inner renewal, achieved through his having “come so far,” right up to the very threshold of paradise: “Remade, as new trees are / renewed when they bring forth new boughs, I was / pure and prepared to climb unto the stars.” The Christian ideal of rebirth through the power of faith became a myth of social and political reform in the Middle Ages. The most eloquent example is the restoration of the republic that Cola di Rienzo (1313?–54) attempted in Rome. As brief as that experiment may have been, it had immense repercussions. The forces that drove Cola di Rienzo were a love of glory, the cult of the sacred Roman people, a fervent desire to restore Rome, and with Rome all of Italy, to its ancient greatness. He himself presented his tribuneship, after the expulsion of the Roman barons, as the dawn of a new era and the revival of a fossilized life, not unlike an act of grace. The power behind moral rebirth is charity: just as the soil is broken up by a plow, likewise the church of God must be renewed through the acts and seeds of charity. The goal is to revive justice, and the rebirth is not the act of a prince but of an entire people, which thus gains new vigor; it is not a simple return to a state of perfection, or the birth of that which existed before, in an identical state, but rather a bringing to light of a new and higher way of life. The people, morally deformed by tyranny, must be reformed and liberated, and it must return to the ideal form that is proper to it. The reform, therefore, is a liberation from corruption and a redemption from decadence. Likewise Petrarch, felt and expressed quite forcefully the myth of rebirth. In a poem that may have been dedicated to Cola di Rienzo, he describes Italy as a lazy, sleepy, befuddled old woman, who fails to respond to the cries of men, until a new redeemer seizes her by the hair, lifts her out of the muck and stands her on her feet, and helps her to regain her old beauty and vigor. Petrarch portrays Italy as a “gentil donna” (‘gentle lady’)
“Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo / iam redit et virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna; / iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto”: Vergil, Eclogues, IV, 5 English translation: Divine Comedy, Allen Mandelbaum, Everyman’s Library, London 1995, pp. 319, 365, and 375. “renovetur operibus et semine caritatis”; Burdach, Riforma Rinascimento Umanesimo, p. 16. “sanitas et revivificacio in caritatis spiritu”; Burdach, Riforma Rinascimento Umanesimo, p. 16. “Amor equidem reipublicae magis quam imperii me accendit, ut reformetur iusticia iam defuncta”; Ibid., pp. 21–22; see also p. 17. Ibid., p. 19. Concerning the religion of Petrarch, see Ugo Dotti, La città dell’uomo, Editori Riuniti, Rome 1992; see also Giuseppe Billanovich, “Nella biblioteca del Petrarca, I; il Petrarca, il Boccaccio e le ‘Enarrationes in Psalmos’ di S. Agostino,” Italia medievale e umanistica 3 (1960), 1–27.
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awaiting rescue at the hand of a husband or a father, and promises deathless glory to her redeemer. Rebirth is the renewal of the spirits that takes place when men rediscover devotion, charity, and virtue. His sources are Psalms: “Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth” (103:30); and Revelation: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. . . . And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new” (21:1–5). He also finds—which Machiavelli was unwilling or unable to do—the words of a prophet to herald the rebirth of virtue and the return of the golden age: Beautiful souls, the friends of virtue, shall hold the world, and then we shall see the age become golden and full of the ancient worthiness. Coluccio Salutati, who was in many ways a pupil of Petrarch, perceived indications of a new age in the victorious war that Florence waged against the papacy. Leonardo Bruni, in turn, adopted—as an interpretative criterion of human affairs—the cycle of birth, growth, perfection, and decay. Civilizations decay and die due to the effects of the corruption that dissolves the original virtue of the peoples, and especially because of the loss of liberty. States are reborn, in contrast, when they learn how to rediscover virtue and they reconquer liberty, as is demonstrated by the example of Florence, which not only was able to endow itself with a free republican government, but which established itself as a protector of Italian liberty and therefore became the providential place for the rebirth of literature and the arts, the rediscovery of the ancients, and the reconquest of civil living. Giovanni Nesi, in his Oraculum de novo saeculo (1496), interprets the new century as a time of political rebirth for Florence and a rebirth of Christianity:
Konrad Burdach, Riforma Rinascimento Umanesimo, pp. 92–93: “The religious concept of the Rebirth filtered from the circles of the ecclesiastical and political and social reformers to the thoughts and habits of the humanistic movement.” See Raffaello Morghen, Civiltà medievale al tramonto, Laterza, Bari 1971. Eugenio Garin, I cancellieri umanisti della Repubblica Fiorentina da Coluccio Salutati a Bartolomeo Scala, in Idem, La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano, p. 11. See also Garin, I trattati morali di Coluccio Salutati. Leonardo Aretino, Istoria Fiorentina, translated into the vernacular by Donato Acciajuoli, Le Monnier, Florence 1861, pp. 24–25. See also Vasoli, Civitas mundi, pp. 217–18; Riccardo Fubini, “Cultura umanistica e tradizione cittadina nella storiografia fiorentina del ‘400,” Atti e memorie dell’Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere ‘La Colombaria’ 56 (1991), pp. 65–102; Fubini, Leonardo Bruni cancelliere della Repubblica di Firenze, Convegno di studi (Florence, 27–29 October 1987), edited by Paolo Viti, Olschki, Florence 1990.
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What does the new age mean if not the conversion and the renewal of the church? . . . Indeed, after so many different cases, I summon you to that golden age. . . . Whoever is an adherent of Christ, come into the kingdom of Christ. . . . Do you want the prophet? Here he is, truthfully announcing the future, admirable always and everywhere. . . . Italy will be devastated by the barbarians; the Florentine realm, today in crisis due to the ambition, perfidy, and frivolity of its citizens, will extend its name and its powers, endowed with growing wealth, power, and glory. Rome will soon come to ruin, invaded by foreigners; but the church will save itself through divine intervention and will then triumph; the Mohammedans will soon convert to the Christian faith. And, finally, there will be only one flock and only one shepherd. The demand for moral and religious reform drew some of its vigor from the comparison between the bad customs of the Italians and the good customs of the German peoples. Poggio Bracciolini, who lived in the Roman curia and was chancellor of the Florentine Republic, has left us an illuminating description of the “pleasant way of life due to the extreme freedom of customs” that he noticed in the baths of Baden. Everyone did their best to live happily and to enjoy life’s pleasures. They are not obsessed with “splitting up common goods,” but rather tend to “share things that have been divided up.” In the diverse crowd at the baths “there are never quarrels, disorders, divisions, murmurings, or cursing.” They are contented with very little, live one day at a time, and are not busy pursuing riches they will never obtain. The contrast with Italian customs is very clear: we “indulge in slander and backbiting,” we are entirely focused on getting and our appetites, never satisfied with what we earn and what we own, always unhappy, always frantic.
Eugenio Garin, L’età nuova. Ricerche di storia della cultura dal XII al XVI secolo, Morano, Naples 1969, pp. 96–97. The need for spiritual renewal and for a revolt against the corruption of the clergy was strong as well in such highly religious men as the Galateo (Antonio de Ferrariis, 1444–1517) who wrote pages of invective against the hypocrisy of the monks, denouncing them not only for doing wicked deeds, and for protecting “usurers, the unjust, those who steal the property of others, and those who batten off the people,” but also for “making God an accomplice to their thefts,” and thus establishing through fraud a religion that “does not remove sin but conceals it.” See Antonio de Ferrariis also known as the Galateo, “Esposizione del Pater noster,” Collana di scrittori di Terra d’Otranto, vol. IV, Lecce 1868, pp. 145–238; vol. XVIII, Lecce 1871, pp. 5–104; Galateo, L’Heremita, vol. XII, Lecce 1875, pp. 3–134. Even a pious and melancholy humanist such as Lapo da Castiglionchio, who died in 1438 in Ferrara while attending the Council as a secretary to the Roman curia, perceived with sincere mortification how grievous the corruption of the church had become; Lapo da Castiglionchio, “Dialogus de curiae commodis,” in Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, p. 171. Poggio Bracciolini, “Epistole,” in Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, pp. 220–29.
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In Germany, Poggio was brought into direct contact with the world of heresy. In Konstanz, he witnessed the trial of Jerome of Prague, a pupil of John Huss. He was greatly impressed by the defendant’s eloquence, worthy of the great masters of antiquity. He had serious doubts about the legitimacy of the charges of heresy, and he could find nothing to criticize in the faith that he proclaimed in the presence of the judges of the Inquisition: “He said nothing that would be unworthy of a faultless man, and if his faith truly was that which he professed, then he could not be found guilty of anything deserving—let alone a verdict of capital crime—even of the slightest punishment.” Poggio quoted the words of Jerome of Prague in defense of John Huss with evident approval: “He said that he has not held anything against the Church, but only against the abuse committed by the priests, against the overweening pride, the magnificence, and the pomp of the prelates,” and against all those things that were “unworthy of the religion of Christ.” Poggio, a Catholic, saw in Jerome of Prague, about to be burned at the stake as a heretic, a man who was “eminent beyond all belief,” and who knew how to die like a philosopher. Even before they began to hear about Martin Luther, the Florentines had an idea of Germany as a land of peoples who lived in accordance with a sincere Christian faith, which translated into a powerful civil conscience. Francesco Vettori had already noted this in 1512, when he narrated an account of his diplomatic mission to the court of Maximilian I from June 1507 to March 1508. Vettori’s account is a savory and impressive document of the corruption rampant among priests and monks. In nearly every tavern and inn at which he stopped, he heard tales of priests and monks guilty of every sort of wrongdoing. In the district around Verona, he was able to hear, from the mouths of several Germans returning home, the disgust with which true Christians judged the papal court: “If you ask me the reason that I am leaving Rome, I will tell you that we from the Rhineland are good Christians, and we have heard and read that the faith of Christ was founded with the blood of the martyrs upon good customs, and strengthened by many miracles, so that it would be impossible for someone from the Rhine to question the true faith. I have been in Rome for a number of years, and I have seen how the prelates and others live, such that I was afraid that if I lingered there any longer, not only might I lose the faith of Christ, but that I might become an epicurean and lose my immortal soul.” Years later, in his Sommario della istoria d’Italia, Vettori
Ibid., pp. 229–41. Francesco Vettori, “Viaggio in Alamagna,” in Scritti storici e politici, edited by Enrico Niccolini, Laterza, Rome-Bari 1972, p. 42. Ibid., p. 25.
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wrote that the Roman papacy had “created a new religion with nothing in it of Christ save for the name”: Christ “commanded poverty, and they desire wealth, Christ commanded humility, and they pursue pride, Christ commanded obedience, and they want to command everyone else.” In the lands through which he was traveling, Vettori also met street artists, charlatans, and frauds, like the one he encountered near Verona who claimed that he had miraculously survived hanging in Bologna and was going to see the Blessed Simon in Trent to fulfill a vow. With this fairytale, he managed to pry money out of “poor men,” which he then cheerfully spent in the nearest tavern. The episode, in itself of minimal importance, caused Vettori to think about the countless modes, arts, industries, and wiles that men, first and foremost among them the religious, employ to deceive their fellow men. Alongside the corrupt prelates and the charlatans were those heralding new religions meant to restore the authenticity and simplicity of the evangelical message and to dissolve the wicked religion that popes and priests have established through deception and force. In Mirandola, for instance, he heard the story of Piero Bernardino who “was proselytizing a certain new religion,” and for that reason was burnt at the stake. Vettori talks about the things of the world and religion in a cold and detached manner. He notes, all the same, as he walks toward Germany, that the message of Christ is quite another matter from the corruption of the clergy and casuistry of theologians: The theologians are the first in our religion who have made and continue to make many books, many disputations, many syllogisms, many subtleties, and not only all the libraries are filled with them, but also the booksellers’ shops. Nonetheless, our Savior Jesus Christ says in the Gospels: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” In these two precepts we find all the laws of the prophets. What need have we, then, of so many disputations over the Incarnation, the Holy Trinity, the Resurrection, the Eucharist? These are things that we Christians must believe by our faith, and by believing become worthy, and reasons need not be added.
Francesco Vettori, “Sommario della istoria d’Italia,” in Scritti storici e politici, p. 157. Vettori, “Viaggio in Alamagna,” in Scritti storici e politici, p. 32. Ibid., pp. 20–21. Concerning Piero Bernardo (or Bernardino), see the entry by Giampaolo Tognetti, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 1967 vol. 9, pp. 310–11. See also Ottavia Niccoli, Profeti e popolo nell’Italia del Rinascimento, Laterza, Rome-Bari 1987. Vettori, “Viaggio in Alamagna,” in Scritti storici e politici, pp. 40–41.
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The reform of the church had also been the topic of discussion, admittedly with objectives that were anything but noble, of the prelates who met in Pisa to take part in the Gallican Council held at the behest of the king of France in opposition to Pope Julius II, at the grave peril of the city of Florence. In the session of 7 November 1511, which Machiavelli may have attended (he had been sent to Pisa by the Signoria), the abbot Zaccaria Ferreri read a passage from the Gospel of John, all about the “reform of the Church,” and concluded that “all the most reverend cardinals and prelates should first reform themselves before attempting to reform the church.” A text that puts us into the direct presence of how Machiavelli’s Florence was experiencing the hope of a religious and moral reformation is the Dialogo della mutatione di Firenze, which Bartolomeo Cerretani, a proMedici moderate, wrote around 1520. The protagonists of the dialogue, Lorenzo and Girolamo, both fervent followers of Savonarola, set off on a journey to Germany to meet “Martino Luter,” and they explained to Giovanni Rucellai, whom they chanced to meet near Modena, the reasons for their pilgrimage: “To you, as our brother, our desire need not remain secret: we are going to Germany, attracted by the fame of a Venerable Religious there whom they call Brother Martino Luter, whose writings have been published in Italy and especially in Rome, as I know you are aware, and which suggest that this man must be in his way of life, his doctrine, and his religion very admirable, and it strikes us that his conclusions are quite proper and in keeping with the opinions and way of life of the early church militant.” On hearing these words from the wayfarers, Rucellai responded: “Ah, then, you are victims of the same superstition as you were before with Fra’ Girolamo from Ferrara.” In the mentality of the Florentine pilgrims, Martin Luther overlapped with their memory of the monk who had been burnt at the stake twenty years earlier, and became the prophet of a renovatio that some yearned for, others feared, and still others mocked. “Don’t you have in Rome,” asks Girolamo,“a great fear of this renewal of the church out of love for your temporal possessions?” Even if “everyone is calling for a renovatio,” Giovanni Rucellai responded, “and your nuns and peasants and friars and other two-bit prophets talk about it all the time these days, everyone laughs at it in Rome, and you are living on dreams.”
Niccolò Machiavelli, “Lettere, legazioni e commissarie,” in Opere, vol. II, pp. 1370–71. Bartolomeo Cerretani, Dialogo della mutatione di Firenze, edited by Raul Mordenti, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome 1990, pp. 18–19. Ibid., pp. 4–5. See in this connection the excellent study by Paolo Simoncelli, “Preludi e primi echi di Lutero a Firenze,” Storia e politica 22 (1983), pp. 674–744, in particular pp. 699–702.
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All those who were calling for religious reform were in favor of a regeneration of the body of the church through a return to the authentic beginnings of the Christian religion. Savonarola, to cite the most significant example, preached the need to renew and rebuild the church with poverty, simplicity, unity, and peace.” His renovatio had above all a moral and spiritual significance, based on a rediscovery of justice, a return to the beginnings of the apostolic life, and the republican and communitarian political values that Florence preserved by divine will: “Thus the church of Christ, which was founded by His apostles in poverty and simplicity and unity and peace, and you see today how it could be said to be destroyed, as the temple of Jerusalem was. And yet God chose to renew and rebuild it, and He wants Florence also to be renewed, whence comes the renewal of many other places.” To draw back the church or a city toward its beginnings means correcting the distortions in such a way that the work will be consistent with the purpose for which it was founded. In order to revive a people that has become dead through sin requires not only natural wisdom, but also the aid of God, the gift of prophecy, and the warmth of charity. Pico della Mirandola, who listened to Savonarola’s sermons in fascination, summarized the meaning of the aspiration to renovatio when he wrote that man can “descend to the lower, brutish forms of life” or regenerate himself in accordance with his will in the higher things “whose life is divine.” How and why the church needed to regenerate itself was explained during those same years by the Venetian reformer Gasparo Contarini (1483–1542) in a report on Savonarola written in 1516. In the conclusion of that text, Contarini explicitly states that reform is needed to keep the church alive and explains that reform can only take place as a return to the beginnings: “This renovation of the church I do not know through prophecy, rather natural and divine reason dictates it to me. Natural reason because human affairs do not follow an infinite straight line but follow a circular line; although they do not all follow a perfect circle and when they attain a certain point of growth, then they decline.”
Savonarola, “Prediche sopra Aggeo,” in Prediche sopra Aggeo con il Trattato circa el reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, p. 239. See in this connection the observations by Vasoli, Civitas mundi, pp. 8 and 51–52. Savonarola, “Prediche sopra Aggeo,” in Prediche sopra Aggeo con il Trattato circa el reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, p. 243. Ibid., p. 205. Pico della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate, pp. 106–7. See Felix Gilbert, “Contarini on Savonarola: An Unknown Document of 1516,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 59 (1968), pp. 145–50. Ibid., p. 149; see Gilbert, “Cristianesimo, Umanesimo e la bolla ‘Apostolici Regiminis’ del 1513,” Rivista Storica Italiana 79 (1967), pp. 976–90.
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Machiavelli shared with the culture of his time the ideal of the renovatio. In the last pages of The Art of War, which he wrote in order to restore to life the ancient orders and the ancient Italian military virtue, he expresses his belief that Italy “seems born to raise up dead things, as she has in poetry, in painting, and in sculpture.” In the Canto degli spiriti beati (The Blessed Spirits) he harks back to the myth of the return of the golden age and the revival of ancient virtue with words similar to those of Petrarch: Oh, throw away all fear, All enmity and hate. All greed and pride and cruelty away! And in your hearts once more Let love of true and noble virtue rise, And bring the world back to that ancient day. This is the only way To open up a path to paradise Where flame of valor never dies. As did Petrarch, Machiavelli saw Cola di Rienzo as the creator of a rebirth, however fleeting, of ancient virtue. In the Florentine Histories, he writes that “at this time a memorable thing happened in Rome: one Niccolò di Lorenzo, chancellor at the Capitol, drove out the Roman senators and made himself, with the title of tribune, head of the Roman republic, which he restored in its ancient form with such a reputation for justice and virtue that not only the towns nearby but all Italy sent ambassadors to him. So the old provinces, seeing how Rome had been reborn, lifted their heads; and some being moved by fear and some by hope, they honored him.” Machiavelli harshly criticizes the corruption of the church with words similar to those used by so many others before him. He accuses the church of Rome of having divided Italy and of keeping Italy divided, of having brought about the death of “all devotion and all religion,” and of instilling in the minds of the Italians the especially malign wickedness of those who are without religion: “Thus we Italians have this first obligation to the church and to the priests that we have become without religion and wicked.” Because they have no fear of God, nor the sense of modesty
Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra [The Art of War], in Opere, vol. I, p. 689. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 726. Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, pp. 405–6. English translation: Tusiani, Lust and Liberty, p. 8. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, I, 31, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. II, p. 328. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 43. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 12. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 140.
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that arises from true religion, the Italians are convinced that they can always escape, in one way or another, their just punishment, and that they can be wicked without consequences. Fra Timoteo, a model in The Mandrake of a friar who has only the appearance of a religious, makes the reader and the audience laugh, and is after all a jovial soul. The bad moral education that the Christian religion diffuses, however, deserved a serious condemnation. “Our religion,” writes Machiavelli, “has glorified humble and contemplative more than active men. . . . It has then placed the highest good in humility, abjectness, and contempt of things human,” and if “our religion asks that you have strength in yourself, it wishes you to be capable more of suffering than of doing something strong.” The religious tradition, therefore, bears a heavy burden of responsibility for having suffocated in modern men the love of republican liberty, of having rendered “the world weak” and “given it in prey to criminal men, who can manage it securely, seeing that the collectivity of men, so as to go to paradise, think more of enduring their beatings than of avenging them.” Machiavelli contrasted with Christian education, as an example to be emulated instead, the pagan education that taught the young to esteem the honor of the world and to place in it “the highest good,” which beatified only men who were “full of worldly glory, as were captains of armies and princes of republics,” which celebrated “greatness of spirit,” strength of body, and “all other things capable of making men very strong.” Many conscientious critics and writers therefore judged him to be a pagan. They failed to notice that Machiavelli also found in modern Christian peoples examples of a religion that instills good moral and political customs. Like others before him, Machiavelli looked to Germany, where he had traveled in 1508, passing, in part, through the same hamlets and cities that Vettori mentions in his Viaggio in Alamagna. Of the religiosity of the Germans, and the good customs that derive therefrom, Machiavelli wrote in Discourses on Livy to emphasize that in the “province of Germany” there was
Ibid., II, 2. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses on Livy, p. 131. Ibid. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses on Livy, p. 131. Savonarola had praised humility and charity in his Trattato dell’umiltà written in 1492: “The virtues of humility and charity form the two extremities of the spiritual edifice; because humility is the foundation of the fabric, and charity the perfection and consummation of the whole”; in Pasquale Villari, Storia di Girolamo Savonarola e de’ suoi tempi, 2 vols., new ed., Le Monnier, Florence 1887–88, vol. I, p. 116. Life and times of Girolamo Savonarola, translation by Linda Villari, Haskell, 1989, p. 111. See, above all, Isaiah Berlin, The Originality of Machiavelli, in Studies on Machiavelli, edited by Myron P. Gilmore, Sansoni, Florence 1970, pp. 168–70, 172–74, and 198. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses on Livy, p. 131.
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still a great “goodness” and a “religion” that were very similar to that of the Romans. Thanks to that goodness of customs, and that good religion, those peoples lived securely and in freedom. The contrast between Italy and Germany was quite distinct: on the one side was irreligion and wickedness, on the other was religion and goodness. This, however, is not a contrast between Christianity and paganism, but rather between two ways of being Christians. Machiavelli finds in the Christian religion those moral and political principles that he admires and which he yearns to see reborn in the modern world. It is not that the principles of Christianity are wicked, rather it is that the interpretation that the church has given of those principles is wicked: “And although the world appears to be made effeminate and heaven disarmed, it arises without doubt more from the cowardice of the men who have interpreted our religion according to idleness and not according to virtue.” What is needed, then, is to return to the principles of the Christian religion, not to abandon it in order to revive paganism, nor to invent a new religion out of whole cloth, as other republican political theorists would attempt to do after him. “If such religion had been maintained by the princes of the Christian republic as was ordered by its giver,” he writes in Discourses on Livy, “the Christian states and republics would be more united, much happier than they are.” Neither a pagan nor the creator of a new religion, Machiavelli sought and found in the religious tradition a God who teaches us to love the fatherland and liberty and identified that God as the principle for a moral and religious reform. A religious reform would have to be in his view a genuine renovatio, that is, a return to the original principles, betrayed by bad interpreters and offended by corrupt followers. “If one wishes a sect or a republic to live long, it is necessary to draw it back often toward its beginning,” he wrote in the first chapter of the third book of Discourses on Livy. And he explained that those changes “that lead them back toward their beginnings” are beneficial to republics and religions because “all the beginnings of sects, republics, and kingdoms must have some goodness in them, by means of which they may regain their first reputation and their first increase.” As examples of a religious renewal implemented through a return to the beginnings, Machiavelli cites Saint Francis and Saint Dominic: those
Machiavelli, Discorsi, II, 2. English translation: Discourses on Livy, pp. 131–32. Ibid., I, 12. English translation: Discourses on Livy, p. 37. During the years in which Machiavelli was writing the Discourses on Livy there were circulating, within the Roman church, ideas of reform based not on the idea of looking back to the original principles, but rather to looking upward, to the ideal of the celestial church. See O’Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome, pp. 201–3.
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two saints, “with poverty and with the example of the life of Christ,” caused to bloom again in “the minds of men” the Christian religion that “had already been eliminated there.” He adds, however, that the reform undertaken by Saint Francis and by Saint Dominic ultimately left the corruption of the clergy without any restraint. This happened not because they preached and practiced a return to the principles of Christ, but because they taught in their sermons that “it is evil to say evil of evil,” that it is good to obey the prelates, and that when they are in the wrong, one should “leave them for God to punish,” with the consequence that “they do the worst they can because they do not fear the punishment that they do not see and do not believe.” Whatever the negative effects of the “renewal” of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic, the fact remains that if the two preachers had not “drawn it back toward its beginning,” the Christian religion would have died. The idea of renovatio that Machiavelli defends and sets forth as a religious and political ideal is the same as that found in the Christian tradition: it is a return to the true form. In the case of Christianity it was a return to poverty and charity, which are the true path of Christ, just as for Machiavelli the true path was that of virtue. He had no interest in issues of dogma. This is the difference between his idea of moral and religious reform and the idea put forth by the proponents of the Protestant Reformation. He knew about Luther and the Lutherans, but that Reformation was different from his approach to reform. He was not interested in
Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 209–12. In his letter dated 5 August 1526, Vettori mentions the “Lutherans” without feeling any need to provide his friend with further explanations, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, p. 601. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 395. See also Simoncelli, “Preludi e primi echi di Lutero a Firenze,” pp. 674–744; and Silvana Seidel Menchi, “Le traduzioni italiane di Lutero nella prima metà del Cinquecento,” Rinascimento XVII (1977), pp. 31–108. Corrado Vivanti sees a reference to the Reformation in the passage of the Florentine Histories (I, 9) where Machiavelli writes: “And you will see how the popes—first through censures, then by censures and arms together, mixed with indulgences—were terrible and awesome; and how, for having used them both badly, they have lost the one altogether and as regards the other remain at the discretion of others.” English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 20; Introduction to Opere, vol. III, pp. xl–xli. Machiavelli was familiar, at least in part, with the debates over the reformation of the church because he had attended, as an envoy sent by the Ten, the Gallican Council that was held in Pisa from 2 to 9 November 1511; see Opere, vol. II, p. 1371. With reference to Machiavelli’s mission to the Pisan Council, Delio Cantimori wrote: “For that matter, Machiavelli’s compatriots and superiors considered him to be competent as well in religious and ecclesiastical matters.” When the Florentine commissioners in Pisa had to report back on the progress of the council, they explicitly stated that as far as matters were concerned that they had failed to understand or that they had overlooked, they freely recommended making recourse “to the wisdom of Nicolò [sic] Machiavelli, who was also present, and who is more knowledgeable in these matters than we are”; Delio Cantimori, “Machiavelli: il politico e lo storico,” in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, edited
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indulgences, predestination, divine grace, free will, or the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. He wanted a God who would help the men of his own time, and those of times still to come, to rediscover their love of liberty and the inner strength demanded by a free way of life. He was not seeking a new theology, but a new way of living in the world. For that reason, he spoke of a God capable of entering into the hearts of men and of giving them the strength to overcome moral corruption. Bad religion has rendered the Italians wicked, keen to do evil and to deceive, as well as to oppress others without shame. Only a good religion can change them, even if the disease is so serious and so far advanced that there is little real hope of a cure. A religion that has been renewed in keeping with the ancient virtues was needed for all modern peoples in order to recover that old love of freedom that among the ancient peoples had brought about the foundation, and had kept alive, many free republics. Without becoming either a prophet or a promoter of a religious reform, Machiavelli worked with the power of words to bring about the birth of a new religious and moral custom. by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, Garzanti, Milan 1966, vol. 4, Il Cinquecento, pp. 13–14. See also Augustin Renaudet, Le Concile gallican de Pise-Milan. Documents florentins (1510– 1512), Bibliothèque de l’Institut Français de Florence, Paris 1922. See Giuseppe De Luca, Letteratura di pietà a Venezia dal ‘300 al ‘600, edited by Vittore Branca, Olschki, Florence 1963, p. 46. See the writings of Antonio Corsano, Umanesimo e religione in G.B. Vico, Laterza, Bari 1935, pp. 152–53.
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CHAPTER TWO
THE POWER OF WORDS
1. Rhetoric and Civil Religion In Machiavelli’s Florence, the power of words pervaded both political and religious life. With public orations magistrates educated the populace to love the republic; preachers taught the love of Christ with their sermons. Both magistrates and preachers were well aware that words were capable of educating the people to a love of liberty and justice, encouraging faith, stirring them to devotion, and most of all, that words could impress in the hearts of men and women a love of virtue and a hatred of vice. In terms of the themes they treated, the arguments that they used, and the authorities that they cited, civil and religious eloquence frequently overlapped, and together they made of Florence a city in which rhetoric was the queen of the arts. In the opinion of Coluccio Salutati, who was a statesman and a political writer, mastery of eloquence was an essential aspect of the duties of a citizen. Political experience had taught him that the persuasive power of words is essential to the preservation of civil life and especially to the reformation of moral life. What could be more important, he writes, than to control the passions, move those who listen to you as and where you wish, See in this connection Daniel R. Lesnick, “Civic Preaching in the Early Renaissance: Giovanni Dominici’s Florentine Sermons,” in Christianity and the Renaissance. Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, edited by Timothy Verdon and John Henderson, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY 1990, pp. 208–25; Ronald F.E. Weissman, “Sacred Eloquence. Humanist Preaching and Lay Piety in Renaissance Florence,: ibid., pp. 250–71. See also Emilio Santini, Firenze e i suoi ‘oratori’ nel Quattrocento, Sandron, Milan-Palermo 1922, pp. 65–69 and 163–67; James Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance, University of California Press, Berkeley 1974. Coluccio Salutati, De nobilitate legum et medicinae, edited by Eugenio Garin, Vallecchi, Florence 1947, p. 4. See also Eugenio Garin, “I cancellieri umanisti della Repubblica Fiorentina da Coluccio Salutati a Bartolomeo Scala,” in Garin, La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano, Sansoni, Florence 1961, pp. 3–18.
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and then return them, with courtesy and kindness, to the position from which you first took them? It is useful to know how to adorn and embellish one’s writings, but it is much more important to manage to bend the souls of those who listen to you. By means of eloquence we can help our fellow citizens and moderate the most pernicious passions. Rhetoric must be considered the queen of the arts and the sciences, but it should never be split off from reason, because eloquence without wisdom has always brought only serious harm to mankind. Salutati saw no contrast between eloquence and Christian truth. Indeed, eloquence should be placed in the service of the wisdom that Christ revealed to us. Man depends on God for all his excellent works, and eloquence is no exception. If used properly, it can bring Christian truth into the souls of men and reinforce civil virtue. Leonardo Bruni too believed that eloquence was necessary in order to foster the religion of the fatherland. On the most important occasions in the life of the republic, such as, for instance, funerals of citizens who gave their lives for the fatherland, eloquence adds the ornamentation of words to the solemnity of the ceremony. With its splendor, eloquence illuminates the virtues and the works of the dead person, highlights the religious nature of the love of the fatherland, and moves the spirits of the audience to understand that the fatherland is sacred (“patria sua cuique sanctissima”) and that those who have given their lives for its liberty and its safety will receive eternal rewards in the heavens. The true model that a citizen must follow in order to be capable of fulfilling properly his duties is that of Cicero, who was able to combine eloquence and wisdom, and who added to Roman power eloquence, the “mistress of human affairs.” For those reasons, Bruni concludes, it was proper and fitting to call him both the father of the fatherland and the father of our [Italian] language and literature. Eloquence not only aids the religion of the fatherland, but also the Christian religion. In his De studiis et litteris, written between 1422 and 1429 for Battista Malatesta, the wife of the lord of Pesaro, Galeazzo Malatesta, Bruni Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, 4 vols., edited by Francesco Novati, Istituto Storico Italiano, Rome 1891–1911, vol. I, pp. 176–87. For the public letters that Salutati wrote as the Chancellor of the Florentine Republic, see Peter Herde, “Politik und Rhetorik in Florenz am Vorabend der Renaissance,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 47 (1965), pp. 141–220. Epistolario, vol. I, pp. 179–80. Ibid., vol. III, p. 506. Ibid., vol. III, p. 424 and vol. II, p. 164. Ibid., vol. I, p. 300. Ibid., vol. III, p. 602 and vol. IV, p. 138. Leonardo Bruni, Oratio in funere Iohannis Strozze, in Opere letterarie e politiche, edited by Paolo Viti, Utet, Turin 1996, pp. 746–49. Leonardo Bruni, Vita Ciceronis, in Opere letterarie e politiche, pp. 468–69.
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explains that “the Christian woman” should meditate on Holy Scripture with the assistance of eloquent authors, such as Augustine, who “offers us a learned text worthy of being heard,” and Lactantius, “undoubtedly the most eloquent of all Christians.” The author who felt more than any others that religion was fostered by eloquence was, in any case, Lorenzo Valla, who from his earliest youth devoted himself to the study of oratory, guided by the conviction that if an orator is, as he ought to be, “a good man skilled in the art of speaking” (“vir bonus dicendi peritus”), then the study of oratory brings great help to men and is pleasing to God. Valla theorized a rhetorical theology based on modesty, a great understanding of divine matters, integrity in the way of life, and gravity of character. These are the qualities of the Ciceronian orator, adapted to the Christian orator. But the Christian orator, in contrast to the orator of antiquity, must also possess a sincere faith and lead a Christian life. Just as an orator cannot move his listeners to wrath or pity if he does not himself feel wrath and pity, likewise a religious orator cannot instill a love for divine matters in the minds of others if he himself does not feel that love within. By means of the power of words, a Christian orator can lead men toward God in a true and easy manner. Men cannot see heavenly bliss, they can only imagine it, and they can accept faith in imitation of those who already live in accordance with that faith. The only art that is able to stimulate men’s imagination and move them to act through imitation is eloquence. It is, therefore, Valla concludes, the best ally of religion. Religion, he writes in the Of Elegancies, makes use of persuasion, not demonstration, and persuasion is far more powerful than demonstration. Even the Fathers of the Church and the Apostles were outstanding in their eloquence. Many of them were skilled at ably setting the jewels of the divine word in gold and silver, without putting aside theology in favor of eloquence. Monks and friars, too, though Valla rails at them for their pretense at superiority to other men merely because they have taken holy
Leonardo Bruni, De studiis et litteris, in Opere letterarie e politiche, pp. 253 and 261. Girolamo Mancini, “Alcune lettere di Lorenzo Valla,” Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana 21 (1893), p. 30. See also Armando Verde et al., Immagine e parola: retorica filologica–retorica predicatoria (Valla e Savonarola), Centro riviste della provincia romana, Pistoia 1988. Lorenzo Valla, Scritti filosofici e religiosi, edited by Giorgio Radetti, Sansoni, Florence 1953, pp. 165–66. “Religio auten Christiana non probatione nititur, sed persuasione, quae praestantior est quam probatione”: Lorenzo Valla, In quartum librum elegantiarum praefatio, in Opera omnia, edited by Luigi Firpo, Bottega d’Erasmo, Turin 1962, vol. II, pp. 119–20. Lorenzo Valla, Elegantiae linguae latinae, V, 30, in Opera omnia, vol. II, p. 172.
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orders, ought to speak “more in the style of orators than that of philosophers,” if they truly wish to correct men and lead them away from sin, free them from false beliefs, and guide them toward piety and true knowledge and understanding. Those who do not know how to use the persuasive power of words, Valla states, are “unworthy of speaking about theology.” The true pillars of the church have been men of eloquence, and foremost among them, Saint Paul. Thus blame should be laid not on those who are masters of eloquence but those who lack skills in that field. Both civil eloquence and poetic and religious eloquence are worthy of unconditional praise. The former can be compared to the song of a swallow that lives on city rooftops; the latter is like the song of the nightingale that lives in trees and in the woods. Although they have different aims and use different means of expression, one marvelously completes the other. It is from these considerations that Valla derived his outspoken subordination of philosophy to rhetoric. Philosophy, he writes, is like a soldier or a tribune serving under the command of rhetoric. Orators have explored and treated moral questions with far greater clarity, profundity, and magnificence than have the obscure, tawdry, anemic philosophers. More important, they treated them in the midst of mainstream civil life, long before philosophers debated them in their nooks and crannies. The orator, Valla assures us, and not the philosopher, is humanity’s guide, a true civil man, a true scholar, and a true politician. In response to those who criticized him for exhorting readers to explore books dipped in the poison of eloquence, Valla shot back that “the books of the ancients are all so eloquent when they teach wisdom, they possess the utmost eloquence, and that when they teach eloquence, they possess the utmost wisdom.” It is therefore necessary to condemn them all or absolve them all, without exception. If an orator is vir bonus, the art that he teaches— “how to find and how to arrange the bones and the sinews of the discourse, and how to adorn it, that is, how to apply flesh and color to it and, finally, teaches you to commit it to memory and how to deliver it elegantly” —cannot be harmful in any manner. Indeed, it is the only art Lorenzo Valla, De professione religiosorum, in Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, edited by Eugenio Garin, Ricciardi, Milan-Naples 1952, pp. 591–93. Lorenzo Valla, De falso et vero bono, in Scritti filosofici e religiosi, pp. 247–48. Ibid., pp. 30–31. “plus esse oratorem quam philosophum. Vere civilis i.e. vere sapiens; hoc est politicus: nam civilis scientia idem quod sapientia”; in Salvatore I. Camporeale, O. P., “Da Lorenzo Valla a Tommaso Moro. Lo statuto umanistico della teologia in Umanesimo e teologia,” Memorie Domenicane N.S. IV (1973), p. 25. Valla establishes the modus rhetoricus as the foundation of the scientific study of the sacred doctrine. Valla, Scritti filosofici e religiosi, pp. 40 and 167.
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that is able to instill and foster a religious sentiment and a civil awareness in a people. Eloquence flourishes in a free city and languishes under tyranny. When Florence was free, writes Alamanno Rinuccini (1426–99), a figure of prime importance from the period of Florentine civic humanism, freedom of speech was the rule in assemblies, and with that freedom the eloquence of the citizens flourished. Since the city has been subjugated, silence reigns; and if from time to time the voice of the usher rings out giving the floor to someone who has requested it, “everyone understands that it is an empty sound, since no one dares give their true views and speak openly, because of fear.” In the years of Machiavelli’s youth, the learned men summoned to teach in the Studio Fiorentino (the nucleus of what would later be the University of Florence) explained to their young students who were preparing for public life that a good citizen, in order to perform his duties well, should cultivate with all his will and determination the art of eloquence. Angelo Ambrogini, also known as Politian (Poliziano), for instance, began his course in 1480 with an introduction that is a fervent exaltation of the importance of eloquence as the necessary foundation of civil life: What could be finer than to succeed in outshining other men precisely in that quality whereby men outshine the other animals? What could be more marvelous, when speaking before great multitudes, than to intrude to such a degree into the souls and minds of men as to propel and draw their will as you like, so as to render their sentiments either gentler or more violent, and ultimately to master the wills and the emotions of one and all? What could be more admirable than to be able to embellish and exalt with one’s words men who excel in their virtues and their admirable actions, and in contrast to defeat and discourage the evil and harmful, heaping shame and crushing their foul deeds? What could be more useful and productive than to be able to persuade with one’s words all one’s fellow citizens, dear to one’s heart, in all the matters that you consider crucial to the state, and guiding them at the same time away from pointless and evil purposes? What could be more necessary than always to have ready the armor and the sword of eloquence with which to protect oneself, attack one’s adversaries, and defend one’s innocence, besieged by evil men? What could be more magnanimous and in keeping with a well-educated soul than to be able to console the Alamanno Rinuccini, Dialogus de libertate, edited by Francesco Adorno, Atti e memorie dell’Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere ‘La Colombaria’ 22 (1957), p. 283.
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unfortunate, succor the afflicted, aid the supplicants, and procure and maintain friendship and patronage? The natural venue for eloquence was political life. Citizens summoned to deliver political orations attempted with the power of their words to infuse a civil faith based on the love of the fatherland and of liberty. There are some very significant documents on the use of eloquence to infuse and keep alive a civil faith in the orations delivered in the presence of the Signori when the new gonfalonier of justice took his office. The orations, described as protestatio de iustitia, gave a religious significance to the political principles of justice and liberty, and with that end in mind, the orators would quote from both the Bible and the Fathers of the Church as often as from the Greek and Latin masters. Bono Boni, for instance, in the oration delivered in 1461, emphasized that living in accordance with justice is “complying with God” and that Christ himself recommended cultivating justice in order to ensure that our earthly home does not collapse as a result of disunity and discord. Anyone who respects and promotes justice becomes godlike, and after death a place in heaven is set aside for him where he can enjoy eternal beatitude, Boni explains, referring to the theme of the Somnium Scipionis, which was so popular in Florentine humanism. Donato Acciaiuoli (1429–78), who was gonfalonier of justice in 1474, emphasizes that justice is a divine virtue that God “sent to earth into our hands and the hands of others who rule and govern.” Because of this divine origin it is so magnificent that if we could see it with our own eyes, it “would fill all our senses and ignite in our souls an ardent love and desire toward its beauty and dignity.” Similarly, Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459) speaks of justice as a divine virtue, inasmuch as it imitates the work of God, who punishes evil with mercy and rewards through grace. The cities that practice justice tend to prosper, and God Himself in the Bible commands us to love justice and
Angelo Poliziano, Oratio super Fabio Quintiliano et Statii Sylvis, in Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, p. 883. See also the texts by Pico della Mirandola and Ermolao Barbaro collected by Francesco Bausi in Filosofia e eloquenza, Liguori, Naples 1998, in particular, pp. 52–53. Girolamo Savonarola, Prediche sopra l’Esodo, edited by Pier Giorgio Ricci, Belardetti, Rome 1966, Sermon XII, p. 3. Emilio Santini, “La protestatio de iustitia nella Firenze medicea del sec. XV,” Rinascimento 10 (1959), pp. 41–42. Ibid., pp. 77–79. Ibid., p. 79. “Protesto facto da Donato di Neri di Messer Donato Acciaiuoli G[onfalonie]re di compagnia al dì 15 maggio 1469,” ibid., p. 50.
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to honor those who defend it. Bernardo Canigiani (1443–97), who was a close friend of Marsilio Ficino, admonishes those who govern a city and those who administer justice, urging them to “make a profession of standing watch, so that others may sleep, to work hard, so that others may rest, and to put themselves at risk, so that others may live in safety,” and he exhorts them to emulate the Good Shepherd of the Gospels who “ponit animam pro ovibus suis” (“giveth his life for the sheep,” John 10:11). In order to urge his readers to consider public honors as a form of service, he quotes from Saint Paul, who “showed by his own example that it is the duty of the superior to administer to the inferior [the] washing of the feet, with the apostles.” Finally, he points out that “immortal rewards are reserved to those whose soul is received pure and immaculate by God.” When the Florentine Republic began to develop into a de facto principality under the rule of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the orators accentuated the religious content of the civil faith. Evidence of this can be seen in the oration that Filippo Pandolfini delivered in 1475, entirely built around the idea that man “was commanded by the almighty God only to perform justice in this present life.” Pandolfini develops the theme of justice as a religious principle based on the premise that God created the universe out of love for man and created man so that he could love God. The “thing created” must consequently perform the will of his creator, because anyone who “truly does not know God and does not love God, lives contrary to nature and goes against the statute and divine law, and therefore manifestly we see that man was created solely in order that he might live with religion and justice.” Just as Plato taught, too, it is only by means of justice that man can become godlike and continue to live even after death. Justice also ignites in the souls of men “an ardent and vast love of the fatherland,” which makes him think “of the common good of the rep[ublic]” and gives men the necessary wisdom to establish good orders and good laws, as well as the strength to defend the common liberty. Even the charity of the fatherland, which demands that one govern with justice, is a religious principle: “This is the thing that above all others pleases the omnipotent God, who commands us to do no other thing, and exhorts no other thing from us save that we administer justice.” For those reasons we must necessarily conclude, Pandolfini emphasizes, that “God created us to perform justice.” “Protesto fatto per M. Giannozzo Manetti et recitato da altri alla excelsa Signoria et a Rectori in palazzo confortandogli amministrare giustizia,” ibid., pp. 58–59. “Protesto fatto per Bernardo di Simone Canigiani e da llui recitato nel Palagio de’ Signori di Firenze et Rectori e a tutti e Magistrati intorno all’osservanza della iustitia,” ibid., pp. 62–64. “Protesto fatto per Ser Filippo Pandolfini, exhortatio de iustitia, a rectori et a tutti i magistrati die iulii 1475 die sabbati,” ibid., pp. 69–73.
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Alamanno Rinuccini, in the oration delivered on 15 July 1493, describes justice as a “celestial and divine virtue” that descends from the Creator to all creatures, not only in the perceptible world but also in the “intelligible, angelic, and spiritual” world. Justice is one of the attributes of God. For that reason, when men acknowledge “Madonna Justice,” and submit the perceptible, brutal, and inferior powers to the superior, intellectual, and rational powers, governing their works with “just imperium,” they conform with the will of God. Justice, Rinuccini emphasizes, is the virtue that, more than any other, is necessary to “human living and especially political and civil life.” Those who are just become similar to the highest monarch God, “who not only governs the universe with the greatest justice” but also rewards the just with great generosity. Justice is the inspiration of the great legislators who gave their peoples blessed laws for the common good; for justice the martyrs of the Christian faith sacrificed themselves, and it was thanks to them that fatherlands preserved themselves in freedom and became great and powerful. From justice is born “peace and delight,” the two goods that are especially acceptable to God and Christ, who reward those who behave in accordance with justice with final and eternal happiness. Justice permits men to step beyond their mortal condition and makes creatures “similar to the creator,” capable of “boundless love.” Thanks to the “holy piety” and the “singular justice” that makes us think of the “common good,” celebrated men from history were able to found great undertakings. Justice is also invoked in the Council of the Eighty (Consiglio degli Ottanta), and often the orators place special emphasis upon its religious significance. To respect justice, Bernardo di Carlo da Diacceto stated, for instance, on 28 November 1499, is the true way of respecting God: “He encouraged at some length the Signoria to exert all diligence in ensuring that justice is observed, saying that where justice is observed, there God is, and where God is, there is every good and every thing, and where justice is lacking, there can be no good at all.” In the same case, Cappone Capponi, in order to encourage the Signoria to ensure that magistrates practice proper justice, quotes from the Psalms (84:11): “Pax et iustitia oscula sunt” (“For the LORD God is a sun and shield: the LORD will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly”), while Giovanni Buondelmonti quotes from the Epistle to the Hebrews 1:9: “Dilexisti iustitiam et odisti iniquitatem / propterea unxit te “Oratio seu protestatio a Francisco Rinuccino Philippi filio edita et per eundem publice recitata in palatio publico . . . anno MCCCCLXXXXIII et die XV mensis iulii,” in Alamanno Rinuccini, Lettere ed orazioni, edited by Vito R. Giustiniani, Olschki, Florence 1953, pp. 200–3. Ibid., p. 204.
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Deus Deus tuus oleo exultationis prae participibus tuis” (“Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated iniquity; therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows”). Aside from diplomatic affairs, the natural venue for political eloquence was in the public councils. When they were summoned to deliberate on political decisions, the citizens of Florence employed their eloquence to persuade, admonish, exhort, evoke dangers, and stir hope. In the speeches that they made, even in the most concrete ones, those furthest from the magniloquent style, they did their best to bring to life the principles of the republican political ethic. A genuine commonplace was the exhortation to virtue as the necessary foundation for political freedom and the true path to glory. Another recurring topos, or theme, which also emphasized the religious nature of the republican ethos, was the idea that God was a friend to republics, like Florence, that defended justice, even if they were thus obliged to battle against the temporal power of the pope. A truly illuminating example of this is the speech that Gonfalonier Pier Soderini (1452–1522) delivered before the Consiglio Maggiore (Major Council) in favor of gaining approval of a law that required the clergy of Florence to pay a large sum of money for use in the defense of the city from the impending arrival of the troops of the Holy League under the command of Pope Julius II. Aside from being a response to the need to find resources to pay for the defense of the city, the law was also a response to the interdiction that the pope had imposed against Florence, for having allowed the inauguration of the Council of Pisa in November 1511—a council that the king of France had instigated in opposition to the papacy. The interdiction forbade the city’s clergy to celebrate Mass, to administer certain sacraments, to perform religious burial services for the dead, and gave anyone the right to avail themselves of the goods of Florentine merchants wherever they might be. It was a powerful weapon, and it exerted pressure on both the souls and the material possessions of the Florentines. In order to win approval of the law, Pier Soderini appealed not only to the supreme necessity of defense, but also to divine law, maintaining that the safety of the fatherland was a religious obligation, even if the enemy was the church: Nor let the Fear of offending the divine Majesty restrain you; for the Danger is great and evident, and such are our Wants and Necessities . . . that we are permitted to assist ourselves not only with that
Consulte e pratiche della Repubblica Fiorentina. 1498–1505, edited by Denis Fachard, Preface by Gennaro Sasso, Droz, Geneva 1993, vol. 1, pp. 260–61. See in this connection Santini, Firenze e i suoi “oratori,” pp. 105–6.
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Part of the Revenues which is not converted to pious Uses, but it would even be lawful for us to lay our Hands on things consecrated; because Self-Defence is allowed to all Men by the Law of Nature, and approved by Almighty God, and the Consent of all Nations; had its Beginning and will end with the World, and can suffer no Derogation by Civil or Canon Laws, which are founded on the Will of Men, and being written on Paper cannot invalidate a Law, not made by Men, but written, engraved and infixed in the Breasts and Minds of all human Generations. The true way of being Christians and acting in a way that is acceptable to God, Soderini insisted, is to defend the liberty of the city: “It is the common Opinion of all Sages that God is highly pleased with the Liberties of Cities, because by them the common Good is more consulted than under any other Form of Government, Justice is administered with greater Impartiality, the Minds of the Citizens are more incited to virtuous and honourable Actions, and more Respect and Reverence are paid to Religion. And can you believe that the Almighty will be displeased at your defending a Thing so precious as Liberty, for which whoever spends his Blood meets with the highest Praises, by employing a small Part of your temporal Profits and Revenues for that Purpose?” There is no “service more pleasing and acceptable in the Sight of God Almighty,” Soderini concludes, that a citizen can perform than to help the fatherland. Another equally important aspect of the Florentine civil religion was the belief that the republic owed its birth and preservation to God, and therefore had an obligation to respect God and those who convey His message, even at the risk of great perils. This theme emerges with particular power in the dramatic session (or pratica, which was an advisory council summoned by the Signoria to discuss matters of particular importance; the leading citizens were invited to attend) of 14 March 1498, convened to debate how to respond to the papal brief ordering the city to prevent Savonarola from preaching. While some orators held that the city had to obey the papal orders for fear of an ecclesiastic interdiction and because he is the “High Pontiff, vicar of God, lord of the Christians [who] has jurisdiction over the whole world,” others exhorted their listeners to “preserve the liberty of this city of ours, which has given so much to recover it” and emphasized that “it did not strike them that it was honorable for a city
Francesco Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia [The History of Italy], X, 6, in Opere di Francesco Guicciardini, edited by Emanuella Lugnani Scarano, Utet, Turin 1981, vol. II, p. 967. English translation: Austin Parke Goddard, Esq., The History of Italy, Z. Stuart, London 1763, pp. 305–6. Ibid., p. 968. English translation: Goddard, The History of Italy, pp. 307, 308.
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to insist, against a servant of God, such as Fra’ Girolamo, that he should abstain from preaching,” while others still pointed out that to prevent Savonarola from preaching would be tantamount to a sin of ingratitude, would offend God, and thus draw down on the city ills far worse than an interdiction. The civil religion that lived on in the minds of the Florentines taught them to seek comfort in God in order to decide wisely and to act courageously and firmly in times of danger; likewise Baldassarre Carducci exhorted the Council of Eighty (Consiglio degli Ottanta) on 17 June 1512, when the demise of the republic was clearly imminent, “to turn to God with prayer, oration, and charity that he should give us the grace to take all the advice and decisions that are beneficial to the city.” The appeal to God as a guide to good decisions when the liberty of the city is in danger recurs as well in the speech that Pier Soderini delivered before the Great Council (Consiglio Grande), summoned to make a decision concerning the ultimatum of the Holy League that was demanding that Florence allow the return of the Medici. Soderini exhorted the Great Council to reject the ultimatum and to invoke the aid of God to guide the hearts and minds of the citizens. The Great Council (Consiglio Grande), Soderini emphasized, is the “the prince of this city.” The life of the republic depended on its decisions. The citizens need the aid of God in order to understand the decision that will lead to the salvation of the republic and in order to avoid the decision that will lead to its ruin: “Examine how much the Demand of the Viceroy concerns your Liberty, and may God give you Grace to illuminate your Understanding, and cause you to make Choice of the better Part.”
2. Machiavelli, Orator From this cultural context, Machiavelli drew, and put into practice, the belief that the civil religion lived on the power of words. Like his compatriots, he knew that without a religion that teaches the people to love liberty, and without the eloquence that touches the souls of the citizens, a free republic cannot live, no matter how well ordered its political institutions. He also knew that the Christian religion, in contrast with the pagan religion, “which was founded on the responses of the oracles and on the
Consulte e pratiche della Repubblica Fiorentina. 1498–1505, pp. 45–49. Ibid., p. 304. Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia [The History of Italy], XI, 3. English translation: Goddard, The History of Italy, p. 41. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses on Livy, p. 37.
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sect of the diviners and augurs,” lived on the power of words. He had seen Savonarola persuading the Florentines, even though they were in no way “coarse men,” to accept his religious and political ideas. He acknowledged that Saint Francis and Saint Dominic were able to persuade people with their preachings and with “the example of the life of Christ.” He also saw, however, the hypocrisy and fraud that lurked beneath prophetic and apocalyptic preaching. When he received rumors of preachers of that sort, he pretended with his friends that he had been terrorized by the dark predictions, in order to ridicule the seers and those who believed in their visions. The letter to Vettori dated 19 December 1513 is an exemplary document: In this city of ours—a magnet for all the world’s pitchmen—there is a friar of Saint Francis who is half hermit and who, to increase his standing as a preacher, professes to be a prophet; and yesterday morning in Santa Croce, where he preaches, he said “many things great and wonderful”: that before much time elapses, so that whoever is ninety years of age will be able to see it, there will be an unjust pope created against a just pope, and he will have false prophets with him, he will create cardinals, and he will divide the Church. Item, that the king of France was to be crushed and someone from the House of Aragon was to be master of Italy. Our city would go up in flames and be sacked, the churches would be abandoned and would crumble, the priests dispersed, and we would have to do without divine services for three years. There would be pestilence and widespread famine. . . . These activities demoralized me so much yesterday that I was supposed to go this morning to see La Riccia, but I did not go; I am not at all sure whether, had I been supposed to go see Riccio, I would have been concerned. I myself did not hear the sermon, for I do not observe such practices, but I have heard it told about in this manner throughout all of Florence. Even Savonarola’s sermons were, in his view, filled with hypocrisy and often inspired by tactical political concerns. In a letter to the antiSavonarola Ricciardo Becchi dated 9 March 1498, Machiavelli emphasizes that “in my judgment, [Savonarola] acts in accordance with the times and colors his lies accordingly.” More than twenty years had passed since he wrote that letter, and Machiavelli, this time from Carpi, recalled the monk Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi, III, 1. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 211. Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori, 19 December 1513, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, p. 431 English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 267.
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again as a “wily” man, agile and quick to shift position and attitude according to what a specific situation demanded: such a quality was positive for Machiavelli in a politician, less so in a religious. And yet, in the same letter, Machiavelli showed that he was well aware of how much good preachers might do if they truly imitated Saint Francis: They would like a preacher who would teach them the way to paradise, and I should like to find one who would teach them the way to go to the Devil. Furthermore, they would like their man to be prudent, honest, and genuine, and I should like to find one who would be madder than Ponzo, wilier than Fra Girolamo, and more hypocritical than Frate Alberto, because I think it would be a fine thing—something worthy of the goodness of these times—should everything we have experienced in many friars be experienced in one of them. For I believe that the following would be the true way to go to Paradise: learn the way to Hell in order to steer clear of it. Moreover, since I am aware how much belief there is in an evil man who hides under the cloak of religion, I can readily conjure up how much belief there would be in a good man who walks in truth, and not in pretense, tramping through the muddy footprints of Saint Francis. Machiavelli was aware that the word, similar in this aspect to amorous passion, entrances, binds up, and chains. Savonarola, he wrote in the First Decennale, held the Florentines “bound to his prophetic word.” He was equally aware that persuasion was able to arouse and renew religious faith but was not sufficient on its own to found states and govern peoples. The reason, as he explains in The Prince, is that “the nature of peoples is variable; and it is easy to persuade them of something, but difficult to keep them in that persuasion. And thus things must be ordered in such a mode that when they no longer believe, one can make them believe by force.” For this reason, Savonarola, even though he knew how to keep the Florentines “bound to his prophetic word,” “was ruined in his new orders as soon as the multitude began not to believe in them, and he had no mode for holding firm those who had believed nor for making unbelievers believe.” Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus, who were able to use, alongside the Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Guicciardini, 17 May 1521, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, p. 520. See in this connection the essay by Mario Martelli, Machiavelli e Savonarola, in Savonarola. Democrazia Tirannide Profezia, edited by Gian Carlo Garfagnini, Edizioni del Galluzzo, Florence 1998, in particular pp. 81–82. Letter to Francesco Guicciardini from Carpi, 17 May 1521, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, p. 520. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 337. Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori, 3 August 1514, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, p. 328. English translation: Tusiani, Lust and Liberty, p. 157.
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power of words, the force of arms, on the other hand, succeeded in holding their peoples in their persuasion, and therefore to “observe their constitutions for long.” These passages, so frequently cited, by no means indicate that Machiavelli considered persuasion to be of little importance in political action. He knew the limitations of persuasion, but he was also convinced that the power of words was indispensable for the founding, preservation, and renewal of states. Unarmed prophets come to ruin; but arms alone are not sufficient to educate and emancipate a people. The very birth of cities was in many cases the work of men who knew how to use the power of words. When men lived dispersed “in many small parts,” Machiavelli explains, they were “moved either by themselves or by someone among them of greater authority” to band together to defend themselves. Those who succeeded in moving them to live together possessed authority, that is to say, power, but also knew how to move them with the power of words. To an even greater degree the founders of new political orderings were skilled at using the power of words. The power of words is more effective with “coarse” men than with civil peoples; but even civil men can be persuaded to accept “a new order or opinion,” especially if the founders are able to persuade them that the new orders will bring advantages. If the “evident reasons” of the goodness of the new orders were not sufficient to persuade the people to accept the new orderings, the founders will need to pretend that they have been inspired by God. In either case, the foundation of new political orderings requires the persuasive power of words. Machiavelli criticized with blistering words those princes who believed that they could preserve their states with superficial and external eloquence alone:
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, VI. English translation: Mansfield, The Prince, p. 24. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 1, in Opere vol. I, p. 199. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses on Livy, p. 7. Plutarch, Machiavelli’s likely source, writes: “Now, after the death of his father Aegeus, forming in his mind a great and wonderful design, he gathered together all the inhabitants of Attica into one town, and made them one people of one city, whereas before they lived dispersed, and were not easy to assemble upon any affair for the common interest. Nay, differences and even wars often occurred between them, which he by his persuasions appeased, going from township to township, and from tribe to tribe. And those of a more private and mean condition readily embracing such good advice, to those of greater power he promised a commonwealth without monarchy, a democracy, or people’s government, in which he should only be continued as their commander in war and the protector of their laws, all things else being equally distributed among them;—and by this means brought a part of them over to his proposal. The rest, fearing his power, which was already grown very formidable, and knowing his courage and resolution, chose rather to be persuaded than forced into a compliance”; Plutarch, Vite parallele, edited by Carlo Carena, Einaudi, Turin 1958, vol. I, pp. 19–20. English translation by John Dryden can be found at http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/theseus.html. Discorsi, I, 11. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 35–36.
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“The common belief of our Italian princes, before they felt the blows of Transalpine war” —he writes in The Art of War— was that a prince needed only to think of a sharp reply in his study, to write a fine letter, to show quickness and cleverness in quotable sayings and replies, to know how to spin a fraud, to be adorned with gems and with gold, to sleep and eat with greater splendor than others, to be surrounded with wanton pleasures, to deal with subjects avariciously and proudly, to decay in laziness, to give positions in the army by favor, to despise anybody who showed them any praiseworthy course, and to expect their words to be taken as the responses of oracles. It did not enter the minds of these wretches that they were preparing themselves to be the prey of whoever attacked them. All the same, he exhorts the prince to make use of eloquence for the purpose of simulating. A prince, he admonishes, should seem “merciful, faithful, humane, honest, and religious” and in order to succeed in this, he must be a master in the art of using words: “A prince should thus take great care that nothing escape his mouth that is not full of the abovementioned five qualities and that, to see him and hear him, he should appear all mercy, all faith, all honesty, all humanity, all religion.” Even more than a prince must, those who lead armies should be capable of using the power of words. A good commander, Machiavelli explains, must know how to speak to the whole army: “To persuade or dissuade a few about a thing is very easy, because, if words are not enough, you can use authority and force; but the difficulty is to remove from a multitude a belief that is unfavorable and contrary either to the common good or to your belief, when you can use only words proper to be heard by all, since you are trying to persuade them all. Therefore an excellent general is usually an orator because, unless he knows how to speak to the whole army, he will have difficulty in doing anything good; but anything of the sort is in these times of ours completely obsolete.” Only words can instill in the soul of soldiers the conviction and passions necessary for them to be good fighters: “This speaking lightens fear, sets courage afire, increases determination, uncovers deceptions, promises, rewards, shows perils and the way to escape them, reproaches, begs,
Niccolò Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra [The Art of War], in Opere, edited by Corrado Vivanti, Einaudi–Gallimard, Turin 1997, vol. I, p. 688. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 724. Machiavelli, Il Principe [The Prince], XVIII. English translation: Mansfield, The Prince, p. 70. Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra [The Art of War], in Opere, vol. I, p. 625. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 661.
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threatens, fills with hope, praises, berates and does everything through which human passions are extinguished or excited.” A prince or a republic that wishes to establish a new militia and give luster to the military art must accustom “its soldiers to hearing their generals speak, and must accustom its generals to speak skillfully.” Like the political writers of humanism, Machiavelli considered eloquence to be the very soul of civil life, especially in free republics. He praised liberty of speech in the assembly as an order that was well suited to a republic of good citizens. Before Rome became corrupt, he writes, “A tribune, or any other citizen whatever, could propose a law to the people, on which every citizen was able to speak, either in favor or against, before it was decided. This was a good order when the citizens were good, because it was always good that each one who intended a good for the public could propose it; and it is good that each can speak his opinion on it so that the people can then choose the best after each one has been heard.” In contrast he deplored, as a bad custom typical of corrupt republics, the degeneration of the freedom of speech for all into the freedom of speech only for the powerful. He knew very well that eloquence has the power to conceal and mask evil intentions. In order to describe this aspect of rhetoric, Machiavelli used the terms adonostare or colorare, that is, to give evil intent the appearance of honesty and present it in a positive light. In classical rhetoric, to “color” or to “justify” were terms that indicated an orator’s skill at presenting facts or propositions in a favorable way. Machiavelli cites examples of skill in “coloring,” taken both from international politics and domestic politics. The Venetians, he writes in Florentine Histories, knew that they could not start a war against Florence without at least attempting to justify their actions with some pretense of justice. In order to “color” their plan, they said that Florence had gravely damaged them and had made friendship Ibid., in Opere, vol. I, p. 626. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 661. Cicero in a passage of De oratore has Crassus say that eloquence reigns among all free peoples (“in omni libero populo”): Cicero, De oratore, I, 8, 30–34. “But when the citizens have become bad, such an order becomes the worst, for only the powerful propose laws, not for the common freedom but for their own power; and for fear of them nobody can speak against them. So the people came to be either deceived or forced to decide its own ruin”; Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 18. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses on Livy, pp. 50–51. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, XI, I, 85. “unless war were justified under some color”: Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, VI, 25. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 258; “without having, not a just, but even a colorable cause”; Ibid., VI, 26. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 260.
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between the two republics impossible. Among the examples drawn from the political life of Florence there was the oration of certain citizens who exhorted the Signori to institute a reform of the orderings of the city to end factional strife. The chiefs and promoters of the factions that are destroying the republic, the orator stated, “give decent appearance to their intention and their end with a pious word,” and although they are all enemies of freedom, “they oppress it under color of defending the state either of the best or of the people.” Another example is that of Corso Donati, an enemy of the popular government, who “thought he would make the indecency of his intent appear decent with a decent cause,” and in this manner succeeded in persuading many citizens that he was acting out of love of the fatherland. Machiavelli was not afraid of eloquence. He believed that the citizens of a free republic were perfectly capable of deciding the truth, even in an assembly in which eloquent men faced off: “As to judging things, if a people hears two orators who incline to different sides, when they are of equal virtue, very few times does one see it not take up the better opinion, and not persuaded of the truth that it hears.” When the people deceive themselves, eloquence can return it to the right path: “The desires of free peoples are rarely pernicious to freedom because they arise either from being oppressed or from suspicion that they may be oppressed. If these opinions are false, there is for them the remedy of assemblies, where some good man gets up who in orating demonstrates to them how they deceive themselves; and though peoples, as Tully (or Cicero) says, are ignorant, they are capable of truth and easily yield when the truth is told them by a man worthy of faith.” The eloquence of “a good man,” as a true orator must be, can lead back “to the good way” even a “licentious and tumultuous” people. When words are inadequate, then weapons decide. In the face of a wicked prince, words are of no use, “nor is there any remedy other than steel.” The social conflicts in Florence, which had not been settled by “disputation,” were decided through the use of violence. Machiavelli wrote to educate. He composed The Prince in order to bring back to life with his words a redeemer similar to Moses capable of arousing “obstinate faith,” and “piety,” and to revive the “ancient valor” in the
Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, VI, 25. Ibid., III, 5. Ibid., II, 21. English translation: Bandfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 110. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 58. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 118. Ibid., I, 4. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 17. Ibid., I, 58. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 118–19. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine [Florentine Histories], III, 1. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 125.
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hearts of the Italians. He set down on paper Discourses on Livy in order to persuade his readers to change their way of life, and in order to shape “the spirits” of youths to encourage them to eschew their own times, filled with “every extreme misery, infamy, and reproach” and to emulate the times of antiquity, so filled with virtue and religion. In The Art of War he wished to encourage his contemporaries and posterity to “bring back” the militia into its ancient orders and to rediscover the age-old virtue. He laments the fact that he himself was unable to undertake the work of redemption and, as in Discourses on Livy, hopes that others, in a new age, might be enabled to implement his teaching. He believes that Italy “seems made to revive the dead things of the past” and hopes to inspire the same faith in those who read his pages, so that they will be freed from their fear and timidity in the face of great enterprises. All his greatest works, then, were designed to shape souls, to teach, to revive forgotten ways of life, and to bring back dead ideas and principles. Like the humanist political writers, he knows that education is above all persuasion. For that reason he wrote all his political and historical works in accordance with the rules of classical rhetoric. He knew how to use the power of words in a masterly fashion because he was a writer by nature and possessed a true civil passion, and because he had studied the art of rhetoric from his earliest education. In the home where Machiavelli grew up, the canonical texts of classical rhetoric were found. “I here record,” writes Bernardo Machiavelli, Niccolò’s father, “that today, 16 December, I returned to Matteo the stationer the Rhetorica ad Herennium by Tully [Cicero] that he lent me several days back, and also I returned to Zanobi the stationer Tully’s De Oratore that he lent me several days ago.” While it is highly unlikely that a Florentine from the late fifteenth century could write about politics in a nonrhetorical manner, that the secretary of the second chancellery could do so was entirely impossible. Among Machiavelli’s responsibilities was the writing of letters and the composition of political orations. In both the former and latter occupations, he would be expected to demonstrate to a discerning audience that he knew every detail of the art of rhetoric, which is not even to mention the expectation that he would be a skillful practitioner of eloquence on his diplomatic missions. The instructions that the Signoria gave him often contained ex Bernardo Machiavelli, Libro di ricordi, edited by Cesare Olschki, Le Monnier, Florence 1954, p. 123. See Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Europe, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 1986; Il pensiero pedagogico dell’Umanesimo, edited by Eugenio Garin, Sansoni, Florence 1958; Armando Verde, Machiavelli studente, in “Memorie domenicane,” IV (1973), pp. 404–8.
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hortations to find words and rhetorical devices that would be effective in persuading rulers and princes. The assignment for the legation to Caterina Sforza, dated 12 July 1499, for instance, contains these instructions: “Upon these several points you will enlarge in the most effective language and in the best terms that may suggest themselves to you; so as to convince Her Excellency of our sincere desire for an opportunity to benefit her, and to acknowledge the services which she has rendered to our republic, as also of our entire confidence in her. At the same time, you will point out the necessity of the union of our states, employing the most acceptable language in your endeavor to persuade her to that effect.” When he met Caterina Sforza in Forlì, a few months after being appointed secretary of the second chancellery, Machiavelli was skillful at minimizing Florence’s responsibilities in the eyes of the Contessa (“And that if the refusal to accept her services now seemed contrary to these assurances, . . . the reason of it was the impossibility of providing the means, because of the heavy charges to which our republic was already subjected”) and emphasize on the other hand the willingness to help her (“I pointed out to her Ladyship that it had never been your intention to refuse to do anything that might be agreeable to her”). The instructions of the Signoria, dated 18 July 1500, for the legation in France even contained explicit recommendations to use properly the rhetorical devices of amplificatio and extenuatio, two techniques of redescription treated extensively by the Roman theorists of eloquence. The extenuatio is used when we wish to attenuate our responsibilities concerning matters or events that could prove damaging, while the amplificatio is used to amplify our merits or the value of the cause that we are defending. “It will, furthermore, be proper for you to speak of the capture of our commissioner,” the letter states, “of the persons guilty of this outrage, and of the manner in which it was done, and of the outrages and insults we have had to bear, even from the lowest private soldier. You must make a summary of all these matters, which will go to prove that we have been treated Niccolò Machiavelli, Lettere, legazioni e commissarie, in Opere, vol. II, pp. 470–71. English translation: Detmar, The historical, political, and diplomatic writings, http://oll.libertyfund.org. Ibid., pp. 474–75. English translation: Detmar, The historical, political, and diplomatic writings, http://oll.libertyfund.org. Rhetorica ad Herennium advises that, when we wish to highlight someone’s defects, we should speak “cum amplificatione et enumeratione peccatorum”, but if we wish to defend ourselves, we should narrate matters so as to attenuate all suspicions: Rhetorica ad Herennium, II, XVII, 26. Cicero in De oratore advises “ut boni quod habeat id amplectar, exornem, exaggerem, ibi commorere, ibi habitem, ibi haeream”, De oratore, II, LXXII, 292. See also Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, IV, I, 27: “ita quod laedit aut omnino repellere aut certe minuere ex causa”. The greatest value of eloquence consists in Cicero’s view in the ability to use the amplificatio and the extenuatio; see De oratore, III, XXVI, 104.
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by them more like enemies than friends, amplifying or extenuating these matters as will best serve our cause.” The fact that they wrote in this manner meant that the Signori were well aware that Machiavelli was familiar with rhetoric and was capable of using it with prudence. And indeed, when Machiavelli and Francesco della Casa succeeded in obtaining an audience with the king of France and his courtiers, they vastly overstated, as the Signori of Florence had recommended, the guilt of the French army in the failure of the Pisa operation: “We began by submitting that inasmuch as the enterprise against Pisa and the siege of the city had, to our great prejudice and the great discredit of his Majesty’s army, an entirely different issue from his other most fortunate and successful enterprises, . . . and more particularly all that related to the departure from camp of the Gascons, the outrages of the Swiss, and the carrying off of our commissioner, and to the constant parleying of the French commander with the enemy.” And they cunningly understated the shortcomings of the Florentines: “We said that your Lordships had never failed to furnish the most abundant supply of provisions, and that there never had been any deficiency, but that they had been wantonly wasted, and that those who had brought them into camp had been overwhelmed with all sorts of insults and bad treatment.” A full-fledged synthesis of rhetorical instructions is contained in the commission that Marcello Virgilio Adriani, secretary of the first chancellery and teacher of eloquence, wrote to Machiavelli to explain how he should address Giampagolo Baglioni, tyrant of Perugia. His speech should have a preamble that would put Baglioni in a well-disposed state, and a proper arrangement of the arguments, in accordance with the classical technique of the dispositio. Then it would have as its central theme the harm that can be caused to a prince by gaining the reputation of being an ingrate, it will be measured in its amplifications and extenuations so as to move the interlocutor to reveal his inner thoughts. Adriani wrote, “You will shape your remarks to him in such wise manner as to make it appear that this is the only object of your mission”; you must then “stir [Baglioni] up in some way,” explaining to him the blame that will fall on him for the “the ingratitude that may be imputed to him for all the benefits he has received Opere, vol. II, p. 512. English translation: Detmar, The historical, political, and diplomatic writings, http://oll.libertyfund.org. Concerning his diplomatic experience, see Eugenio Dupré-Theseider, Niccolò Machiavelli diplomatico, Marzorati, Como 1945. Ibid., pp. 523–24. English translation: Online Library of Liberty, The historical, political, and diplomatic writings http://oll.libertyfund.org. Concerning Marcello Virgilio Adriani see Peter Godman, From Poliziano to Machiavelli: Florentine Humanism in the High Renaissance, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1998.
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in the past, and his want of faith as a soldier, the two essential and fundamental points that men look to”; finally, “you must endeavor to remove the apprehensions which he pretends to have” and “you must try to bring him to the point of revealing to you the real motive for his determination.” The account that Machiavelli sent back to Florence 11 April 1505 showed once again that he was capable of deploying the tools of rhetoric in a masterful manner, even though he was unable, as had been easy to foresee, to dissuade Baglioni from his decisions. “I said to him,” wrote Machiavelli, “that those who learned of his reputation for ingratitude and faithlessness would regard him as a stumbling horse which nobody would ride for fear of getting his neck broken; that matters of this kind were not to be judged by learned doctors, but by gentlemen [Baglioni had adduced in his own defense the opinions of Perugian jurists]; and that whoever attached any value to wearing armor, and desired to win honor by his arms, could lose nothing that was prized so much as the reputation for good faith, and that it seemed to me that in this case he staked his very lightly. And as he persisted in saying that he could justify his conduct, I answered that men ought to do everything in their power never to be obliged to justify themselves, for justification presupposes error or the suspicion of error. . . . And thus I pricked him right and left, speaking to him as a friend, and as though merely coming from me; and although I noticed several times that he changed countenance, yet he gave no indication that could make me hope he would change his determination.
3. Creator of Myths Machiavelli continued to reflect, even many years later, on the characters that he had met and known and, based on their stories, he developed fullfledged political myths. He wrote about Caterina Sforza in Discourses on Livy, narrating and commenting on an episode that was at the time quite notorious. “Some Forlí conspirators,” wrote Machiavelli, killed Count Girolamo, their lord, and took his wife and his children, who were small. Since it appeared to them that they could not live secure if they did not become masters of the fortress, and the castellan was not willing to give it to them, Madonna Caterina (so Opere, vol. II, pp. 947–51. English translation: Detmar, The historical, political, and diplomatic writings, http://oll.libertyfund.org.
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the countess was called) promised the conspirators that if they let her enter it, she would deliver it to them and they might keep her children with them as hostages. Under this faith they let her enter it. As soon as she was inside, she reproved them from the walls for the death of her husband and threatened them with every kind of revenge. And to show that she did not care for her children, she showed them her genital parts, saying that she still had the mode for making more of them. In reference to the passage from Discourses on Livy that I quoted, which gave origin to the “leggenda della rocca,” or “legend of the fortress,” I believe that we can safely rule out the possibility that when Machiavelli wrote those lines he did so merely to offer an example of female nobility and strength of character to set up against male ferocity. If that had been his chief intent, he would certainly have found in the sources that were available to him more eloquent subjects than the story of Caterina. He might well, for example, had cited the story of Epicharis from Tacitus’s Annales. While the organizers of the conspiracy hesitated in uncertainty, writes Tacitus, “a certain Epicharis (how she informed herself is uncertain, as she had never before had a thought of anything noble) began to stir and upbraid the conspirators. Wearied at last of their long delay, she endeavoured, when staying in Campania, to shake the loyalty of the officers of the fleet at Misenum, and to entangle them in a guilty complicity.” This “freedwoman,” who had not previously distinguished herself with honorable deeds, when betrayed by Volusius Proculus, gave an example of strength and dignity that Tacitus describes with great eloquence: Nero, meanwhile, remembering that Epicharis was in custody on the information of Volusius Proculus, and assuming that a woman’s frame must be unequal to the agony, ordered her to be torn on the rack. But neither the scourge nor fire, nor the fury of the men as they increased the torture that they might not be a woman’s scorn, overcame her positive denial of the charge. Thus the first day’s inquiry was futile. On the morrow, as she was being dragged back on a chair to the same torments (for with her limbs all dislocated she could not stand), she tied a band, which she had stript off her bosom, in a sort of noose to the arched back of the chair, put her neck in it, and then straining with the whole weight of her body, wrung out of her frame its little remaining breath. All the nobler was the example set by a Machiavelli, Discorsi, III, 6. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 231–232.
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freedwoman at such a crisis in screening strangers and those whom she hardly knew, when freeborn men, Roman knights, and senators, yet unscathed by torture, betrayed, every one, his dearest kinsfolk. Despite her magnificence, Machiavelli placed no emphasis on the figure of Epicharis, which Tacitus had offered to him, as it were, on a silver platter. He wrote merely that “in the Pisonian conspiracy there was a woman called Epicharis, who in the past had been the mistress of Nero. Judging that it would be to the purpose to put among the conspirators a captain of some triremes whom Nero kept as his guard, she communicated to him the conspiracy but not the conspirators. Hence, when that captain broke his faith and accused her to Nero, so much was Epicharis’s audacity in denying it that Nero, left confused, did not condemn her.” Instead, he places a great deal of emphasis on Caterina’s act, and even adds a few details of his own to the accounts that were already circulating during the time of his legation to Forlì. The historical record and legend present us with two different images of Caterina. The record describes Caterina as a loving mother who might, out of maternal charity, compromise the interests of the state and who was therefore left out of the negotiations with the conspirators by the castellan; the legend depicts her as a woman who did not hesitate, in order to preserve her own power, to risk the lives of her children and even to consider them as replaceable by others to which she might give birth. Precisely because Machiavelli had met Caterina in person, he should have put more stock in history than in legend. During his mission to Forlì, he had seen with his own eyes Caterina neglecting affairs of state because she was “indisposed and in bad spirits over the great illness that befell Lodovico, her and Giovanni de’ Medici’s son.” He preferred however to accept, and hand down to posterity, the account of Caterina smothering her own love for her offspring, knowing full well that it was a legend. Why did he prefer legend over history? And why did he select from among all the various versions of the story the most theatrical one? According to the chroniclers of Forlì, the popular story had two variants: in Tacitus, Annals, XV, 57, 1–2. English translation: Tacitus, Annals, Book XV, translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, http://classics.mit.edu/Tacitus/annals .11.xv.html. That the “leggenda della rocca” (legend of the fortress) was in fact a legend is clearly stated to begin with by Desiderio Pasolini Dall’Onda, the leading biographer of Caterina Sforza. The historians of Forlì who witnessed the conspiracy wrote that the castellan, fearing that the mother, “softened by love and pity might decide to hand over the Fortress,” negotiated directly with the conspirators. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 226; See Pier Desiderio Pasolini, Caterina Sforza, ELA, Rome 1968, vol. I, pp. 234–35. Opere, vol. II, p. 486. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 232.
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one, it is said that Caterina answered in manly fashion to the conspirators that they should do what they wanted, because she was perfectly capable of having new children; in the other variant, “hiking up her skirts, she showed them that she had the equipment to make new babies.” The narrative in Discourses on Livy clearly draws on the second variant and, indeed, accentuates its expressive power: he does not merely say that Caterina raised her skirts and showed them the equipment, but writes that “she showed them her genital parts,” a detail that is not found in the other common versions. In Niccolò’s account, the gesture with which Caterina challenged the conspirators became a direct one: she did not simply raise her skirts; she displays her genitalia to the male conspirators so that they can see her power of engendering new life. The image of Caterina standing behind the battlements of the fortress and hiking up her skirts was itself sufficiently vivid to satisfy Machiavelli’s purpose. Indeed, in the context of the reasoning that he was putting forth, even the milder version of the episode would have been sufficient. Machiavelli is interested in explaining that it is highly dangerous, after killing a prince in a conspiracy, to leave the children, the brothers, or any other close relatives alive who may hope to take revenge. In order to present this argument he might perfectly well have limited himself to narrating the story in the chaster tones that he employed just a few years later in the Florentine Histories, where he limited himself to writing that “as soon as [Caterina] was inside, she threatened them with death and every kind of punishment in revenge of her husband; and when they threatened to kill her children, she said that she had with her the mode of producing more of them.” It may be that when he tells the story in Discourses on Livy of the episode of the fortress, Machiavelli had classical sources in mind and wished to imagine Caterina as one of those great women of antiquity described by his historians. One of Machiavelli’s sources might very well have been Tacitus, who in his Histories recounts the heroism of a Ligurian woman in the face of the ferocious soldiers of Otho: In the field indeed they had secured no plunder; their rustic adversaries were poor, and their arms worthless; nor could they be taken prisoners, for they were swift of foot, and knew the country well. But the rapacity of the troops glutted itself in the ruin of an innocent population. The horror of these acts was aggravated by a noble display of fortitude in a Ligurian woman; she had concealed her son, Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine [Florentine Histories], VIII, 34. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, , p. 359.
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and when the soldiers, who believed that some money had been hidden with him, questioned her with torture as to where she was hiding him, she pointed to her bosom, and replied, “It is here that he is concealed”; nor could any subsequent threats or even death itself make her falter in this courageous and noble answer. It is all the same more likely that Machiavelli had in mind a passage from Plutarch’s Moralia concerning the courage of the Persian women. The Persian women, Plutarch recounts, “ran out to meet them before the city, plucking up their petticoats to their middle, saying, Ye vilest varlets among men, whither so fast? Ye surely cannot find a refuge in these parts, from whence ye came forth.” Mortified by what they saw and by the words they heard, the Persian men regained their courage and turned back to face the enemy that was chasing them. Both Tacitus’s narrative and that of Plutarch are nonetheless different from Machiavelli’s. The Ligurian woman challenges the men, displaying her power to engender life, but she does so in order to protect her hidden son. Her act is a gesture of resistance in the face of male ferocity, which ultimately crushes her. The Persian women are not challenging their enemies; they are doing their best to make their men ashamed of their display of cowardice: in this case the generative power of the female sex is not opposed to savagery, but rather to immaturity. In his narrative of the episode concerning Caterina Sforza, her open display of her female sex organs strikes terror into the males present and reveals the cowardice concealed behind their savagery. By displaying their sex organs, the Persian women in Plutarch redeem their men from their cowardice; Caterina in Machiavelli’s account, on the other hand, uncovers the cowardice that accompanies male savagery. The Ligurian woman in Tacitus challenges male ferocity, but she loses; Caterina challenges male ferocity and she wins. Like Tacitus and Plutarch, Machiavelli also wishes to leave to posterity a eulogy of the virtue of women, but his narrative contains elements that are absent in the classical sources. Niccolò intended to build a narrative of the virtue of women. Caterina has greater courage and more “heart” than the males who threaten her and her sons. She acts as a true prince, but she does not transform herself into a male in order to be a prince. She affirms her virtue by displaying the generative power that is specific to her as a woman, and in this way she
Tacitus, Historiae, II, 13. English translation: Tacitus, Annals, Book XV, translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, http://classics.mit.edu/Tacitus/histories .2.ii.html. There existed a Latin translation of Plutarch’s text, by Alamanno Rinuccini, published in Venice in 1500 by the house of Bernardinus Venetus de Vitalibus, entitled De claris mulieribus.
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wins for herself that honor that was commonly perceived as a male quality par excellence. In the “leggenda della rocca,” Machiavelli in other words employs a rhetorical invention in the classical sense. He finds among the numerous narratives available to him elements that allow him to recount with unusual expressive power a story that reverses the commonplace of his time that identified virtue and honor as male qualities, and in this way he presents Caterina Sforza as a great example of princely virtue. The best-known example of Machiavelli’s skill at mythologizing the characters he met during his diplomatic missions is, in any case, his description of Cesare Borgia. In the dispatches that he sent back to the Signoria, Machiavelli placed an extraordinary emphasis on the figure of the duke. Instead of using indirect discourse, as he normally did to summarize diplomatic exchanges, he had him speak directly, in the first person, to ensure that the Ten of Liberty and Balia perceive the power of his words. In the letter dated 26 June 1502, for instance, he quotes these words of the duke directly: “I am determined to understand first of all with whom I am negotiating our agreement, and next I wish to have good assurances from you, and if that is done, you will always have me in agreement with your intentions; if not, I will be obliged to continue my undertaking and make sure I am safe from you, lest you present a danger to me. Because I am all too well aware that your city is not well disposed toward me, indeed, it has murderous impulses as far as I am concerned; and they have tried to raise very serious charges against me with the Pope and before the King of France.” After reporting that both he and Francesco Soderini denied and refuted the last portion of the duke’s statements and asked him to be more explicit in his views of Florence, he returned to the duke’s direct discourse in order to ensure that the government of the republic should clearly hear
Machiavelli presents Caterina Sforza as an example of virtue gleaming in contrast with the ferocity of the males as well in the Art of War [Arte della Guerra], which he completed a few years after the Discorsi. The reference to Caterina is inserted into the text as if by force, in the context of a purely military consideration on the utility of fortresses. After explaining the manner in which Cesare Borgia, with the army of the king of France, took possession in January 1500 of the fortress of Forlì, Machiavelli recounts: “So the badly planned fortress and the incapacity of its commander brought shame upon the Countess’ bold undertaking. She would have had the spirit to await an army, as neither the King of Naples nor the Duke of Milan had done. But though her efforts did not turn out well, nonetheless she carried off such esteem as her valor deserved. This was testified to by many epigrams made in her honor at the time”; Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra [The Art of War], in Opere vol. I, pp. 670–71. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 706. See in this connection the essay by Frédérique Verrier, “À propos d’un anàsurma machiavélien,” La Cultura 40 (2002), pp. 397–422. Concerning Caterina Sforza and Machiavelli see also Francesco Bausi, “Machiavelli e Caterina Sforza,” Archivio Storico Italiano 149 (1991), pp. 887–92; Julia L. Hairston, “Skirting the Issue: Machiavelli’s Caterina Sforza,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000), pp. 687–712.
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the terrible threat: “I am quite sure that you are wise and you can understand me, but I’ll state it again in simple words: I dislike this government and I cannot trust it; you must change it and you must give me reassurance that you are keeping your word to me; otherwise you will soon understand that I do not mean to live in this manner. And if you choose not to have me as a friend, you will see what it is like to have me as an enemy.” The Florentine envoys, in their response, defended the honor of the republic and tried to persuade the duke to set aside his threatening plans, availing themselves of the cliché of Florence as a city that always kept its pledges, even at the cost of burdensome consequences: “We answered that the city had the finest government that could be found, and if she was satisfied with it, her friends could be just as satisfied with it. And as for keeping our pledges, we did not think that there was anyone in Italy who could claim to have done better, nor any that had suffered for it as much as her; and that his Excellency should decide for once to be the good friend that he claimed to be and he would find a reliable ally.” They could not find more suitable words than these, but the duke “would not shift” from his position. Indeed, he replied, with even more derisive words: “And what did you think, in faith, that I intended to justify myself?” Machiavelli and Soderini appealed to his magnanimity, one of the virtues that treatises of rhetorical hail as proper to princes, and they insisted on Florence’s loyalty and interest: “We said to him that, given the greatness of his soul and considering your friendship and obedience toward him, we expected that he should begin to offer you some great benefit, as we knew was in his power, especially since the lord Vitellozzo was his man.” The duke replied that Florence had not deserved any benefits, to the contrary, it had forfeited any such claims. The last resource of which the two Florentine orators availed themselves was an appeal to justice: “What reason have we given you to have your generals and men to attack us?” In Machiavelli, Lettere, legazioni e commissarie, in Opere, vol. II, pp. 623–24. See in this connection Jean-Jacques Marchand, “L’évolution de la figure de César Borgia dans la pensée de Machiavel,” Revue Suisse d’Histoire 19 (1969), pp. 327–55. Ibid., p. 624. The locus classicus of Florentine political rhetoric concerning faithfulness and respecting one’s undertakings is the Laudatio florentinae urbis by Leonardo Bruni: “Joined to this beneficence and liberality is the admirable loyalty that this Republic has always preserved inviolate with an extraordinary constancy. It has always felt that before promising it is necessary to reflect thoroughly; but once it has made a promise it refuses to go back on its word. Having adhered to this principle from the very beginning and having judged that to do this is right, never for any sort of advantage has it been possible to induce it to break its pacts, agreements, treaties, oaths, and promises. In its judgement, nothing suits the dignity of a state more than to maintain firmness in all its words and all its deeds; nothing is less fitting than not to keep its promises”; Leonardo Bruni, Laudatio florentinae urbis, in Opere politiche e letterarie, edited by Paolo Viti, Utet, Turin 1996, pp. 619–21.
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response to this argument, the duke attributed all responsibility for the attacks on the Florentine possessions to Vitellozzo Vitelli, then reiterated that he wished to have Florence as either an enemy or a friend: “Decide which it is to be soon, because I cannot keep my army here [Urbino], since this is a mountain town, and it would be damaged thereby; there can be no half measures between me and you: you must either be friends to me, or enemies.” What emerges from Machiavelli’s account is a duke who is a master of the rhetorical art of “coloring” his actions and changing the names of things. He wished to deprive Florence of part of its dominion but he told the Florentine emissaries that “he did not think that he was taking anything from them”; he wished to make himself the master of a large state in central Italy, but he stated that his goal was not to “tyrannize,” but to “destroy tyrants.” Machiavelli, however, was also familiar with rhetoric, and he immediately realized that the duke was “coloring” reality in order to justify his actions, and immediately wrote to that effect to the Ten: The Duke did not accept those places for himself, nor will he make terms with them, but has referred them to Rome, saying that all he aimed at was to have them return to their obedience to the Church, and to suppress the factions in those places, and to deliver them from their tyrants. And to give more color to these professions, he has refused until now permission to the banished to return to Perugia. It seems even that he has promised to the deputies who came to him from Perugia that the banished shall not return there, telling them that his intention had not been to deliver them from one tyrant for the purpose of replacing him by ten others. Skillful in “coloring” and changing the names of things, the duke knew how to use silence and secrecy effectively. Machiavelli did not fail to note this aspect as well: “As I have mentioned to you before, the Duke is so secret in all he does that he never communicates his designs to any one. His first secretaries have repeatedly assured me that he never makes his plans until the moment of his giving orders for their execution, and he gives these orders only when forced by necessity, and on the spur of the moment, and never otherwise.” Machiavelli attempted with the most effective methods he knew to persuade the duke to talk, but he was unsuccessful. “Yet notwithstanding my efforts to get at his real thoughts, he always avoided the subject, so that I did not succeed in getting more from him than what I
Opere, vol. II, p. 624. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses. Ibid., p. 790. English translation: Detmar The historical, political, and diplomatic writings, http://oll.libertyfund.org.
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have written,” he wrote to Florence on 7–8 October; and again on 20 November: “More than this I could not by any further remarks of mine obtain from him.” In order to delve into the soul of the duke, he attempted to interpret the significance of his deeds, such as the spectacular execution of Ramirro de Orco. In his letter from Cesena dated 26 December 1502, he reported that “Messer Ramiro was found to-day cut into two pieces in the public square, and his body still remains there, so that the whole population has been able to see it. The cause of his death is not precisely known, other than that it was the pleasure of his Excellency thus to show that he has the power to make and unmake men at his will, and according to their merits.” With his actions and his words, the duke imparted to Machiavelli invaluable lessons in the art of statesmanship. He taught him that when necessity forces his hand, a prince can use any and all means to preserve his state, and that God will forgive him for his actions. He says it to him openly in Urbino: “He wished to be excused with God and men, if he used whatever means were at his disposal to assure himself of his state”; he repeated that idea to him a few months later at Assisi: “He should be sorry to be obliged to injure others, but he felt that he would be excused by God and by men, and even by the Siennese themselves, as being forced to it by necessity.” These words remained impressed in Machiavelli’s mind. Ten years later, when he was writing The Prince, he repeated them with reference to cruelties well employed, “that are done at a stroke, out of the necessity to secure oneself.” Those who act in this way, he writes, “can have some remedy for their state with God and with men.” This is what the true prince should be like: a master of the art of coloring and simulating with words, certain that he can rely on God’s pardon, and godlike in the grandeur of his soul and his certainty that he can overcome all obstacles: “For
Ibid., pp. 774 and 721. English translation: Detmar, The historical, political, and diplomatic writings, http://oll.libertyfund.org. Ibid., p. 774. English translation: Detmar, Online Library of Liberty, The historical, political, and diplomatic writings, http://oll.libertyfund.org. In The Prince Machiavelli interprets the execution of Ramiro as a gesture dictated by the need to placate the populace: “And because [the duke] knew that past rigors had generated some hatred for Ramiro, to purge the spirits of that people and to gain them entirely to himself, he wished to show that if any cruelty had been committed, this had not come from him but from the harsh nature of his minister. And having seized this opportunity, he had him placed one morning in the piazza at Cesena in two pieces, with a piece of wood and a bloody knife beside him. The ferocity of this spectacle left the people at once satisfied and stupefied”; The Prince, VII. English translation: Mansfield, The Prince, p. 30. Ibid., pp. 623 and 791. English translation: Detmar, The historical, political, and diplomatic writings, http://oll.libertyfund.org. Il Principe, VIII. English translation: Mansfield, The Prince, pp. 37–38.
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on the one hand there is the Duke with his unheard of good fortune, with a courage and confidence almost superhuman, and believing himself capable of accomplishing whatever he undertakes.” Machiavelli also showed that he was a skilled master of the rules of the ars dicendi (the art of speaking) in the orations that he composed during his years as secretary. One example of this is the oration entitled Words to Be Spoken on the Law for Appropriating Money, after Giving a Little Introduction and Excuse (Parole da dirle sopra la provisione del danaio, facto un poco di proemio et di scusa), which he wrote, probably for the lifetime gonfalonier Pier Soderini in March 1503, to be delivered before some assembly or special session, or in the presence of the Consiglio Maggiore (Major Council) or the Council of the Eighty. The specific purpose of the oration was to urge the approval of a new tax to ensure that Florence could defend herself from the attacks of her enemies and at the same time improve her reputation among her allies. In order to convey to the members of the Council the need to disburse money, Machiavelli set forth a general principle that, since it applied to the security of all states, applied to Florence as well: “All the cities that ever at any time have been ruled by an absolute prince, by aristocrats or by the people, as is this one, have had for their protection force combined with prudence, because the latter is not enough alone, and the first either does not produce things or, when they are produced, does not maintain them. Force and prudence, then, are the might of all the governments that ever have been or will be in the world. Hence any man who has considered change of kingdoms and the destruction of provinces and of cities has not seen them caused by anything other than failure in arms or in good sense.” Now that it had endowed itself with an institution that ensured
Machiavelli, Lettere, legazioni e commissarie, in Opere, vol. II, pp. 790–91. English translation: Detmar, The historical, political, and diplomatic writings, http://oll.libertyfund.org. In this text, written to be read by someone else, as Jean-Jacques Marchand has pointed out, “it would be erroneous to imagine that Machiavelli expresses ideas contrary to those of the government; indeed, we may conjecture that it was his job to put in an oratory and argumentative format the political ideas of the high officials close to the Gonfalonier, in order to obtain the broadest possible consensus among the representatives of the various currents or interests (optimates, commoners, Savonarolians, Mediceans, republicans, artisans, bankers, or major businessmen) within the councils. Nonetheless, the technique of argumentation, given the original aspects that we have emphasized [the dilemmatic structure], should be entirely attributed to Machiavelli”; in Niccolò Machiavelli, L’Arte della guerra. Scritti politici minori, Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, edited by Jean-Jacques Marchand, Denis Fachard, and Giorgio Masi, Salerno Editrice, Rome 2001, p. 401. See also, by Jean-Jacques Marchand, Niccolò Machiavelli: i primi scritti politici (1499–1512). Nascita di un pensiero e di uno stile, Antenore, Padua 1975. Niccolò Machiavelli, Parole da dirle sopra la provisione del denaio, facto un poco di proemio et di scusa [Words to Be Spoken on the Law for Appropriating Money, After Giving a Little Introduc-
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greater prudence in political decisions, by naming a gonfalonier for life, Florence should waste no time equipping itself with the military forces needed for self-defense. Having set forth the proposal, Machiavelli moved on, again in accordance with the rules of the art of rhetoric, to refute the belief of the citizens of Florence who were opposed to budgeting money and who adduced the argument that, in case of danger, the king of France would hasten to the city’s rescue. In order to move the Florentines away from this facile and deeply rooted opinion, Machiavelli availed himself of another general principle of political wisdom, soundly corroborated by the experience of history: “Every city, every state ought to consider as enemies all those who can hope to take possession of her territory and against whom she cannot defend herself. Never was princedom or republic wise that was willing to let her territory stand in the power of others or which, so letting it stand, thought she held it securely.” In order to make that same concept more evident and persuasive, he made use of an image: “It is not always possible to put your hand on another’s sword, and therefore it is good to have a sword at your side and to gird it on when the enemy is at a distance, because afterward another man is too late and you have no recourse.” Well aware that the Florentines were in serious danger of losing their liberty, Machiavelli attempted to overcome their greed with the fear of death. To that end, he recounts a terrifying historical example with which his fellow-citizens were quite familiar: Many of you can remember when Constantinople was taken by the Turks. That Emperor foresaw his ruin. He called upon his citizens, not being able with his organized forces to make proper provision. He showed them their dangers, showed them the preventives, and they ridiculed him. The siege came on. Those citizens who had before had no respect for the exhortations of their lord, when they heard within their walls the thunder of the artillery and the yells of the army of their enemies, ran weeping to the Emperor with their bosoms full of money; but he drove them away, saying: “Go to die with this money, since you have not wished to live without it.” Last of all, loyal to the rules of political rhetoric, he concluded his oration with an exhortation. He knew very well that his fellow citizens had a deep-rooted pride in their liberty. He therefore did his best to exert tion and Excuse], in Opere, vol. I, p. 12. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 1439. Ibid., p. 13. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 1440. Ibid., pp. 14–15. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 1442.
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leverage on this emotion to urge them to make those decisions that are incumbent on a people that have always cherished their liberty: “Such a fall I cannot believe in, when I see that you are free Florentines and that in your own hands rests your liberty. For that liberty I believe you will have such regards as they always have had who are born free and hope to live free.” Machiavelli used the force of eloquence not only to sustain the love of liberty but also to attempt to remove from the minds and souls of the Florentines the bad old religious mentality that taught them to trust in the aid of God in times of danger rather than seeking active remedies in wisdom and strength, as was the case when the duke Cesare Borgia left Rome with his armies “and everybody prayed God to give us time.” He placed before the eyes of his fellow citizens the image of a God that never provides aid, but who punishes those who—despite being able—refuse to see and refuse to understand: “And seeing that you can learn and see, and yet that you do not learn and see things about which even your enemies are astonished, I am convinced that God has not yet punished us as he intends, and that he is keeping us for greater chastisement.” And he warned, in his final exhortation, that “the heavens do not wish or are not able to support a city that is determined to fall in any case.” Like the authors of the protestatio of justice from which I have quoted, Machiavelli described a God who is the friend of those who are wise and strong, emphasized the religious significance of the virtue of justice, and insisted that the Christian religion is an ally of liberty. In his Allocuzione ad un magistrato, which he composed around 1519–20, he made use of a parable: “Men in the first age were so good that the gods were not ashamed to come down from heaven and inhabit the earth with them. Later, as virtues vanished and vices abounded, they gradually began to withdraw to heaven, and the last to leave the earth was Justice.” From that time on, Justice no longer returned to the world of men, with the exception of a few fortunate cities that, thanks to Justice, have become peaceful and united. Justice engenders “unity in states and kingdoms; unity provides power and the preservation of states and kingdoms; justice defends the poor and the powerless, represses the rich and the powerful, humiliates the arrogant and the bold, restrains the rapacious and the greedy, chastises the insolent, and disperses the violent; unity engenders in the states that equality that
Ibid., p. 16. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 1443. Ibid., pp. 12, 15, and 16. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 1442, 1440, and 1443. Niccolò Machiavelli, Allocuzione ad un magistrato, in Opere, vol. I, p. 713.
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is desirable in a state to ensure its preservation.” For that reason, justice is the virtue that “pleases God above all others.” In the conclusion of the oration, quoting from the “golden and divine” verses of Dante, he reiterates once again that “God loves justice and piety.” Machiavelli’s tie with the rhetoric of a civil religion also emerges in the Discursus florentinarum rerum post mortem iunioris Laurentii Medices (November 1520–February 1521). In this piece, he reaffirmed with particular force the idea that God rewards those who have loved and served their fatherland: “I believe that the greatest honor that men can achieve is that which is voluntarily given to them by their fatherland; I believe that the greatest good that can be done, as well as the most acceptable in the eyes of God, is that which is done on behalf of the fatherland.” It is true that here Machiavelli was writing to persuade Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici to restore a republican government in Florence, but the topos that God loves those who serve the fatherland is a rhetorical artifice that Machiavelli uses in other writings as well. His goal was to bring about the reopening of the hall of the Great Council (Consiglio Grande) and to restore the republican regime, and that is why he makes use of the conventional image of a God who loves those who desire the best interests of the fatherland. To invoke the name of “almighty God and His glorious mother, ever virgin, and the holy Saint John the Baptist, and any and all other advocates and protectors of the city of Florence” at the beginning of the Minuta di provvisione per la riforma dello stato di Firenze, as did Machiavelli in 1522, is a simple and straightforward piece of convention. It is not however a piece of conventional ritual to invoke God, who loves those who reform republics in order to endow them with a free and peaceful way of life. Without that God, men will not know how to, indeed cannot become, creators of great political enterprises. And that is why he calls on that God in his exhortations: “As our Magnificent and Excellent Lordships may consider that no law and no order is more laudable among men or more pleasing in God’s sight than that which ordains a true, united, and holy republic, in which advice is freely given, deliberations prudently undertaken, and orders faithfully carried out.”
Ibid., p. 714. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discursus florentinarum rerum post mortem iunioris Laurentii Medices, in Opere, vol. I, p. 744. Niccolò Machiavelli, Minuta di provvisione per la riforma dello stato di Firenze l’anno 1522, in Opere, vol. I, p. 746.
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4. His Finest Piece of Oratory The most important of all his political orations is The Prince. Machiavelli wrote the work to show his expertise in the art of statesmanship, but he was not writing as a detached expert. He felt a religious veneration for the art of statesmanship. He clearly shows it when he speaks about the art of founding and guiding states as “that food that alone is mine and for which I was born.” Having derived it from the great men of antiquity and from his own direct experience in Palazzo Vecchio and in the courts, Machiavelli wished to donate that food to someone who could truly savor it and translate it into a work of creation and political redemption. He wishes to persuade and motivate, and it is with that goal in mind that he composed the entire work, from the first page to the last, in strict compliance with the rules of ars retorica. In order to understand the rhetorical structure of The Prince it is quite sufficient to focus our attention on the Exhortatio. Many writers have judged it to be useless, harmful, unsuccessful, and poorly linked to the rest of the work. It is, however, a perfect conclusion to the text. The rules of classical rhetoric prescribe that, for a political oration to be persuasive, it must end, after a brief summation of the theses put forth, with a peroratio (conclusion) or an exhortatio (exhortation) in which the orator touches the passions of the listeners to ensure that they decide or act in accordance Letter to Francesco Vettori dated 10 December 1513, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, p. 426 English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 264. The best studies of the rhetorical composition of The Prince are those by John F. Tinkler, “Praise and Advice: Rhetorical Approaches in More’s ‘Utopia’ and Machiavelli’s ‘Prince,’” Sixteenth Century Journal 19 (1988), pp. 187–207, and Virginia Cox, “Machiavelli and the ‘Rhetorica ad Herennium’: Deliberative Rhetoric in ‘The Prince,’” Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997), pp. 1109–41. See also John F. Tinkler, “Renaissance Humanism and the Genera Eloquentiae,” Rhetorica 5 (1987), pp. 278–309, and John W. O’Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome, in particular, pp. 36–51, Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric from the Counter Reformation to Milton, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1994, in particular pp. 18–43. Federico Chabod, beginning with his Introduction to The Prince (1924), believed that the book contained twenty-five “rigidly logical” chapters, and another chapter, chapter 26, “which is an expression of the author’s feelings, passion, and imagination”; Federico Chabod, Scritti su Machiavelli, Einaudi, Turin 1964, p. 18. In his commentary on the invective against tyrants in chapter 10 of Book I of the Discorsi, Luigi Russo wrote that “we read with a certain astonishment this page, which lacks the sobriety and the quality of scientific analysis that is usually found in Machiavelli’s thinking and style. We find in it an oratorical and literary raptus, that goes well beyond the writer’s scholarly perceptions”; Luigi Russo, Machiavelli, 3d ed., Laterza, Bari 1949, p. 224. Fredi Chiappelli writes that “Machiavelli is in fact an unusual writer of treatises, at once a writer of treatises and an artist”; Fredi Chiappelli, Studi sul linguaggio del Machiavelli, Le Monnier, Florence 1952, p. 9. See also Chiappelli, Nuovi studi sul linguaggio del Machiavelli, Le Monnier, Florence 1969.
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with his advice. The orator must use above all indignation (indignation), if he intends to arouse disdain in his listeners, and conquestio (lamentation), in order to arouse compassion. In the first case, he must emphasize that something is grim, cruel, nefarious, and tyrannical; in the second case, he must insist especially on the innocence of the victim and emphasize the victim’s weakness. Skilled orator that he was, Machiavelli diligently put into practice the teachings of the classical masters. The book’s concluding chapter is a full-fledged exhortation, constructed in accordance with the techniques of the indignatio and the conquestio: to move a potential redeemer to indignation, he emphasizes the “barbarous cruelties and insults”; in order to arouse compassion, he describes an Italy which is “more enslaved than the Hebrews, more servile than the Persians, more dispersed than the Athenians: without a head, without order, beaten, despoiled, torn, pillaged, and having endured ruin of every sort.” Without the Exhortatio, The Prince would be stripped of one of the most effective devices for arousing just passions, and would therefore be ill suited to attain the objectives for which Machiavelli wrote it, first and foremost to persuade a redeemer to take on the challenge of emancipating Italy. Among these devices are the reference to God who loves justice and a civil way of life, a God who is the friend of those who wish to found and reform states and redeem peoples. Machiavelli writes that those who attempted to liberate Italy but failed seemed as if they had been “ordered by God for her redemption,” though in reality they were not. Those men who succeeded in their efforts at redemption, on the other hand, such as Cyrus, Theseus, and especially Moses, truly were ordered by God. God was “a friend to them,” as He would be a friend to others who truly wished to aid in the redemption of Italy. The signs of the friendship of God were evident, especially in the case of Moses: “Here may be seen extraordinary things without example, brought about by God: the sea has opened; a cloud has escorted you along the way; the stone has poured forth water; here manna has rained.” The alliance between religion and eloquence concludes his greatest political oration. The book’s rhetorical structure is revealed as well in the dedicatory letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici. It serves as a preamble and as such it is intended to render the reader well disposed, docile, and benevolent. In order to achieve this result, on which the successful outcome of the entire discourse
Concerning the peroration as an instrument to calm or excite passions, see Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996, p. 121. Cicero, De inventione, I, LII, 102. Ibid., I, LV, 109.
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depends, Machiavelli emphasizes, as the classical authors of rhetoric advised, his good qualities, his experience, his knowledge of affairs of state, the sacrifices that he has had to make to obtain that experience and knowledge, and the bad fortune that has persecuted him, keeping his merits from attaining adequate recognition. He writes that he has condensed in this book “the knowledge of the actions of great men, learned by me from long experience with modern things and a continuous reading of ancient ones,” attained “in so many years and with so many hardships and dangers.” To be sure to make the reader properly disposed to accept his advice and his exhortations, Machiavelli must also remove the doubts or hostile opinions concerning his own person and his authority in providing political advice: first of all, the prejudice, which was current in the Florence of his time, that a man of the people could not properly offer advice in affairs of state, and that such a privilege was exclusively the domain of the powerful and great. In order to remove this prejudice, he describes his status as a man of the commonfolk as a condition that better enables him to see political matters than the great and mighty: “To know well the nature of peoples one needs to be prince, and to know well the nature of princes one needs to be of the people.” The former secretary of the Florentine Republic under Soderini, imprisoned just a few months previous on charges of conspiracy, Machiavelli cannot fail to express his loyalty to the house of Medici: “Therefore, your Magnificence, take this small gift in the spirit with which I send it. If your Magnificence considers and reads it diligently, you will learn from it my extreme desire that you arrive at the greatness that fortune and your other qualities promise you.” Nor does he miss the opportunity counseled by the classics to point out that he has suffered though innocent and that his merits have been overlooked: “And if your Magnificence will at some time turn your eyes from the summit of your height to these low places, you will learn how undeservedly I endure a great and continuous malignity of fortune.” He promised—and it was a promise that he kept—not to adorn or fill his book “with fulsome phrases nor with pompous and magnificent words, nor with any blandishment or superfluous ornament whatever” as so many other political writers had done. “For I wanted it either not to be honored for anything or to please solely for the variety of the matter and the gravity of the subject.” This choice of style was not a rejection of rhetoric, but rather a result of his thorough knowledge of the rules of the art, in particular the rules that govern the selection of style and the usage of Machiavelli, Il Principe, in Opere, vol. I, pp. 117–18. English translation: Mansfield, The Prince, pp. 102–3 and 3–4.
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ornamentation (“ornamenta”). The Roman master had explained that an oration of the deliberative genre should be in a simple and grave style (“simplex et gravis”), because the material under discussion itself possessed magnificence and splendor. The simple, grave style nonetheless does not exclude the ornaments that make an orator’s discourse clear and persuasive. Among the various ornaments in question, examples taken from history are especially effective. History, Cicero had written, is “the evidence of time, the light of truth, the life of memory, the directress of life, the herald of antiquity.” Quintilian in his De institutione oratoria had explained that history seems to repeat itself and that the experience of the past is a valid aid to reason. The orations delivered before the people and the opinions discussed in the senate offer valuable examples of persuasion and dissuasion. History, moreover, has the power of instilling a love of virtue with its narrative of great examples from antiquity, and for that reason, history is far more effective than philosophy. The belief that history and historical examples were the best source of political wisdom was a commonplace in Florentine culture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. History, writes Salutati, teaches us what we need to do, both in private life and in political life. Political advice based on historical examples is much more persuasive than advice based on abstract principles. Human affairs tend to repeat themselves, and men do not change over time, just as the laws of the world remain the same. Thanks to the knowledge of history, therefore, it is possible to understand the present and make conjectures about the future. The Florentine historians of the fifteenth century were of the same opinion. In the preface to his history of the Florentine people Leonardo Bruni emphasizes that writing about history is a “highly useful” thing because history allows us to know the actions and thoughts of ancient people in various eras (“partiti presi”) and therefore teaches us prudence (“fare prudenti”). Moreover, by placing
In the judgment of Stella Larosa, The Prince [Il principe] “presents itself on the other hand as a work intentionally devoid of rhetorical ornamentation”; Stella Larosa, “Autobiografia e tradizione letteraria nella ‘giornata’ di Niccolò Machiavelli,” Interpres 22 (2003), p. 267. “Tota autem oratio simplex et gravis et sententiis debet ornatior esse quam verbis”; Cicero, De partitione oratoriae, XXVII, 97; “ita cum verba rebus aptentur, ipso materiae nitore clarescunt”; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, III, VIII, 60–65. Cicero, De oratore, II.IX.36. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, III, VIII, 66–67. Ibid., XIII, II, 29–31. Epistolario, vol. II, pp. 289–302; see also Cesare Vasoli, Coluccio Salutati e la storia, Atti del Convegno su Coluccio Salutati, Buggiano Castello, June 1980, Buggiano 1981, pp. 27–46. Leonardo Aretino, Istoria Fiorentina, translated into the vernacular by Donato Acciajuoli, Le Monnier, Florence 1861, pp. 3–4.
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before our eyes examples of excellent men, history encourages us to pursue virtue. Iacopo Bracciolini, in the preface to the translation into Italian of his father Poggio’s Istoria Fiorentina observed: Hence it becomes clear how useful it [history] is for the human race and to what degree, if we wish to express our gratitude, we have an obligation with it; as it is the sole faithful custodian of our actions, and it is the way that reminds us of the works of singular men, urging us to work to become immortal, and through the actions of others shows us the lives of each one: and councils deliberating, and positions taken, and customs of the republics, and great variety of fortune, and the various events of wars, so that through the examples of others, we can choose that which is useful to us, and to the fatherland. Machiavelli, once again, in The Prince follows the teachings of the classic and the Florentine historians. He considers history as a source of political wisdom because he believes that “in all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the same humors, as there always have been.” He supports all his political advice with historic examples, and he explains the reason why: No one should marvel if, in speaking, as I will do of principalities that are altogether new both in prince and in state, I bring up the greatest examples. For since men almost always walk on paths beaten by others and proceed in their actions by imitation, unable either to stay on the paths of others altogether or to attain the virtue of those whom you imitate, a prudent man should always enter upon the paths beaten by great men, and imitate those who have been most excellent, so that if his own virtue does not reach that far, it is at least in the odor of it. He should do as prudent archers do when the place they plan to hit appears too distant, and knowing how far the strength of their bow carries, they set their aim much higher than the place intended, not to reach such height with their arrow, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to achieve their design. “and by the example of excellent men kindle the soul to the performance of virtue”; Ibid., p. 4. Iacopo Bracciolini, Istoria di M. Poggio Fiorentino: tradotta di latino in volgare da Iacopo suo figliuolo, Filippo Giunti, Florence 1598, pp. 1–2. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 39; see also III, 43. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 83. Machiavelli, Il Principe, VI. English translation: Mansfield, The Prince, p. 22. Machiavelli makes use of historic examples in another text that provides a good instance of his way of
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Therefore Machiavelli’s examples are not scientific, but oratorical. They do not serve the purpose of demonstrating the empirical validity of a scientific law, but rather to render more persuasive a piece of political advice and to stimulate the desire to emulate a specific way of acting. The best way of explaining a concept, the classics of rhetoric teach us, is to render it visible to the audience by means of similes, images, and metaphors. Machiavelli was a faithful pupil in this as well. When he wishes to convey that a new prince should be capable of using both force and deceit, he avails himself of the images of the fox and the lion: “Thus, since a prince is compelled of necessity to know well how to use the beast, he should pick the fox and the lion, because the lion does not defend itself from snares and the fox does not defend itself from wolves. So one needs to be a fox to recognize snares and a lion to frighten the wolves.” In order to explain that a prince should never entrust his self-defense to the armies of another prince, he relies on a “figure” of the Old Testament: “When David offered to Saul to go and fight Goliath, the Philistine challenger, Saul, to give him spirit, armed him with his own arms—which David, as soon as he had them on, refused, saying that with them he could not give a good account of himself, and so he would rather meet the enemy with his sling and his knife.” Machiavelli reads the Bible “judiciously.” using the technique of the deliberative style, Del modo di trattare i popoli della Valdichiana ribellati, written between July and August 1503. In order to persuade the rulers of Florence to abandon the deplorable practice of compromising with rebellious cities, in fact, he made use of the historical example: “I have heard it said that in our actions we should look to history as our teacher, which is particularly true for princes. The world has always been inhabited in the same way by men who have had the same passions: There have always been those who rule and those who serve, those who serve willingly and those who serve unwillingly, those who rebel and those who are punished.” English translation: Peter Constantine, The Essential Writings of Machiavelli, Modern Library, New York 2007, p. 361 If the Florentines, as they repeatedly claimed in public assemblies, accepted this principle, they should also agree to learn from the Romans “who were masters of the world.” Experienced orator that he was, Machiavelli preferred to let Livy speak, and limited himself to emphasizing the similarities between the cases described by Livy and those that faced the Florentines and to explain that the solutions adopted by the Romans were still valid; Niccolò Machiavelli, Del modo di trattare i popoli della Valdichiana ribellati, in Opere, vol. I, pp. 22–26. Concerning the use of examples, see Barbara Spackman, “Machiavelli and Maxims,” Yale French Studies 77 (1990), p. 152; John D. Lyons, Exemplum. The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1989, in particular, pp. 35–36, 49, and 63–65. See also Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, pp. 49–51. Machiavelli, Il Principe, XVIII. English translation: Mansfield, The Prince, p. 69. Ibid., XIII. English translation: Mansfield, The Prince, p. 56. “And whoever reads the Bible judiciously will see that since he wished his laws and his orders to go forward, Moses . . .” Machiavelli, Discorsi, III, 30. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 280. See also I, 23: “He who reads all the histories judiciously . . .” English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses on Livy, p. 58; and the Preface to Book I: “as from not having a true knowledge of histories, through not getting from reading them that sense nor
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He is not interested in grasping the authentic sense of the stories, but rather in extracting from them the “flavor that they have within them,” that is to say, teachings that penetrate deep within and instill a desire to act and to emulate. The act of Saul giving David his armor has been interpreted as one of the finest acts of friendship in the Bible: “The exchange of clothing and arms between the two men expresses the gift of what is most intimate in man, and shows that it is necessary to be willing to give anything to one’s friends.” But this time, Machiavelli is not interested in friendship. His imagination does not halt with the gesture of Saul who gives his arms to David but focuses instead on David’s gesture, as he strips off the armor that Saul gave him. This figure, in Machiavelli’s view, teaches that “the arms of others either fall off your back or weigh you down or hold you tight.” Machiavelli also uses with complete confidence the technique of irony as a means of derision. As the classics had taught us, he describes persons and actions with the greatest seriousness, but intends precisely the reverse. One example is the chapter on ecclesiastic principalities where he writes that those states maintain themselves without virtue and without fortune, for they are sustained by orders that have grown old with religion, which have been so powerful and of such a kind that they keep their princes in the state however they proceed and live. These alone have states, and do not defend them; they have subjects, and do not govern them; and the states, though ungoverned, do not care, and they neither think of becoming estranged from such princes nor can they. Thus, only these principalities are secure and prosperous. But as they subsist by superior causes, to which the human mind does not reach, I will omit speaking of them; for since they are exalted and maintained by God, it would be the office of a presumptuous and foolhardy man to discourse on them. tasting that flavor that they have in themselves.” English translation: Discourses on Livy, p. 6. From the Libro di ricordi we know that Bernardo in 1480 returned to Domenico Lippi the Bible that he had borrowed from him; Machiavelli, Libro di ricordi, See also Josef Macek, “La jeunesse de Machiavel,” Historica XII (1966), pp. 45–70. That the Bible should be read allegorically was taught by Savonarola in his sermons. See Pasquale Villari, La storia di Girolamo Savonarola e de’ suoi tempi, 2 vols., new ed., Le Monnier, Florence 1887–88, vol. I, p. 123. See Luigi Pizzolato, L’idea di amicizia nel mondo antico classico e cristiano, Einaudi, Turin 1993, p. 222. Cicero De oratore, II, LXVII, 269. Machiavelli, Il Principe, XI. English translation: Mansfield, The Prince, p. 45.
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What he is really thinking, on the other hand, is that ecclesiastical princes, given the way in which they live and govern, deserve to lose their states, and that they will lose them, even if they proclaim that they derive their power from God. Machiavelli also respects the rules of classical rhetoric, which focus on the subdivision of the oration. As Cicero taught, following the exordium (introduction) comes the partition (outline), in which the orator must explain in a clear, concise manner the theme of the speech that he is about to deliver. Before concluding with the peroratio (peroration) or with the exhortatio (exhortation), he must then reiterate and summarize the main points and emphasize that he has demonstrated what he set out to show at the beginning of his oration. At the outset of The Prince, he writes: “I shall leave out reasoning on republics because I have reasoned on them at length another time. I shall address myself only to the principality, and shall proceed by weaving together the threads mentioned above; and I shall debate how these principalities may be governed and maintained.” As he nears the conclusion of the work, then, in order to reiterate that he has kept that promise, he observes that “when the things written above have been observed prudently, they make a new prince appear ancient and immediately render him more secure and steady in his state than if he had grown old in it.” If we keep in mind classical rhetoric then we can understand not only the form, but also the content of The Prince, that is, the end that Machiavelli wished to attain with his advice. Concerning this point, the position of the classic authors vary. In Cicero’s view, political oration should have as its goal both honesty and utility. Actions are honest that respect the virtues of justice, wisdom, strength, and temperance; useful actions are those that aim at the security, liberty, and greatness of the republic. In Quintilian’s view, deliberative oratory should have as its goal that which is honest (“quod honestum”). The orator, however, must often address an ignorant audience made up of people incapable of understanding that that which is See for instance what Machiavelli seriously states, in Parole da dirle sopra la provisione del denaio, facto un poco di proemio et di scusa [Words to Be Spoken on the Law for Appropriating Money, After Giving a Little Introduction and Excuse], in Opere, vol. I, p. 13 and in Discorsi, I. 27. Cicero, De inventione, I, XXII, 31. Machiavelli, Il Principe, II. English translation: Mansfield, The Prince, p. 6. Ibid., XXIV. English translation: Mansfield, The Prince, p. 96. “in deliberationibus, ut nos arbitramur, quid honestum sit et quid utile”; Cicero, De inventione, II, IV, 12; “In deliberativo autem Aristoteli placet utilitatem, nobis et honestatem et utilitatem”; Ibid., II, LI, 156. Ibid., II, LII, 159.
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honest cannot be in conflict with that which is useful. In these cases, he must distinguish between that which is useful and that which is honest, and adopt his oratory to common opinion. The objective of deliberative oratory must therefore be both honesty and utility. In the opinion of the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium the goal that an orator has to set for himself when offering advice in political deliberations (“in civili consultatione”) should only be interest. He adds, however, and this is an important point, that interest (“utilitas”) consists of two parts: security (“tuta”) and honesty (“honestas”). Then he subdivides security into might and craft (“vim et dolum”). “Might is determined by armies, fleets, arms, engines of war, recruiting of manpower, and the like”; craft “is exercised by means of money, promises, dissimulation, swiftness, deception.” Honesty is subdivided into the right and the praiseworthy (“rectum et laudabile”). “The Right is that which is done in accord with Virtue and Duty. Subheads under the Right are Wisdom, Justice, Courage, and Temperance.” On the other hand, “the Praiseworthy is what produces an honourable remembrance, at the time of the event and afterwards.” The Roman masters of eloquence were aware that in political deliberations, utility often conflicts with honesty, and they advised various ways in which an orator could resolve this problem. In De inventione, Cicero emphasizes that a true orator must put honesty first, second safety, third interest. He adds, however, that in cases in which the safety of the state is truly in danger, the orator can modify the order and place safety first, especially if honesty can be recovered in a later phase through courage and diligence. He may also defend a political decision that violates the principle of honesty by claiming that it is necessary for the safety of the state. He can also claim that without safety and security it is not possible even to obtain honesty. Another way of dealing with the contrast between security and honesty is that found in the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Even if an orator must not propose abandoning virtue, he can still state that in given circumstances
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, III, VIII, 2–4. “Utilitas in duas partes in civili consultatione dividitur: tutam, honestam”; Rhetorica ad Herennium, III, II, 3. Ibid. Rhetorica ad Herennium, III, II, 3 and III, IV, 7. “persaepe evenit ut utilitas cum honestate certet”; Cicero, De partitione oratoriae, 25. 89–90. Cicero, De inventione, II, LVIII, 174. “Hoc genus in deliberationibus maxime versabitur, cum aliquid quod contra dicatur, aequum esse concedimus, sed id quod nos defendimus necessarium esse demostramus”; Ibid., I, LI, 96. “vere poterimus dicere nos honestatis rationem habere, quoniam sine incolumitate eam nullo tempore possumus adipisci”; Ibid., II, LVIII, 74.
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virtue does not take the form of those actions that we normally consider virtuous, and he can describe the action that he is recommending in a different way. He may, for instance, state that the actions that others consider courageous are actually cowardly. Above all, he can state that “nothing is more useful than salvation”; that no one can make use of virtues if they have failed first to consider security; that not even the gods are of any help to those who recklessly place themselves in peril; that it is not possible to consider honest any action that fails to ensure safety. Quintilian’s suggestion points in the same direction: if an orator must place interest above honesty, he must not openly admit that his advice is dishonest (“inhonestum”), but change the names of things. In the Florentine intellectual context there were fervent advocates of the primacy of honesty over interest who made no effort at all to express and defend their point of view in public debates over political matters of the utmost gravity. Piero Aldobrandini, speaking during a discussion on foreign affairs, emphasized that “it is best not to break promises made to the Most Christian [king of France], because it has always been an ancient tradition of this Republic not to break our word to others.” In the same debate, Bono Boni exhorted the Ten of Liberty to keep the promises that they had made “because‚ this city has never broken its word to anyone, and that he would rather die altogether than break his word, because at least that would be a great-spirited death.” Another orator reiterated the same point of view: “Those forefathers of mine . . . always held the same determination, that once you made a promise, you must keep it, indeed, even if it might be dangerous; from which maxim I do not wish at all to vary, because honesty should be put before utility, if necessity, which obeys no law, did not compel us to act otherwise.” There were even those who maintained with the same degree of certainty that there are cases in which utility comes before honesty. One faithful follower of Cicero, Matteo Palmieri, wrote for instance: The truth approved by the greatest minds and by the authority of stern and grave philosophers in no way divides or separates honesty
Rhetorica ad Herennium, III, III, 6. Concerning the techniques of redescription, see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, pp. 138–80. “honestum nihil oportere existimari, quod non salutem pariat”; Rhetorica ad Herennium, III, V, 8. “Sed neque hic plane concedendum est esse id inhonestum”; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, III, VIII, 31. “Haec autem, quae tantum inter se pugnant, plerumque nominibus deflecti solent”; Ibid., III, VIII, 32. See Consulte e pratiche, 1505–1512, edited by Denis Fachard, Droz, Geneva 1988, pp. 320–25. Ibid., p. 353.
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from utility, indeed, it joins them together; and they insist that that which is honest must also be useful, and that which is useful must also be honest, nor do they admit in any way that the two qualities be divided: the wisdom of which is certainly approved and true. But matters are judged otherwise when in disputation the truth itself is examined more closely, and otherwise do words find application in the common opinion of the great masses. To us, speaking at present in the vernacular, it is fitting to employ words in accordance with the usage of the commonfolk, and to leave aside the well-honed subtleties of absolute truth. And as the many say, so shall we, at times something that is not honest may be useful, and something that is not useful may be honest. When he is exploring the relationship between the useful and the honest, Machiavelli is probably referring to the political debates in Florence’s public councils, rather than treatises of advice to princes, which he did not know well and which he considered of minor importance. In the central section of his oration, he closely hews to Rhetorica ad Herennium and he rejects the Ciceronian doctrine that what is useful is also honest and that what is honest is also useful. The end of his advice is utility, but by utility he means both security (understood as force and dolus [cunning]) and honesty (that which is praiseworthy and that which is in keeping with virtue). He stated, that “my intent is to write something useful to whoever understands it.” In chapter XXIV, nonetheless, he explicitly refers Matteo Palmieri, Della vita civile, edited by Felice Battaglia, Zanichelli, Bologna 1944, pp. 127–28. The importance of the setting of the pratiche and the debates in the councils for an understanding of the rhetoric of The Prince has been clearly emphasized by Virginia Cox, “Machiavelli and the ‘Rhetorica ad Herennium’: Deliberative Rhetoric in ‘The Prince,’” in particular p. 1136. Concerning Machiavelli’s scant familiarity with and scant interest in the humanistic treatises of advice to the prince, I refer the reader to my own Introduction to Machiavelli, The Prince, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005, pp. xxxv–xxxvi. Cicero, De Officiis, II, VII, 34–VIII–35. According to John F. Tinkler, every serious political debate that aims at ultimately recommending political action must be practical and therefore have an interest in mind, as is taught in both the Rhetorica ad Herennium and the De inventione, the two most important texts on rhetoric during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; Tinkler, “Praise and Advice: Rhetorical Approaches in More’s ‘Utopia’ and Machiavelli’s ‘Prince,’” p. 198. In Skinner’s view, Machiavelli supports the “subversive suggestion” that “the question of what is utile in such matters of statecraft may have no connection with what is onesto at all”; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, p. 44. Virginia Cox, who rightly points out the importance of the Rhetorica ad Herennium to an understanding of the structure of The Prince, claims however that Machiavelli wished to demonstrate that the advantages of security vastly outweigh the advantages of a good reputation and, indeed, “that the pursuit of security may in fact be the best way
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to security as the objective of his advice. In chapter XVIII he insists on honor and praise: “So let a prince win and maintain his state: the means will always be judged honorable, and will be praised by everyone.” In chapter XV, he explicitly states that his advice is in keeping with virtue, even if it appears to be vice. He explicitly recommends what is just in the Exhortatio: “Their undertaking was not more just than this one, nor easier. . . . Here there is great justice: ‘For war is just to whom it is necessary.’” If we analyze in a more detailed manner the arrangement of the themes, we can see that he deals, in correspondence with the scheme of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, with “vim et dolum,” that is, weapons, money, promises, simulation and dissimulation; and the “rectum et laudabile,” that is, those actions for which princes are praised or blamed; and honesty. In particular, Machiavelli discusses the contrast between that which is honest and that which is useful, in four chapters that occupy the central section of The Prince: “Of Those Things for Which Men and Especially Princes Are Praised or Blamed” (XV); “Of Liberality and Parsimony” (XVI); “Of Cruelty and Mercy, and Whether It Is Better To Be Loved than Feared, or the Contrary” (XVII); “In What Mode Faith Should Be Kept by Princes” (XVIII). In order to resolve the contrast between security and honesty, Machiavelli avails himself both of the argument for the need to postpone considerations of honesty in favor of safety, and of the technique of redescription. He uses, for instance, the argument of necessity in chapter XV: “Hence it is necessary to a prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able not to be good and to use this and not use it according to necessity,” and in chapter XVIII, which concludes the discussion of actions for which princes are praised or blamed: “This has to be understood: that a prince, and especially a new prince, cannot observe all those things for which men are held good, since he is often under a necessity, to maintain his state, of acting against faith, against charity, against humanity, against religion. And so he needs to have a spirit disposed to change as the winds of fortune and variations of things command him, and as I said above, not depart from good, when possible, but know how to enter in evil, when forced by necessity.” He resorts to the technique of the redescription of actions in chapter XV: “And furthermore one should not care about incurring the reputation of those vices without which it is difficult to save one’s state; for if one considers everything well, one will find something in the long run to ensure a lasting good repute”; Cox, “Machiavelli and the ‘Rhetorica Ad Herennium,’” p. 1128. Rhetorica ad Herennium, III, II, 3
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appears to be virtue, which if pursued would be one’s ruin, and something else appears to be vice, which if pursued results in one’s security and well-being.” The hidden plot of The Prince is the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Machiavelli teaches utility in all its components because he advises the prince not only to equip himself with good weapons and to know how to be deceptive, but also teaches true virtue and the true way of obtaining praise and glory. In this book, wrongly considered to be Machiavelli’s most scientific work, whereas it was in reality a political oration, Machiavelli teaches a new prince the true virtue that does not hesitate in the face of evil nor does it stop in evil, but rather makes it possible to found and preserve a state. He explains that entering into evil is necessary, and that this is not a vice but a virtue, and even he promises the friendship of God to those who are capable of doing so in order to emancipate Italy. In his finest oration Machiavelli puts into practice the teachings of classical rhetoric and the image of God who was a friend of the founders of states, retrieved from the Bible and from the Florentine context.
5. Republican Eloquence and Wisdom The context of classical rhetoric allows us to understand not only the meaning of The Prince, but also, and to a greater degree, Discourses on Livy. A book like Discourses, Machiavelli writes in the preface, demands virtue, judgment, and eloquence (“discorso”), in order to free men from error and ensure that they can “taste” from episodes from ancient history “that flavor that they have in themselves.” “Tasting that flavor”: Machiavelli uses once again the metaphor of food, as he had done in the letter to Vettori (“that food that alone is mine”), in order to convey the idea that he wishes to teach something that will enter into the soul, nourish it, and give it renewed strength and new life. In The Prince he wants to move a founder of states; in Discourses on Livy he wants to encourage the hearts of the young to emulate the virtue of the ancients and to eschew the corruption of the moderns. Both one and the other are undertakings of education, not chilly issuings of precepts.
Machiavelli sets forth the principle that honesty should be put second to security in The Discourses [Discorsi] as well: “Where one deliberates entirely on the safety of his fatherland, there ought not to enter any consideration of either just or unjust, merciful or cruel, praiseworthy or ignominious; indeed every other concern put aside, one ought to follow entirely the policy that saves its life and maintains its liberty”; Machiavelli, Discorsi, III, 41. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 301. Ibid., I, Preface. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 6.
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The objective that Machiavelli pursued in Discourses on Livy is even more ambitious than that which he pursued in The Prince. This time he intended to emancipate the souls of the many from wicked moral education and from bad religion. “For it is the duty of a good man,” he writes in the preface to the Second Book, “to teach others the good that you could not work because of the malignity of the times and of fortune, so that when many are capable of it, someone of them more loved by heaven may be able to work it.” But a good man was, according to the classical Romans, the true orator. Only the true orator can educate men who can found new and free political orders, if they are beloved of the heavens. Machiavelli wanted to teach young people republican political wisdom and an understanding of political and military institutions. But he also wished to renew their souls by instilling in them with the power of words a love of a free way of life, a hatred of tyranny, and a yearning for true glory, because he was convinced that only a man who has these passions in his soul can hope to be loved by God and thus to achieve great things. Machiavelli employs with confidence the devices of rhetoric, first and foremost the technique of the laudatory genre for praising men, institutions, and periods. Cicero and Quintilian had explained that when we wish to praise someone, it is a good idea to focus above all on the virtues that confer benefits on others. Aurelio “Lippo” Brandolini (1454–97) in his De ratione scribendi libri tres, completed around 1485, emphasized that a substantial portion of the laudatory genre has to do with the praise of great men, especially those who managed to distinguish themselves for their virtue in times of corruption. Machiavelli begins Discourses on Livy with a consideration of men who deserve praise and those who merit reproach. In the dedicatory letter to Zanobi Buondelmonti, he writes that while writers often “praise him [the prince] for all virtuous qualities when they should blame him for every part worthy of reproach,” he has chosen instead to dedicate his composition to a man who for his qualities would deserve to be a prince. In The Art of War, in order to praise as highly as possible Cosimo Rucellai, he writes that he had all the virtues that can be desired “in a good friend by his friends” and “in a citizen by his native
Ibid., II, Preface. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 125. “Eum qui sit orator, virum bonum esse oportere, sed ne futurum quidem oratorem nisi virum bonum”; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, XII, I, 3. Cicero, De oratore, II, 85, 346; Quintilian Institutio oratoria III, 7, 16. Aurelio Brandolini, De ratione scribendi libri tres, A. Birckmannus, Cologne 1573, p. 125. See in this connection O’Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome, passim. Machiavelli, Discorsi, in Opere, vol. I, pp. 195–96. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 3.
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city.” The clearest example of his mastery of the technique of praise and blame, nonetheless, is found in his preface to the Second Book of Discourses on Livy: “Men always praise ancient times—but not always reasonably— and accuse the present; they are partisans of past things in such a mode that they celebrate not only those ages known to them through the memory that writers have left of them, but also those that once they are old they remember having seen in their youth.” But one born in Italy in the time Machiavelli was writing “has reason to blame his times and to praise the others” because, he explains, “in the latter there are very many things that make them marvelous and in the former there is nothing that recompenses them for every extreme misery, infamy, and reproach.” And the first defect of the times that Machiavelli blames is the decline of religion: “There is no observance of religion.” To move anyone who was “born of man” to be terrified “away from every imitation of wicked times” and to be “inflamed with an immense desire to follow the good,” Machiavelli employs the technique of transforming his readers into spectators, placing before their eyes a series of powerful images (“ante oculos ponere”). The classical Romans had insisted a great deal on this essential rhetorical technique. Cicero had recommended speaking in such a way that listeners would see the events with their inward eyes, the eyes of the imagination. Quintilian, in his turn, had emphasized that one of the chief qualities of an orator is to narrate events as if painting a picture with his words. With explicit reference to Horace’s famous phrase, “ut pictura poesis,” the theorists of eloquence and the political writers of the fifteenth century repeated insistently the concept that a true orator is very much like a painter, and that the most effective way of amplifying an argument, and to describe men in order to instill a desire to emulate them, is to portray them as if depicting them on a canvas. Machiavelli in The Prince explicitly admits that he considers his work to be similar to that of the painter: “Nor do I want it to be thought pre Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra [The Art of War], in Opere, vol. I, p. 532. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 568. Machiavelli, Discorsi, in Opere, vol. I, pp. 324–26. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 123–124. Cicero, De inventione, I, LIV, 104; De oratore, III, LIII, 202. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, VIII, III, 62 and VIII, III, 81. See for instance Brandolini, De ratione scribendi, p. 70; Poliziano, Praefatio in Suetonii expositionem, in Opera, N. Episcopius, Basel 1553, p. 499. See in this connection Wesley Trimpi, “The Meaning of Horace’s ‘Ut Pictura Poesis,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973), pp. 1–34; Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1971.
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sumption if a man from a low and mean state dares to discuss and give rules for the governments of princes. For just as those who sketch landscapes place themselves down in the plain to consider the nature of mountains and high places and to consider the nature of low places place themselves high atop mountains, similarly, to know well the nature of peoples one needs to be prince, and to know well the nature of princes one needs to be of the people.” I have already shown how Machiavelli designed the figure of the prince with metaphors and comparisons. In Discourses on Livy he used the same technique to move his readers to eschew tyranny and imitate good princes. In chapter X of book I, for instance, he writes: Thus, let a prince put before himself the times from Nerva to Marcus, and compare them with those that came before and that came later; and then let him choose in which he would wish to be born or over which he would wish to be placed. For in those governed by the good he will see a secure prince in the midst of his secure citizens, and the world full of peace and justice; he will see the Senate with its authority, the magistrates with their honors, the rich citizens enjoying their riches, nobility and virtue exalted; he will see all quiet and all good, and, on the other side, all rancor, all license, corruption, and ambition eliminated. He will see golden times when each can hold and defend the opinion he wishes. He will see, in sum, the world in triumph, the prince full of reverence and glory, the peoples full of love and security. If he then considers minutely the times of the other emperors, he will see them atrocious because of wars, discordant because of seditions, cruel in peace and in war; so many princes killed with steel, so many civil wars, so many external ones; Italy afflicted and full of new misfortunes, its cities ruined and sacked. He will see Rome burning, the Capitol taken down by its own citizens, the ancient temples desolate, ceremonies corrupt, the cities full of adulterers. He will see the seas full of exiles, the shores full of blood. He will see innumerable cruelties follow in Rome, and nobility, riches, past honors, and, above all, virtue imputed as capital sins. He will see calumniators rewarded, slaves corrupted against their master, freedmen against their patron, and those who lacked enemies oppressed by friends. And he will then know very well how many obligations Rome, Italy, and the world owe to Caesar.
Machiavelli, Il Principe, in Opere, vol. I, p. 118. English translation: Mansfield, The Prince, p. 4. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I,10. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 32–33.
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In Discourses on Livy as well, Machiavelli uses the commonplaces of utility understood as safety and honor. For instance, when he discusses whether it is better to place a guard on liberty (“Where the Guard of Freedom May Be Settled More Securely, in the People or in the Great; and Which Has Great Cause for Tumult, He Who Wishes to Acquire or He Who Wishes to Maintain”), he argues his case entirely from the point of view of security. But when he discusses the problem of whether an aristocratic republic is preferable to a popular republic, he concludes his argument with an appeal to honor: “In ordering a republic there is need to think of the more honorable part.” Finally, lest there be a proliferation of examples, in the chapter in which he offers advice on the best way of expanding territory, he makes use of the useful, security, praiseworthiness, and virtue. He describes expansion by means of simple conquest as “useless in armed republics” and “very useless” in unarmed republics, and concludes by pointing to the methods employed by the ancient Tuscans as an example to be followed, because they were secure, praiseworthy, and a cause of good customs: “And if the imitation of the Romans seems difficult, that of the ancient Tuscans should not seem so, especially to the present Tuscans. For if they could not, for the causes said, make an empire like that of Rome, they could acquire the power in Italy that their mode of proceeding conceded them. This was secure for a great time, with the highest glory of empire and of arms and special praise for customs and religion.” Aside from explaining which institutions and decisions are truly useful to a republic, Machiavelli also wished to rekindle in modern people the love of liberty that history books tell us was so strong in the ancient peoples of Italy. In order to achieve that result, he amplified the contrast between the beauty of a free way of life and the misery of lives spent in servitude: It is an easy thing to know whence arises among peoples this affection for the free way of life, for it is seen through experience that cities have never expanded either in dominion or in riches if they have not been in freedom. And truly it is a marvelous thing to consider how much greatness Athens arrived at in the space of a hundred years after it was freed from the tyranny of Pisistratus. But above all it is very marvelous to consider how much greatness Rome arrived at after it was freed from its kings. The reason is easy to understand, for it is not the particular good but the common good that makes cities great. And without doubt this common good is not observed
Ibid., I, 6. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 17, 23. Ibid., II, 4. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 138.
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if not in republics, since all that is for that purpose is executed, and although it may turn out to harm this or that private individual, those for whom the aforesaid does good are so many that they can go ahead with it against the disposition of the few crushed by it. The contrary happens when there is a prince, in which case what suits him usually offends the city and what suits the city offends him. In this mode, as soon as a tyranny arises after a free way of life, the least evil that results for those cities is not to go ahead further nor to grow more in power or riches but usually—or rather always—it happens that they go backward. Below, again to instill in his readers a love of freedom and a contempt for servitude, he reiterates with equally strong words the same contrast: It is an easy thing to consider whence that order arose and whence this disorder proceeds; for it all comes from the free way of life then and the servile way of life now. For all towns and provinces that live freely in every part (as was said above) make very great profits. For larger peoples are seen there, because marriages are freer and more desirable to men since each willingly procreates those children he believes he can nourish. He does not fear that his patrimony will be taken away, and he knows not only that they are born free and not slave, but that they can, through their virtue, become princes. Riches are seen to multiply there in larger number, both those that come from agriculture and those that come from the arts. For each willingly multiplies that thing and seeks to acquire those goods he believes he can enjoy once acquired. From which it arises that men in rivalry think of private and public advantages, and both the one and the other come to grow marvelously. The contrary of all these things occurs in those countries that live servilely; and the more they decline from the accustomed good, the harder is their servitude. In The Art of War, Machiavelli uses rhetoric to teach the political and military wisdom of the ancients and in order to instill a new attitude in the souls of the young. “And I repine at Nature, who either should have made me such that I could not see this or should have given me the possibility for putting it into effect. Since I am an old man, I do not imagine today that I can have opportunity for it. Therefore I have been liberal of it with you who, being young and gifted, can at the right time, if the things I have said please you, aid and advise your princes to their advantage.” He
Ibid., II, 2. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 129–30. Ibid. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 132–33.
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wishes to see not only the rebirth of the military discipline of the ancients, but also a new moral life: “To honor and reward excellence, not to despise poverty, to esteem the methods and regulations of military discipline, to oblige the citizens to love one another, to live without sects, to esteem private less than public good, and other like things that could easily fit in with our times.” He believes that his effort can be successful because he is convinced that he is teaching the truth: “About these customs, it is not difficult to be persuaded when one thinks about them enough and takes them up in the right way, because in them so plainly can be seen the truth that every public-spirited nature is capable of receiving. He who accomplishes such a thing plants trees beneath the shade of which mankind lives more prosperously and more happily than beneath this shade.” Machiavelli made use of the teachings of classical rhetoric in his plays as well, when he wants to move the audience to laughter. As Aristotle and Cicero taught, the subjects of laughter are persons or actions that have a degree of imperfection or turpitude but are neither excessive nor grave, nor do they cause grief or damage. For that reason, one should not laugh at outsized evil or hateful crimes, nor a grave hardship or misfortunes that arouse sentiments of pity, but rather at common vices and shortcomings, especially vainglory, greed, ambition, cunning, and the folly of lovers. When he writes plays “to benefit and to please the audience,” Machiavelli makes intelligent use of these teachings and parodies “an old man’s avarice, a lover’s madness, a servant’s tricks, a parasite’s gluttony, a poor man’s distress, a rich man’s ambition, a harlot’s flatteries, all men’s faithlessness.” Nicia, in The Mandrake, makes the audience laugh because of his excessive greed and vainglory, though neither one nor the other cause any real lasting pain or harm and they are not grave sins. Machiavelli laughs at himself as well, and puts himself in the comedy in full view. The Nicomaco of the Clizia is a little bit like the unfortunate Niccolò Machiavelli who, nearing his sixties, falls in love with the young Barbara Salutati. Nicomaco deserves the derision to which he is subjected because he has behaved excessively, but he also deserves some human understanding because until this point he has always been a model man and citizen.
Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra [The Art of War], in Opere, vol. I, p. 536. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, pp. 726, 572. Aristotle, Poetics, 1449a. 30–35; Cicero, De oratore, II, LVIII, 235–38. See in this connection Luigi Blasucci, Introduction to the Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, pp. 19–20. In the view of Quentin Skinner, to laugh at oneself was entirely inconceivable to the writers of the Renaissance because they saw it as a loss of face, pure and simple; see Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter,” in Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 3, Hobbes and Civil Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2002, p. 164; also worth consulting, concerning laughter in the medieval and Renaissance tradition, Mikhail
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To move his audience to laughter, he sets aside “language serious and solemn” and fills the comedies with words that are “either stupid, or biting, or amorous.” A different style than that used in his political works, but with the same objective, which is to teach wisdom that can be used in life: For though the aim of a comedy is to hold up a mirror to domestic life, the way it does this, all the same, is with a certain urbanity and with expressions which excite laughter, so that the men who come eagerly to enjoy themselves, taste afterward the useful lesson that lay underneath. This is why it is difficult to use serious characters; for there can be no gravity in a cheating servant, a ridiculous old man, in a love-crazed youth, in a wheedling harlot, in a greedy parasite, yet their actions can convey various lessons, useful to our daily life. In Discourses on Livy he condemns with grave words the religion that makes men wicked and irreligious; in The Mandrake he derides that religion, using this time the technique of irony. He describes Fra Timoteo with serious language, as if he were a person worthy of respect. When a noblewoman reveals (with ill-concealed longing) what her “insistent” husband forces her to undergo, Fra Timoteo responds impassively: “Don’t worry, God’s mercy is great.” In response as well to Ligurio’s suggestion that a scandal be covered by arranging an abortion, the monk offers words of great piety: “Amen, in the name of the Lord. Let it be as you will, and may everything be done for God and for divine Charity. Tell me the name of the convent, give me the potion, and, if you like, the money, too, and then we can begin to do some good. ” Fra Timoteo, after his own fashion, is a harsh critic of the decline of religion: I couldn’t close my eyes all night long, I have been so eager to hear how Callimaco and the others have made out. I did everything I could to pass the time: I said my matins, I read a Life of the Holy Bakhtin, L’opera di Rabelais e la cultura popolare. Riso, carnevale e festa nella tradizione medievale e rinascimentale, Einaudi, Turin 1979, in particular p. 66. English-language title: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 984. English reference for the plays is: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 824. Niccolò Machiavelli, Clizia, Prologue, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, pp. 178–79. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 824. Niccolò Machiavelli, A Dialogue on Language [Discorso o dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua], in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, pp. 274–75. English translation: Hale, The Literary Works, p. 188. Niccolò Machiavelli, La Mandragola [The Mandrake], Act III, Scene III and IV, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, pp. 137 and 140. English translation: Sices and Atkinson, The Comedies, pp. 207, 213.
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Fathers, I went to church and relit a candle that had gone out, and I changed the veil on a miraculous statue of the Virgin. How many times have I told those friars to keep her well cleaned! And then they wonder why attendance is going down. I remember when there were five hundred holy images, and nowadays there are barely twenty. It’s all our own fault, because we haven’t been smart enough to keep up the publicity. We always used to hold a procession every evening after vespers, and we would have hymns sung there every Sabbath. We used to take vows there ourselves, so that people would see fresh, new plaques all the time, and we would encourage the men and women to make vows when they came for confession. Now nobody bothers to do any of these things, and then we wonder why business has fallen off ! Oh, my fellow friars really don’t have any brains! In the face of such devotion on the part of a “venal” friar, we can only laugh. But the smile of those who believe, as did Machiavelli, that religion should teach us to be truly good and strong in our souls is a smile filled with bitterness. Just as we laugh at the goodness of Lucrezia, who first allows herself to be led docilely by the monk, by her mother, and by her husband, but when she discovers the qualities of the lover that they have introduced into her bed, actually declares that she can no longer resist what heaven has ordained: “Since your cleverness, my husband’s stupidity, my mother’s silliness, and my confessor’s guile have led me to do what I would never have done by myself, I have to judge that this comes from a divine providence that willed it so. I am not capable of refusing what heaven itself wants me to accept.” Machiavelli uses a comic and burlesque narrative as well to mock the religion that instills a fear of Hell and of devils in its followers. In the story of Belfagor a saintly man, “transported in prayer,” believed that many of those who “had died in the displeasure of God” descended to Hell through the faults of their wives. To such pious men, Machiavelli explained in his fable that the devils were decent and upright men, first and foremost Pluto, king of the underworld, himself. The words that Pluto addresses to his infernal advisers, and his method of treating the thorny question, are worthy of the finest of earthly princes: Beloved friends! By celestial decree and the irrevocable course of destiny I am the ruler of this kingdom and thus cannot be bound by Machiavelli, La Mandragola [The Mandrake], Act V, Scene I, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 159. English translation: Sices and Atkinson, The Comedies, p.259. Ibid., Act V, Scene IV, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 163. English translation: Sices and Atkinson, The Comedies of Machiavelli, pp. 267–69.
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any judgment, earthly or celestial. Nevertheless, the wisest rulers are those who, though they have the greatest power, are keenest to submit themselves to the laws and are most inclined to respect the judgment of others. Therefore I have concluded that I would do well to be counseled by you on a matter that could bring shame to our reign. When all the souls of men who enter our kingdom proclaim that they have been driven here by their wives—a thing that seems impossible to me—I fear that if I should pass a judgment that is too severe, I might be accused of being too cruel, and if I should pass a judgment that is not severe enough, I might be accused of being too lenient, and not a lover of justice. The first sin is that of a frivolous ruler, the second of a ruler who is unjust. As I wish to avoid either charge but cannot find the means of doing so, I have called you together so that with your counsel you can offer assistance and be the reason that our kingdom will once again prevail without infamy! The true devils are probably women like Onesta, who are perfectly willing, under the guise of virtue, to ruin a man out of pure ambition and an unbridled love of money; or men like that monk who “for more than four years had kept a woman in his cell dressed as a novice”; or like Gianmatteo del Brica, the laborer described by Giovanni del Bene, who “had outwitted the devil.” The devils, writes Machiavelli, were expelled from heaven for their pride. But he hastens to add that “he who sees the devil in very truth, sees him with smaller horns and not so black.” Even if he was not accustomed to listening to sermons, Machiavelli was familiar with the rhetorical technique for the composition of thematic sermons. According to the rules of the ars praedicandi, a sermon should begin with a quote from Holy Scripture, known as the “theme.” After the theme, the preacher should provide a short section intended to capture the attention of the audience by evoking subjects designed to arouse wonder or fear. He should then subdivide the sermon into three parts and develop each one with appropriate examples, references to the authorities, and amplifications. Finally, it was advisable to end with a summary or an admonition. The Exhortation to Penitence faithfully follows the canonical scheme. It begins with a quote from Psalms: “De profundis clamavi te, Domine; Domine exaudi vocem meam” (Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O
Belfagor arcidiavolo, in Opere, edited by Corrado Vivanti, Einaudi, Turin, vol. III, 2005, p. 89. Niccolò Machiavelli, Canto di diavoli scacciati di cielo, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 401. Niccolò Machiavelli, Canto dei romiti, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 407. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 881. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, p. 316.
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LORD. Lord, hear my voice, Psalm 130, 1–2). It continues with words that explain the theme and attract the attention of listeners, evoking the fear of sin and an admiration for divine mercy: Since this evening, honored Fathers and Superior Brothers, I am to speak to Your Charities, in order to obey my superiors, and am to say something on penitence, it has seemed to me good to begin my exhortation with words of that teacher of the Holy Spirit, David the Prophet, so that those who have sinned with him may, according to his words, hope they can receive mercy from God all-powerful and all-merciful. And that they can obtain it, since David obtained it, they should not fear, because neither greater transgression nor greater penitence for a man than in his instance can be conceived, nor in God can greater generosity to pardon be found. He then develops the theme, amplifying the gifts of God to man and quoting from Saint Paul, Saint Matthew, Saint Francis, and Saint Jerome, and concluding with the admonition: “Hence, to get out of [the snares of sin], we must resort to penitence and cry out with David: ‘Have mercy upon me, oh God!’ and with Saint Peter weep bitterly, and for all the misdeeds we have committed feel shame ‘And repent and understand clearly / that as much as pleases the world is a short dream’ [Petrarch].” In the Florentine Histories, Machiavelli’s last great work, he uses eloquence to teach once again political wisdom and to instill a love of liberty. Like the classic Romans and the humanists, he was well acquainted with the persuasive power of history: “And if every example of a republic is moving, those which one reads concerning one’s own are much more so and much more useful.” Even if he cannot magnify examples of virtue, and must instead recount stories of corruption and political foolishness, the history of Florence still preserves its value intact: “And if in describing the things that happened in this devastated world one does not tell about either the strength of soldiers, or the virtue of the captain, or the love of the citizen for his fatherland, it will be seen with what deceits, with what guile and arts the princes, soldiers, and heads of republics conducted them
Niccolò Machiavelli, Esortazione alla penitenza, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, pp. 283–86. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 170. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, Preface. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 6. See Franco Gaeta, “Machiavelli storico,” in Various Authors, Machiavelli nel quinto centenario della nascita, Bologna 1973, pp. 137–53; Nicolai Rubinstein, “Machiavelli storico,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, s. 3, 17 (1987), pp. 695–733; Mario Martelli, “Machiavelli e la storiografia umanistica,” Interpres 10 (1990), pp. 244–57; Andrea Matucci, Machiavelli nella storiografia fiorentina. Per la storia di un genere letterario, Olschki, Florence 1991.
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selves so as to maintain the reputation they have not deserved. It may, perhaps, be no less useful to know these things than to know the ancient ones, because, if the latter excite liberal spirits to follow them, the former will excite such spirits to avoid and eliminate them.” This history of times of decline is more useful than philosophical considerations not only because it is capable of evoking passions, but also because it explores details and is therefore better suited to teach true political wisdom. In the specific case of Florence, Machiavelli explains, the historical narrative allows one to describe in a detailed manner the serious problem of civil discord and factional strife: “For if nothing else delights and instructs in history, it is that which is described in detail; if no other lesson is useful to the citizens who govern republics, it is that which shows the causes of the hatreds and divisions in the city, so that when they have become wise through the dangers of others, they may be able to maintain themselves united.” In the Florentine Histories Machiavelli allows the protagonists to speak directly, and he uses imagined orations to persuade or dissuade. In this way, he lets us witness deliberative rhetoric in action, and he can have the Florentines of the past speak to the Florentines of his own time and of times to come, in order to exhort them to avoid the errors that caused the decline of their city. Their arguments are almost always based on the topoi of utility, honesty, or necessity. An example of a political oration built around the theme of interest is the speech that a member of the Signoria delivers before the Duke of Athens to persuade him to abandon his ambition to become tyrant over the city. It is not our intention, emphasizes the orator, “to oppose your designs with any force, but only to point out to you how heavy a weight you are taking on your back, and how dangerous the course you are selecting, so that you can always remember our advice and that of those who counsel you otherwise, not for your advantage but to vent their rage.” After working to reduce the duke’s hostility by pointing out that their objective is to offer him a way of behaving that better corresponds to his own interests, the orator continues his speech, emphasizing the point that it would be difficult, indeed impossible, to impose a tyranny over a city like Florence, which has a long tradition of liberty. Anyone who wished to become a tyrant in Florence would be obliged to face the hostility of the entire city, and “amidst universal hatred one never finds any security, because you never know from whence evil may spring, and he who
Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, V, 1. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 186. Ibid., Preface. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 6. See in this connection Brian Richardson, “Notes on Machiavelli’s Sources and His Treatment of the Rhetorical Tradition,” Italian Studies 26 (1971), pp. 24–28.
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fears every man cannot secure himself against anyone. If indeed you try to do it, you aggravate the dangers, because those who remain burn more with hatred and are readier for revenge.” It would therefore be much safer not to try to become a tyrant over Florence but rather to live contented with “the authority that we have given you” because “that dominion is alone lasting which is voluntary. Nor should you, blinded by a little ambition, be led to place yourself where, unable either to rest or to rise higher, you must necessarily fall with the greatest harm to yourself and to us.” The duke’s reply is an example of the rhetorical technique of arguing on both sides (“in contrarias partes”). The Duke of Athens states that it is not his intention to deprive Florence of her liberty, but rather to restore that liberty by destroying sects and factions. As for the dangers that the orator of the Signoria had pointed out to him, he answered that “he did not regard them, because it was the office of a man not good to set aside the good for fear of evil, and of a pusillanimous man not to pursue a glorious undertaking because the end was doubtful.” Nor were the words of the duke persuasive in their turn, and not because the Signori had hardened their hearts, but rather because those words were nothing more than a poor attempt to conceal wicked intentions. What ultimately resolved the disagreement was the use of weapons, as a demonstration of the principle that when words prove inadequate, the sole remedy is force. An example of an oration based on the commonplaces of humanity, honesty, and a love of the fatherland is the speech of the Gonfalonier Luigi Guicciardini in the name of the Signoria. “And truly, if we had believed that during our magistracy our city had to be ruined, either by opposing you or by gratifying you, we would have avoided these honors with flight or exile; but as we hoped to have to do with men who might have in them some humanity and some love for their fatherland, we accepted the magistracy willingly, believing that with our humanity we could conquer your ambition by any mode.” Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, II, 34. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, pp. 91–92. Cicero, De oratore, I, XXXIV, 158; see also Quintilian, Istitutio oratoria, XII, I, 35. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, II, 35. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories,p. 93. “For a licentious and tumultuous people can be spoken to by a good man, and it can easily be returned to the good way; there is no one who can speak to a wicked prince, nor is there any remedy other than steel.” Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 58 . English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 118–119. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, III, 11. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 119.
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After the appeal to humanity and the love of the fatherland, Machiavelli puts in the magistrate’s mouth a strong contrary argument, constructed in accordance with the rhetorical figure of the interrogatio, that is, a question posed not in order to obtain information but in order to give an argument greater persuasive force. What end will these demands of yours have, or how long will you abuse our liberality? Do you not see that we tolerate being conquered with more patience than you tolerate victory? To what will your disunions lead this city of yours? Do you not remember that when it was disunited Castruccio, a vile citizen of Lucca, defeated it? That a duke of Athens, one of your private condottieri, subjugated it? But when it was united, neither an archbishop of Milan nor a pope could defeat it, and after many years of war they were left in shame. Why, then, do you want your discords to make a slave of a city in peace that so many powerful enemies left free in war? What do you get out of your disunion other than servitude? Or of the goods that you have stolen or would steal from us other than poverty? For those are the things that, with our industry, nourish the whole city; and if it is despoiled of them, they cannot nourish it; and those who will seize them, as things ill acquired, will not know how to preserve them: from this, hunger and poverty will come to the city. In perfect keeping with the classical model, the oration of the gonfalonier concludes with an exhortation built around the principles of decorum and moderation: “These Signori and I command you, and if decency permits it, we pray you to still your spirits for once and be content to rest quietly with the things that have been ordered through us, and if ever you wish something new, be pleased to ask for it with civility and not with tumult and arms. For if they are decent things, you will always be granted them, and you will not give occasion to wicked men, at your charge and to your cost, to ruin your fatherland on your shoulders.” Luigi Guicciardini’s oration is a model of the discourse that a “good citizen” ought to deliver in order to calm the evil passions. The words of the gonfalonier, because they “were true,” “moved the spirits of those citizens very much.” Because
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, IX, II, 7–8. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, III, 11. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 120. Ibid. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 120. “These words, because they were true, moved the spirits of those citizens very much, and they thanked the Gonfalonier courteously for having done his duty to them as a good Signore
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of the way in which he skillfully spoke, Machiavelli notes, Luigi Guicciardini acted not only as a “good citizen,” but also as a “good Signore,” two expressions that reveal in Machiavelli the presence of the old language of prehumanist theories of republican self-government. Aside from the oration to the Duke of Athens, Machiavelli presents in the Florentine Histories other examples of words that fail to persuade. Among them, we should cite the description of the conspiracy against Maso degli Albizzi, who had established a regime that was hated even by the citizens who belonged to his faction. A group of citizens that Maso had banished decided to enter Florence secretly, kill Maso, summon the populace to revolt, and establish a free government. “With loud voices [the conspirators] urged the men to take up arms and escape the servitude they hated so much. They asserted that the grievances of the malcontents of the city, more than their own injuries, had moved them to want to free them.” Their words, Machiavelli notes, “even though true, did not move the multitude in any way”: either because of fear or else because the murders that the conspirators had committed had made them hateful and odious. In any case, the example confirmed the truth of the maxim that it is very dangerous “to want to free a people who want in every mode to be enslaved.” The Florentine Histories also provide examples of orations built on the theme of compassion and the fear of God, such as the speech that the citizens of Seravezza delivered before the Ten of War (Dieci della guerra, a magistracy in charge of international affairs) of Florence. In order to protest against the sack of their city perpetrated by the Florentine commissioner Astorre Gianni, and in a request for compensation, the citizens of Seravezza appealed to their audience’s sense of justice: “We are sure, magnificent Signori, that our words will find faith and compassion in your Lordships when you learn the way in which your commissioner seized our country and in what manner we were treated afterwards by him.” They then told the story, in moving words, of the atrocities they had suffered, and to the city as a good citizen”; Ibid. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 120. See Quentin Skinner, “Machiavelli’s ‘Discorsi’ and the Pre-humanist Origins of Republican Ideas,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, edited by Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1990, pp. 121–41. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine [Florentine Histories], III, 26. “These words, even though true, did not move the multitude in any way, either because of fear or because the killing of those two might have made the murderers hateful”: ibid., III, 27. English translation: Florentine Histories, Laura Banfield and Harvey Mansfield, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. 1988, p. 143. Ibid., III, 27. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, pp. 142–43.
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and concluded their plea with an appeal to the fear of God: “And if our countless ills do not move you, may fear of the wrath of God move you, for He has seen His churches sacked and burned and our people betrayed in His bosom.” The oration attained its purpose, Machiavelli comments, because “the atrociousness of the thing, first learned and then understood from the living voices of those who had suffered it, touched the magistracy; and without delay Astorre was made to return and was then condemned and admonished.” A typical oration based on the theme of necessity is the speech by the anonymous worker who spoke to his comrades during the mutiny of the Ciompi to exhort them to continue the revolt and to increase the level of violence. After a brief preface, the orator comes to the essential point: “But because arms have been taken up and many evils have been done, it appears to me that one must reason that arms must not be put aside, and that we must consider how we can secure ourselves from the evils that have been committed. Certainly I believe that if others do not teach us, necessity does.” In order to overcome the sense of inferiority felt by many of his fellow mutineers toward the city’s nobility, the orator appealed to the natural equality of all men: “For all men, having had the same beginning, are equally ancient and have been made by nature in one mode. Strip all of us naked, you will see that we are alike; dress us in their clothes and them in ours, and without a doubt we shall appear noble and they ignoble, for only poverty and riches make us unequal.” He then attempted to assuage their moral scruples by explaining that victory, however they might obtain it, never brings shame, and that it was not advisable to take the voice of their conscience too seriously: “For neither conscience nor infamy should dismay you, because those who win, in whatever mode they win, never receive shame from it. And we ought not to take conscience into account, for where there is, as with us, fear of hunger and prison, there cannot and should not be fear.” Finally, he concludes his speech by returning to the concept of necessity: “I confess this course is bold and dangerous, but when necessity presses, boldness is judged prudence; and spirited men never take account of the danger in great things.” This oration, Machiavelli comments, was effective. The orator was able to enflame the spirits of his fellow mutineers and persuade them to take up arms again. What rendered the oration so persuasive was the appeal to necessity, a
Ibid., IV, 21. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, pp. 167–68. Ibid., III, 13. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 122. Ibid. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, pp. 122–23. Ibid. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 123.
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motive that is more powerful than any other in urging men to undertake dangerous acts. As in Discourses on Livy, in the Florentine Histories too Machiavelli makes use of the technique of contrast to move his listeners to eschew bad examples and to emulate good examples. One exemplary case is the comparison between the social conflicts in ancient Rome and those in Florence: The grave and natural enmities that exist between the men of the people and the nobles, caused by the wish of the latter to command the former not to obey, are the cause of all evils that arise in cities. For from this diversity of humors all other things that agitate republics take their nourishment. This kept Rome disunited, and this, if it is permissible to compare little things with great, has kept Florence divided, although diverse effects were produced in one city and the other. For the enmities between the people and the nobles at the beginning of Rome that were resolved by disputing were resolved in Florence by fighting. Those in Rome ended with a law, those in Florence with the exile and death of many citizens; those in Rome always increased military virtue, those in Florence eliminated it altogether; those in Rome brought the city from equality in the citizens to a very great inequality, those in Florence reduced it from inequality to a wonderful equality. Machiavelli mentions God in many accounts of historical events. He speaks of God in one of the first chapters in which he recounts the turmoil occasioned by the barbarian invasions and the religious conflicts during the times of Honorius and Arcadius. The need to draw a broad historical outline in order to be able to describe the origins of Florence did not require that he focus on the “variations of religion” (transitions from one religion to another) and on the conflicts among the churches and among the sects. And yet Machiavelli includes a consideration on the consolatory power of religion: But among so many changes, change of religion was not of lesser moment, because in the struggle between the custom of the ancient “At other points we have discoursed of how useful is necessity to human actions and to what glory they have been led by it. As it has been written by certain moral philosophers, the hands and the tongue of men—two very noble instruments for ennobling him—would not have worked perfectly nor led human works to the height they are seen to be led to had they not been driven by necessity”; Machiavelli, Discorsi, III, 12 . English translation: Manfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 246. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, III, 1. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 105.
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faith and the miracles of the new, the gravest tumults and discords were generated among men. If indeed the Christian religion had been united, fewer disorders would have followed; but the struggles among the Greek Church, the Roman Church, and the Church at Ravenna— and even more, the struggle between the heretical and catholic sects— afflicted the world in many modes. Witness to this is Africa, which suffered more anguish on account of the Arian sect believed in by the Vandals than through their avarice or natural cruelty. Living thus, among so many persecutions, men bore the terror of their spirit written in their eyes, because, aside from the infinite evils they endured, for a good part of them the possibility of seeking refuge in God, in whom all the miserable are wont to hope, was lacking. Therefore, as the greater part of them were uncertain as to which God they ought to turn to, they died miserably, deprived of all help and all hope. When the subject matter allows him to point this out, Machiavelli reiterates the concept that he had already expressed in Discourses on Livy, that is, that without religion and a fear of God, republics are corrupted. One of the evident signs of the “common corruption of all the Italian cities,” states an anonymous orator, is that “because religion and fear of God have been eliminated in all, an oath and faith given last only as long as they are useful.” Instead, citizens who love liberty appeal to God: “Nor do I wish to say more to you than this: may God keep this city that no one of its citizens becomes prince of [Florence].” This is a God that in extreme circumstances helps the city: “But God, who in such extremities has always had a particular care for it, made an un-hoped-for accident arise that gave the king, the pope, and the Venetians something greater to think about than Tuscany.” The help of God, at times, is manifested through defeats and tragedies that force the city to rediscover virtue: “But, since God had willed the troops to be defeated, the loss would be that much more grave if others were abandoned; but if they faced fortune and applied what remedies they could, neither they would feel their loss nor the duke his victory.” At other times God prevents a city from expanding its dominion, even if in this way He causes a great displeasure to the citizens: “God and men had not wanted the Lucchese to come under their rule.” Machiavelli often has the protagonists of events say that God is an enemy to wicked man. He places the following words in the mouths of the citizens of Milan, in despair over Francesco Sforza’s betrayal:
Ibid., I, 5. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 15. Ibid., III, 5. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, pp. 109–110, 176–77, 341, 152, 203.
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And even if ambition blinds you, the whole world as witness to your wickedness will open your eyes; God will open them for you, if perjuries, if violated faith and betrayals displease Him, and He does not always wish to be the friend of wicked men, as up to now He has done for some hidden good. So do not promise yourself sure victory, for that will be kept from you by the just wrath of God; and we are ready to lose our liberty with death; if ever we cannot defend it, we will submit to any other prince rather than you. And even if our sins have been such that we have fallen into your hands against every wish of ours, have firm faith that the kingdom you have begun with deceit and infamy will come to an end for you or your sons with disgrace and harm. In response to these words, Francesco Sforza replied that “whether this was true or not, that God upon whom they called to avenge their injuries would demonstrate at the end of the war; through Him they will see which of them is more His friend, and which has fought with greater justice.” In that circumstance, God was friend to a wicked man: Francesco Sforza entered “Milan as prince the twenty-sixth of February in 1450,” and “was received with utmost and marvelous joy by those who not long before had defamed him with so much hatred.” At the time of the War of the Eight Saints, God on the other hand helped the Florentines, who were fighting for justice and against the pope: “But if God was just, if acts of violence were displeasing to Him, then those of his vicar must have displeased Him, and He must be glad that offended men, finding no refuge in that place, would have recourse to Him.” Machiavelli interpreted extraordinary events as punishments or warnings from God to men. In connection with the fire that burned the Church of Santo Spirito during the visit of the Duke of Milan in 1471, he mentions,
Ibid., VI, 20 English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 252; Machiavelli cites a diverse array of examples of the instrumental use of God to cover the most reprehensible of acts: “They used God as a means to oppress many others who remained in the city under the faith that had been given; and so that God be a participant in their treacheries, they had had many citizens imprisoned and killed in the midst of public and sacred ceremonies and solemn prayers—an act of impious and wicked example”; Ibid., VII, 19. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 298; “And so that God himself might appear to take part in their enterprise, they held public processions and solemn offices to thank Him for the honors they assumed”; Ibid., VII, 4. English translation: Bansfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 280. Ibid., VI, 21. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 253. Ibid., VI, 24. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 258. Ibid., VIII, 11. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, pp. 330–31.
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without discounting it, the popular belief that the fire was a punishment of God for the corrupt customs of the duke’s court: At that time was seen a thing never before seen in our city: this being the season of Lent, in which the Church commands that one fast by not eating meat, his court, without respect to Church or God, all fed on meat. And because many spectacles were held to honor him, among which was represented the giving of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles in the church of Santo Spirito, and because that church burned down as a result of the many fires that are made in such solemnities, it was believed by many that God, angered against us, had wished to show that sign of his wrath. Similar considerations come into play when he describes an extraordinary storm that ravaged Tuscany: Thereupon, when arms had been put away by men, it appeared that God wished to take them up Himself: so great was a wind storm that then occurred, which in Tuscany had effects unheard of in the past and for whoever learns of it in the future will have marvelous and memorable effects. . . . Without doubt, God wanted to warn rather than punish Tuscany; for, if such a storm had entered into a city among many and crowded houses and inhabitants, as it did enter among few and scattered oaks and trees and houses, without doubt it would have made ruin and torment greater than that which the mind can conjecture. But God meant for them that this small example should be enough to refresh among men the memory of His power. With his comments, Machiavelli meant to remind men that heaven is by no means unarmed, as the Catholic religion would have us believe, but is indeed inhabited by a God that threatens and chastises. He puts an armed God back in heaven and has God intervene in human affairs because he wants to combat a bad moral and religious education, and replace it with a way of living that is based on a love of liberty and virtue. Even though his friends jokingly tell him that he is “a greater prophet than the Hebrews or any other nation ever had,” he is no prophet, nor does he want to be, either armed or unarmed, but he uses the power of words to revive the religion that republics need.
Ibid., VII, 28. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 307. Ibid., VI, 34. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, pp. 270–71. Filippo Casavecchia to Niccolò Machiavelli, 17 June 1509, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, pp. 308–9.
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CHAPTER THREE
THE REPUBLIC AND ITS RELIGION
In Machiavelli’s view, a republic is a political constitution based on the rule of law and the common good, as well as a way of life that adheres to those principles: a “free way of life,” as he frequently wrote. In a republic the people are sovereign, even though in the republics of his own time, including the Florentine Republic, many were excluded from political rights, and governing was a privilege accorded only to a tiny minority. The people had the power to approve laws and to select the magistrates who would govern. A republic is created through the extraordinary virtue of its founders; it survives if it is well ordered and possesses good laws and good customs, and it is reborn, if and when it is reborn, through the virtue of its redeemers. The extraordinary virtue of both its founders and its redeemers, as well as the customs of its citizens, are in need of a religion that exhorts them to seek glory here on earth, that infuses them with courage, and that teaches them to serve the fatherland and to love liberty. Without this religion, republics cannot be created; they would be incapable of withstanding either external aggression or the evils of corruption from within; they would not have the moral strength to be reborn and to rediscover the basic principles of justice. The religion of virtue is not an accessory to the free life; it is, rather, its very soul. That is why Machiavelli places the founders of religions above the founders of states in his hierarchy of excellent men, and singles out first and foremost in the ranks of detestable men those who undermine and dissipate religions.
1. Republican Government and Religion The idea of the republic as a self-governing political community, based on the rule of law and on the common good, has a long history in Machiavelli’s intellectual and political context. According to republican political
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thought, cities that are self-governing (“proprio regimine”) are free. A free city is a city that recognizes no other greater power (“civitas quem superiorem non recognoscit”). The power to approve laws and appoint magistrates belongs to the citizens, in accordance with the principle of Roman law that “what concerns a large number of individuals must be decided by the entire sovereign body of the citizenry, acting with respect for the law and the procedures established by statute,” as Leonardo Bruni wrote. Only a self-governing republic can produce laws intended for the common good, thus enjoying a true civil life and true liberty. The most significant consequence of this approach to the conception of political liberty is that equality in the eyes of the law must be accompanied by an equal liberty to take part in the government of the republic. This was stated very clearly by Poggio Bracciolini in a letter to the Duke of Milan in 1438: “Our republic is not governed either by a number of citizens, nor by the aristocrats; rather the entire populace is allowed equal access to public office; this ensures that both the great and the lowly citizens, nobles and non-nobles are joined in the service of liberty, and in order to defend it, they will spare neither expense nor effort.” For republican theorists, the right to take part in sovereign deliberations and to stand for elections to public office is a fundamental aspect of liberty. They emphasize that this liberty is particularly dear to the interests of the citizens of the republics because it gives them an opportunity to achieve their own legitimate ambitions and refine their better moral and intellectual qualities. A well-ordered republic, then, must encourage the participation of the citizens by rewarding virtue and entrusting public office to those individuals who have shown an ability to serve the common good. As stated in the declaration that served as the preamble to the law
See Joseph Canning, The Political Thought of Baldus De Ubaldis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1987, p. 96; see also Diego Quaglioni, Civilis sapientia: dottrine giuridiche e dottrine politiche fra medioevo e età moderna, Maggioli, Rimini 1989. Leonardo Bruni, “Laudatio Florentinae Urbis,” in Opere letterarie e politiche di Leonardo Bruni, edited by Paolo Viti, Utet, Turin 1996, pp. 636–37. The source of this principle is the Corpus iuris civilis, Codex 5, 59, 5, 2. “Quod omnes similiter tangit, ab omnibus comprobetur.” The principle was cited in Florentine political debates. See Le Consulte della Repubblica Fiorentina, edited by Alessandro Gherardi, Florence 1969, vol. I, p. 175: “quae tangunt omnes debent ab omnibus approbari.” In the Latin text, Poggio Bracciolini uses the term aequo iure rather than aequa libertas. Epistolae, edited by Tommaso de’ Tonelli, Florence 1859, vol. II, p. 183. See Nicolai Rubinstein, Florentine Constitutionalism and Medici Ascendancy in the Fifteenth Century, in Florentine Studies, edited by Nicolai Rubinstein, London 1968, p. 448, n.4. “It is truly marvelous the degree to which these faculties of attaining honors and the possibility of achieving them, when offered to a free people, are capable of exciting the engagement of the citizens”; Leonardo Bruni, “Oratio in funere Iohannis Strozzi,” in Opere letterarie e politiche, pp. 716–19.
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that introduced election by lot in 1458, citizens who have shown prudence and rectitude should be gradually promoted to the highest public offices, while those “who live in such a way as to be unworthy of public honors should not be chosen for the responsibilities of government.” If a republic wishes to remain free, republican political theorists warn, it must have a ranking or hierarchy of honors based solely on virtue. In order to ensure that participation in the public deliberations was truly an exercise of political freedom, the citizens must be able to express their ideas without fear. Freedom of speech in deliberative councils, stated one of the participants in the debates concerning the reform of the city statutes in November 1458, is the most precious possession. Another participant emphasized that the difference of opinions that took place in the council chambers was not to be taken as a signal of civil discord but rather as the best possible way to discover the truth. A republic cannot claim to be free, wrote Alamanno Rinuccini in his Dialogus de libertate, if through fear, corruption, or for any other cause, the citizens are forced to refrain from openly and freely stating their views. The preamble to the draft of the constitutional reform dated 23 December 1494 that established the new republican government following the expulsion of the Medici clearly and precisely documents the fact that the Florentines considered freedom of speech in public councils, and the rightful allocation of honors, to be two fundamental conditions of political liberty. According to that document, the “ public and universal good” consisted “of advising, arranging, and ordering freely in public and private cases and in the establishment of the best and most carefully considered provisions and laws and in the just distribution of honors and weights such as to create a well established republic.” Along with self-government, one fundamental principle of the republic is the rule of law. In the view of the humanist and prehumanist political theorists, the republic, or civitas, is an association of individuals bound together by shared rules of justice. Men established civil communities, writes Brunetto Latini in his influential Tresor (Book of the Treasure), in order to live in peace and security under the protection of laws. A civil community
Delizie degli eruditi toscani, edited by Idelfonso di San Luigi Cambiagi, Florence 1779, vol. XII, p. 288. See Rubinstein, Florentine Constitutionalism, p. 458, n.1. Alamanno Rinuccini, “Dialogus de libertate,” Atti e memorie dell’Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere ‘La Colombaria’ 22 (1957), p. 283. Provvisioni concernenti l’ordinamento della Repubblica Fiorentina 1494–1512, edited by Giorgio Cadoni, Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, Rome 1994, vol. 1, p. 40. See Macrobius, Commento al Somnium Scipionis, edited by Mario Regali, Giardini, Pisa 1983.
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(“cité”), then, is, to use the words of Cicero, an association of men who live in accordance with a single law. Following the translation into Latin of Aristotle’s Politics, around 1260, political writers used the concept of “civil life” as a synonym for “political life.” Giles of Rome, in his De Regimine Principum Libri III, completed in 1280, speaks of a political community, or civitas (“communitatem politicam sivi civitatem”), and calls it a necessary condition for living well, that is, for living in accordance with virtue. Likewise, in the neo-Aristotelian version, the fundamental nature of political life is the rule of law. To live politically (“vivere politicum”), wrote Giles of Rome, means living in accordance with good laws and good statues. The rule of law marked the boundary between civil or political life and tyranny. Since no tyrant accepted the restraint of laws, a tyrant’s rule violates the fundamental prerequisite of civil or political living. While a monarchic government can still be defined as a political government, writes Coluccio Salutati in De Tyranno, tyranny cannot be so described because the “principatus politicus” is the only one in which sovereign power is limited by laws. Thirty years later, around 1430, Giovanni Cavalcanti described the custom of making the most important political decisions in the homes of the powerful citizens rather than in the public buildings as a practice typical of a “tyrannical and non-political way of life.” The jurists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries also provided a significant, if often overlooked, contribution to the development of the theory of republican self-government. They defined the political man as a man who lives in a civil community, emphasizing that to live politically or in a civil fashion means living in accordance with the rules of civil law and justice. The civil or political life is something different from the political regime, that is, from republican government. Giles of Rome maintains, for instance, that the form of government most in keeping with political life is an hereditary monarchy. Tolomeo da Lucca, in contrast, writes that the form of government best suited to achieve and preserve political life is the rule of magistrates elected by the citizens for limited periods of time.
“Por ce dist Tuilles ke cités est un assemblemens de gens a abiter un lieu et vivre a une loi”; Brunetto Latini, Li livres dou Tresor, edited by Francis J. Carmody, Berkeley-Los Angeles 1948, III, 73, 3. “secundum aliquas leges et secundum aliquas laudabiles ordinationes”; Giles of Rome, De Regimine Principum Libri III, Rome 1607, III, I, 2, p. 404. Coluccio Salutati, De Tyranno, I, 6, edited by Francesco Ercole, Walther Rothschild, Berlin-Leipzig 1914, p. xiii. Giovanni Cavalcanti, Istorie fiorentine, edited by Guido di Pino, Aldo Martello, Milan 1944, II, 1; see also Claudio Varese, Storia e politica nella prosa del Quattrocento, Einaudi, Turin 1961, pp. 93–129. See Canning, The Political Thought of Baldus De Ubaldis, pp. 159–69.
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Republican government (“politia” or “principatus politicus”), Tolomeo explains, is the appropriate government for civil communities (“civitates”) and goes on to specify that by republican government he means the form of government in which the citizens elect rulers who are subject to the laws and statutes of the city. Republican political theorists of the fifteenth century identified civil or political life with mixed government, understood as that form of government that wisely combines the virtues of popular government, aristocracy, and monarchy. The argument that mixed government is the most appropriate way of encouraging true political life is present above all in the writings of both theorists and historians, who identified the constitution of the Republic of Venice as the best model to imitate. The historian Lorenzo de’ Monaci summarized the prevailing notion of his own time when he wrote that the finest political constitution is one in which the laws are sovereign and that the best way to ensure the rule of law is to establish a mixed government emulating the example of Venice. In a public oration delivered in 1493, which Machiavelli might well have listened to, Alamanno Rinuccini emphasized, with a reference to Cicero, that justice and good laws are the foundation of all “humano vivere et maxime politico et civile” — “human, and especially political and civil, life.” Less than a year later, in the Treatise on the Government of the City of Florence (Trattato circa el reggimento della città di Firenze) that served as a theoretical and political foundation for the republican government that would then summon Machiavelli to take the office of secretary, Girolamo Savonarola explained in a detailed fashion that the true civil government is a government “for all the people,” and that as such, it is the most reliable shield against tyranny. Before examining Machiavelli’s writings, we should analyze the relationship between civil life and the liberty of the city and of the citizens: this theme was of great importance in the political thinking of the Renaissance. For the jurists and political philosophers of the fourteenth century, the essential element of political liberty was independence. They understand independence as a city’s power to endow itself with statutes and
Tolomeo da Lucca, De Regimine Principum ad Regem Cypri, II.8. “Ubi vero leges principantur, est vera politia, et politicum est nisi quod bonum est”; Lorenzo de’ Monaci, Chronicon de rebus Venetiis, in Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, VIII, Venice 1758, pp. 276–77. Alamanno Rinuccini, Lettere ed orazioni, edited by Vito R. Giustiniani, Olschki, Florence 1953, pp. 202 and 191. Girolamo Savonarola, Trattato circa el reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, in Prediche sopra Aggeo con il Trattato circa el reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, edited by Luigi Firpo, Belardetti, Rome 1965, p. 442. See in this connection Donald Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1970, pp. 289–315.
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laws; its opposite was the state of dependence on the will of the emperor, in which a city was given statutes and laws by the emperor, or was, at best, required to ask his approval. Much as with the liberty of the city, the liberty of a citizen consisted of independence from the will of another individual. It can exist only if the laws govern men, rather than men governing the laws. The existence of a true political and civil life in a free city, then, is a necessary precondition to the liberty of a citizen. The source that jurists use to interpret political liberty as the absence of personal dependency is Roman law, and in particular those passages in which the status of a free individual is defined as the status of a person who is not subject to the power (“dominium”) of another person. The opposite of the free condition is the servile condition, that is, the condition of the individual who is dependent on the will of another. Just as a city or a people are free as long as they live under the rule of their own laws, likewise an individual is free as long as he is not subject to the will of another individual (“sui iuris”). From this principle, Roman political writers derived the corollary that if a people receives its laws from a king, it is not free but enslaved: it lives, not in a state of liberty, but in a servile condition, that is, in a state similar to that of a slave with respect to his master. While monarchy in the narrowest sense—that is, in the sense of an absolute monarchy—is similar to dominion (“dominium”), the republic is the form of government and the way of life of a free people. One significant consequence of political liberty understood as the condition of an independent people that lives in accordance with its own laws is that liberty entails constraints or hindrances on the actions of individuals. This interpretation of political liberty is described eloquently in three classic texts that became the core of modern republicanism. The first is Livy’s statement that the liberty that the Romans won for themselves following the expulsion of their kings consisted first and foremost in the fact that laws were more powerful than men. The second is the speech, Concerning the theory of republican government in the fourteenth century, see Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. II, in particular, pp. 10–117. The Latin expressions that describe the status of a free man and of a slave are respectively “persona sui iuris” and “alieni iuris”; see Chaim Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome during the Late Republic and the Early Principate, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1950, pp. 1–15; see also Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1998; Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995. See Livy, XXXVII, 54, 26: “Carthago libera cum suis legibus est”; and XXXIII, 32, 5: “Liberos, immunes, suis legibus esse iubent Corinthios.” “Non in regno populum Romanum sed in libertate esse”; Livy, II, 15, 3. “Liberi iam hinc populi Romani res pace belloque gestas, annuos magistratus, imperiaque legum potentiora quam hominum peragam”; Livy, II, I, 1.
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reported by Sallust, in which Aemilius Lepidus proclaimed that the Roman people are free because they obey no one but the law. The third is a passage from Cicero’s Pro Cluentio: “legum . . . idcirco omnes servi sumus ut liberi esse possimus” (“We are slaves of the laws in order that we may be free.”) These aspects of Roman political wisdom were adopted and reformulated by Florentine civic humanism. Liberty, writes Coluccio Salutati, is a “gentle brake” (“dulce libertatis frenum”) that the law imposes on all citizens. True liberty, Leonardo Bruni reiterates, consists of the equality ensured by law, and it remains intact as long as the laws are more powerful than the citizens. In the second half of the fifteenth century, it was chiefly the opposition to the Medici that warned that the foundation of civil liberty is the rule of law. A republic that wishes to “live in freedom,” writes Alamanno Rinuccini in his Ricordi, should never allow a citizen to have “more power than the laws.” A few years later, in the Dialogus de libertate, he reiterated the same concept with the words of Cicero: “Legibus parere summa Libertas est” (“To obey the laws is the greatest liberty”). True laws have a divine character for the humanists. The objective of laws is to supervise human affairs, and their goal is the good, and not just any good, but that most divine good, which is the common good. Since republican government is better suited than any others to promote the common good and liberty, God prefers it above any other form of government. With perfect consistency in terms of these principles, the fifteenth “Nam quid a Pyrrho, Hannibale, Philippoque et Antiocho defensum est aliud quam libertas et suae cuique sedes, neu cui nisi legibus pareremus?” Sallust, Orationes et epistulae excertae de historiis, 4. Cicero, Pro Cluentio, 146. Letter to Niccolodio Bartolomei, April 1369, in Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, 4 vols., edited by Francesco Novati, Istituto Storico Italiano, Rome 1891–1911, vol. 1, p. 90. See Rubinstein, Florentine Constitutionalism, pp. 442–61, in particular, p. 445; and Leonardo Bruni, Historiarum Florentini populi libri XII, edited by Emilio Santini and Carmine di Pierro, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, vol. XIX, part 3, S. Lapi, Città di Castello, p. 82; see also Bruni, Laudatio Florentinae Urbis, in Opere letterarie e politiche: “Et iuris quidem gratia magistratus sunt constituti, iisque imperium datum est et in facinorosos homines animadversio, maximeque ut provideant ne cuius potentia plus valeat in civitate quam leges,” pp. 634–35; “Nec est locus ullus in terris in quo ius magis equum sit omnibus. Nusquam enim viget tanta Libertas et maiorum cum minoribus exequata condicio,” pp. 642–43. See Ricordi storici di Filippo di Cino Rinuccini dal 1282 al 1460 colla continuazione di Alamanno e Neri suoi figli, edited by Giuseppe Aiazzi, Florence 1840, p. 103. Rinuccini, Dialogus de libertate, pp. 267–303. Coluccio Salutati, De nobilitate legum et medicinae, edited by Eugenio Garin, Vallecchi, Florence 1947, chapter 5. Eugenio Garin, I cancellieri umanisti della Repubblica Fiorentina da Coluccio Salutati a Bartolomeo Scala, in Idem, La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano, Sansoni, Florence 1961, pp. 10–11 and 14–15.
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century humanists maintained that the Christian religion teaches the true morality of the citizen. Matteo Palmieri, in his Vita civile, explained that the “human nation” is subject to two laws: the “almost divine and natural” law, and the laws, similar to them, that have been written and approved by men. Religion derives from divine and natural laws. Men recognize themselves in religion and keep it alive because, in their souls, there lives “a supernal essence, eternally perfect, in divine union,” and it commands them to consider their duties to the republic and toward humanity as duties to God. In order to instill and preserve in citizens the sentiment of social duties as an obligation to God, Palmieri emphasizes, the republic must take great and diligent care of religious worship and teach its people to love justice and the fatherland by educating good and venerated priests and by using ceremonies that capture and stir the emotions of the multitude. Palmieri further expands on his ideas concerning the republic and religion in his Libro del poema chiamato Città di Vita, which he wrote between 1455 and 1464. This work had a troubled existence because of the strong suspicions of heresy, suspicions that grew even stronger immediately after Palmieri’s death in 1475. In Palmieri’s view, religion is the inseparable companion of justice and the virtue that, more than any other, is crucial to civil life. To Palmieri, a city that lived in accordance with this religion would be a perfect republic, like the one that Plato chose to imagine. Since human corruption does not allow such perfection, civil wisdom advises us to attempt to attain here on earth not necessarily Plato’s republic, but the republic that Cicero depicted, “as clearly as can be obtained here on earth.” In the earthly republic as well, men can live and rule in accordance with justice and, for those who live according to justice, Palmieri assured, the reward will be the eternal city. Just as other political writers of civil humanism had done before him, Palmieri insisted on the belief that God loves the honest life and wishes to ensure that it is preserved and that without the restraints of religion, an honest life is not possible. God, last of all, rewards as an excellent human endeavor “the extermination of tyrants for the good of the many” and “the establishment of just governments and of peace.”
Matteo Palmieri, Della vita civile, edited by Felice Battaglia, Zanichelli, Bologna 1944, p. 93. Ibid., p. 93. Libro del poema chiamato Città di Vita composto da Matteo Palmieri Fiorentino, edited by Margaret Rooke, in Smith College Studies in Modern Languages 8 and 9 (1927–1928), vol. 8, pp. vii–ix. Palmieri, Città di Vita, III, XXII, vv. 26–35. “Qui saper basti insino al cielo trovoro / esser saliti que che vixon giusti / & con giustitia in terra governoro”; ibid., vv. 49–50. Ibid., vv. 6–10.
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Bartolomeo Sacchi, also known as the Platina (1421–81), was of the same opinion, and in his De optimo cive, an exemplary text of fifteenthcentury Florentine civil thought, he reiterated that religion is necessary to the preservation of republics, and that the Christian religion is the best suited to the education of stalwart and good citizens. Platina sets off from the assumption that the ultimate goal of republics, as Aristotle tells us, is to allow the citizens to live well. No man is capable of governing so great and significant an entity as a republic unless he has the guidance of God. Since religion is the true foundation of the republic, a ruler must take great care to ensure that in the city the worship of the God of the Christian religion is piously and sacredly observed. For that matter, it is clearly demonstrated just how great the power of religion and piety toward God is by the fact that those peoples who preserve their religion and respect the cult of the divine, as the Roman people did as a result of the ordinances introduced by Numa, have achieved astonishing progress. If this is true for the false religion of the ancients, it is therefore all the more true of the sacred and chaste Christian religion. Our religion, Platina explains, instructs us to pursue justice, strength, and modesty; it teaches us shame, respect for promises made, constancy, and honesty. It commands us to shun carnal violence, deceit, wicked actions, rage, turpitude, lust, injustice, sensuousness, sloth, and foolhardiness. Far more than the ancient religion of the pagans, based on fables, our religion, proven by the blood of countless martyrs and by the opinion of the most learned men whom the church honors, is well equipped to sustain the life of the republic. It is therefore the duty of those who rule to encourage in any way and with all efforts devotion to the Christian religion and to ward off superstition, that is, the cult of false gods. With this end in mind, a prince must protect himself from hypocrites and flatterers who have no faith of their own and who work in countless ways to appear highly religious. Love of the fatherland is a duty that comes second only to one’s duties toward God, and a good ruler must devote the same effort and care to love of the fatherland as he devotes to religious worship. Inasmuch as it is an expression of charity (“charitatem patriae”), Platina points out, love of the fatherland is not only entirely in keeping with the ethical and civil teach “ut Aristoteli placet, eorum qui in civitate degunt institutio, cuiusque finis est bene vivere”; Bartolomeo Sacchi (the Platina), De optimo cive, edited by Felice Battaglia, Zanichelli, Bologna 1944, p. 185. “reipublicae singulare fundamentum religio est”; Ibid., pp. 186–87. Ibid., pp. 187–88. Ibid., pp. 189–90.
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ings of the Christian religion, but is even a necessary part of it. Concerning love of the fatherland there is no intellectual division between Roman republican thinking and Christian ethics and therefore there is no need to hark back to pagan beliefs in search of a religion that teaches the love of the fatherland that is so necessary to a republic. The idea that a republic has need of the Christian religion to serve as its moral essence and to regulate its customs encountered, at the end of the fifteenth century, its most steadfast, but also its most extreme, formulation in the sermons of Girolamo Savonarola and in Savonarola’s Treatise on the Government of the City of Florence, written in 1494 at the behest of the Signoria. Savonarola openly hoped that the republican government that was established on his advice following the expulsion of the Medici would operate in a devout manner to make Florence into a latter-day Zion, living in unity in the love of God and in a mutual love among the citizenry, and becoming a powerful source of inspiration for the moral and religious reformation of Italy and the world. Florence, he urged, must make Christ its king: not only because, once Christ was king, no one else would be able to become prince of the city, but also because taking Christ as its king meant taking on the solemn commitment to live in accordance with divine law. Savonarola reiterated frequently that he was preaching religious reform and the establishment of a civil government at God’s behest. The new republican government that Florence had established for itself was a part of God’s plan to save the city. Its principles and its institutions were entirely in keeping with both natural law and the teachings of the church. Both natural law and Christian doctrine agree in condemning tyranny as an enemy to true religion and as the greatest political and moral evil. A tyrant feigns piety and religiosity but pursues and cultivates only the surface aspects of devotion, rewards bad prelates, and rejects the good ones, thus destroying all sincere religious sentiment. True civil government on the other hand guides the city toward the beatitude that Christ promised men, encourages proper living, and supports religion understood not as a set of external practices related to worship, but rather as a deeply felt truth, experienced with sincere faith through the teachings of good ministers. A civil or republican government derives from God and receives all its benefits from God. The religiosity and good customs of citizens render
See the paraphrase of Cicero’s words in De Officiis, on pp. 190–91. Savonarola, “Prediche sopra Aggeo,” in Prediche sopra Aggeo con il Trattato circa el reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, pp. 422–23. Ibid., p. 436 Ibid., pp. 456–66. See in this connection Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence, pp. 289–316.
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perfect the government of a city, both because they draw on the favor of God, and because the citizens summoned to govern will be capable of giving good advice, once again as a result of the enlightenment and illumination of God. At the same time, Savonarola did not fail to point out that the first duty of good government, and the most reliable bulwark against tyranny, is the true religion. Tyranny offends all cities, but more than all the others, it is an offense to the cities in which the citizens cultivate Christian piety with sincere love. Florence was profoundly Christian, and if tyranny was finally eradicated, it could become a perfect Christian city; as long as tyranny could rule the city or threaten it, however, Florence would be unable to live in accordance with the true religion. The warning that Savonarola launched in the pages of the Treatise on the Government of the City of Florence, and from the pulpit, was urgent and peremptory: either the true religion, or tyranny. Savonarola recommended four principles for good government: the fear of God, the love of the common good, peace and reciprocal love among the citizens, and the respect of justice. He wanted the citizens of Florence to look to the Consiglio Maggiore (Major Council), the soul of the republic, as a special gift from God, and therefore that they view it with profound devotion. They must sense their duty to make the republican government increasingly perfect and just as an obligation that each of them owes to God: Every Florentine citizen who wants to be a good member of his city and to lend his support to it, as everyone should, must believe that this Council and civil government have been mandated by God, as is indeed true, not only insomuch as every good government proceeds from Him, but also through the special providence God has at present for the city of Florence; concerning this, anyone who has been here for the past three years and who is not blind and totally without judgment clearly understands that if it had not been for the hand of God, there would never have been such a government in the face of so much and such strong opposition, nor would it be able to maintain itself up to this day against so many traitors and so few champions. But because God wants us to exercise our intellect and free will, which He has given us, He makes those matters appertaining to human gov Savonarola, Trattato circa el reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, in Prediche sopra Aggeo con il Trattato circa el reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, pp. 467–68. Ibid., pp. 469–70. Ibid., pp. 477–79.
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ernment imperfect at first so that we with His help might make them perfect. If Florence is just, Savonarola assured, it will also be great and powerful because the people will happily accept the rule of a just republic that lives in accordance with a Christian manner. Rome was not Christian, but it was just, and God, who wishes the peoples to be governed with justice, gave that city dominion over the world. Florence, if it so desires, can follow Rome’s example. From civil government come the most precious treasures: true liberty, security of property and person, the honor of women and children, the progress of the arts and commerce, prosperity, free marriages, and the desire to produce children. The conclusion of the Treatise on the Government of Florence is worth quoting, because it summarizes the idea that Savonarola had of the divine value of the republic: Given then, as we have proved, that the one who rules well is happy and like to God, and that the one who rules badly is unhappy and like to the devil, every citizen ought to forsake his sins and selfish concerns and make the effort to rule well and to preserve and augment and make perfect this civil government for the honor of God and the salvation of souls (all the more so considering that He has especially given us this government on account of the love He bears for this city), in order that he may be happy in this world and the next, through the grace of our Savior, Jesus Christ, King of kings and Lord of lords, Who with the Father and the Holy Ghost lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen. The prose of Savonarola fails to make it entirely clear whether it is a good religion that creates a good civil government or whether it is necessary to have a good civil government before it becomes possible to see a good religion flourish in the city. This would be a problem for a philosopher, not for a preacher and prophet like Savonarola, who had every right, as such, to say in one case that religion demands good civil government and helps to preserve it, and in other cases that good government encourages good religion. In contrast with philosophers, preachers and prophets are chiefly interested in being effective, and care little for doctrinal consistency. From a more purely theoretical point of view, the relationship between republican institutions and religiosity has to do with the relationship between political orderings and ways of life. Religion forms part of a people’s customs and at the same time it is a force that can change those customs:
Ibid., pp. 476–77. Ibid., p. 487. Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence, pp. 302–303.
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for the better (when it encourages hostility to a tyrannical or princely government); or for the worse (when it is used to justify corruption). A republic must eject bad priests and encourage and preserve intact and uncorrupted religious worship, and indeed it should establish “a most perfect cult” and an “excellent Christian way of life.” In this way, Florence will restore the way of life of the early Christians; it will become the New Jerusalem, mirror of true religion in the world, “an earthly paradise” that lives “in jubilation and song,” where the children will be as angels. Supported by Christian living, the civil government will become more celestial than earthly. In Savonarola’s millenarian vision, the republic and religion are two aspects of the same reality. The city taken as a whole, its institutions, and its way of life become a true church, placing themselves in the service of good Christian living; at the same time, the church is fully realized in the republic into which it instills its spiritual patrimony. The union of religion and republic is emblematic of the victory of the divine plan on earth and the reconciliation between heaven and earth, between the human and the divine. The problem of the liberty of other peoples and the other cities under Florentine domination is of no concern to Savonarola. His overriding objective is to ensure that the Florentines devote themselves wholeheartedly to political and religious reform. He seeks not only a new republican leader, but a redeemer, a politician who can attain a religious and moral reformation, and who is himself a prophet. For that reason, he condemns the saying commonly attributed to Cosimo de’ Medici, that states are not held with paternosters, as an example of the irreligious cynicism that destroys both civil living and Christian living. For that same reason, he emphasizes the idea that the more a republic is spiritual, the stronger it becomes and that those who govern become true rulers only inasmuch as they obey Christian morality. He states specifically, Savonarola, “Prediche sopra Aggeo,” in Prediche sopra Aggeo con il Trattato circa el reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, pp. 336–37. See also Pasquale Villari, La storia di Girolamo Savonarola e de’ suoi tempi, 2 vols., new ed., Le Monnier, Florence 1887–88, vol. I, Appendix, p. xiv, Saggio di sommarii autografi delle Lezioni fatte in San Marco ai suoi frati, where Savonarola writes: “Lex est ordinatio rationis ad bonum comune, ab eo qui curam comunitatis habet promulgata,” p. xiii, and establishes a parallel between human or civil law and the eternal law “promulgata ab eo qui habet curam comunitatis, idest a Deo, qui universa gubernat ad bonum comune, id est ad se ipsum qui est ome bonum, iuxta Ex., 333 Ostendat tibi omne bonum.” Savonarola believed that the political and religious reform of Florence was a return to the ancient way of living. See Felix Gilbert, “Florentine Political Assumptions in the Period of Savonarola and Soderini,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20 (1957), p. 211. Savonarola, “Trattato circa el reggimento e governo della città di Firenze,” in Prediche sopra Aggeo con il Trattato circa el reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, pp. 469–70, 466–69, and 481–87. Savonarola, “Prediche sopra Aggeo,” in Prediche sopra Aggeo con il Trattato circa el reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, pp. 134–35.
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however, that electing to public office men who are good but foolish is a way of undermining “the honor of God, the common good, and the honor and reputation” of a city. The Florentine political elite shared only in part the millenarian vision of Florence as a New Jerusalem. It accepted, on the other hand, and almost without exception, the idea that the republican constitution of 1494 was a divine gift, that God had a special love for Florence, and that the city’s respect for the law of God and for religious worship assured it of God’s friendship. When the most respected and influential citizens of Florence took the floor in sessions and in deliberative and advisory bodies to offer their carefully thought-out advice on problems of domestic politics and international affairs, they would emphasize the idea that Florence was a religious republic and that it needed religion. For the Florentines, God is all-powerful and intervenes whenever He wishes in human affairs. Fortune is often malevolent, but God “can alter fortune,” as an orator explained in the session of 19 August 1505. We must turn to God for wise advice. At times of grave danger, it is necessary that priests organize processions, that the republic increase its charity to the poor, and that the miraculous image of the Madonna dell’Impruneta be solemnly conveyed into the city. During the crisis in the spring of 1512, which led to the dissolution of the republican regime, a number of members of the advisory body suggested delaying all their deliberations for one day so that they could gather in prayer. The Florentines believed that governing on behalf of the public good was a religious duty, in the precise sense of a duty to God. To fail to perform that duty entailed divine punishment. When someone works toward a just cause, on the other hand, “God must favor his efforts.” Even in cases where the defense of the republic has been entrusted to men who have erred through their sins, God will still be at their side. For the followers of Savonarola, it was necessary in all public deliberations always to put Christian principles above the principles dictated by human reason. They called the Great Council (Consiglio Grande) the “soul” and “the life of our city.” Since it was a gift of God and dear to God, the Great Council had succeeded in withstanding the attacks of the enemies of free
Savonarola, Prediche italiane ai Fiorentini, La Nuova Italia, Perugia 1930, vol. 2, p. 390. See Gilbert, Florentine Political Assumptions in the Period of Savonarola and Soderini, p. 207. Ibid. Ibid. “Referring always rather to Christian advice rather than philosophical advice because it is more in keeping with God,” 17 July 1512: ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. 210.
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living. The belief that republican institutions and civil living were a gift of God had as its political consequence the belief that those institutions were perfect and that the only way to reform them would be to draw them back to their original principles. A significant document of the republican religion in Machiavelli’s Florence is the speech by Lamberto del Nero Cambi in favor of the law imposing a tithe on the revenues of priests. His oration is entirely inspired by the religion of the fatherland, taken not as an alternative to the Christian religion, but as the true and right interpretation of that religion. After a brief preamble, Lamberto del Nero explains that Republics and kingdoms, and more generally all states, as they are acquired, thus they are maintained, either by force through arms, or by love through religion, or with both one and the other thing taken together; and in my own view, if one of those two elements were to be absent, I would prefer to be deprived of the force of arms, rather than being deprived of religion, as I judge it not only more pious but also more secure to entrust oneself to the will of God than to place oneself in the power of men. And it is a true thing that, both religion and arms need—indeed, demand—not merely good laws, which are important, but good men, who set their hands to those laws, and ensure that they are justly and inviolably observed and executed on both one side and the other. In order to reinforce his argument, he cites the Romans and urges his listeners to follow their example: If the Gentiles so greatly revered—as we see in the Roman republic, better ordered than all other republics—their own religion, which was manifestly false, then what should we Christians do with respect to our own religion, which is indubitably true? And if they punished so harshly those who violated or besmirched their ceremonies, then what chastisement can be administered that is not trifling to those who violate or besmirch our own ceremonies? It strikes me that I have observed, while reading ancient histories, that men have been—not merely better—but greater and more prudent, the more they have emphasized and always followed the matters of religion; nor do I believe that there is a greater sign, or better argument that a certain city or region must choose between either quickly changing or falling into ruin, than seeing in that place either changes in or scorn of a divine cult.
Ibid.
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As he draws to his conclusion, he levels against the papacy the charge that it has corrupted the Christian religion: Those who say that the popes have been absolutely the prime and foremost cause of our ruin and miseries, as well as of the servitude of Italy, do not speak the truth; because it was not the popes, but the ambition of the popes, and the avarice of the popes, and the infinite lust and cruelty of the popes that caused and continue to cause all of our ills. Their vast greed and incredible wickedness, not the popes themselves, have annihilated and virtually extinguished the Christian faith, which is in and of itself holy and good, but which is doubtless also highly useful, indeed, entirely necessary, not only so that we may live in beatitude in the world beyond, but also to live securely in this world. Last, in the peroration, he appeals to the tradition of Florentine republican Christianity: “Read your histories, and you will find that eight men, who were at the time the most religious and Catholic men to be found, having shown greater respect for the common good than to the private interests of a few priests, won so much favor among the populace, and so much benevolence among one and all, that they are were generally called, and are still known today, when we think or talk of them, as the Otto Santi (Eight Saints).” When, at the end of the third decade of the sixteenth century, the Florentine experiment with republican government was on the wane, there was a corresponding decline in the faith in a God who loved republics. One piece of evidence of this decline is found in Guicciardini’s reflections in his Cose fiorentine (1528). In this text, Guicciardini reports the belief that God loves the freedom of peoples as a commonly held opinion in Florence, but he cautiously abstains from adopting that opinion as his own. He neither criticizes confiding in God nor expressing gratitude to Him, but he exhorts his reader to be wise and to hope for God’s help as a reward for wisdom rather than as a remedy for foolishness or madness: “It is quite appropriate to put one’s hopes in God, to recommend oneself with prayers and good deeds, but then to follow the advice of reason and to hope that God will help you if you behave sagely, and not to do wrong in order to have things turn out well, and behaving in accordance with the call of reason, and in all other things resign oneself to God; by doing otherwise you do not placate Him, rather you irritate Him and you give Him
Benedetto Varchi, Storia fiorentina, X. 9. Francesco Guicciardini, Le cose fiorentine, edited by Roberto Ridolfi, Olschki, Florence 1945, p. 124.
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good reason to transform His mercy into righteous wrath.” These are words that express a stern criticism of the religion of indolence, and they tell us that even a strictly observant Catholic and a clear-eyed realist like Guicciardini sensed the link between the republic and a civil religion.
2. The Religion of Liberty Machiavelli’s republican theory, like that of the humanists, strongly believes in the ideal of “political and civil way of life.” Any form of government, including a republican or popular government, that fails to satisfy the requirements of civil life, is either a tyranny or a corrupt republic. In full agreement with the tradition of political thought that I have summarized here, Machiavelli considered the rule of law to be a fundamental principle of civil life. In Discourses on Livy, he contrasts a “political way of life” with tyranny understood as “absolute power.” In other places, he separates political life and corruption: “Two things are to be considered here: one, that one has to seek glory in a corrupt city by modes other than in one that still lives politically.” In a corrupt city, he explains, “well ordered laws do not help” and “neither laws nor orders can be found that are enough to check a universal corruption.” When he speaks of the rule of law, Machiavelli always means a government of just laws and statutes that tend to promote the common good. In complete agreement with the Ciceronian doctrine and with the interpretation that the humanists gave of it, Machiavelli claims that a law is a legitimate command that respects the principles of fairness and equity. As an anonymous orator eloquently explains in the Florentine Histories, in order to restore the “true free and civil life,” Florence needs new laws and new statutes that will protect the common good against the power of fac Francesco Guicciardini, “Ragioni che consigliano la Signoria di Firenze ad accordarsi con Clemente VII”, in Scritti politici, edited by Roberto Palmarocchi, Laterza, Bari 1933, pp. 218–19. Concerning Machiavelli and the republican tradition, see Nicolai Rubinstein, “Machiavelli and Florentine Republican Experience,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, edited by Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1990, pp. 3–11; Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1978, vol. I, The Renaissance; Skinner, Machiavelli, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1981; Giovanni Silvano, ‘Vivere civile’ e ‘governo misto’ a Firenze nel primo Cinquecento, Pàtron, Bologna 1985. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 25. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 61. Ibid., III, 8 English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 238. Ibid., I, 17. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 48. Ibid., I, 18. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 49.
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tions and will replace the laws and statutes ordered “not in accordance with free life but by the ambition of that party which has come out on top.” The same orator, though it is of course Machiavelli himself who is speaking, states as well that the laws against the common good were one of the effects of a bad religious mentality. In contrast, the good laws and the good orders of the Romans sprang from the love of the common good that their religion instilled. Since the rule of law and the common good are the essential features of a civil way of life, the best government will be one that is most likely to ensure these two goods. A “political way of life” can be attained either through a republican form of government or else through a monarchic government, on the condition that the sovereign power is, in either case, regulated by laws: “a prince who can do what he wishes is crazy; a people that can do what it wishes is not wise.” Between a people “fettered” by the laws and a prince likewise “obligated to the laws,” Machiavelli believes that the former is preferable to the latter, because it is more apt to choose better rulers and to safeguard the common good. In his defense of the superiority of a republican government over a monarchy, Machiavelli makes use of the classic argument that if the deliberations over matters of general interest are entrusted to the many, it is more likely that the common good will prevail over narrow and individual interests. “And without doubt,” he writes, “this common good is not observed if not in republics, since all that is for that purpose is executed, and although it may turn out to harm this or that private individual, those for whom the aforesaid does good are so many that they can go ahead with it against the disposition of the few crushed by it.” Even when he is discussing the matter of “Where the Guard of Freedom May Be Settled More Securely, in the People or in the Great”—that is, the establishment of a specific magistracy charged with monitoring the legality of political decisions—his chief concern is defending the rule of law. If we consider the aims of the nobility and the aims of ordinary citizens, he writes, we clearly see that the nobility desires power, while the commonfolk wish only to avoid domination, and therefore to live freely: “So when those who are popular are posted as the guard of freedom, it is reasonable that they have more care for it, and since they are not able to
Niccolò Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, III, 5. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 110. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 58. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 118. Ibid., II, 2. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses on Livy, p. 130. Concerning the guard of liberty, and more in general, on the theme of legality in the republican tradition, see the book by Riccardo Ferrante, La difesa della legalità: I sindacatori della repubblica di Genova, Giappichelli, Turin 1995, pp. 279–343.
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seize it, they do not permit others to seize it.” He then presents the point of view of those who support the idea of government by the aristocracy: they declare that it is safer to entrust the nobility with a dominant role in the public institutions because in that way the nobles will be satisfied and will have no reason to agitate in opposition to the republic. After conceding that “he who discourses well on the one thing and the other could remain doubtful as to which should be chosen by him as guard of such freedom,” Machiavelli concludes his analysis by examining the question of which are more dangerous in a republic: those who wish to obtain more than what they already have, or those who fear losing the wealth and honor that they already possess. Both the former and the latter, Machiavelli comments, can trigger grave disturbances, but the nobles who fear losing their honors and their wealth are the more dangerous because “it does not appear to men that they possess securely what a man has unless he acquires something else new. There is this besides: that since they possess much, they are able to make an alteration with greater power and greater motion.” If we carefully weigh the arguments on behalf of both the first and the second thesis, it is clearly wiser to entrust the populace with the task of guarding freedom than to assign that task to the nobility. The aspect of Machiavelli’s republicanism that reveals in an especially clear fashion his debt to the Roman tradition is his analysis of political liberty. Like the Roman political writers, and using a language similar to that used by jurists, he defined as “free men” those men who do not “depend on others,” drawing a contrast between the status of the free citizen and that of a slave: “born free and not slave.” Along the same line, he calls free states those states that “are accustomed to living by their own laws and in liberty.” Like republican political writers, he believes that citizens can securely enjoy their liberty only in an independent republic where political life is sufficiently protected. If the rule of law is restored, and if the laws that protect the interests of factions are replaced with laws and statutes that aim at the common good, states a citizen driven by love of the fatherland in the Florentine Histories, Florence will once again have a “true free and civil life.” In contrast, a city cannot be free if there is a citizen who is “feared by the magistrates.”
Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 5. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 18–19. Ibid., I, 1. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 7. Ibid., II, 2. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 132. Ibid., I, 5; Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, V. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine [Florentine Histories], III, 5. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 29. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 67.
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As he explained in the Florentine Histories, a city “can be called free” only if it has good laws and good constitutional orderings capable of restraining both the ill humors of the nobles and those of the commonfolk, that is, the insolence of the former and the license of the latter. Free republics must be capable of moderating the passions and the desires of the citizens in such a way that they respect the boundaries of civil life. One example of this is the Roman republic, where the people “never served humbly nor dominated proudly while the republic lasted uncorrupt; indeed, with its orders and magistrates, it held its rank honorably.” Another example, in modern times, are the free German cities, which “observe their laws so that no one from outside or inside dares to seize them.” In another chapter of Discourses on Livy he reiterates the necessary connection between law and freedom with words that require no comment: the republic degenerates when “one begins to corrupt a law that is the nerve and the life of a free way of life.” A monarch or a prince can satisfy the wishes of individuals to live securely if they introduce laws and constitutional provisions that protect both their power and the tranquility of their subjects, and if they respect the laws and prevent others from breaking them. If a prince does these things, the people will feel secure and contented, as in France, where the kings are “obligated to respect countless laws, which preserve the security of all their peoples.” Political liberty, nonetheless, is secure and the citizens can enjoy it fully only in a republic, on the condition that the republic has not been corrupted. In Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli speaks of the “common utility that is drawn from a free way of life,” and he describes it as “being able to enjoy one’s things freely, without any suspicion, not fearing for the honor of wives and that of children, not to be afraid for oneself.” Aside from ensuring security, a good republic also allows its citizens to enjoy a degree of liberty that the subjects of a monarch cannot attain, that is, the freedom to take part in sovereign deliberations, the freedom to be summoned to serve in public office, and even to win the highest honors. In a republic, he writes in Discourses on Livy, the citizens “can, through their virtue, become princes”; in a principality this possibility is not available to them because the prince “cannot honor any of the citizens he tyrannizes Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, IV, 1. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 146. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 58. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 116. Ibid., I, 55. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 110. Ibid., I, 33. Ibid., I, 16. Ibid., I, 16. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 45.
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over who are able and good since he does not wish to have to have suspicion of them.” A free way of life “proffers honors and rewards through certain honest and determinate causes, and outside these it neither rewards nor honors anyone.” A prince, in contrast, frequently gives honors to corrupt men. In a well-ordered republic, the poor citizens must have the same possibilities as the others to win public honors; in Rome, Machiavelli writes, “the way to any rank whatever and to any honor whatever was not prevented for you because of poverty, and that one went to find virtue in whatever house it inhabited.” If it was the citizens, in their councils, who freely elected the magistrates, it is more likely that they would select honest and capable men, as a true political order demands. Finally, Machiavelli accepted without reservation another political principle that the Roman theorists and their modern disciples had indicated as one of the distinctive characteristics of a free city, that is, the possibility of freely expressing one’s own opinions in public assemblies. Machiavelli cited as an example the Roman republic, where “a tribune, or any other citizen whatever, could propose a law to the people, on which every citizen was able to speak, either in favor or against, before it was decided.” It is a good thing, he comments, that “each one who intended a good for the public could propose it; and it is good that each can speak his opinion on it so that the people can then choose the best after each one has been heard.” Because a republic makes possible the secure enjoyment of all aspects of political liberty, Machiavelli identifies republics with freedom and draws a contrast between the republic and not only tyranny and license, but also with monarchies and principalities. In the well-known opening of The Prince he writes: “All states, all dominions that have held and do hold empire over men have been and are either republics or principalities.” A few lines below that, he reiterates the same distinction, replacing the term republic with “being free”: “Either in the habit of living under a prince or used to being free.” In the fifth chapter, he writes that “when cities or provinces are used to living under a prince, and his blood line is eliminated—since
Ibid., II, 2. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 130–32. Ibid., I, 16. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 45. Ibid., I, 58. Ibid., III, 25. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 271. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discursus florentinarum rerum post mortem iunioris Laurentii Medices, in Opere, edited by Corrado Vivanti, Einaudi-Gallimard, Turin 1997, vol. I, p. 269. See also Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 58. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I,18. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 50. Machiavelli, The Prince, I. English translation: Mansfield, The Prince, pp. 5–6. See also English translation: Mansfield, The Prince, pp. 21, 39
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on the one hand they are used to obeying, and on the other they do not have the old prince—they will not agree to make one from among themselves and they do not know how to live free.” In the ninth chapter he cites three mutually exclusive possibilities: “principality or liberty or license.” In Discourses on Livy the examples in which he equates republican government with liberty are of course far more numerous. In book 3, chapter 12, when writing about the mainland cities subject to Venetian rule, he notes that they were “used to living under a prince,” “not free,” and “accustomed to serving.” Living under the rule of a monarch or a prince, as is demonstrated by the passage that I have quoted here, not only means being not free in the sense that the subjects are excluded from all sovereign deliberations and from public office, but also that they are dependent on the will of a single man, and therefore not a free people. Under the rule of a monarch, if that monarch is just, the subjects can enjoy a certain security, but that security remains precarious at best, because they nevertheless remain dependent on his will. Since they have no power to prevent the monarch from imposing laws that favor his own interest or other private interests, they may at any moment be oppressed. Machiavelli’s republicanism was inspired by the ideal of a well-ordered popular government. By well-ordered popular government he meant, in accordance with the Ciceronian conception of order as moderation and proper placement of the parts within the whole, a republic in which each social component played a role of its own. As an example, he cites Sparta, where Lycurgus “ordered his laws so as to give their roles to the kings, the aristocrats, and people and made a state that lasted more than eight hundred years, achieving the highest praise for himself and quiet in that city”; and Rome, which became a “perfect republic” only when, with the creation of the tribunes of the plebs, “all three kinds of government there had their part.” As an example of a badly ordered republic, Machiavelli points to Florence, which never had a political constitution that recognized to each social group a role of its own, and for that reason remained unstable, over the course of its history, oscillating between governments that were either excessively popular or excessively aristocratic. The too-popular governments prevented the nobles from attaining public honors, and therefore the city became increasingly humble and abject; in the excessively aristocratic governments, “the people did not play a part of its own,” and the republic was therefore shaken by a permanent state of instability.
Cicero, De Officiis, I, 142. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 2. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 13–14. Machiavelli, Discursus florentinarum rerum, in Opere, vol. I, p. 734.
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Religion is an essential aspect of Machiavelli’s republicanism. Although some founders, such as Romulus, were not obliged to avail themselves of the “authority of God” in order to establish new civil and military orders, many others, “such as Numa Pompilius, Lycurgus, and Solon,” in order to persuade the citizens to accept their extraordinary laws, had recourse “to God.” Numa, in particular, “pretended to be intimate with a nymph who counseled him on what he had to counsel the people,” and thanks to this charade he succeeded in persuading the Romans to accept the new laws. Savonarola succeeded in persuading the citizens of Florence, who were neither ignorant nor coarse, to accept the new republican orderings of 1494 because he convinced them that he “spoke with God.” Founders such as Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus, obtain the friendship of God as a result of their remarkable virtue, and they succeed, with divine aid, in the exceedingly difficult task of founding a state. Lawgivers are successful in the almost equally difficult challenge of introducing new orderings because they too possess extraordinary qualities— “the goodness and prudence” of Numa; “the life and learning” of Savonarola”— and, thanks to their qualities they are believed when they claim to have been inspired by God. Other men as well could do what Numa and Savonarola did before them, if they possessed similar qualities: “No one, therefore, should be terrified that he cannot carry out what has been carried out by others, for as was said in our preface, men are born, live, and die always in one and the same order.” The founder who succeeded, through his virtues, in persuading the people that he had been inspired by God, and therefore achieved his goals, was not in Machiavelli’s eyes an ancient myth, but rather a possibility of modern politics, attainable on the condition that men, or at least some men in their midst, free themselves of the mistaken belief that it is impossible to imitate the great statesmen of the past. To Machiavelli, both founders and lawgivers are similar to God or else sent directly by God, as was the case with Numa. In his narrative, Livy wrote that “when they heard the name of Numa, although the Roman fathers [the senators] perceived that the balance of power would incline to the Sabines if a king were chosen from them, yet none of them ventured to prefer himself, or any other member of his party, or, in fine, any of the citizens or fathers, to a man so well known, but unanimously resolved that the kingdom should be offered to Numa Pompilius.” When he reached Rome, Numa determined that the gods should be consulted, but Livy says nothing of divine inspiration. Machiavelli, on the other hand, focuses on
Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 11. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 35–36. Livy, Ab urbe condita, I, 21; Italian translation: Storia di Roma, edited by Carlo Vitali, Zanichelli, Bologna 1967.
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the divine influence in the senate’s decision: it was “the heavens,” he wrote, that “inspired in the breast of the Roman Senate” the sound counsel that brought infinite good to Rome, advising them to elect Numa as successor to Romulus “so that those things omitted by him might be ordered by Numa.” Since this is a task that falls to men who are friends of God or to men who are inspired or sent by God, the birth and ordering of states has a religious characters and prompts reverence and veneration. All states, Machiavelli observes, “have some reverence in the beginning,” and the founders of states who succeed in making their peoples observe “their constitutions for long” obtain “veneration.”
3. Customs and Religion Even the best political orders established by the wisest lawgivers are incapable of protecting a free life if the customs are corrupt: “For as good customs have need of laws to maintain themselves, so laws have need of good customs so as to be observed.” The jurists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had emphasized in their treatises that the objective of the laws is to shape customs in order to make men well suited to civil living (“viventem civiliter”), and in order to forge individuals who know how to keep a republic alive. Coluccio Salutati, in his De nobilitate legum et medicinae, emphasizes that the goal of lawgivers “is to make the citizens good and obedient to the laws”; he also adds: “Politics is intended to preserve human society; the law has the same objective. Politics wants a good citizen, and what else do the lawgivers desire, with their institutions?” Machiavelli was familiar with this tradition of thought and he accepted its fundamental principle. In Discourses on Livy he reiterates the common belief that “hunger and poverty make men industrious, and the laws make them good,” that is to say, disposed to obey the laws and to perform their civic duties. The task of the law is therefore to correct customs: “Where a thing works well on its own without the law, the law is not necessary; but when some good custom is lacking, at once the law is necessary.” Following the lead of the political writers of humanism, Machiavelli stresses that religion is more effective than laws in moderating the customs
Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 11. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 34. Ibid., I, 18. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 49. I venture to refer the reader to my own From Politics to Reason of State, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1992, pp. 56–59. Salutati, De nobilitate legum et medicinae, pp. 104–5, 170–71. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 3. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 15.
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of a people. Those who carefully consider Roman history will see, he warns in Discourses on Livy, how useful religion was as a way “to keep men good.” Laws “keep” men good through fear of human punishment, or through the desire for human reward; religion keeps them good with the fear of divine punishment or the hope of divine reward. The good customs upheld by religion remain vigorous even when laws and orders lose their power. Religion, therefore, is stronger than laws and even than the virtue of the rulers. For that reason, it is “a thing altogether necessary if [one] wished to maintain a civilization,” whether that civilization takes the form of a kingdom or a republic. The sovereign people of a republic has, when it is not corrupt, a special kind of wisdom that makes it godlike: “A people is more prudent, more stable, and of better judgment than a prince. Not without cause may the voice of a people be likened to that of God; for one sees universal opinion produce marvelous effects in its forecasts, so that it appears to foresee its ill and its good by a hidden virtue.” Through the sovereign people, the voice of God speaks secretly to ensure that common good is attained in the world and free living is established. Machiavelli recognizes in the sovereign people of a free republic a divine aura that is never attributed to the prince. He takes divinity from the prince and assigns it to the sovereign people, thus blazing a path for intellectual and political developments of great importance in the history of republican political thought. Religion is more necessary in republics than in monarchies because in republics the people is master of the laws, and therefore there is no fear of a prince to restrain men from their natural insolence: “As the observance of the divine cult is the cause of the greatness of republics, so disdain for it is the cause of their ruin. For where the fear of God fails, it must be either that the kingdom comes to ruin or that it is sustained by the fear of a prince, which supplies the defects of religion.” That fear would in any case be extinguished on the death of a virtuous prince, while the fear of God will survive, whether or not the prince is alive. In order to ensure that a republic lives on for a long time, it is wiser to rely on religion than on the fear that a virtuous prince is capable of instilling. A people that has no true and good religion can live only under a prince or under a tyrant. We shall see what the moral content should be of the kind of religion that is needed by republics, but that a free life cannot exist without a religious underpinning is an undoubted matter for Machiavelli.
Ibid., I, 11. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 34. Ibid., I, 58. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 117–18. Ibid., I, 11. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 35.
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All the free peoples that Machiavelli points out as examples are profoundly religious. The first is the Roman people, where for many centuries “there was never so much fear of God as in that republic; which made easier whatever enterprise the Senate or the great men of Rome might plan to make.” Another such people were the Etruscans, one of the “very free peoples” of antiquity, who lived “secure for a great time, with the highest glory of empire and of arms and special praise for customs and religion.” Yet another such people were the Samnites, who were also a free people of antiquity, who “Had Recourse to Religion” as a last “remedy from which they could take hope of recovering lost virtue,” providing evidence of “how much confidence can be had through religion well used.” Among the modern examples, we should note the free cities of Germany: “In the province of Germany this goodness and this religion are still seen to be great in those peoples, which make many republics there live free, and they observe their laws so that no one from outside or inside dares to seize them.” The peoples without religion, on the other hand, are corrupt and enslaved. The Italians, who have become, thanks to the church of Rome,
Ibid. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 34. Machiavelli’s authority on the religion of the Romans, aside from Livy, was Polybius: “But among all the useful institutions, that demonstrate the superior excellence of the Roman government, the most considerable perhaps is the opinion which the people are taught to hold concerning the gods: and that, which other men regard as an object of disgrace, appears in my judgment to be the very thing by which this republic chiefly is sustained. I mean, superstition: which is impressed with all its terrors; and influences both the private actions of the citizens, and the public administration also of the state, in a degree that can scarcely be exceeded. This may appear astonishing to many. To me it is evident, that this contrivance was at first adopted for the sake of the multitude. For if it were possible that a state could be composed of wise men only, there would be no need, perhaps, of any such invention. But as the people universally are fickle and inconstant, filled with irregular desires, too precipitate in their passions, and prone to violence; there is no way left to restrain them, but by the dread of things unseen, and by the pageantry of terrifying fiction. The ancients, therefore, acted not absurdedly, nor without good reason, when they inculcated the notions concerning the gods, and the belief of infernal punishments; but much more those of the present age are to be charged with rashness and absurdity, in endeavoring to extirpate these opinions. For, not to mention effects that flow from such an institution, if, among the Greeks, for example, a single talent only be entrusted to those who have the management of any of the public money; though they give ten written sureties, with as many seals and twice as many witnesses, they are unable to discharge the trusts reposed in them with integrity. But the Romans, on the other hand, who in the course of their magistracies, and in embassies, disperse the greatest sums, are prevailed on by the single obligation of an oath to perform their duties with inviolable honesty. And as, in other states, a man is rarely found whose hands are pure from public robbery; so, among the Romans, it is no less rare to discover one that is tainted with this crime”; Polybius, Storie [Histories], VI, 56, edited by Domenico Musti, Rizzoli, Milan 2002, vol. III, pp. 387–91. Machiavelli, Discorsi, II, 2 and II, 4. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 138. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 15. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 110
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“without religion and wicked,” are the most corrupt and servile people. The second example are the French and the Spanish, likewise Catholic, but without the religion and the goodness of the ancient Romans and the modern Germans. And so they live in servitude inasmuch as they are subjects of kings, and they are corrupt, though less so than the Italians, not so much because of their goodness, “which is in good part lacking,” as much as because they have “one king that maintains them united not only through his virtue but through the order of those kingdoms, which is not yet spoiled.” Those who are religious can live a free way of life; those who are not religious can only live in servitude. In order to fully understand the significance of this alternative, one should nonetheless keep in mind that Machiavelli is praising as a foundation of political liberty that religion that teaches virtue and condemns idleness: To think that without you for you God fights, While you are on your knees and nothing do, Has ruined many kingdoms, many states. Prayers are necessary as a rule, And he who from his people snatches rites And orisons is utterly a fool. Perfect control and union they keep, And if you have all this, it is quite true You will good fortune ultimately reap. But let your brain prove not so small and short By thinking that, should your house fall and crumble, God would soon save it with no man’s support: You would soon die beneath its very stones.
Ibid., I, 12. Ibid., I, 55. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 110. L’Asino [The Golden Ass], 115–123, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, Scritti letterari, edited by Luigi Blasucci, with the assistance of Alberto Casadei, Utet, Turin 1989, p. 383. English translation: Tusiani, Lust and Liberty, pp. 81–81. Evidence of how deeply rooted was the religion of idleness that Machiavelli combated so strenuously can be found in the letter Vettori wrote Machiavelli on 5 August 1526: “We are having very poor harvests here [in Rome], and we hear that they are worse elsewhere. So we judge that the year is going to be very bad, because of war, plague, and famine, and since in times of tribulation people turn toward God, having also heard the saints have conquered as a result of making prayers and processions, we have tried to obtain a Jubilee for the middle of August from Our Lord, to be taken without money, and fasts, confessions, and prayers will suffice to take it”; in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, Lettere, edited by Franco Gaeta, Utet, Turin 1984, p. 602. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, pp. 395–96.
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Machiavelli calls for a religion that educates the people to a genuine goodness of heart. Just what he means by “goodness,” he explains with two examples drawn from the history of the peoples that he admires for their religiosity and their good customs, the Romans and the Germans. The Roman example refers to an episode from the war against the inhabitants of Veio. The spoils of war, in part intended for Apollo, fell instead into the hands of the Roman plebs. In order to recover the booty, the Senate issued an edict ordering all those who had taken the loot to return a tenth of it. This edict proves that the Senate had full faith in the plebs and was certain that none of the commoners of Rome would refuse to return what was ordered. And yet that restitution did not take place, in part because the plebs mutinied against the edict with “open indignation.” That open rebellion, and that rejection of deceit, demonstrated in Machiavelli’s view, “how much goodness and how much religion were in that people, and how much good was to be hoped from it.” The example of the peoples of Germany is even more eloquent because it proves that in those peoples there still lives “that ancient goodness” and because their goodness “is so much more to be admired in these times as it is rarer; indeed one sees it remaining only in that province.” “When it occurs to those republics,” Machiavelli writes, “that they need to spend some quantity of money for the public account, they are used to having those magistrates or councils that have authority for it assess on all the inhabitants of the city one percent or two of what each has of value. When such a decision has been made, each presents himself before the collectors of such a duty according to the order of the town; and having first taken an oath to pay the fitting amount, he throws into a chest so designated what according to his conscience it appears to him he ought to pay. Of this payment there is no witness except him who pays.” History demonstrates to Machiavelli that in the peoples of Germany there was still much “goodness” and much “religion.” To perform one’s duties in accordance with “conscience,” to eschew “fraud,” to possess a sense of individual responsibility, this is the goodness that an uncorrupted Christian religion teaches, and which Machiavelli considers necessary to a free way of life. And in order to find these qualities, it is not necessary to go back in time to ancient paganism, nor is it the realm of dreams to think of reviving it. Those citizens of the free German republics were Christians, not pagans. And yet the civil ethos of religion lived on in them. The same ethos survived, though more feebly, in his own Florence. What Machiavelli was lamenting
Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 55. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 110. Ibid. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 110–11.
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was the fact that the ancient goodness had not survived in the princes of the Christian religion: “If such religion [of the Romans],” he writes in a significant passage of Discourses on Livy, “had been maintained by the princes of the Christian republic as was ordered by its giver, the Christian states and republics would be more united, much happier than they are.” Christianity, on the other hand, did all it could to destroy not only the pagan religion, but even the memory of that religion: “For when a new sect —that is, a new religion—emerges, its first concern is to extinguish the old to give itself reputation; and when it occurs that the orderers of the new sect are of a different language, they easily eliminate it. This thing is known from considering the modes that the Christian sect took against the Gentile. It suppressed all its orders and all its ceremonies and eliminated every memory of that ancient theology.” Along with those orders, ceremonies, and theology, it also extinguished—and this is what Machiavelli deplored—the civic virtue that religion had kept alive. The religion that is necessary to a free way of life is the religion that makes men good and brings “shame to the wicked.” Machiavelli here adopts another theme that was beloved by the humanists. Salutati had written in this connection that it is necessary to distinguish between the shame that fills men before guilt, and leads them to “act to conceal,” and the shame that “makes them abhor vicious and dishonorable actions.” While the first kind of shame encourages the guilty to act stealthily and to “lurk in the shadows for the turpitude that they commit,” the second kind wards them away from evil, and should therefore be considered a virtue. The shame that drives us to refrain from evil is an obligation to the conscience that “accuses us, persuades us, judges us”; and internalization of the sentiment of the duty that a true Christian must feel more deeply than others, as Saint Paul teaches when he writes that “for our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience.” When he speaks of the shame that religion manages to produce within the souls of the guilty, therefore helping to uphold the laws, Machiavelli too is referring not to the fear of the reproof of other men or of punishments, but rather of that internal feeling that springs from the awareness that one has violated the duties that one’s conscience and God impose on one. Machiavelli praises the religion that is able to enter into the hearts of I accept Emanuele Cutinelli-Rèndina’s proposed reading, in Chiesa e religione in Machiavelli, Istituti editoriali e poligrafici, Pisa 1998, pp. 180–84. Machiavelli, Discorsi, II, 5. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 139. Coluccio Salutati, De verecundia, edited by Eugenio Garin, Vallecchi, Florence 1947, pp. 309–11. 2 Corinthians I:12.
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men and keep alive a sense of duty, like the pagan religion of the ancient Romans and the Christianity of the modern Germans. The charge that he levels against the Catholic religion of having made the Italians wicked should be interpreted together with his praise of the religion that makes men good. Wicked are not only those men who break the law, deceitfully, even more than those who use force, but especially those men who no longer have any morals or conscience in the strict sense of the term. If men are to be taught to be good, and aided effectively to live in a civil manner, then religion must keep its distance from political power and not become subordinate to the powerful. Machiavelli obtains this teaching from the religion of the Romans. “The life of the Gentile religion,” he observes, “was founded on the responses of the oracles and on the sect of the diviners and augurs. All their other ceremonies, sacrifices, and rites depended on them; for they easily believed that that god who could predict your future good or your future ill for you could also grant it to you. From these arose the temples, from these the sacrifices, from these the supplications and every other ceremony to venerate them; through these the oracle of Delos, the temple of Jupiter Ammon, and other celebrated oracles who filled the world with admiration and devotion. As these later began to speak in the mode of the powerful, and as that falsity was exposed among peoples, men became incredulous and apt to disturb every good order. The history of the church confirms the same teaching. In the first centuries of Christianity, the pontiffs had authority and veneration “for the holiness of their lives and for the miracles” as well as for “reverence for their customs and their learning.” When they became powerful through the weakening of the emperor and of the barbarian kings in Italy, and through their arms, their censures, and their indulgence, they were “terrible and awesome,” but they lost their moral authority. In subsequent centuries, they also saw their temporal power weakened, and having rendered the Italians unbelievers and without religion, they are now “at the discretion of others.” Machiavelli, like others before him, wanted to see an end put to the temporal power of the popes. One piece of evidence among many is his account of the unsuccessful conspiracy of Stefano Porcari, who attempted to free Rome from the “hands of prelates” and “restore it to its ancient way of life.” Even though Porcari failed in his attempt, Machiavelli remarks, his
Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 12. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 37. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, I, 9. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, , p. 19. Ibid. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 20.
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intention can be praised by some. Machiavelli’s desire to see the punishment of the corrupt popes and prelates also emerges in his account of Julius II’s visit to Perugia. When he reached the city, with the intention of expelling therefrom Giovampagolo Baglioni, Machiavelli recounts, Julius II “did not wait to enter that city with his army, which was guarding him, but entered it unarmed, notwithstanding that Giovampagolo was inside with many troops that he had gathered for defense of himself.” Giovampagolo, despite the fact that he was a man capable of all sorts of wickedness, failed to take advantage of the pope’s mistake. If he had, Machiavelli observes, “everyone would have admired his spirit and that would have left an eternal memory of himself as being the first who had demonstrated to the prelates how little is to be esteemed whoever lives and reigns as they do; and he would have done a thing whose greatness would have surpassed all infamy, every danger, that could have proceeded from it.”
Ibid., VI, 29. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 19. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 27. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 64. Guicciardini is even harsher in his condemnation of the temporal power and the corruption of the church than Machiavelli: “On these foundations and by these means, raised to secular power, little by little forgetting about the salvation of souls and divine precepts, and turning all their thoughts to worldly greatness, and no longer using their spiritual authority except as an instrument and minister of temporal power, they began to appear rather more like secular princes than popes. Their concern and endeavors began to be no longer the sanctity of life or the propagation of religion, no longer zeal and charity toward their neighbors, but armies and wars against Christians, managing their sacrifices with bloody hands and thoughts; they began to accumulate treasures, to make new laws, to invent new tricks, new cunning devices in order to gather money from every side; for this purpose, to use their spiritual arms without respect; for this end, to shamelessly sell sacred and profane things. The great wealth spreading amongst them and throughout their court was followed by pomp, luxury, dishonest customs, lust and abominable pleasures: no concern about their successors, no thought of the perpetual majesty of the pontificate, but instead, an ambitious and pestiferous desire to exalt their children, nephews and kindred, not only to immoderate riches but to principalities, to kingdoms; no longer distributing dignities and emoluments among deserving and virtuous men, but almost always either selling them for the highest price or wasting them on persons opportunistically moved by ambition, avarice, or shameful love of pleasure. And for all these misdeeds, reverence for the papacy has been utterly lost in the hearts of men, and yet their authority is somewhat sustained by the name and majesty, so powerful and effective, of religion; and mightily by the means they have of gratifying great princes and those powerful personages around them, by conferring dignities and other ecclesiastical concessions. Whence knowing themselves to be held in the greatest respect by men, and that whoever takes arms against them gains grave infamy thereby and often opposition from other princes, and in any event profits very little, and that when victors they employ the victory as they will, and when vanquished they obtain whatever conditions they will, and pricked on by the greed to raise their families from private conditions to principalities, the popes have been for a long time, and very often, the instruments of stirring up wars and new conflagrations in Italy”; Francesco Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia [The History of Italy], IV, 12, in Opere di Francesco Guicciardini, edited by Emanuella Lugnani Scarano, Utet, Turin 1981, vol. II, pp. 471–72. English translation: History of Italy, translated by Sidney Alexander, New York, Macmillan 1969, pp. 149–50.
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Machiavelli praised the princes and captains who used rituals and auspices as they saw best, in the tradition of the Romans, who “Interpreted the Auspices According to Necessity, and with Prudence Made a Show of Observing Religion When Forced Not to Observe It; and If Anyone Rashly Disdained It, They Punished Him.” He did not, however, accept the idea that popes could humiliate kings. A private individual, he writes in the Florentine Histories, would have been ashamed to subject himself to the conditions that Pope Alexander III imposed on the king of England. Machiavelli was indifferent to the question of whether the church was run as a republic or a monarchy. What mattered to him was whether the prelates were good and if they nourished and sustained religious sentiment. Princes and republics, in their turn, must maintain “the foundations of the religion they hold,” and support “all things” that encourage religion, even if they judge them false. Machiavelli did not want a religiosity that was reduced to the mere exterior practices of the cult and which absolved those who did evil, much as did Fra Timoteo, who was concerned with processions and statues, and who was false, greedy, tawdry, and shameless. Nor did he wish a religion that inspires the reverence of cowards, who know neither how “to be honorably wicked or perfectly good” and who are incapable of performing those acts of noble, great-spirited wickedness that are necessary to the success of great political undertakings. What he wanted, in other words, was a religion made up of faith and the fear of God, a religion that instills sincere devotion, that penetrates into the soul, that educates the faithful to a sense of duty, that teaches its adherents to love liberty, and which helps men to find within themselves the moral strength to defend the free way of life. He was willing to let others worry about the forms of worship and the internal organization of the church.
4. Religion, War, and Social Conflict Aside from serving to reinforce and maintain civil virtue, religion is necessary in order to have good armies: “For where there is religion, arms can easily be introduced, and where there are arms and not religion, the latter can be introduced only with difficulty,” as the history of Rome teaches
Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 14. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 41. “All these things were accepted by Henry: thus did such a king submit to a judgment to which today a private man would be ashamed to submit”; Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine , I, 19. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 30. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 12. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 37. “And when malice has greatness in itself or is generous in some part, they do not know how to enter into it”; Ibid., I, 27. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 63.
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us. Good armies are in Machiavelli’s view the necessary foundation of any state. “The principal foundations that all states have, new ones as well as old or mixed, are good laws and good arms. And because there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms, and where there are good arms there must be good laws, I shall leave out the reasoning on laws and shall speak of arms.” In The Art of War, he reiterates the same point: “Because all the arts that are provided for in a state for the sake of the common good of men, all the statutes made in it so that men will live in fear of the laws and of God, would be vain if for them there were not provided defenses, which when well ordered, preserve them, even though they themselves are not well ordered.” Because religion helps to establish and preserve the good arms needed to defend the lives of states, without religion, or with a bad religion, states cannot survive. For this reason as well Machiavelli placed on the highest step of men worthy of praise the “heads and orderers of religions,” and beneath them, “those who have founded either republics or kingdoms,” and believed that Rome owed its fortune more to Numa, who introduced the religious orders, than to Romulus, who introduced the political and military institutions. Religion is necessary to the creation of good armies, especially because it renders sacred the oath that soldiers take before going into battle: “Also very powerful in keeping the ancient soldiers well disposed were religion and the oath sworn when they were taken into service, because in all their transgressions they were threatened not alone with the ills they could fear from men but with those they could expect from God. This condition, mingled with other religious customs, many times made every sort of undertaking easy for the ancient generals, and always will make them so, where religion is feared and observed.” In Italy, by contrast, where men have no religion, and are “corrupt” and “unaccustomed to any honorable obedience,” the oath taken by soldiers is of no value, and it is therefore impossible to establish a good army. Machiavelli believed that the oaths that soldiers swore were an essential aspect of good military discipline. When he was secretary, he had inserted in the Provision of the Ordinance of the Militia (Provisione della ordinanza)
Ibid., I, 11. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 35. Machiavelli, The Prince, XII. English translation: Mansfield, The Prince, , p. 48. Niccolò Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra [The Art of War], in Opere, vol. I, pp. 529–30. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 566. Ibid., p. 626. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 661. Concerning the swearing of oaths, see Paolo Prodi, Il sacramento del potere. Il giuramento politico nella storia costituzionale dell’Occidente, Il Mulino, Bologna 1992, pp. 234–37.
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that established the militia (1506) a detailed description of the solemn ceremony of the administration of the oath: This commissioner, or any deputy as described above, should the following morning, as agreed the previous day, have a solemn mass of the Holy Ghost said in such a place that all those assembled can hear it. And after this mass has been celebrated, the deputy should speak to them such words as are appropriate in such a ceremony; then he should read to them the regulations and duties that they must observe, and administer a solemn oath to them to that effect, causing each of them, one by one, to place his hand on the book of the Holy Gospels. And before they swear that oath he should read to them all the capital penalties to which they will be subject, and all the admonitions ordained by said officials in the preservation and reinforcement of their union and oath; rendering more majestic the oath with all the obligatory words of body and soul that are found to be most effective; once this has been done, they will all be free to go back to their own homes. The soldiers of the militia that Machiavelli had established at the cost of such great effort fled in terror when they were faced with the attack on Prato of the Spanish infantry, in 1512, and they died without honor. Little seemed to count the solemn oath that they had sworn to defend with their lives the freedom of the republic. Fifteen years later, in the words that he places in the mouth of Fabrizio Colonna in The Art of War we can perceive all the despair of a man who, by now drawing near to the end of his life, understands how much harm was done to Italy by the wicked religion that stripped that oath of all value: “By what God or by what saints can I have them take oath? By those they worship or those they blaspheme? What one they worship I do not know, but I know well that they blaspheme them all. How can I believe they will observe their promises to those for whom every hour they show contempt? How can those who feel contempt for God respect men?” Religion, profoundly experienced as an obligation to God, helps peoples to gather their moral forces to react to military defeats that endanger the liberty and lives of one and all. “For after the defeat that Hannibal had given to the Romans at Cannae,” Machiavelli writes, “many citizens gathered together and, terrified for their fatherland, agreed to abandon Italy
Niccolò Machiavelli, Provisione della ordinanza, in Opere, vol. I, p. 39. Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra [The Art of War], in Opere, vol. I, p. 687. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 723.
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and move to Sicily. Hearing this, Scipio went to meet them and with naked steel in hand constrained them to swear they would not abandon the fatherland.” Livy emphasizes the terror that Scipio struck into the hearts of those citizens who wanted to abandon the fatherland: “Terrified, as though they were beholding the victorious Hannibal, they all take the oath, and deliver themselves to Scipio to be kept in custody.” Machiavelli focuses rather on the importance of religion in the face of extreme peril, when laws, and the love of the fatherland, strong though that was among the Romans, are no longer enough to win out over fear and to preserve the determination to defend liberty, even at the cost of one’s life: “So those citizens whom the love of fatherland and its laws did not keep in Italy were kept there by an oath that they were forced to take.” Likewise, in his account of another episode from the history of Rome, that of how Lucius Manlius was saved by his son, Livy emphasizes that the tribune of the plebs Marcus Pomponius decided to abandon charges against Lucius Manlius out of fear of that man’s son, who had gone to confront him with a knife in his hand. Machiavelli interpreted this episode as yet another demonstration of the power of religion: “This arose from nothing other than that religion Numa had introduced in that city.” When he speaks of arms, Machiavelli always means arms under the laws of the republic. The republics that educate citizens to military discipline without ever allowing them to wage war as an art are successful in warding off corruption. As long as Rome “continued without reproach,” Machiavelli writes, “no great citizen ever presumed, by means of such an activity, to retain power in time of peace, so as to break the laws, plunder the provinces, usurp and tyrannize over his native land and in every way gain wealth for himself. Nor did anybody of low estate dream of violating his oath, forming parties with private citizens, ceasing to fear the Senate, or carrying out any tyrannical injury.” A well-ordered republic, then, must “decree that this practice of warfare shall be used in times of peace for exercise and in times of war for necessity and for glory.” If the exercise of the art of war is firmly under the control of the laws, the republic need in
Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 11. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 34. Livy, Ab urbe condita, XXII, 53. “The tribune alarmed, (for he saw the steel glittering before his eyes, himself alone and unarmed; the other a young man, and very powerful, and what was no less terrifying, savagely ferocious in his bodily strength,) swears in the terms in which he was obliged; and afterwards acknowledged that forced by this proceeding he gave up his undertaking”; Ibid., VII, 5. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 11. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 34. Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra [The Art of War], in Opere, vol. I, p. 539. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 575. Ibid., p. 540. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 576.
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no way fear that armed citizens will become seditious. Its arms-bearing citizens, quite to the contrary, are the soundest foundation of liberty. Religion is necessary as a way of teaching soldiers to experience shame at doing wrong. To Machiavelli, men without shame are bad soldiers: “What can I do to make them modest, who are born and bought up without modesty?” Fabrizio Colonna complains in The Art of War. However respected a commander may be, and however skilled he is at inspiring love, he will be unable to instill in his men a sense of shame, if they are not religious. Machiavelli clearly states the horrors of which soldiers without religion—and therefore without discipline and shame—are capable, and he is willing to cite examples of crimes perpetrated by militias in the pay of Florence. Roman soldiers also sacked and looted, as Machiavelli notes in Discourses on Livy, but “being men full of religion,” they stopped before temples, and when they did enter, they did so “without tumult, all devoted and full of reverence.” The Christian religion is a brake, hindering unjust wars and a warning to seek peace. God approves only necessary wars as just; He abhors wars waged “for least cause,” as he writes in the canzone The Blessed Spirits (Gli spiriti beati), probably composed around the time of the war between François I and Charles V for domination over Italy (1521–23). Machiavelli also explains in this canzone that “it is our Lord’s desire / That peace should prosper, and mankind cease fire.” Although they meet with God’s displeasure, wars are a constant scourge: “For as long as I can remember, people have always been either making war or talking about going to war; it is now being talked about and in a short while it will be declared; when it is over, people will start talking about it again,” he wrote to Guicciardini on 3 January 1526. The causes of war are either the ambition that drives princes and peoples to conquer and expand their domains, or else necessity, “when an entire people, with all its families, removes from a place, necessitated by either famine or war, and goes to seek a new seat and a new “Weapons borne by citizens or subjects, given by the laws and well regulated, never do damage; on the contrary they are always an advantage, and cities keep themselves uncorrupted longer by means of those weapons that without them”; Ibid., p. 549. English translation: Allan Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 585. Concerning the militia, see Gennaro Sasso, Machiavelli, Cesare Borgia, don Micheletto e la questione della milizia, in Machiavelli e gli antichi e altri saggi, Ricciardi, Milan-Naples 1988, vol. II, pp. 57–117. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine [Florentine Histories], IV, 20. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 723. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 12. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 37. Machiavelli, The Prince, XXVI. Machiavelli, Canto degli spiriti beati, 5–10, In Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 404. English translation: Tusiani, Lust and Liberty, p. 7.
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province, not to command it like those above but to possess it all individually, and expel or kill the ancient inhabitants of it.” Whatever the cause, war cannot be warded off by calling for peace: “I agree with the friar who said, ‘Peace, peace, there will never be peace!’ ” he wrote in a letter to Francesco Vettori dated 26 August 1513. In order to ward off war, or to ensure that it ends as soon as possible, diplomatic initiatives and good weapons are necessary. In short, it is necessary, to use the words of Fabrizio Colonna in the Art of War: “To love peace and to know how to make war.” But one element that is useful to an ability to wage war is a good religion that teaches men to be both strong and respectful of the laws of a civil way of life and of the laws of God. In Machiavelli’s view, peace is always preferable to war, unless one can only obtain peace at the price of one’s liberty. The lust to conquer out of the mere desire to expand one’s power is a pernicious vice that leads, not toward greatness, but rather to the ruin of a state. The cause of the fall of so many republics and kingdoms, he writes in The Golden Ass, is that “all rulers here on earth / with wealth and power never feel replete.” The lust for conquest “ruins all states”; and even though one and all are well aware of this pitfall, “yet into it [they still] fall.” While Venice, Sparta, and Athens fell because they conquered too extensively, in Germany every free city “lives secure and safe from harm, / Barely encompassing six miles of ground.” States must be able to expand if they are to remain free, but conquest and rapacious expansionism lead to their ruin. In all his writings on the topic, Machiavelli condemns the policy of expansion by means of conquest and the subjugation of conquered peoples. This policy, he writes, is “useless,” and for those republics that do not have their own arms, as was the case with Florence, “very useless.” He condemned Florentine expansionism toward Pisa, Siena, and Lucca and praised its policy of protection of Pistoia: the former policy ensured that the Pisans, Siennese, and Lucchese “have exerted and exert all their force” to resist the Florentines; the policy of protection, on the other hand, “has made the Pistoiese run willingly under their rule.” The words with which he concludes the chapter require no other comment: “And without doubt if the Florentines by way either of laws or of aids had tamed their neighbors and not made them savage, they would Machiavelli, Discorsi, II, 8. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 143. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 378. Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, p. 415. English translation: Atkinson and Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends, p. 257. Machiavelli, Discorsi, III, 44. Machiavelli, L’Asino [The Golden Ass] 37–62, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, pp. 380–81. English translation: Tusiani, Lust and Liberty, pp. 77–78.
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without doubt at this hour be lords of Tuscany. This does not mean I judge that arms and force do not have to be put to work, but they should be reserved for the last place, where and when other modes are not enough.” In the Florentine Histories, finally, Machiavelli praised the Florentines’s decision to regain the control of Arezzo, offering their protection to the city. On the other hand, the policy, so frequently pursued by the Florentines, of insistent expansion of their domains without offering the people adequate protection from external aggressors and evil-doers, was reckless and the cause of countless evils. The example to be followed in pursuing a policy of expansion is that of the Romans who established alliances, while reserving to themselves “the rank of command, the seat of empire, and the title of the enterprises,” but extended Roman citizenship to their “partners” (“who in many things lived with it under equal laws”). Machiavelli praised the expansionism of the Romans, also because “they let those towns they did not demolish live under their own laws, even those that surrendered not as partners but as subjects. They did not leave in them any sign of the empire of the Roman people but obliged them to some conditions, which, if observed, kept them in their state and dignity.” He likewise praised the method of expansion employed by the Etruscans, based on the leagues of free cities. The Etruscans, he writes, obtained considerable “greatness,” not by means of military conquest, but rather by forming leagues in which the various republics all enjoyed equal rights and authority. Well aware that it was impossible for Florence to follow the example of the Romans, he recommended that the Florentines should follow the example of the Etruscans: “And if the imitation of the Romans seems difficult, that of the ancient Tuscans should not seem so, especially to the present Tuscans. For if they could not, for the Machiavelli, Discorsi, II, 4 and II, 21. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 136–38, 178. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine [Florentine Histories], II, 38. “Let us not deceive ourselves deliberately,” he writes. “Let us examine a bit, if you will, our situation; and let us begin by looking within. You find yourselves unarmed. You see your subjects without fidelity; and a few months ago you had experience with them. It is reasonable that it should be so, because men cannot be, ought not to be, faithful servants of that master by whom they cannot be either defended or punished. How you have been able and are able to punish them is known to Pistoia, Romagna, Barga—places which have become nests and refuges for every sort of thief. How you have been able to defend them is known by all those places that have been attacked.” English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, pp. 1440–41; Niccolò Machiavelli, Parole da dirle sopra la provisione del danaio, facto un poco di proemio et di scusa [Words to Be Spoken on the Law for Appropriating Money, After Giving a Little Introduction and Excuse], in Opere, vol. I, p. 13. See also Niccolò Machiavelli, La cagione dell’ordinanza dove la si truovi et quel che bisogni fare, ibid., p. 26.
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causes said, make an empire like that of Rome, they could acquire the power in Italy that their mode of proceeding conceded them.” When he composed orations intended to persuade the Florentines to equip themselves with a proper army, Machiavelli did not appeal to their hunger for conquest and expansion, nor did he invoke the cliché of Florence’s right to lord it over the other cities of Tuscany. Instead he used all his rhetorical skills to persuade his fellow citizens that the republic needed a good army in order to protect effectively its own liberty. No prudent kingdom or republic, he explained, has ever placed its own independence at the discretion of other states or considered itself to be secure when it was forced to rely on the protection of other great powers: “Because every city, every state ought to consider as enemies all those who can hope to take possession of her territory and against whom she cannot defend herself. Never was princedom or republic wise that was willing to let her territory stand in the power of others or which, so letting it stand, thought she held it securely.” If a republic wishes to protect its own freedom, it must attain sufficient territorial size to allow it to defend itself through adequate alliances and federations, while protecting and treating justly the cities and peoples under its dominion and making war only as a last resort. This is what political wisdom advises; this is what God commands; Machiavelli, Discorsi, II, 4. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 135–138. I venture to refer the reader to my own Machiavelli, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1998, pp. 139–43. “That to retake Pisa is necessary if we wish to preserve our liberty, which no one doubts, seems unnecessary to demonstrate with any other reasons than those that you can understand for yourselves”; Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorso sopra Pisa, in Opere, vol. I, p. 3. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 3. In the Provision for Infantry [Provvisione della ordinanza] that established the Florentine militia, Machiavelli insisted on the necessity of arms “in order to defend themselves from their enemies” and in order to “restrain and to govern their subjects”; Opere, vol. I, p. 31. Likewise the peroration that concludes the Parole da dirle sopra la provisione del danaio, facto un poco di proemio et di scusa [Words to Be Spoken on the Law for Appropriating Money, After Giving a Little Introduction and Excuse] insists on arms as a way of defending liberty: “Such a fall I cannot believe in, when I see that you are free Florentines and that in your own hands rests your liberty. For that liberty I believe you will have such regards as they always have had who are born free and hope to live free”; Opere, vol. I, p. 16. English translation: Allan Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, Duke University Press, Chapel Hill, NC 1989, p. 1443. See, finally, the conclusion of the Decennale primo [First Decennale]: “Yet we trust in the skilful steersman, in the oars, in the sails, in the cordage; but the voyage would be easy and short if you would reopen the temple of Mars”; Opere, vol. I, pp. 106–7. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 1457. Machiavelli, Parole da dirle sopra la provisione del danaio, facto un poco di proemio et di scusa [Words to Be Spoken on the Law for Appropriating Money, After Giving a Little Introduction and Excuse], in Opere, vol. I, p. 13.
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He will not help those peoples in which “all zeal in you forever dies”; and this is how every citizen who loves liberty should consider these matters. Whom does Machiavelli consider good? Certainly not docile men, but rather the citizens who, like the ancient Romans, want “neither to serve humbly nor dominate proudly.” That people, “which never served humbly nor dominated proudly while the republic lasted uncorrupt; indeed, with its orders and magistrates, it held its rank honorably. When it was necessary to move against someone powerful, it did so, as may be seen in Manlius, in the Ten, and in others who sought to crush it; and when it was necessary to obey the dictators and the consuls for the public safety, it did so.” The religion that Machiavelli admires brings “shame to the wicked” but is also effectively able to “animate the plebs,” that is to say, giving the people the courage to withstand the powerful who wish to crush without however inciting them to become oppressors in their turn. Machiavelli on the other hand scorns the corrupt Christian religion which puts the highest value on “humility” and “abjectness” and which, if it “asks that you have strength in yourself, it wishes you to be capable more of suffering than of doing something strong.” The goodness that religion taught to the Romans ensured that social conflicts would strengthen the liberty and the power of that republic, while the wickedness that the corrupt religion had instilled in the souls of the Florentines helped to make Florence servile and humble. In ancient Rome, Machiavelli points out, the conflicts between the plebs and the senate never, or very rarely, violated the boundaries of civil life and they were resolved “by disputing”; in Florence they were resolved “by fighting.” Machiavelli condemned those social conflicts that degenerate into armed combat and culminate in the imposition of the interests of one group or faction to the damage of some other group or faction, as was the case in Florence. He praised only those that culminated with laws that incorporated the demands of the various groups, and therefore served to promote the common good, as was the case in republican Rome. Social conflicts therefore serve to uphold the common freedom if they do not violate the fundamental requirements of a civil way of life, and this is possible if the people, through a good religion, is neither docile nor proud. Machiavelli, Canto degli spiriti beati, 45, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 405. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 1440. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 58. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 116. Ibid., II, 2. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 131. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, I, 1. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 105.
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Machiavelli harshly criticized the arrogance of the nobility; but he also denounced with equal emphasis and firmness the ambitions of the commoners. Not content with having reinforced its position vis-à-vis the nobles, Machiavelli observed, the Roman people “began at once to engage in combat through ambition, and to wish to share honors and belongings with the nobility.” The excessive ambition of the commonfolk led to conflicts over the agrarian law and to the ultimate dissolution of the republic. The ambitions of the nobles would have caused the ruin of the republic much sooner, if the people hadn’t successfully kept those ambitions in check for three hundred years. In many cases, however, it was also necessary to restrain the demands of the tribunes of the people, as they had become dangerous to the common good and to the safety of the fatherland. An even more eloquent example is that of Florence, where the people wished to exclude the nobility entirely, so as “to be alone in the government.” While the desire of the Roman people to share access to public office with the nobles was reasonable, the desire of the people of Florence was “injurious and unjust.” With their exaggerated demands, the commoners of Florence obliged the nobility to resist with all its power, and as a result the social conflicts degenerated into armed combat and civil wars. As long as the commoners shared the highest public offices with the nobles, they acquired those virtues that were peculiar to the nobility; but once the nobility was excluded from the government, Florence became increasingly humble and abject. Was the disrespect for justice—equally distributed between the nobility and the people—also a consequence of the Florentines’ irreligiosity? Machiavelli does not explicitly draw this conclusion. However, he has openly told us that whereas the Romans were religious, the Italians of the early modern times were not. If we put together the two pieces of Machiavelli’s analysis, we can rather safely conclude that the destructive effects of social
Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 37. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 78. Ibid. “When, therefore, the tribunate authority became insolent and formidable to the nobility and to all Rome, some inconvenience would have arisen from it harmful to Roman freedom”; Machiavelli, Discorsi, III, 11. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 244. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, III, 1. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 105. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, IV, 1. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 146.
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conflicts in Florence were the consequence at least in part of the widespread irreligiosity of the city. Precisely because he was a republican, Machiavelli did not advocate any form of social conflict that attempted to impose a partisan interest of any kind against the rule of law and the common good. In this connection, it would be appropriate to comment on a text that at first glance appears to bring support to the thesis of Machiavelli’s populism. I am referring to his account of the revolt of the Ciompi in the Florentine Histories. In this book, Machiavelli emphasizes that the cause of that uprising was the unjust manner in which the lowest classes, with no guild of their own, were treated. From injustice, sprang “the hatred that the lesser people had for the rich citizens and princes of the guilds, since it did not appear to them that they had been satisfied for their labor as they believed they justly deserved.” After this general consideration, Machiavelli presents a speech by an anonymous leader of the uprising, and has him deliver a denunciation of social inequality that culminates with an exhortation to increase the violence in order to crush the Signoria and the magistrates and become “princes of all the city.” This text is a radical critique of populism in the name of the republican principle of the common good. The oration delivered by the anonymous plebeian, Machiavelli writes, “strongly inflamed spirits that were already hot for evil on their own.” Why hot for “evil”? Because the revolt of the commoners was not directed toward the common good, but rather the victory of a faction; the goal was not a general emancipation from dominion, but rather the substitution of one form of dominion with another: “Now is the time not only to free ourselves from them but to become so much their superiors that they will have more to lament and fear from you than you from them.” The plebeian regime that culminated in the gonfaloniership of Michele di Lando was an unjust government, just as the oligarchic regime that followed it was unjust: “This state was neither less injurious toward its citizens nor less oppressive in its
See John McCormick, “Machiavelli against Republicanism: On the Cambridge School’s ‘Guicciardinian Moments,’” Political Theory 31 (2003), pp. 615–43. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, III, 12. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 121. Ibid., III, 13. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 121. See in this connection Gabriele Pedullà, Il divieto di Platone. Machiavelli e il discorso dell’anonimo plebeo, in Various Authors, Storiografia repubblicana fiorentina (1494–1570), edited by Jean-Jacques Marchand and Jean-Claude Zancarini, F. Cesati, Florence 2003, pp. 209–66.
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beginnings that that of the plebs had been.” The plebs that Machiavelli condemned because it imposed a government that was contrary to the common good—and this is an important aspect to keep in mind—were plebs that had abandoned the conscience that would have made them repent of the acts of violence they had committed and “abstain” from committing other, graver acts of violence. The problem of Florence is that its social conflicts do not lead to the establishment of a good republican regime, but rather to an alternation of servitude and license: “Cities, and especially those not well ordered that are administered under the name of republic, frequently change their governments and their states not between liberty and servitude, as many believe, but between servitude and license. For only the name of freedom is extolled by the ministers of license, who are the men of the people, and by the ministers of servitude, who are the nobles, neither of them desiring to be subject either to the laws or to men.” This is a vicious circle that can only be halted by a wise and powerful man capable of restraining the humors of both the plebs and the great: “A wise, good, and powerful citizen by whom laws are ordered by which these humors of the nobles and the men of the people are quieted or restrained so that they cannot do evil, then that city can be called free and that state be judged stable and firm.” Licentious commoners lead the state toward a principality. The mutiny of the Ciompi only reinforced the power of Salvestro de’ Medici, and Salvestro de’ Medici led to Cosimo de’ Medici, the founder of a government that was a principality under the guise of a republic, just as the disorders that broke out in Rome as a result of the agrarian law led to the rule of Caesar, who “was the first tyrant in Rome.” Stern in his condemnation of the social conflicts that aim to impose the dominion of one party over another, Machiavelli becomes very stern when discussing conflicts among sects, or factions. Government by sects is the opposite of free government, as Machiavelli has a good citizen say, speaking out of love of the fatherland. While the conflict between humors may have positive results for a republic, the conflict among sects is always harmful because, by its very nature, it is contrary to the common good: “It is true that some divisions are harmful to republics and some are helpful. Those are harmful that are Ibid., III, 22. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 135. About Michele di Lando, all the same, Machiavelli writes that “he deserves to be numbered among the few who have benefited their fatherland”; Ibid., III, 17. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 130. Ibid., IV, 1. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 146. Ibid., IV, 1. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 146. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 37. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 80. Ibid., II, 5.
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accompanied by sects and partisans; those are helpful that are maintained without sects and partisans. Thus, since a founder of a republic cannot provide that there be no enmities in it, he has to provide at least that there not be sects.” How then to prevent the formation of sects and partisans, and the destructive conflict that they engender? The chief causes of sects are fear and corruption. Machiavelli speaks of fear especially in the chapter of Discourses on Livy entitled “How Far Accusations May Be Necessary in a Republic to Maintain It in Freedom.” After praising the fact that the tribunes of the plebs had spared Coriolanus from lynching by summoning him to defend himself in the tribunal, Machiavelli observed: “Everyone may consider how much ill would have resulted to the Roman republic if he had been killed in a tumult; for from that arises offense by private individuals against private individuals, which offense generates fear; fear seeks for defense; for defense they procure partisans; from partisans arise the parties in cities; from parties their ruin.” He also deals with corruption as a cause for sects and partisans in the Florentine Histories when he distinguishes between the “public ways” and the “private modes” of winning reputation in a city: And therefore it is to be known that citizens in cities acquire reputation in two modes: either by public ways or by private modes. One acquires it publicly by winning a battle, acquiring a town, carrying out a mission with care and prudence, advising the republic wisely and prosperously. One acquires it in private modes by benefiting this or that other citizen, defending him from the magistrates, helping him with money, getting him unmerited honors, and ingratiating oneself with the plebs with games and public gifts. From this latter mode of proceeding, sects and partisans arise, and the reputation thus earned offends as much as reputation helps when it is not mixed with sects, because that reputation is founded on a common good, not on a private good. The remedy for private offenses, and against the fears that they engender, is the unyielding defense of the rule of law. The remedy against the “private modes” of winning fame is either to prevent the existence within the city of men so wealthy that they could hire many supporters or else to
Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, VII, 1. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 276. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 7. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 24. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, VII, 1. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, pp. 276–77.
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ensure that the citizens are so virtuous that they would be unwilling to serve powerful men. Both the former remedy and the latter one are exceedingly difficult to put into practice. And the obvious consequence is that republics often die, either from weakness, because they are incapable of imposing the rule of law and protecting citizens from private harm, or else from corruption, because they reward those men who pursue their own self-interest. There is of course the alternative of a principality which imposes civil peace. A principality however is nothing other than a sect that has become far more powerful than the others. Caesar, who became the leader of what had been the party of Marius, “remained superior” and became the “first tyrant of the city”; Cosimo de’ Medici “surpassed every other man of his times not only in authority and riches” and became the de facto lord of Florence. But neither Caesar nor Cosimo were heroes to Machiavelli. Instead, he recommended establishing good political orders capable of restoring the common good and the rule of law. But he also knew that, in order to uproot completely the evil of the sects and to prevent social conflicts from destroying liberty, it is necessary that religion and goodness be rekindled in the soul of the people. The “common corruption” of all the cities in Italy flourishes and spreads because, aside from the political factors, “religion and fear of God have been eliminated in all, an oath and faith given last only as long as they are useful.” Only the rebirth of a civil religion could truly free the republics from the evil that is undermining them and could help them to return to a truly civil way of life.
5. The Reform of Orders and the Reform of Customs The path that Machiavelli was pointing out to his contemporaries, and to posterity, for the rebirth of republican liberty, was political reform. To conquer the disease of corruption, it is necessary to annul “the orders that nourish sects,” and to put in their place those “that do in truth conform to a free and civil life.” He reiterates that concept as well in the chapter of Discourses on Livy in which he explores the possibility of maintaining or ordering a “free state” in corrupt cities. In order to restrain corruption in Rome, he explained, it was necessary to cancel the laws that the powerful had imposed “not for the common freedom but for their own power,” and “if Rome wished to maintain itself free in corruption, therefore, it was necessary that it should have made new orders, as in the course of its life it
Ibid., III, 5. English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, pp. 109–10.
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had made new laws. For one should order different orders and modes of life in a bad subject and in a good one; nor can there be a similar form in a matter altogether contrary.” New political orders and new laws that restore a civil way of life can be established with peaceful and legal means or else with violence and absolute power. In sharp contrast to a lengthy interpretative tradition, Machiavelli’s advice is to attempt to follow the former approach rather than the latter. In order to restore a civil way of life in a corrupt city with extraordinary means, a man of exceptional virtue is required, capable of winning absolute power that will allow him to dispose of the city “in [his] own mode.” To reorder a city to a political way of life, then, demands a “good man,” but to win absolute power in a corrupt city requires “a bad man.” “It very rarely happens,” Machiavelli warns, “that someone good wishes to become prince by bad ways, even though his end be good, and that someone wicked, having become prince, wishes to work well, and that it will ever occur to his mind to use well the authority that he has acquired badly.” Reform, on the other hand, could be implemented peacefully by a wise and powerful citizen who can see the shortcomings of the existing institutions and who manages to persuade his fellow citizens of the need to change them. Such an undertaking however is very difficult because men who are “used to living in one mode do not wish to vary it.” Precisely because it is difficult, the restoration of the rule of law is an achievement that brings glory more than any other. The two eulogies to potential redeemers that Machiavelli composed for the conclusions of, respectively, The Prince and the Discursus florentinarum rerum are both eloquent on that subject. War and arms, he writes in The Prince, quoting Livy, are just when they are necessary, and become sacred when there is no hope other than them. He adds, and this is an important point, that “nothing brings so much honor to a man rising newly as the new laws and the new orders founded by him. When these things have been founded well and have greatness in them, they make him revered and admirable”: revered and admirable because his achievement is similar to that of God. In the peroration that concludes the Discursus, Machiavelli expresses the same concept with words of even greater eloquence: No man is so much exalted by any act of his as are those men who have with laws and with institutions remodeled republics and kingdoms; these are, after those who have been gods, the first to be
Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 18. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 50–51. Ibid., I, 18. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 51. Machiavelli, The Prince, XXVI. English translation: Mansfield, The Prince, pp. 103–104.
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praised. And because there have been few who have had opportunity to do it, and very few those who have understood how to do it, small is the number who have done it. And so much has this glory been esteemed by men seeking for nothing other than glory that when unable to form a republic in reality, they have done it in writing, as Aristotle, Plato, and many others, who have wished to show the world that if they have not founded a free government, as did Solon and Lycurgus, they have failed not through their ignorance but through their impotence for putting it into practice. Since he considers it to be the necessary foundation of a civil way of life, and the highest expression of man’s divine nature, Machiavelli exhorts his readers to respect the order of law with the greatest firmness and determination. Once they have been enacted, laws must be enforced without tolerance for privileges or discriminations, and crimes must be punished without any regard for the public or private merits of the guilty party. “No well-ordered republic,” he writes, “ever cancels the demerits with the merits of its citizens; but, having ordered rewards for a good work and punishments for a bad one, and having rewarded one for having worked well, if that same one later works badly, it punishes him without any regard for his good works.” If this principle of civil justice is violated, he concludes, and these are significant words, “any civility will be dissolved.” Even if the guilty party is the most evil of men and has committed the worst crimes against the republic, his civil rights established by law must be respected. Machiavelli explains this fundamental aspect of his theory of the republic when he is commenting on the death of Appius Claudius, the chief of the decemviri who imposed a tyranny in Rome, who was denied the right to appeal to the people (“appellatio ad populum”). Given the seriousness of his crimes, Appius deserved the harshest of penalties; all the same, Machiavelli writes, and the words that he uses are important in this case as well, “it was hardly a civil thing to violate the laws, and so much the more one that had been made then.” Those who govern must take care to ensure that punishments are always inflicted within a respect for the law by the public authorities and never by private citizens, if they wish to prevent the corruption of the republic. The tribunes of the people, we read in Discourses on Livy, saved Coriolanus from the fury of the mob and hauled him to judgment for hav Machiavelli, Discursus florentinarum rerum, in Opere, vol. I, p. 744. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 114. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 24. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 59. Ibid., I, 45. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 93.
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ing used illicit means to diminish the power of the plebs. If the mob had lynched Coriolanus, Machiavelli comments, his death would have been an “offense by private individuals against private individuals,” which would have undermined the faith of the citizens in the efficacy of the law. They would then have banded together into factions to protect themselves, to the grave detriment of the republic. But because the matter was resolved by the public authorities in full respect of legal process, it did no damage to the republic. “For if a citizen is crushed ordinarily, there follows little or no disorder in the republic,” Machiavelli explains, “even though he has been done a wrong. For the execution is done without private forces and without foreign forces, which are the ones that ruin a free way of life; but it is done with public forces and orders, which have their particular limits and do not lead beyond to something that may ruin the republic.” In order to protect the city from corruption, magistrates must be inflexible in their defense of the law, especially when the law is in danger from powerful and eminent citizens. Death sentences carried out against men such as Brutus, the decemviri, Maelius, Manlius Capitolinus, the lawsuits against Papirius Cursor and against Fabius, and the charges leveled against the Scipios, Machiavelli comments, were so noteworthy and came in such close succession one after another, that they kept alive in the populace the fear of consequences and induced the people to respect the laws. When such memorable executions became less frequent, men began to break the laws and “corrupt themselves.” It is therefore useful, Machiavelli points out, to remember and to emulate the severity of Junius Brutus, the father of Roman liberty, who not only sat on the jury that condemned his own sons to death for having conspired against the republic, but even witnessed their execution. The republic must, in sum, entrust the magistracies to citizens who love only the “common good” and who have no respect for “private ambition.” Machiavelli expressed his belief that respect for the law is the basis for civil order as well when he judged the important episodes that took place in the Florence of his own time, where the laws were often broken by means of statues or provisions that served to protect the power and the interests of private groups, or through discrimination and special privileges. In order to justify these waivers of the laws, the rulers, aided by jurists, almost inevitably made recourse to arguments of extraordinary conditions or overriding necessity. In 1501, for instance, the notary Domenico
Ibid., I, 7. Ibid. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 24. Ibid., III, 3. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 210. Ibid., III, 22. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 267.
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Bonsi, a moderate Savonarolian, advised the Signoria not to be too exacting in their observance of the laws, and emphasized that “to want certitude in everything is impossible, that affairs must be conducted according to accident and circumstance, and that one should not will the ruin of the city by [always] insisting on the observance of the laws.” A significant example of the attitudes among the Florentine political elite on the matter of legality and respect for the law was the trial of Paolo Vitelli, the condottiere hired by the Florentines in the war against Pisa. Accused of treason, Vitelli was tried and sentenced to death in October 1499. Niccolò Altoviti, a doctor of civil law and canon law, summed up the views of the jury when he stated that there was no way to spare the life of Paolo Vitelli because he had not denied being in contact with the Pisans; because he could, through his rank and his authority, greatly damage the Florentine Republic; and most important because “this is not the way things are usually done in the affairs of states.” The most important debate over issues of legality that was conducted in Florence during Machiavelli’s time, in any case, was the one concerning the trial and subsequent death sentence issued against five eminent citizens—Bernardo del Nero, Niccolò Ridolfi, Lorenzo Tornabuoni, Giannozzo Pucci, and Giovanni Cambi. All five were charged in August 1497 with conspiring to restore the rule of the Medici. According to a law inspired by Savonarola, and approved in March 1495, any citizen who had been sentenced to death, to exile, or to the payment of a fine greater than three hundred large florins, had the right to appeal their case to the Signoria, and the Signoria had the duty of presenting the appeal before the Great Council. The jurists who advocated the decision not to carry out the appeal all invoked a state of necessity. We have no documents allowing us to establish clearly Machiavelli’s position in the Vitelli case. In a letter to a chancellor of Lucca dated in early October 1500, he openly supports the republic’s decision and writes that Vitelli’s actions deserve “infinite chastisement.” A few years later, in 1504, he commented on Vitelli’s death with these verses: “Soon after, for the trick he played, you [Florence] took revenge in full / inflicting death on him who had caused you such great harm.” These are ambiguous words. Machiavelli speaks of vengeance for a trick, not of justice. He knew full well, as all Lauro Martines, Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1968, p. 426. Ibid., p. 434. Ibid., pp. 441–45. Niccolò Machiavelli to a chancellor of Lucca, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. III, pp. 84–86.
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the Florentines who read his verses knew, that revenge is one thing, and justice is quite another. He says no more than that, however. As secretary he was sworn to silence, and he respected that duty scrupulously. On the other hand, we do know his opinion on the condemnation of the five Florentine citizens sentenced to death in 1497. In contrast with the decision of the high authorities of the Florentine Republic, and differing with the opinions of eminent jurists, he viewed the matter much as he had judged the behavior of the Roman republic in the case of Appius, that is to say, as setting a bad example. Machiavelli writes, “I do not believe there is a thing that sets a more wicked example.” In both the case of Appius and in the case of the five Florentine citizens, Machiavelli took a position in favor of respect for the law, even though the death sentences were issued against enemies of republican liberty and on behalf of the interest of the state (“per conto di stato,” or “on the state’s account”). Jurists developed sophisticated and ornate arguments to justify the violation of the law on behalf of the security of the state; Machiavelli, the supposed advocate of the priority of politics over the law, instead took a position in defense of legality. If constitutional orders are not provided to make it possible for republics successfully to face emergencies, when rapid decisions and exceptional measures become necessary, then those republics will be short lived. Republics must necessarily respect their constitution and perish; or, in order to survive, to violate their constitutions. Machiavelli does not at all recommend relying on a redeemer capable of rescuing the republic with his exceptional virtue, and with violence and cruelty. Instead, he exhorts republics to establish constitutional procedures that allow them to deal effectively with states of emergency: “In a republic, one would not wish anything ever to happen that has to be governed with extraordinary modes. For although the extraordinary mode may do good then, nonetheless the example does ill; for if one sets up a habit of breaking the orders for the sake of good, then later, under that coloring, they are broken for ill.” But unless a republic “has provided for everything with its laws,” its rulers must be willing to take on themselves the responsibility for violating the laws and using extraordinary methods. The behavior of the gonfalonier of the Florentine Republic under whom Machiavelli served from 1498 to 1512, Pier Soderini, who refused to employ extraordinary means and to break the laws in order to thwart the plots of the partisans of the Medici, was certainly, wrote Machiavelli “wise and good”; but the consequences of his Niccolò Machiavelli, Decennale primo [First Decennale], 229–31, in Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. IV, p. 303. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 1450. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 45. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 93. Ibid., I, 34. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 75.
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decision were disastrous, both for him and for the republic: “So much so that, through not knowing how to be like Brutus, he lost not only his fatherland but his state and his reputation.” Matters stand differently in a case where laws and orders are good, but the republic lacks the power to impose a respect for them. Where customs are corrupt, Machiavelli explains, “well-ordered laws do not help unless indeed they have been put in motion by one individual who with an extreme force ensures their observance.” In order to preserve republican orderings in a corrupt city, he subsequently makes clear, it would be necessary to turn the republic “more toward a kingly state than toward a popular state, so that the men who cannot be corrected by the laws because of their insolence should be checked in some mode by an almost kingly power.” These exhortations to draw back the republic more toward the royal state than toward the popular state and to restrain insolence with an “almost kingly power” should not be taken as an abandonment of the republican principles in favor of the principality or the monarchy. They are, instead, a recommendation to give temporarily greater weight to the monarchic element of a mixed government in preference to the popular component. As I have previously emphasized, Machiavelli’s republicanism is a theory of a civil way of life that is to be achieved by means of a mixed government that also includes an element that is almost monarchic, as Machiavelli is always careful to point out, in the person of a gonfalonier for life or a doge. The supreme magistrate of the republic has the option, in order to combat corruption, to make use of extraordinary means: in accordance with the statutes, if the statutes allow him to do so; outside of the statutes, however, if necessary. The most radical, but also the most effective, remedy that Machiavelli recommends as a way of combating corruption is to renew a republic, by drawing it back toward its beginnings. He resorts, that is, to the religious idea of reformation and resurrection through the rediscovery of founding principles: It is a very true thing that all worldly things have a limit to their life; but generally those go the whole course that is ordered for them by heaven, that do not disorder their body but keep it ordered so that either it does not alter or, if it alters, it is for its safety and not to its harm. Because I am speaking of mixed bodies, such as republics
Ibid., III, 3; see also Ibid., III, 9 and III, 30. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 215. Ibid., I, 17. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 48. Ibid., I, 18. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 51. Ibid., I, 18; see also Ibid., I, 34 and I, 55.
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and sects, I say that those alterations are for safety that lead them back toward their beginnings. So those are better ordered and have longer life that by means of their orders can often be renewed or indeed that through some accident outside the said order come to the said renewal. And it is a thing clearer than light that these bodies do not last if they do not renew themselves. The mode of renewing them is, as was said, to lead them back toward their beginnings. For all the beginnings of sects, republics, and kingdoms must have some goodness in them, by means of which they may regain their first reputation and their first increase. Because in the process of time that goodness is corrupted, unless something intervenes to lead it back to the mark, it of necessity kills that body. The healthy and necessary renewal of republics can take place through the virtue of a man or through the virtue of good ordering that, all the same, “have need of being brought to life by the virtue of a citizen who rushes spiritedly to execute them against the power of those who transgress them.” This is the “simple virtue” of a man who, “without depending on any law,” does not attempt to replace the rule of law nor eliminate the republican orders. We can grasp the historic significance of Machiavelli’s republican theory only if we keep in mind the fact that the virtue of men and the rule of law integrate one another. The virtue of the “good man” is necessary when the rule of law no longer exists or has been undermined by corruption. Once it has been restored, the rule of law still needs virtue and goodness, this time, the virtue and goodness of the many. The way to “regain new life and new virtue” that Machiavelli proposed for republics was to return to the “observance of religion and justice.” In Rome, he explained on the basis of the text of Livy, religion and justice “were beginning to be tainted”: religious ceremonies were no longer observed; those responsible for grave crimes were no longer punished, such as the three Fabii who had violated the “ius gentium” (‘the law of nations’) while fighting against the Gauls, but were actually rewarded with tribuneships. The Romans knew how to react against corruption and conquer it, because they restored to life all the good political orders that had been established by Romulus and “by the other prudent princes,” and they understood that it was necessary not only “to maintain religion and justice but also to esteem its good citizens” and “to take more account of their virtue” than of private and personal interests. They were capable of being reborn because they examined their way of life and were able to return to the principles from which they had grown estranged.
Ibid., III, 1. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 12, 209–11.
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The method of rebirth that Machiavelli recommends is a reform that is both political, because it restores good orders that have deteriorated through corruption, and moral, because it changes the way that men judge matters. It is, however, a primarily religious reform, not only because it revives worship, but because it allows the people to rediscover that “reverence” that “all states have . . . in the beginning,” and the “goodness” that gives states “their first reputation and their first increase.” The rebirth of republics has the same features and physiognomy as the rebirth of religions. Both arise through a reform that brings back to life in the minds of men the original principles. Machiavelli understands that the revival of a free way of life requires both political reform and moral and religious reform. One cannot succeed without the others. A political reform without a religious reform would engender good orders and good laws but would be unable to model customs, and would necessarily have a short and troubled existence. A religious reform without a political reform would fail to enforce the moral principles diffused by preaching and example. In the first case, a redeemer would not be a prophet; in the second case, he would be an unarmed prophet. Without a moral and religious reform, the only alternative remains the principality, in which it is the fear of the prince “which supplies the defects of religion.” Precisely because he is unwilling to resign himself either to the principality or to the corrupt republic, Machiavelli points the way to a religious reform that is capable of rekindling in the minds of the Italians a religion capable of teaching them to love liberty and to punish those that have done wrong, not a religion that, like that of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic, preaches that “it is evil to say evil of evil,” that it is good to live in obedience to dishonest prelates, and that if they do wrong it is best “to leave them for God to punish,” and as a result they “do the worst they can because they do not fear the punishment that they do not see and do not believe.” Like the theorists of the religious reformatio of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Machiavelli means by beginnings not the origins in a chronological sense, but the right form, or “segno,” (literally, ‘mark’): “In the process of time that goodness is corrupted, unless something intervenes to lead it back to the mark.” When Sofronia in the Clizia exhorts her husband Nicomaco to “ritornare al segno” — “come back to your mark”—she does not only mean that he should go back to being “that Nicomaco you were a year ago,” but that he must go back to being a husband, a father, and
Ibid., III, 1. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 35 and 209. Ibid. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 212
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a citizen as he ought. In a passage that is difficult to interpret, Machiavelli seems to be saying that in the teachings of Christ what was good in the religion of the Romans had been preserved, and that this good was later lost in the beginnings or the principles of the Christian “res publica,” and most especially, in the church of Rome. In another passage, which poses no difficulties of interpretation, he maintains that it is possible to replace the “false” interpretations of “our religion according to idleness” with another interpretation, this one true, in accordance with virtue: “For if they considered how [the Christian religion] permits us the exaltation and defense of the fatherland, they would see that [the Christian religion] wishes us to love and honor it and to prepare ourselves to be such that we can defend it.” While the false interpretations of the Christian religion and the education based on them have made the world weak and therefore ensured that in the modern world “not as many republics are seen in the world as were seen in antiquity; nor, as a consequence, is as much love of freedom seen in peoples as was then,” a renewed religion of virtue would make the world once again strong, good, and capable of rediscovering the love of liberty. To reform the Christian religion means, as I emphasized in chapter 1, drawing it back to its true principles, principles ensuring that it lives in the souls of men in the most just and perfect manner, that is to say, in accordance with virtue, charity, and justice. Machiavelli’s reform did not refer to a specific time in the past and it had no specific theological content. Rather it indicates a moral content and a way of life. In this way, but in this way alone, it is similar to the reforms of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic, who renewed and gave new life to the Christian religion, not because they proclaimed a new theology but because they lived in poverty and they followed “the example of the life of Christ.” Machiavelli wished to see the rebirth of a religion that would teach its followers to love one’s fatherland more than one’s own soul, to serve the common good with a spirit of charity, to defend with all one’s might the free way of life, and such a spirit had indeed been alive in the religious sentiment of Florentine and Italian humanism. In part through his writings, that religion continued to live in Italian history as the aspiration of those who wished to enjoy a life of freedom. Machiavelli, Clizia, Act V, Scene 3. English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 861. “If such religion had been maintained by the princes of the Christian republic as was ordered by its giver, the Christian states and republics would be more united, much happier than they are”; Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 12. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 37. Ibid., II, 2. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 132.
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CHAPTER FOUR
MACHIAVELLI AND THE RELIGIOUS AND MORAL REFORMATION OF ITALY
Francesco De Sanctis writes in the History of Italian Literature that during the years in which Martin Luther gave the world a new theology, religious reform was no longer possible in Italy. A country that had too much culture, accustomed to laughing at the corruption that had aroused the indignation of the entire German world, Italy had already progressed beyond “the age of theology,” believed only in science, and considered both Luther and Calvin as “new latter-day scholastics.” For that reason, De Sanctis concludes, “the Reformation could not flourish in Italy; it never affected Latin culture, which was developing on its own lines. Already emancipated from theology, and holding not only Christianity but all religions and the whole of culture in a single embrace, the Italy of Pico and Pomponazzo, seated on the ruins of the Middle Ages, could not possibly look to theology for the basis of its new edifice, but only to science. The Luther of Italy was Niccolò Machiavelli.” Federico Chabod (1901–60) developed this intuition by De Sanctis and proposed a parallel between the need for religious reform and the need for political reform. Chabod writes: [During the crisis of the sixteenth century] political protest and religious protest came into the world at a single birth pang: exceedingly different, indeed, antithetical as to objective and in terms of means and tone, and therefore not nourished on the same spirit of reaction against the immediate past, but germinating in the same cli Francesco De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana, edited by Niccolò Gallo, EinaudiGallimard, Turin 1996, p. 412. English translation: De Sanctis, History of Italian Literature, Joan Redfern, Harcourt, New York 1931, p. 463.
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mate of general anguish, doubt, and unease; destined, both one and the other, to failure, at least in practical and immediate terms, and to be followed, rather than by the redemption of Italy at the hands of a prince of great virtue, by the definitive establishment of Spanish dominion, for the first form of protest and, rather than by the defeat of the church and of the “human” spirit of the Curia, by the victorious Counter Reformation, for the second form of protest; they did share, then, from the very outset, a mindset of rebellion and a culmination in failure. The “return to principles” took place in neither of the two fields: Machiavelli was succeeded by Ammirato and Botero, well content that so much of Italy had come under the domination of His Catholic Majesty; while Valdés and Ochino and the other reformers were succeeded by the diocesan synods of the Counter Reformation. Delio Cantimori (1904–66) plumbed the matter even deeper, identifying, rather than a straightforward parallel, an interpenetration or an intersection between Machiavelli and the variegated universe of Italian reformers: The themes set forth by Machiavelli became essential elements of the cultural life of the entire sixteenth century and beyond, right up to the last century, when Francesco De Sanctis, in a transport of historiographic lyricism, went to so far as to declare that Niccolò Machiavelli was the Martin Luther of Italy. This oratorical impetus on De Sanctis’s part may appear, even to those with ears attuned to the voices of the men of the centuries past, a little excessive, rhetorical, provincial, and antiquated. But if we base ourselves purely on the facts, there was a certain continuity, though it may have been a literary continuity . . . : and a historian must record it. Suffice it to recall symbolically, that Mazzini’s favorite nom de guerre as a conspirator was none other than that of Filippo Strozzi: the hero, it is true, of a tragedy by Niccolini, but also a friend of Machiavelli’s. With these names of De Sanctis and Mazzini, a cycle comes to an end. The fact remains that this cycle existed, and that it began, as far as we are concerned as historians, with the themes put forth in the works of Machiavelli. Federico Chabod, “Per la storia religiosa dello Stato di Milano durante il dominio di Carlo V,” Annuario del R. Istituto Storico Italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea 2–3 (1936– 37), p. 85.
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For that matter, notes Cantimori, “it was Italians that were in exile for religious issues who translated and printed, or had printed in Latin, The Prince.” The meditations of De Sanctis, Chabod, and Cantimori all point out Machiavelli’s role in the long and fascinating history of the ideas of the religious and moral reform of Italy. In some cases, Machiavelli’s presence within this history is marginal and springs from the tactical needs of antiCatholic polemics or from an interest in specific aspects of his work. Nonetheless, the attention paid by Italian reformers, heretics, and dissidents to Machiavelli’s thoughts on the subject of religion is too extensive and continued for too long a time to be considered nothing more than a marginal convergence of ideas and intentions that derived from distant motivations and objectives. The ideal common ground was the objective of the reformatio peculiar to humanism, that is, the aspiration to achieve religious reform in the sense of moral reform, rather than an overall plan for the reformation of ecclesiastical institutions or even an ambition to achieve dogmatic revision. The thinkers who perceived these demands for reform from the sixteenth century onward saw Machiavelli as a fellow traveler and a guide. Machiavelli, as I have stressed, had neither proposed a new system of dogma nor outlined the structure of a new church. He had however pointed out the need to reform the Christian religion by drawing it back to its original principles and had likewise urged a reinterpretation of the moral content of the Christian religion in accordance with virtue. He had, in short, called for a religion capable of infusing a sense of duty, strength of soul, and a love of the fatherland and the common good. His thoughts on the subject of religion were indivisible from his political teachings, intended to instill or revive a love of republican liberty and an aspiration to create a national state. He presented religious rebirth and political rebirth as two processes with the same form, which each required the presence of Delio Cantimori, Niccolò Machiavelli: il politico e lo storico, in Storia della letteratura italiana, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, vol. IV, Il Cinquecento, Garzanti, Milan 1966, pp. 49–50. “The desire for the reform of the church of Rome,” Federico Chabod wrote, “was rooted in him in quite different motives than those that drove the dissidents and the reformers of the time”; Federico Chabod, Scritti su Machiavelli, Einaudi, Turin 1964, p. 80, n. 4. See also on p. 87: “It remained unclear to him that, in order to allow the soldiers to swear a genuine oath, a religion was necessary that he did not offer them, that, before demanding any sacrifice, it was necessary to create a common awareness that was at least regional in scale, and a political sense of feeling that derived from an awareness, in however muddled a manner, of a passion of a government that was indissolubly linked to the passion of the subjects.”
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the other. For that reason, his works influenced those who felt the need for religious reform as well as those who felt the need for political reform, and especially those who understood that in Italy there would never be true political liberty and a true civil way of life without a religious reform capable of engendering and rooting a new moral way of life. Machiavelli’s presence in the history of moral and religious reform allows us to understand the problem that Italy had been dragging forward with it through the centuries: the lack of a profound and powerful moral awareness that prevented, and still prevents Italians, from being a truly free people. The ideal process that traces its roots back to civic humanism, and which had one of its most dogged supporters in the person of Machiavelli, does not come to an end with Mazzini and De Sanctis, as Cantimori believed. It continues right up to the present day and can be seen in the way of thinking and feeling of those who are unwilling to resign themselves to the idea of living in a country that laughs at corruption and has no sense of shame. Despite the few, or the many, who are unwilling to resign themselves, the moral reform of Italy will probably remain an aspiration destined never to be achieved, not even in part. But the history of that aspiration, and the role that Machiavelli played in it, still deserves to be recounted, if for no other reason than to keep it from being forgotten.
1. Heresy and Aspirations for Religious Reform Machiavelli developed a reputation as an atheist at an early date. One of the first to call him an atheist was Paolo Giovio in his Elogia, written between 1545 and 1546. During his lifetime, he was also widely considered to be a heretic, at least to judge from a letter that Giovanbattista Busini wrote to Benedetto Varchi in 1549: “To the piagnoni (followers of Savonarola) he appeared to be a heretic, the good people thought him dishonest, the wicked thought him more wicked and more valiant than them; so that they hated him one and all.” That the piagnoni, of all people, who had seen their leader put to death by the church and burned at the stake as a heretic, should accuse Machiavelli of heresy may sound odd. It may have been an inaccurate depiction of events, but it might also be an invaluable piece of evidence that tells us that in Florence there were those who had Paolo Giovio, Elogia veris clarorum virorum imaginibus apposita, edited by Carlo Caruso, Sellerio, Palermo 1999, pp. 194–99. Lettere di Giovanbattista Busini a Benedetto Varchi sopra l’assedio di Firenze, edited by Gaetano Milanesi, Le Monnier, Florence 1865, pp. 84–85.
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detected in the writings of Machiavelli heretical ideas that stood in open contrast with church doctrine, and that were still quite distinct from the ideas held by Savonarola. Still more serious was the accusation of heresy leveled against Machiavelli by Antonio Caracciolo, author of the Life and Deeds of Gian Piero Carafa, Pope Paul IV (Vita et gesti di Giovan Pietro Carafa cioè di Paolo IV Pontefice Massimo). In Italy, wrote Caracciolo, referring to the period of the trial of Piero Carnesecchi (1566–67), “there was practically not a single major city that remained untainted by heresy. Indeed, not only those cities bordering the regions beyond the mountains, but also the other Mediterranean cities, and Rome itself were gravely blighted in this context.” And he added that “the good and wise old gentleman, Signore Pietr’Antonio Bandini, father of the current Cardinal Bandini, told me that in many cities of Italy, and especially in Florence, where Machiavelli and Carnesecchi lived, there was practically not a shred of Catholic faith remaining, which fact has been extensively confirmed to me by numerous older cardinals and prelates, and in particular the cardinals Monreale, Camerino, and Arrigone.” Even though the church had placed his works on its Index of Forbidden Books, Machiavelli continued to be read in heretical circles. Alessandro Strozzi, for instance, wrote to his brother Carlo: “We spend Carnival here in the usual fashion . . . and in the evenings I go from time to time to entertainments at the home of Signore Bernardo da Castiglione, where there are a great many gentlemen, and we read the occasional fine book and spend our time in a virtuous manner; and in particular we have taken the liberty of reading Machiavelli and copy his words extensively.” Someone who knew Machiavelli very well—specifically, Luigi Guicciardini (1478–1551)—described him as a person who “had difficulty be See Vita et gesti di Giovan Pietro Carafa cioè di Paolo IIII Pontefice Massimo, the original autograph manuscript now in the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome (ms. 349), f. 194r. I quote from Paolo Simoncelli, “Preludi e primi echi di Lutero a Firenze,” Storia e Politica 22 (1983), pp. 674–744, a study that proved very helpful indeed. I sincerely thank the author for allowing me to take from his work; concerning Piero Carnesecchi see the entry by Antonio Rotondò, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 1977, vol. 20, pp. 466–76. On the heresy trials of the time, see also Massimo Firpo, Il Processo Inquisitoriale del Cardinal Giovanni Morone, vol. I, Il “Compendium,” Rome 1981; Massimo Firpo and Paolo Simoncelli, “I processi inquisitoriali contro Savonarola (1558) e Carnesecchi (1566–1567): una proposta d’interpretazione,” Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa 18 (1982), pp. 200–52; Luigi Passerini, “Il primo processo per la Riforma Luterana in Firenze,” Archivio Storico Italiano serie 4, 3 (1879), pp. 337–45; John W. O’Malley, Rome and the Renaissance: Studies in Culture and Religion, London 1981. See, in this connection, Giuliano Procacci, Machiavelli nella cultura europea dell’età moderna, Laterza, Rome-Bari 1995, pp. 37–41. Quoted in Simoncelli, “Preludi e primi echi di Lutero a Firenze,” p. 685.
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lieving the things that should be believed, let alone the things that deserve ridicule.” Luigi Guicciardini wrote those words to his brother Francesco on 30 May 1533 to explain that the Niccolò who appears in his dialogue Del libero arbitrio dell’Huomo was Niccolò Machiavelli. Although he was not one of the main protagonists, the Niccolò of the dialogue is a firm proponent of doubt as a point of departure in any quest for the truth: “If I did not doubt, I would have no intellect: nor would I gain any greater merit in finally believing in the truth, than those who never thought about it: Don’t you know that a man is made prudent by restraining and placating?” Luigi Guicciardini attributed to the Niccolò in his dialogue thoughts that the real Niccolò Machiavelli rejected, at least to judge from his works. It is all the same instructive that he should have chosen to use Machiavelli as an interlocutor in a disputation over a topic of theological and religious significance. In the late sixteenth century, Machiavelli was remembered as a skeptic and a scourge of priests and monks. In a letter from late 1571 or early 1572, the philologist and man of letters Vincenzo Borghini wrote to Ludovico Martelli: I don’t believe that Machiavelli was interrogated by the Inquisition, and it may be that he was harmed as much by his name as by the fact that he freely and harshly mocked and went after certain friars, whose character he certainly assassinated in that play of his, La Mandragola [The Mandrake] as well as in his novella Belfagor, and so they were always the bitterest enemies to him, and they persecuted him to the point of death, but I think not to the point of subjecting him to the Inquisition. Although I cannot claim to know. Matters in those days were looser in how they were done and freer as to what could Luciana Pieraccini, Alcuni aspetti della fortuna di Machiavelli a Firenze nel secolo XVI, in Studi e ricerche, Istituto di Storia, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Università degli studi di Firenze, vol. I, Florence 1981, p. 227. Ibid., p. 228 In the dialogue, Luigi Guicciardini presents him as an adversary of the thesis that the heavens influence men’s bodies but not their souls: “Since heaven then instilled its power as you just prudently stated in human bodies and always infusing differently, by various lights and motions of its own, its influences in these and those human bodies, I cannot understand otherwise than that Justice, Chastity, Liberality, and many other admirable virtues, such as were found in many famous men (aside from those just mentioned by you), must derive from the heavens. And likewise for Pride, Cruelty, Lust, Greed, and other shameful sins. Since this is the case (as admitted by valiant philosophers and modern theologians) I cannot see or understand so easily (as you claim) the liberty of our actions.” See Felix Gilbert, “Machiavelli in an Unknown Contemporary Dialogue,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 1 (1937), p. 164. Machiavelli had used the expression ‘libero arbitrio’ (free will) in his Exhortatio ad capessendam Italiam.
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be said; people were not concerned with tiny minutiae, and as a result many people did not then refrain from saying certain things in which there was no real evil intent that nowadays they would take great care to avoid saying; and at the time, in Florence, as you may well have heard, people happily mocked one another and they launched at one another the accusation of the peccadiglio. The “peccadiglio” in question was the “peccadillo” (literally, petty sin) of being a nonbeliever, an allusion to the story about the Spaniard who, after saying confession went back to the father confessor to tell him that he had forgotten to mention a “peccadillo”: that he did not believe in God. Not to believe in God, or to say that you did not believe in God, in CounterReformation Italy, was a very serious fault, especially if you add to that demerit the reputation of being a harsh accuser of the Roman Catholic Church’s responsibility for Italy’s moral and political decadence. The church quickly expressed its hostility toward this aspect of Machiavelli’s criticism. The Roman publisher Blado, keenly attuned as he was to the mood of the court of Pope Clement VII, expurgated his edition of Discourses on Livy of exactly those passages in which Machiavelli writes that “because of the wicked examples of that court, this province has lost all devotion and all religion” and that “we Italians have this first obligation to the church and to the priests that we have become without religion and wicked.” In place of those emended passages, we read: “And because there are those who believe that the welfare of matters in Italy depends upon the church of Rome, perhaps one could say the opposite, with all the due respect, that the Roman church does not respect all those precepts that should be observed and in this way it comes to adulterate those holy Catholic institutions that have long been observed.” A similar fate befell the Florentine Histories at the hands of Giuliano de’ Ricci, Machiavelli’s nephew, who hoped by so doing to obtain permission from the church to publish the work which, like the others, had been placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. Giuliano de’ Ricci also judged particularly unacceptable to the papal authorities those passages in which Machiavelli accuses the church of being the cause of all of Italy’s ills and so eliminates the lines that read “all the wars waged by the barbarians in Italy were for the most part caused by the pontiffs, and all the barbarians who invaded it were most often called in by them. This mode of proceeding
Pieraccini, Alcuni aspetti della fortuna di Machiavelli a Firenze nel secolo XVI, pp. 248–49 and n. 99. Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 38 Discorsi di Nicolo Machiavelli sopra la prima deca di T. Livio a Zanobi Buondelmonti, et Cosimo Rucellai, Antonio Blado d’Asola, Rome 1531, I. 12.
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continues still in our times; it is this that has kept and keeps Italy disunited and infirm.” Equally dangerous in his view were those passages in which Machiavelli praised the virtue of antiquity in contrast with the customs of the present day. Where Machiavelli writes, “As a result, many parts of the world, and especially of Italy, have become deserted by comparison to ancient times; and it all happened and happens because in the princes there is no appetite for true glory and in the republics no order that deserves to be praised,” Giuliano de’ Ricci suggests replacing the last line with a less harsh accusation. Last of all, in the passage in which Machiavelli praises the behavior of the captain Biagio del Melano, who refused to surrender to the enemy, Giuliano entirely eliminates these lines: “An example truly worthy of much-praised antiquity!—and as much more wonderful than those as it is rarer.” Giuliano de’ Ricci is particularly harsh on those passages in which Machiavelli presented and approved examples of behavior guided by a form of morality that rejected the humility and resignation that the church taught. From the well-known oration delivered by one of the leaders of the mutiny of the Ciompi, Giuliano de’ Ricci expunged both the passage in which we read, “And we ought not to take conscience into account, for where there is, as with us, fear of hunger and prison, there cannot and should not be fear of hell,” and another passage in which the anonymous orator declares: And those who, out of either little prudence or too much foolishness, shun these modes always suffocate in servitude or poverty. For faithful servants are always servants and good men are always poor; nor do they ever rise out of servitude unless they are unfaithful and bold, nor out of poverty unless they are rapacious and fraudulent. For God and nature have put all the fortunes of men in their midst, where they are exposed more to rapine than to industry and more to wicked than to good arts, from which it arises that men devour one another and that those who can do less are always the worst off. Giuliano de’ Ricci also decided it was unadvisable to leave in the passage in which Machiavelli praised the Florentine magistrates who loved their fatherland more than their souls, and were thus to be held up as examples of a religiosity that taught a sense of civic duty. He cut out the passage in which Machiavelli wrote: “And they were called Saints even though they
Procacci, Machiavelli nella cultura europea dell’età moderna, p. 440. Ibid., p. 446. Ibid., p. 448 Ibid., p. 447.
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had little regard for censures, had despoiled the churches of their goods, and had compelled the clergy to celebrate the offices—so much more did those citizens then esteem their fatherland than their souls. And they showed the Church that just as before they had defended it as friends, so now as enemies they could afflict it.” During the same years in which the belief that Machiavelli was a heretic and an enemy of the church was taking root, there are also traces of a presence of his ideas in the thoughts of those who felt a deep disgust for the corruption of the church of Rome and of its prelates. Around 1523, when his ties to Machiavelli were particularly close, Francesco Guicciardini wrote in his Ricordi: “Naturally, I have always wanted to see the ruin of the Papal State. But as fortune would have it, I have been forced to support and work for the power of two popes. Were it not for that, I would love Martin Luther more than myself, in the hope that his sect might demolish, or at least clip the wings, of this wicked tyranny of the priests.” Like Machiavelli, Guicciardini focused on the corruption of the “ecclesiastical state” and advocated either its dissolution or any type of reform that might put a halt to the moral corruption of the clergy. In the last version of the maxim (1530), he wrote: “I should have loved Martin Luther as much as myself . . . to see this bunch of rascals get their just deserts, that is, to be either without vices or without authority.” Guicciardini denounced in the priests a mixture of vices that can rarely be found even in the rich variety of human wickedness, a mixture that is particularly detestable in men who claim to live in accordance with the laws of God. And yet he does not level an accusation against the Catholic interpretation of the Christian religion, nor against the moral education that derives from that interpretation. Rather, he hastens to point out that
Ibid., p. 446. Francesco Guicciardini, Ricordi, B 124, in Opere di Francesco Guicciardini, edited by Emanuella Lugnani Scarano, Utet, Turin 1983, vol. 1, p. 829. English translation: Mario Domandi, Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman, Harper and Row, New York 1965, pp. 125– 26. See also ibid., C 28, in Opere, vol. I, pp. 735–36. See as well the critical edition by Raffaele Spongano, Sansoni, Florence 1951, p. 33. Guicciardini knew about Luther as early as 1520, when he was governor of Modena and Reggio; Simoncelli, “Preludi e primi echi di Lutero a Firenze,” pp. 690–91. Guicciardini, Ricordi, B 124, in Opere di Francesco Guicciardini, vol. I, p. 829. English translation: Domandi, Maxims, p. 48. “I know of no one who loathes the ambition, the avarice, and the sensuality of the clergy more than I—both because each of these vices is hateful in itself and because each and all are hardly suited to those who profess to live a life dependent upon God. Furthermore, they are such contradictory vices that they cannot coexist in a subject unless he be very unusual indeed”: ibid., p. 735. English translation: Domandi, Maxims, p. 48.
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he does not love Luther “so that I might be free of the laws based on Christian religion as it is generally interpreted and understood,” but only so that he may witness the end of the tyranny of the priests. A form of tyranny, he explains, that is doubly violent “because [the priests] use both the temporal and the spiritual arm to subjugate us.” He shares with Machiavelli a harsh criticism of the states governed by the pope and by the priests, whom he also refers to as “ecclesiastics,” but does not accept Machiavelli’s idea of a religious reform to be carried out by drawing the church back to its beginnings. In 1530, when he had an opportunity to read and comment on the manuscript of Discourses on Livy in Rome, his Considerations (Considerazioni), though incomplete, focus on the pages with political content, not on religious issues. On more than one occasion, he greatly moderates his friend’s judgments of the importance of religion to the birth and preservation of republics. In his considerations concerning chapter X of book 1, for instance, he does not note that Machiavelli places first among the men who are “most praised” those men who have been “heads and orderers of religions.” Also, concerning Machiavelli’s opinion that Rome owed its good fortune more to Numa than to Romulus, Guicciardini objects that “if the first king of Rome had been Numa and not Romulus, certainly the city would have been threatened in its beginnings by its neighbors and Numa would not have left room for Romulus to put armies in, as Romulus allowed Numa to put religion in.” If we read the series of Ricordi written just two years earlier, in 1528, the traces of Machiavelli’s thoughts about religion are even more evident. “It was said truly that too much religion spoils the world,” writes Guicciardini, “because it makes the mind effeminate, involves men in thousands of errors, and diverts them from many generous and virile enterprises.” It is not possible to say for certain, but it is very likely that Guicciardini had in mind the passage from Discourses on Livy (II, 2) in which Machiavelli accuses the Christian religion of having made the world “effeminate” and “weak” and of having denied the value of the “greatness of spirit” that leads men to undertake strong and generous deeds. Ibid., p. 742. In a previous version (B 95) Guicciardini had written that the violence of the priests is double “for they use both the temporal and the spiritual arms to subjugate us”; Ibid., p. 821. English translation: Domandi, Maxims, pp. 48, 119. The chapter title reads “As Much as the Founders of a Republic and of a Kingdom Are Praisworthy, So much Those of a Tyranny Are Worthy of Reproach.” Francesco Guicciardini, Considerazioni sui ‘Discorsi’ del Machiavelli, in Opere di Francesco Guicciardini, vol. I, pp. 625–29.
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After speaking of how the Christian religion made the world weak, Machiavelli had referred to the possibility of an interpretation of that same religion, not “according to idleness” but “according to virtue” that teaches “the exaltation and defense of the fatherland” and exhorts men to love the fatherland, to honor it, and to ready body and soul to “prepare ourselves to be such that we can defend it.” Guicciardini too levels an accusing finger against the Christian religion as the cause of the weakness of the world, but proposes only a generic reformation: “I do not hereby wish to derogate from the Christian faith and divine worship, but rather to confirm and augment them by distinguishing what is excessive from what is sufficient, and by stimulating men’s minds to consider carefully what should be taken into account and what may safely be ignored.” Guicciardini condemned Luther’s Reformation, even though he had confessed that he was willing to embrace it in order to see an end put to the rule of the priests. What he glimpsed behind the Reformation and a free examination of the Bible was less a return to the principles of the Christian faith than a collapse into a licentious way of life. He did not believe in the possibility of a religious reformation that would revive the authentic principles of Christianity and bring about a rebirth of the love of liberty. He judged Italy too corrupt to be reformed. In contrast with Machiavelli, Guicciardini’s propensity for reform was merely a vague thought, or perhaps an impulse. He limited himself to a reference to the usefulness of correcting and reforming both faith and worship in order to ensure that Christianity was no longer a source of weakness in the world, but would rather encourage men to undertake stronger and more altruistic deeds. That reference, however tenuous, appears in any case in a text in which we can clearly detect the influence of Machiavelli. A far more powerful influence can be sensed in the writings of the supporters of the last Florentine Republic (1527–30). Donato Giannotti (1492–1573), who, like Machiavelli, served as secretary of the Ten of Liberty and Peace, invoked the religion of virtue that teaches that God helps only those peoples who are capable of fighting to defend their liberty. In the name of that religion, and of the need to protect republican government, Giannotti denounced the wicked customs of the young and the hypocrisy and corruption of the friars. In order to perfect the Florentine Guicciardini, Ricordi, B 32, in Opere di Francesco Guicciardini, vol. I, p. 803. English translation: Domandi, Maxims, p. 104. Francesco Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia [The History of Italy], XIII, 15, in Opere di Francesco Guicciardini, edited by Emanuella Lugnani Scarano, Utet, Turin 1981, vol. III, pp. 1325–26. See in this connection the thoughts of Gennaro Maria Barbuto, La politica dopo la tempesta: ordine e crisi nel pensiero di Francesco Guicciardini, Liguori, Naples 2002, pp. 79–109.
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Republic, he writes, it is necessary that the young be “temperate, grave, reverent toward the old, lovers of goodness, enemies of evil, attentive to the public good, observant of the laws, fearful of God, and in each and every action, gladsome and merry.” Likewise, Bartolomeo Cavalcanti, when he spoke about the reconstituted Florentine militia, on 3 February 1530, repeated concepts and ideas from Machiavelli: But can you not see how even those ancient sages who established kingdoms and republics determined that their armies should be guided and governed by the reins of religion? Consider Numa, who as soon as he took over the kingdom of Rome thought of nothing other than to fill with religion the too-savage souls of that bellicose people, since he clearly understood that that ferocious army devoid of religion could not save that city nor lead it to happiness. And you know that Rome, from then on in all public affairs, and especially in matters military, was such a diligent observer of religion that those who scorned the augurs and the sacred laws of war, and other ceremonies were sternly punished by that city, and their actions, however good their outcomes, were rejected; and that the Romans judged the observance of religion to be of greater importance to the safety of the city than defeating their enemies. Cavalcanti borrowed a theme typical of republican Christianity when he emphasized the necessity of religion in order to establish a good army: Your King [Christ] desires nothing more from you than that your souls be inflamed with his love, and that there be among you, with the most holy bond and the indissoluble knot of charity joined together and bound. This is the religion that, if it reigns within you, O Florentine people, you will be always defended by that same [Christ] as his devoted and faithful servant as well as freed from the domain of your enemies, as well as exalted victorious and triumphant above all other peoples: otherwise let none of us confide in their own virtue and hope to achieve successfully anything; because our works will turn out wrong, if we are devoid of the light of divine religion, which guides us along the right path; our daring will be reckless, if it depends not upon confidence of divine help, but that of our own valor; our forces will be weak if they are not supported by
Donato Giannotti, Della Repubblica Fiorentina, in Opere politiche e letterarie di Donato Giannotti, edited by F.L. Polidori, Le Monnier, Florence 1850, 2 vols., vol. I, p. 229. Orazioni politiche del Cinquecento, edited by Manlio Fancelli, Bologna 1941, p. 18.
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the immense power of our King; and ultimately all our hopes will be vain if they are not based on him who governs the universe. In another oration Cavalcanti focuses on republican liberty as a gift from God: “Because on that day, 16 May 1527, the tyranny of the Medici left without being expelled, out of the fear and trembling that God put into them in order to fulfill the prophecy uttered by the prophet, Friar Girolamo, who said: ‘The next time that you regain your liberty, you will regain it from God, and not through your own ingenuity and strength, lest the citizens grow proud in the glory of that liberty, as they did the first time, in the year 1494, when they were unwilling to recognize it as a gift from God, as it was; and they therefore lost it.’” An even more eloquent example of the republican religion is the oration that Francesco Carducci delivered in 1529 when he assumed the office of gonfalonier. From the very beginning of that oration, Carducci not only reproduced the concepts, but even the expressions of Machiavelli: “The Roman republic, from which the Florentine Republic is descended, while it remained uncorrupted, distinguished men not by their names, but by their deeds, and went to find and honor virtue even among the bumpkins and the ploughmen.” In perfect harmony with the tradition of republican Christianity, the gonfalonier further insisted on the concept of a God who loved liberty and on the duty that fell to men of working with all their strength to defend it: “It was the work of God that tyranny was expelled from this city, in contrast with the wishes of many, and it will be God’s work if it is kept away, despite the intention of more than a few: and we therefore cannot say that we may or must feel that we are secure and able to relax our guard.” At the conclusion of the oration he links in a masterful fashion the idea of a God that loves more than other men those who do good deeds on behalf of the fatherland, and the idea that man, by working on behalf of the fatherland, becomes godlike and wins eternal glory on earth and eternal beatitude in the heavens: For myself, I cannot think of anything more acceptable to God nor more desirable to other men than to work in such a way that those who write histories are obliged to place in their books our names, and the things that we have done, either through prudence or valor, in bright inks, in perpetual celebration; because this is nothing other than a way of evading death and preserving oneself alive
Ibid., pp. 17–18. See in this connection Simoncelli, “Preludi e primi echi di Lutero a Firenze,” pp. 727–30. Orazioni politiche del Cinquecento, p. 18.
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for a great age; indeed, it is even a form of never dying, of living eternally in glory. It is not entirely wrong, nor indeed far from our own most true and most holy religion, what the Gentile philosophers and theologists wrote, that the souls of those who have administered republics well and faithfully live on after their death, separate from all the others, in the highest and most resplendent section of the heavens, enjoying sempiternal and blessed life. Because no form of praise can be greater or finer among mortal beings, nor can any make men more godlike, than to help other men, and be the cause of the safety and preservation and the liberty of their republics. Toward the middle of the sixteenth century, other republican political writers converted openly to Lutheranism. The most eloquent example is that of Antonio Brucioli. For his ideas about religion, Brucioli was forced into exile, the first time in 1529 and a second time in 1548, in the wake of a search by the Inquisition. In 1555, the Inquisition subjected him to an interrogation that culminated in a condemnation of all his books to be burned and a state of house arrest for him. Brucioli died either on 4 or 5 December 1566, as noted in the file “in materia heresis” (“on matters of heresy”) that the Inquisition diligently maintained. Brucioli was a friend and an admirer of Machiavelli. He met him during the gatherings in the Orti Oricellari (or Rucellai Gardens) and cast him as one of the interlocutors, though a minor one, in his Dialogi. The considerations that were clearly inspired by Machiavelli were those that Brucioli placed in the mouth of Giangiorgio Trissino. In the cities, Trissino explained in the dialogue Della Repubblica, it is necessary to ensure that “divine matters” are entrusted to men who are “impeccable and of only the most laudable customs and godliness.” Without the fear of God, it is difficult to govern cities, “because there are many who care little for the laws of man yet who fear the laws of God.” If the priests are like those of our own times, “wicked and without any religion, so much the worse become the people.” True lawgivers must be lovers of the wisdom of God, and must be capable of interpreting that “intimate mind of God” that is the foundation of the rational order of the world. A lawmaker who wishes to construct an excellent republic must ensure that “he piously understands all of God’s matters” because “a man cannot be good nor
Benedetto Varchi, Storia fiorentina, edited by Gaetano Milanesi, Le Monnier, Florence 1857, 3 vols., VIII, 26, vol. I, pp. 416–18. Antonio Brucioli, Dialogi, edited by Aldo Landi, Prismi Editrice-The Newberry Library, Naples-Chicago 1982, Critical Note, pp. 553–58. Ibid., p. 131.
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succeed in doing anything good if he lives without the love and the fear of God.” In Brucioli’s view, “our religion” instills in men “great hopes of immortality,” and men, because of that hope, achieve great things and are willing to face “the danger of dying for their fatherland.” In order to explain how important religion was to the proper governance of states, he cites first what Numa did “with the name of religion and divine worship,” and then Moses “who, with nothing more than the harness of the holy and true religion, not only led an enslaved people out of Egypt, but then guided that people for forty years through the desert.” Numa and Moses were two of Machiavelli’s heroes, just as it was Machiavelli’s observation that the corruption of the priests made the people afflicted with that corruption both irreligious and wicked; likewise, Machiavelli originated the idea that the Christian religion exhorts its adherents to serve the fatherland in order to win eternal happiness. The true greatness of a republic is not found in its powerful walls, its wealth, its magnificent mansions, and its mighty armies. Rather, it is found in the customs of the citizens. Only those republics that have citizens who are “learned, wise, good, reasonable, and properly educated, as well as acceptable to God because of their good actions” can be said to be powerful and flourishing. Like Machiavelli, Brucioli, who witnessed the end of the republican experiences, identifies the moral education of the citizens through a proper religious education as one of the necessary foundations of a good republic. The idea that the Christian religion teaches the virtues of the citizen was also present in the context of the Genoan aristocracy during the first half of the sixteenth century. One piece of evidence of this is Ludovico Spinola’s De reipublicae institutione, written between 1528 and 1530 to commemorate the ruling republican oligarchy that claimed to represent the entire city community. Despite the unmistakable apologetic intentions
Ibid., pp. 178–79. Ibid., p. 504. Ibid., pp. 487–97. Ibid., pp. 201–202. In contrast with Machiavelli, Brucioli adopted the pessimistic anthropology of the Reformation, and as Giorgio Spini pointed out, we can sense in his writings, “the Christian and Lutheran note of the polemic against the vanity of human knowledge and the demand to substitute reason for revelation”; Giorgio Spini, Tra Rinascimento e Riforma: Antonio Brucioli, La Nuova Italia, Florence 1940, p. 141. See also Carlo Dionisotti, “La testimonianza del Brucioli,” Rivista Storica Italiana 91 (1979), 26–51; now in Machiavellerie. Storia e fortuna di Machiavelli, Einaudi, Turin 1980. See Silvana Seidel Menchi, “Passione civile e aneliti erasmiani di riforma nel patriziato genovese del primo Cinquecento: Ludovico Spinola,” Rinascimento 18 (1978), pp. 87–121, in particular, pp. 96–100.
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of the book, the philosophy underlying De reipublicae institutione is a civil philosophy based on the principle that a true human and Christian life is one spent in the service of the fatherland and the common good. Like the Florentine humanists, Spinola defends political action on behalf of the good of the republic as “man’s way of saying yes to the divine plan.” In Spinola’s thought, Erasmus’s miles christianus (Christian soldier) develops into the civis genuensis (Genoese citizen) who works to defend the free republic as an implementation of God’s plan. Spinola found comfort in the passage of the Somnium Scipionis that promises those who have aided, preserved, and increased the liberty of the fatherland a place in heaven where they will enjoy eternal beatitude because God loves those who serve the republic. From this interpretation of the civil content of the Christian religion, Spinola derives not only an admonition to preserve and uphold religious worship, but also an exhortation to undertake a full-fledged moral reformation based on the principle of charity and justice as a response to divine love: Our city has always distinguished itself for its faithful adherence to divine worship and its constancy in that pursuit: we wish to persist in that observance and faithfulness, following in the footsteps of our fathers. But our faithfulness to the religious tradition of our city and our fathers is achieved fully and completely in the moment in which we achieve, within ourselves, in response to the love of almighty God, a state of mind disposed to supreme goodness and justice. We can offer God nothing that would be better or more acceptable in response to His love and His redeeming death. He does not look to see whether the hands that are raised toward Him in offering are full: He looks to see whether the hands that are raised to Him in prayer are clean. Spinola harmonized a municipal religiosity based on the idea of a God who protects and loves the Republic of Genoa with an Erasmian religiosity based on the idea of Christ, “who is nothing other than charity, simplicity, and patience.” The same harmony between civic spirit and Christian authenticity emerges with equal clarity in the meditations of Agostino Giustiniani, the Dominican bishop of Nebbio in Corsica who, during the second decade
Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., pp. 101–2 Ibid., pp. 106–7. Ibid., pp. 105–6.
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of the sixteenth century lived in Paris for many years, and traveled extensively, visiting the learned men of Europe, first and foremost Erasmus in Flanders and Sir Thomas More in England. Giustiniani states that he was always faithful to a sober ideal of piety and adverse to superstition. He reiterates that loving one’s fatherland and serving the republic is entirely in keeping with a Christian way of life. In the Epistola al Duce, al Senato, e a tutto il popolo di Genova that begins his Annali della Repubblica di Genova (1537), he writes that “if we call religious those who examine and frequently reread holy matters, then what could be more religious and divine, than to have given instruction to educate our people to be lovers of the republic, so that they attempt not only to maintain it in life and true unity, but also to increase it in power and glory?” To set aside a disorderly love of one’s private interest and to devote oneself to the interests of the public good is neither more nor less than what “God commands.” Machiavelli’s thoughts on religion were also present in sixteenth-century Venice, a place abounding in unrest, with Catholic reforms and heretical movements. Paolo Sarpi, for instance, shared with Machiavelli a critical view of idleness and hypocrisy, and wrote about religious education as one of the means used by “politicians” to preserve the state. Sarpi, like Machiavelli, was aware of the power of religion, and he judged as harmful to the state the corruption of the principles and rites of the Christian religion that had been perpetrated by the priests: “The cunning priests have been able at their leisure to shape religion to their own interests, changing it and twisting it as was convenient to their purposes, introducing on a daily basis innovations, many of them highly prejudicial to the basic principles, which are passed without being noticed.” Sarpi set forth these observations in his commentary on the Italian translation of Sir Edwin Sandys’s book Europae speculum: or, A view or sur
Ibid., p. 111. Agostino Giustiniani, Annali della Repubblica di Genova, Genoa, presso il libraio Canepa, 1854, vol. I, pp. 7–8. Ibid., p. 8. Innocenzo Cervelli, “Storiografia e problemi intorno alla vita religiosa e spirituale a Venezia nella prima metà del ‘500,’” Studi Veneziani 8 (1966), pp. 447–48. See also, by the same author, Machiavelli e la crisi dello stato veneziano, Guida, Naples 1974. Paolo Sarpi, Pensieri sulla religione, in Opere, edited by Gaetano and Luisa Cozzi, Ricciardi, Milan-Naples 1969, Introductory Note, p. 99. See William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation, University of California Press, Berkeley 1984, p. 528. See also Luigi Salvatorelli, “Le idee religiose di fra Paolo Sarpi,” Atti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei: Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche: memorie Ser. 8, 5 (1953), pp. 311–60. Paolo Sarpi, Dalla “Relazione dello stato della religione, e con quali dissegni et arti ella è stata fabbricata e maneggiata in diversi stati di queste occidentali parti del mondo,” in Opere, p. 316.
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vey of the state of religion (Relazione dello stato della religione), printed in Geneva in 1625. In this book the author had emphasized that the religion of the Italians consisted “for the most part in external appearance” and in “intricate and silent ceremonies,” whence sprang the custom of an “exterior and mediocre” obedience to the laws, rather than the “integrity and internal sincerity” that is the product of true religion. From bad religion, Sandys insisted, derives an evident moral corruption: it is impossible to conceal that in general the country is greatly inundated and almost covered with sins, dishonesty of conversation, squalor of actions, everyone competing against everyone else, especially the priests and the monks, in an attempt to outdo one another in impudence; to such an extent that what would not be tolerated elsewhere is here greatly honored; that which elsewhere even the most dissolute individual would be ashamed to confess, here the priests and monks barely blush to do openly. Indeed, if anyone abstains from such actions, it strikes them as strange, and they look upon integrity as little better than simplemindedness and a lack of spirit. The wickedness and shamelessness of the Italians, as Machiavelli had guessed, sprang from religious corruption, indeed from the neglect, the superficiality, and the passivity in the area of religion: “Nothing could be more surprising to those who consider the conversation of the Italians than to observe this nation—acute, prudent, and subtle in all matters, not easy to persuade without good reasons—and yet in the matters of religions so careless, indifferent to knowing or seeing, as if by principle uninterested in knowing, as if it were something of no importance to them.” In the Venetian cultural milieu, the ideas of Paolo Sarpi concerning moral and religious reform were given significant development in the thinking of the Brescian friar Fulgenzio Micanzio, who advocated a reform suited to political liberty and the true religious spirit. For Micanzio, political power requires the support of religion because religion has proven over the centuries its great ability to lead the minds and the passions of the people. It is based on that principle that Micanzio derives a harsh
Ibid., p. 315. Ibid., p. 316 Germano Rosa, “La ‘religione politica.’ Repubblica di Venezia e corte di Roma nei Pensieri di Fulgenzio Micanzio,” Annali dell’Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici 14 (1997), pp. 309–43. Fulgenzio Micanzio, Annotazioni e pensieri in Storici e politici veneti del Cinquecento e del Seicento, edited by Gino Benzoni and Tiziano Zanato, Ricciardi, Milan-Naples 1982, p. 860; see also Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty, pp. 497–500, 528–29, and 595–96.
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critique of the church for having attempted to subjugate temporal power to the spiritual power, and for having “formed a religion that was no longer indifferent to all states, but shaped to its own state and for the furtherance of that state.” At the same time, he scolds those princes who delegate to the ecclesiastics all theological issues and allow the corruption of ceremonies and religious beliefs. In contrast with a religion that claims to subjugate secular power to its own interests, and against those princes who allow the corruption of religion out of self-interest or ignorance, Micanzio provides an interpretation of religion that is in harmony with classical ideals and with Christian ideals and which teaches its followers how to translate the lesson of Christian piety into political engagement in the service of the common good. “But man,” he wrote, was not born for himself, but principally for the fatherland and for the common good. The question as to whether a wise man should become involved in governance can be explored by others. Our father [Paolo Sarpi] will give us the example of turning away from neither hard work nor dangers in the service of God and the fatherland; and that a good and wise man is far from the mistaken doctrine, invented by a mob of seditious frauds, who never speak of the secular police except as a bad thing, even though it was established by God, and in which an upright man can well serve his divine Majesty with a vocation that is so pious and excellent, that either no others equal it, or at least do not outdo it, as in homage to the greatest piety, which can be exercised in the church, and to which God has summoned from time to time the greatest heroes of the entire ecclesiastical order. If we are looking for a confirmation of the link in terms of ideas between humanism and the Italian reformation movement, then let us consider the fact that Machiavelli’s works, even after they were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, were present in the libraries of the victims of the Inquisition. Francesco Gentile da Fermo, against whom the Inqui
Fulgenzio Micanzio, “Vita del padre Paolo,” in Paolo Sarpi, Istoria del Concilio Tridentino, edited by Corrado Vivanti, Einaudi, Turin 1974, vol. II, p. 1389. Ibid., p. 1329. “Reforming evangelism,” writes Silvana Seidel Menchi, “was hailed as the achievement of a religious renewal for which Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Machiavelli had vaguely felt a need”; Silvana Seidel Menchi, Erasmo in Italia 1520–1580, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 1987, p. 90. The author notes that the names of Valla, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, and Aretino were incapable “of striking a spark of a conscious dissent and of encouraging articulate, and not entirely isolated, voices of protest,” as had instead happened with the name of Erasmus; Ibid., p. 321.
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sition began proceedings in 1568, owned and held on the shelves of his library—as did his disciples Manusso Marano and Giovanni Cassimati —alongside the works of Erasmus, both Machiavelli’s The Prince and Discourses on Livy. Luigi Groto, also known as the Cieco di Adria, or the Blind Man of Adria, was ordered to appear on 5 June 1567 before the Inquisition of Rovigo because he had been discovered to be in possession of forbidden books. Among those books was the Florentine Histories by Niccolò Machiavelli. The poor apothecary Giovanni Antonio Paterno, dragged before the Inquisition of Naples on 6 November 1569, had in his small library copies of Discourses on Livy, the Florentine Histories, and a book entitled Princeps christianus, which might either have been Machiavelli’s The Prince or Erasmus’s Institutio principis christiani. The old apothecary loved those books so much that he wrote his name on each one of them, without stopping to consider that by so doing he had only worsened his position in the eyes of the Inquisition. The bookseller Vilio Bonfadini, interrogated on 13 February 1571, replied that “the works of Machiavelli were among the most sought after books, along with Le cento novelle, the Bibles in the vernacular, and the New Testaments in the vernacular.” Machiavelli’s views on religion surface in a broad and diverse array of cultural and political contexts. Their presence, for instance, can be seen in the Dialogue on Religion (Dialogus cui titulus est religio) printed in Lucca in 1539 by the Luccan jurist Enrico Boccella, and in particular in the pages discussing a comparison between modern religion and the religion of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Equally significant are the observations set forth by the Calabrian author Tiberio Rosselli in his Apologeticus, printed in 1519, concerning religious worship as a factor of cohesion and good customs among men, and his worried denunciation of the decadence of Christian rituals, degenerating into superstitious and magical practices.
Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., p. 294 Ibid., p. 301. See also Adriano Prosperi, “La religione, il potere, le élites. Incontri italospagnoli nell’età della Controriforma,” Annuario dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea 29–30 (1977–1978); Emanuela Scarpa, “Machiavelli lettore d’Erasmo?”Atti dell’Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti, cl. sci. mor 134 (1975–76), pp. 143–53. Menchi, Erasmo in Italia, p. 463. According to Adriano Prosperi and Carlo Ginzburg, arguments of Machiavellian inspiration emerge as well in the writings of Tullio Crispoldi, a cleric from Rieti, the author of pious texts in the vernacular; see Carlo Ginzburg and Adriano Prosperi, Giochi di pazienza, Einaudi, Turin 1973, p. 16. I quote from Prosperi, “La religione, il potere, le élites,” p. 507. See Paola Zambelli, “Una disputa filosofica ereticale proposta nelle università padane nel 1519,” in Il Rinascimento nelle corti padane. Società e cultura, Laterza, Rome-Bari 1977, p. 522. See also, concerning the role of religious ceremonies, Albano Biondi, La giustificazione della simulazione nel Cinquecento, in Eresia e riforma nell’Italia del Cinquecento, Miscellanea I, Biblioteca del Corpus Reformatorum Italicorum, Sansoni-The Newberry Library, Florence-Chicago 1974,
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Even closer to Machiavelli’s ideas are the thoughts of the Brescian Benedictine monk Gregorio Bornato who emphasizes, in his De libero hominis arbitrio, completed in 1537, the practical function of religious rites and the effectiveness of Roman religion at inspiring the souls of the young to emulate both virtue and glory. Moving along the same path was the Siennese nobleman Bartolomeo Carli Piccolomini, a follower of the ideas of Juan de Valdés and the author of an uncompleted essay, entitled Trattati nove della prudenza, probably written between 1530 and 1540. In this virtually unknown text, we can clearly see the presence of the idea of religion as a form of human perfection and greatness, and as the foundation of a true civil way of life. Like other Italian thinkers, Piccolomini experienced the religious reformation above all as a demand for moral rebirth, and was a profound admirer of Machiavelli. “In this pursuit,” he writes in the treatise Of the Perfect Chancellor (Del perfetto cancelliere), “men will become expert in many fields, by managing countless affairs, as did Nicolo [sic] Machiavelli in the Florentine Secreteriat, where he acquired lengthy and varied knowledge, a deep and rare understanding of the matters of the world, whence derive his highly valued works about the principality, about War, his Discorsi sopra Livio [The Discourses], and his histories, in which it is possible to glimpse a perfect harmony of a great mind, with extensive experience of varied things pertaining to human life.” Like Machiavelli, Piccolomini called for a religion that did not encourage living in resignation and idleness, relying on God for help, but rather one that exhorted its followers to work wisely and with strength of spirit. In this connection, he quotes a passage from Sallust: “Not by vows nor womanish entreaties is the help of the gods secured; it is always through watchfulness, vigorous action, and wisdom in counsel that success comes. When you abandon yourself to cowardice and baseness, it is vain to call upon the gods; they are offended and hostile.” From Discourses on Livy he draws the pp. 7–68. “Machiavelli’s thoughts,” writes Adriano Prosperi, “matured therefore in close correspondence with the Italian reality of the period, in which—alongside other forms of social cohesion—those that were based on Christian practice also slid into a state of crisis and religion began to become an individual problem”; Prosperi, “La religione, il potere, le élites,” p. 507. I quote from Carlo Ginzburg and Adriano Prosperi, “Le due redazioni del Beneficio di Cristo,” in Eresia e riforma nell’Italia del Cinquecento, pp. 135–204 and 170–71. See Delio Cantimori, “Atteggiamenti della vita culturale italiana nel secolo XVI di fronte alla Riforma,” Rivista Storica Italiana 53 (1936), pp. 83–110; Elisabeth G. Gleason, “Sixteenth Century Italian Interpretations of Luther,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 60 (1969), pp. 160–73. Rita Belladonna, “Pontanus, Machiavelli and a Case of Religious Simulation in Early Sixteenth-Century Siena (Carli’s Trattati nove della prudenza),” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 37 (1975), pp. 377–85 and 381, n.7.
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maxim of political wisdom that the people not only need laws, but also the “fear of God,” if a republic is to be preserved good and united. Princes, even at the cost of evincing a devotion that they do not feel, must respect the cult of the divine and preserve religious ceremonies uncorrupted. Piccolomini maintains that with religion the ancients achieved great things that would otherwise “not have been possible,” and he cites examples from Discourses on Livy and The Art of War: David, Numa Pompilius, Sartorio. He believes, like Machiavelli, that those men who were considered worthy of speaking with the deities were themselves divine, like Scipio Africanus “in whom was considered to be such divinity that he could speak to God.” But if men, or certain men, have divinity within themselves, then religion becomes synonymous with moral virtue, as Piccolomini himself explains: “Under this heading [of religion] I mean to describe a virtue of the soul that consists of the fear of God, in a perfect conscience, and in a great care to preserve the honor of religion. If those parts are found in a prudent man, they will make him miraculous, and place him in the reverence of one and all, because good men will love him, guilty men will fear offending him lest they be seen to be enemies of the good, and especially of religion, which is a dangerous thing to oppose in any manner.” Even the Italian evangelists, though well aware that Machiavelli was quite different from Erasmus, read his books carefully and made use of them. Giovan Battista Goineo, who died an exile in Germany where he had sought refuge because he was accused of heresy, in a letter to Pier Paolo Vergerio written in 1539, quoted, in relation to the origin of the secular power of the popes, a passage from the Florentine Histories. Lucio Paolo Rosello, a parish priest in the Venetian hinterland, in contact with the philo-Erasmus circles of Padua, a correspondent of Melanchthon, a translator of Luther, and an example of Italian Nicodemism (the hypocritical custom of feigned adherence to Catholic worship while concealing Ibid., pp. 384–85; see also Belladonna, Aristotele, Machiavelli, and Religious Dissimulation: Bartolomeo Carli Piccolomini’s Trattati nove della prudenza, in Peter Martyr Vermigli and Italian Reform, edited by Joseph C. McLelland, Waterloo, Ontario 1980, pp. 29–41. Belladonna, “Pontanus, Machiavelli and a Case of Religious Simulation in Early SixteenthCentury Siena,” pp. 384–85. Concerning Erasmus and Machiavelli, see Augustin Renaudet, “Politique d’Erasme et politique de Machiavel,” in Umanesimo e scienza politica, Atti del Congresso internazionale di studi umanistici, Rome-Florence, 1949, edited by Enrico Castelli, Marzorati, Milan 1951, pp. 353–63. See also Augustin Renaudet, Érasme et l’Italie, Droz, Geneva 1954; and Carlo Dionisotti, Machiavellerie, pp. 210–226. Procacci, Machiavelli nella cultura europea dell’età moderna, pp. 37–38. See also John Tedeschi, “The Cultural Contributions of Italian Protestant Reformers in the Late Renaissance,” in Libri, idee e sentimenti religiosi nel Cinquecento italiano, 3–5 April 1986, Atti dell’Istituto di studi rinascimentali di Ferrara, Panini, Modena 1987, pp. 81–108.
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one’s heretical beliefs), used Machiavelli’s ideas extensively in his Ritratto del vero governo del Principe, published in Venice in 1552. Concerning the themes that are most closely connected with religious issues, Rosello nonetheless took the defense of Erasmus’s Christian caritas against Machiavelli. A true prince, he wrote, must show a “religious piety,” as did Numa Pompilius, Hercules, and Alexander the Great, and not move away from the Christian religion, especially where oaths and promises are concerned. Machiavelli was the topic of assiduous debate among those who frequented the Calvinist circles that Alessandro Trissino, a Vicenza aristocratic placed on trial by the Inquisition in 1563, and who died around 1609, helped to run in Venice between 1558 and 1561. From Holy Office sources we know that in those gatherings the discussions turned to the problem of grace, of human freedom with respect to God, the importance of works, the pope, and the legitimacy of the use of images and the cult of the saints. According to available sources, it is difficult to identify what aspects of Machiavelli’s thought most attracted the interest of Alessandro Trissino and the “gentilhuomini” (gentlemen) who attended the Venetian gatherings. It is likely that their interest converged in particular on those passages in which Machiavelli accused the Catholic Church of having undermined the religiosity and the morality of the Italians. It is equally plausible that they applauded the Florentine Secretary’s pessimism with regard to the human condition and the pages he wrote about how fortune dominates so great a part of human affairs and the life of the state. Because of his Calvinist faith and his cultural education and upbringing, Trissino was profoundly opposed to the exterior and superficial forms of religiosity and harshly condemned the hypocritical practice of Nicodemism. This aspect of his religiosity, common to other Italian heretics, was in sharp contrast with Machiavelli’s ideas. Machiavelli had advised See Leandro Perini, “Gli eretici italiani del ’500 e Machiavelli,” Studi Storici 10 (1969), pp. 877–915, in particular pp. 883–901. See also Procacci, Machiavelli nella cultura europea dell’età moderna, pp. 38–39; Andrea Del Col, “Lucio Paolo Rosello e la vita religiosa veneziana verso la metà del secolo XVI,” Rivista di Storia della Chiesa in Italia 23 (1978), pp. 422–59. Not only the Erasmians and the Lutherans, but also the Italian Calvinists looked with close attention to Machiavelli’s works. In Geneva, the elders of the Italian community lodged a protest in 1576 with the city authorities to defend Machiavelli’s honor, which had been offended by the Discours contre Machiavel by Innocent Gentillet; Gentillet was even physically attacked by Francesco Lamberti. It is a minor episode, but it shows a link of sympathy between the Calvinists and Machiavelli. See Tedeschi, “The Cultural Contributions of Italian Protestant Reformers in the Late Renaissance,” p. 89. Achille Olivieri, “Alessandro Trissino e il movimento calvinista vicentino del Cinquecento,” Rivista di Storia della Chiesa in Italia 21 (1967), pp. 55–117. Ibid., pp. 58–59. “Ragionamento della necessità di ritirarsi a vivere nella Chiesa visibile di Gesù Cristo,” in Olivieri, Alessandro Trissino e il movimento calvinista vicentino del Cinquecento, Appendix, p. 110.
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princes and the rulers of republics to feign respect and devotion even for those religious practices in which they did not believe. If princes and rulers of republics could feign and conceal, then it was all the more reasonable to think that their subjects and citizens could do the same. A further documentation of the distance that separated the religious sensibility of the reformation from Machiavelli’s prescriptions in the area of ceremonial can be found in the 1578 letter in which the heretic Bernardino Bonifacio, Marchese of Oria, criticizes the treatment of religion in chapters 11 to 15 of book I of Discourses on Livy because it was excessively favorable to superstition. What the heretics considered to be superstitions were for Machiavelli effective ways of keeping alive in the populace a fear and veneration of God. The purity of the faith was a chief concern for heretics and evangelists, but of less interest to Machiavelli, even though they shared a similar focus on a rigorous civil ethic that was deeply rooted in hearts and minds. That Calvin and the Calvinists were something quite different from Machiavelli was clearly understood by another Luccan, the printer Pietro Perna, who was in religious exile in Basel. With the help of Stefano Tegli of Foligno, Perna published in 1560 the first Latin translation of The Prince, followed by three editions in 1580. In that translation, Perna—in contrast with the theocratic ideas of Calvin and his followers—sang the praises of Machiavelli’s political wisdom. He did so because Machiavelli spoke of the state with no theological presuppositions, and in that manner pointed the way toward civil peace. Machiavelli’s Huguenot enemies, Perna wrote, “have entirely muddled and confused the consciences, the families, the people, and the state. And now I ask you, O readers, whose teachings are better: those of Machiavelli, who shows how it is possible to conquer the government and hold it peacefully, with a minimum of bloodshed . . . or that of these people, who are neither strong enough to govern nor capable of doing so, and who in the meanwhile advocate for years and years conflict and bloody battles and ultimately send to the inferno so many thousands of bodies and souls, devastating cities and provinces, without ever putting an end to the desolation.” In his editions of The Prince, Perna nonetheless inserted powerful antidotes and edited out of the text those passages that most greatly offended Christian morality. His determination to distribute the work of Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 12. Nicolai Maciavelli Princeps. Ex Sylvestri Telii Fulginatis traductione diligenter emendate . . . , Basel, Ex Officina Petri Pernae, 1580, p. 69; see Werner Kaegi, Meditazioni storiche, Laterza, Bari 1960, pp. 193–94. Concerning Perna, see the excellent study by Leandro Perini, La vita e i tempi di Pietro Perna, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome 2002.
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was motivated not only by the desire to encourage the fame of an author whom the Catholic Church had placed on its Index of Forbidden Books or to oppose a secular concept of the state against the Calvinist theocracy. Perna, who like many other exiles brought with him from Lucca the ideals of Italian liberty, the republic, and religious reform, perceived the same aspirations in the pages of Machiavelli. This convergence of political ideals and a demand for moral and religious reform encouraged the translation of works by the Florentine Secretary in the lands of the Reformation, and those works served as a launching pad for a full-fledged rebirth of Machiavelli’s ideas in the history of the conquest of liberty in Europe.
2. The Difficulties of Survival in Counter-Reformation Italy While the proponents of moral and religious reform accepted and reinterpreted in various ways the idea of a Christian religion that would teach the love of liberty and the fatherland, the political writers who were closest to the spirit of the Counter-Reformation either rejected it or twisted it beyond recognition. They judged Machiavelli—and they were not far wrong—to be more than just another of the many critics of the corruption of the priests, but rather a proponent of a different interpretation of the Christian religion. To accuse him of heresy was ill advised, because Machiavelli never dabbled in theology, and yet they still needed to find a way of answering the charge that the church had infested Italy and the world with indolence, and they still had to respond to the question of whether or not the religion of virtue was true Christianity. One of the first to speak out against the idea of a religion that would help to build a virtuous republic was the Paduan Sperone Speroni (1500–88). In a text abounding in references to Machiavelli’s ideas, Speroni explains that a civil way of life is always and exclusively guided either by self-interest or the desire for peace, or else by the lust of conquest. The Christian people never “raises its head toward the heavens,” except when it turns to God, “wheedling and entreating.” The “civil religion” of the men who live in republics is in every way contrary to the true Christian religion. It is a vain dream, unworthy of those who, like Machiavelli, had stated that they did not wish to discuss “republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth,” to pretend that republic has virtue as its ultimate end. The only possibility in the view of Speroni, who failed to per
Sperone Speroni, Apologia dei suoi Dialoghi, in Opere, vol. I, Venice 1740, p. 414. Ibid., pp. 414–15.
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ceive the evident weakness of his argument, was the Christian prince described by Erasmus, who lived in accordance with the laws of God and who educated his subjects to follow his example. Far more refined was the position of Giovanni Botero, the most authoritative Italian political writer of the Counter-Reformation. Botero sharply rejected the idea that Christian morality was incompatible with royal majesty. In order to support his view, he appealed to the God of the Old Testament, the “God of the armies,” the same God that Machiavelli (whom he called “homo ingeniosus sed parum Christianus,” that is, ‘an ingenious man, but scarcely a Christian’) had invoked in his writings, in order to install in princes that virtue that those who act merely out of calculation and personal interest cannot hope to attain. At the same time, Botero rejected Machiavelli’s claims that the teachings of Christ have made men unsuited for war and for military virtue. He acknowledged that church doctrine prohibited unjust wars, but he also emphasized that the Christian faith teaches us that the soul is immortal and that the glory of eternal life awaits those who fight and die on behalf of justice, religion, and the homeland. It is therefore not the cause of corruption, but rather a school for civil and military virtue. Examples such as that of Godfrey of Bouillon do more than any possible argument to demonstrate that Christians are, thanks to their faith, great warriors. Since the Christian religion had not made the world weak, there was no need for any moral and religious reform whatever. Botero failed to understand, or chose not to understand, that Machiavelli had not spoken so much of a decline in military valor, as of the waning of a love of liberty and Ibid., p. 421; see also Cesare Vasoli, Civitas mundi. Studi sulla cultura del Cinquecento, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome 1996, pp. 292–95. English translation: The Prince, Harvey Mansfield, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1985, p. 61. Concerning the interpretations of Machiavelli in the late sixteenth century and in the seventeenth century, see Rodolfo De Mattei, Dal premachiavellismo all’antimachiavellismo, Sansoni, Florence 1969; Idem, Il problema della ‘ragion di stato’ nell’età della controriforma, MilanNaples 1979; Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1992. See Cesare Vasoli, A proposito della ‘Digressio in Nicolaum Machiavellum’: la religione come ‘forza’ politica nel pensiero di Botero, in Botero e la ‘ragion di stato’, Atti del Convegno in Memoria di Luigi Firpo (Turin 8–10 March 1990), edited by A. Enzo Baldini, Olschki, Florence 1992, pp. 44–45. Concerning Botero and the Counter Reformation, see Luigi Firpo, Botero, Giovanni, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 13, Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 1971, pp. 352–62. See also Mario D’Addio, Les six livres de la République e il pensiero cattolico del Cinquecento in una lettera del Mons. Minuccio Minucci al Possevino, in Medioevo e Rinascimento. Studi in onore di Bruno Nardi, Pubblicazioni dell’Istituto di Filosofia dell’Università di Roma, Sansoni, Florence 1955, vol. 1, p. 143 and Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty, pp. 299–304. See Vasoli, A proposito della ‘Digressio in Nicolaum Machiavellum’: la religione come ‘forza’ politica nel pensiero di Botero.
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of the virtue that gives men the strength to resist those wicked men who want to dominate others. Setting aside the essential question of liberty and political virtue in the strict sense, Botero explained with a wealth of references that the real causes of the decline of states are heresy, which foments a spirit of subversion and triggers incurable divisions in the body politic; scorn for the church and the priesthood; and cruelty toward God’s prophets and servants. Machiavelli had praised the Florentine magistrates who in the fourteenth century loved their fatherland more than their souls and placed no importance on a papal excommunication; Botero condemned princes who paid no attention to excommunications as wicked and irreligious men. Machiavelli called for the rediscovery of the God of liberty; Botero was invoking the God of obedience. In his most important work, Della Ragion di Stato, Botero also rejected Machiavelli’s ideas on religious reform, choosing instead to exalt the religion of humility and an apparent full submission to the Catholic Church and its prelates. He begins his argument by emphasizing the role that religion plays in the preservation of states. Religion, he writes, “maintains the state through the divine aid of God’s grace.” He explains that subjects, even the subjects of a tyrant, do not fear being oppressed by a prince who respects God and are less inclined to mutiny in that case. A prince must therefore cultivate religion in order to ensure that he is beloved of God and in order to preserve his state. With the friendship of God, moreover, he can achieve great things in civil life and in military enterprises. In order to reinforce the hope and the daring of soldiers, nothing is more effective than an appeal to God and the promise of happiness in the next life. Like Machiavelli, Botero offers as an example the Romans who “regarded religion as one of the chief bases of government and would not permit it to be altered or violated in any way.” He rejects the idea, however, that a prince can be considered religious even if he lacks a sincere faith. It is unlikely, he observes, “for one who is not truly religious to be thought so, for nothing lasts so short a time as pretence. The prince must prostrate himself in all humility before the Divine Majesty and acknowledge that from Him proceed the power of a ruler and obedience of his subjects. The higher he is raised above his fellows, the lower he should abase himself before the face of God, taking no business in hand unless he is certain that it is in conformity with God’s law.”
Giovanni Botero, Della Ragion di Stato: libri dieci. Con tre libri delle cause della grandezza delle città, presso Andrea Muschio, Venice 1619, p. 86. English translation: Giovanni Botero, The Reason of State, translated by P. J. Waley and D. P. Waley, New Haven, Yale University Press 1956, p. 63. Ibid., p. 87. English translation: Waley and Waley, The Reason, p. 63.
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Still clearly waging a polemic with Machiavelli, Botero absolves the church of Rome of all responsibility for the ruin of Italy, and instead levels an accusation against the emperors: “In the times of the Emperor Arnulf, and in the years that followed, religion declined through the faults and bad example of the emperors, who were most insolent in their behavior toward the Church. At this period of moral collapse Italy was looted by the Saracens, and utterly ravaged by the barbarians.” He even refuses to accept a distinction between religion and the religious, a distinction on which all reformers had insisted: “A man who has no respect for the clergy cannot feel reverence for religion.” He does not hesitate to praise the more exterior and superstitious aspects of the Catholic religion, including the adoration of relics. Men, he explains, aspire to God; but because God is concealed both from human senses and from human intellect, they must go in search of some “sign of his assistance.” A Christian prince therefore must respect prelates, leaving to them the right of judging matters of doctrine, ensuring that they do not slip into poverty, erecting magnificent churches, and even relying on a “spiritual council” made up of theologians and doctors of canon law. The morality of docility and humility in the face of powerful men that Machiavelli and the other reformers had so roundly condemned became in Botero’s view one of the most worthwhile aspects of a Christian education. Christian law “[enjoins them] to obey wicked rulers as well as moderate ones, and to suffer all rather than disturb the peace.” Aside from the docility of the subjects, Christian law, with the aid of the church, allowed princes to extend the dominion of the state to the inner souls of men: “According to [Christian law] not merely the bodies and possessions but even the souls and consciences of his people are subject to him.” This is the most straightforward doctrine of religion as instrumentum regni, with a certain grandeur to its clarity, and Botero set it forth in clear and direct contrast with Machiavelli’s religion of liberty. During that same period, Paolo Paruta (1540–98) also maintained that the Catholic religion is well and entirely suited to the preservation of states and that there was no need to change it. Since divine worship is a necessary condition for a truly civil way of life, it is indispensable that it should be “excellently established” in the city. Private citizens must obey the magistrates and the magistrates must obey the laws, but both the citizens and the magistrates must respectfully, reverently serve the religion “with which all other good conditions would be impossible and the city would not only
Ibid., pp. 90 and 93. English translation: Waley and Waley, The Reason, pp. 65, 68. Botero, Delle cause della grandezza delle città, in Della Ragion di Stato, p. 87. English translation: Waley and Waley, The Reason, pp. 64, 250. Ibid., p. 91. English translation: Waley and Waley, The Reason, p. 66.
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no longer be happy, it could not even be considered a city.” If man moves away from God, he loses his “true form.” Even the gentiles, who admittedly were not aware of this truth, ordered that their civil governments should be based “upon this firm foundation of religion” and celebrated the virtue of Numa Pompilius as a latter-day founder of the city of Rome because he “ordered it in religion.” To that much greater a degree, a Christian prince, who knows that he reigns on earth by God’s will, must “devote every attention, and every effort to ensure that his people be educated to the true faith and that in every part of the city, and in every deed of the citizens the role of religion should be magnificently evident.” The prince should in no case allow there to be two religions, but should ensure that the city abounds with temples and priests, and that the ceremonies of worship are pious and magnificent and that religious holidays are observed devoutly and solemnly. External appearances, Paruta emphasizes with Venetian wisdom, stimulate “internal effects”; moreover, the prince should foster in the souls of the citizens, along with piety, a love of true goodness “which alone can form that perfect civil virtue, that in vain others attempt to bring into the world through fear of the laws.” Tommaso Campanella brought a ferocious attack to bear against Machiavelli who was guilty, in his view, of having reduced religion to nothing more than the art of governing men and for having treated Moses as simply a virtuous and cunning man. Religion, Campanella explained, is a necessary foundation of the lives of states and of society, and he warned the prince against altering the existing religion and its rites for political ends. Campanella also attacked with particular acrimony Machiavelli’s idea that the church bore the principal responsibility for the fragmentation and weakness of Italy: “I know that Machiavelli says that the Pope was the cause of the ruin of Italy, but this statement smacks of ignorance, directed not at the providence of God, nor at the whole, but merely at a part, at a few popes, who summoned the barbarians to Italy.” At the same time, he maintained the necessity of religious worship in republics as a tool of government: “Listen, Venice, to your medicine, for now I speak to you out of the reason of state, not out of theology, which in these times is suspect and
Paolo Paruta, Della perfettione della vita politica libri tre, D. Nicolini, Venice 1599, pp. 477–78. See Tommaso Campanella, Atheismus Triumphatus, seu reductio ad Religionem per Scientiarum veritates, Paris 1636, chapters 1 and 10. Ibid. “non posse Rempublicam fundari absque religione”; Ibid., chapter 9. Ibid., chapter 18. Tommaso Campanella, Antiveneti, unpublished text, edited by Luigi Firpo, Olschki, Florence 1945, pp. 89–94.
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widely mocked. You certainly will perish in this resolution you have made against religion—understood?—because every republic and empire preserves itself with the auspices and orders of living with which it originated and grew to grandeur and glory, just as every plant preserves itself with the water, land, and sunshine that is natural to it; and as soon as its water or native soil is taken from it, it will languish or die.” In a poem that was probably written in 1601, Campanella actually invokes Christ, urging him to “return to earth, armed,” and turn His weapons against the wicked religious who have strayed completely from His law. But his armed Christ does not teach the love of liberty, and he wages war at the pontiff ’s side. Campanella’s ideal is not a return of the love of a free way of life, but rather the triumph of the pope over the other princes and a victory of Catholic doctrine over heresy and atheism. With that goal in mind he judged beneficial that education to humility, docility, and a detachment from worldly affairs that Machiavelli had so strongly condemned. The contrast between the spirit of the Counter-Reformation and Machiavelli’s religion of liberty could not be any more distinct: Therefore know, O Venice, that the reason why the peoples fail to rebel is the religion and the priests and the monks, because they are the soul of the body of politics and the limbs can never rebel against the body, while it is the very soul that animates them, as philosophers know. Now, while the princes behave wrongly and the populace is ill contented and are urged forward by bandits, the religious are the cause for their failure to rebel, and their continued obedience, with their sermons or their secret confessions, admonishing them to live rightly, and distracting them from their vicious intents, and comforting them with Paradise, and terrifying them with the Inferno, and encouraging them to go to church, where they observe the offices and masses and sermons and genuflections and humble faces and bent necks and rough clothing and lessons and exercises, and seeing that they behave according to duty and not according to mockery, they compose their souls and believe in the next world, and happily leave this world: and, if they are outraged, they have in their hearts this comfort that they will be rewarded by God in another life: and these customs have great power in the human heart, making men pious, obedient, loving toward one another, and faithful: and the more
Ibid., p. 73. Tommaso Campanella, A Cristo nostro signore, in Tutte le opere, edited by Luigi Firpo, Mondadori, Milan 1954, vol. I, p. 33. John M. Headley, “On the Rearming of Heaven: The Machiavellism of Tommaso Campanella,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988), pp. 387–404.
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churches are built and religion and sermons and such actions, the more the people believe and are filled with piety: otherwise men would be worse than lions and tigers and worse than the demons themselves, because their minds are unconquerable, they lend their forces one to another and they make use of animals, and boldly do as they please. That men should be domesticated sheep rather than ferocious animals, and that religion is the most effective method for molding them in that way, is explained very clearly by Traiano Boccalini in his Ragguagli di Parnaso. In this satirical work, he describes Machiavelli’s trial and sentencing on Parnassus, the imaginary abode of wise men under the government of Apollo; Machiavelli is condemned less for the impious doctrines that he had drawn from the deeds of princes than for having “been caught during the night in the midst of a flock of sheep, working to insert false dog’s teeth into their mouths, with a most evident danger that all shepherds might abandon their posts.” A grievous crime inasmuch as it stripped the sheep of their simplicity and tameness and made it impossible for a single shepherd to control large flocks of animals, and in brief “was an attempt to kindle the entire world into flame, to make the simple malicious, and to show the light to those moles that Mother Nature had so judiciously brought into this world blind.” Who are the sheep and who are the shepherds? Clearly the Christian people and its priests. As he repeats the clichés of the anti-Machiavellianism of the Counter-Reformation, Boccalini appeared to be attempting to tell his readers that Machiavelli had instigated the people to rise up against the rule of the prelates, who had no other aim than to take wool and cheese from the flock of the faithful; Machiavelli had attempted to enable the simple to see, and therefore to free them from a rule that extended deep into their souls. Similarly Gaspare Scioppio, who was in the forefront of political thought of the seventeenth century, rejects the idea that a moral and religious reform is necessary, and instead makes a considerable effort to shift Machiavelli’s thought into the center of traditional Catholic doctrine. The decision to place the works of Machiavelli on the Index of Forbidden Books, he explains, developed out of political considerations. His writings, if examined with sufficient care, contain nothing in violation of Catholic faith
Ibid., pp. 102–3. Traiano Boccalini, Ragguagli di Parnaso e Pietra di paragone politico, edited by Giuseppe Rua, Laterza, Bari 1910, vol. 1, pp. 107, 199; vol. 2, 1912, p. 66; vol. 3, edited by Luigi Firpo, 1948, p. 77. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 327–28.
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and morality. Machiavelli acknowledged in a way that leaves no room for doubt that religion is the foundation of the good orders and the greatness of republics, and that without the fear of God, the fear of a prince is not sufficient to instill a respect for the law. Even though Machiavelli placed Moses on the same level with Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus, and attributed his victories and his laws to armed might and not to God, he did so because as a politician he wished to consider only natural causes and exclude supernatural causes. Machiavelli’s admonition to a prince to respect and to encourage religious worship, even if he considers it to be false, is not in Scioppio’s eyes an offense to religion, but rather develops out of an awareness that in politics what counts is appearances and actions, not one’s inward convictions. When he accuses the Christian religion of having made the world weak, Machiavelli is speaking to those who wish to live a life that is secure from pain and sacrifice and to cover their ignoble cowardice with religion. Machiavelli explicitly acknowledged that the Christian religion, rightly interpreted, not only allows its followers to defend the fatherland from tyrants, but even exhorts them to do so. Scioppio absolves Machiavelli from the charge of irreligiousness, but he also discards the need for a renewed religion of the fatherland and of liberty, and instead insists on the tired theme of the moderating effects of religion. With tones verging more toward the moralistic than those found in the writings of the theorists of the Counter-Reformation, Scipione Ammirato (1531–1601) also condemns Machiavelli for having subjugated the Christian religion to the demands of the state. Rather than adjust religion to fit themselves, he writes in his Discourses on Cornelius Tacitus (Discorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito), published in Florence in 1594, men, and especially princes, must adjust laws to fit religion, “since in the nature of men in the fields and the caverns, before cities were built, there was a belief in God sooner than there were civil gatherings, on behalf of which laws were made; because it would not otherwise be necessary to say that religion should accommodate to civil life, than who might say that seasons of the year should change to fit individuals rather than the other way round.” When See in this connection Mario D’Addio, Il pensiero politico di Gaspare Scioppio e il machiavellismo del Seicento, Giuffrè, Milan 1962, pp. 471 and 417 Ibid., p. 464. Ibid., pp. 465–66. Ibid., p. 486 Ibid., p. 468. Discorsi del Signor Scipione Ammirato sopra Cornelio Tacito, Filippo Giunta, Florence 1594, Book V, Discorso 5; see also Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries 1527–1800. A
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he exhorts a prince to feign respect for religion even if he is not a believer, in Ammirato’s view Machiavelli is recommending nothing more nor less than fraud, because “nothing other than fraud is it to cause people to believe one thing in place of another.” The wise prince, to the contrary, should free his soul “from such malice” and hold fast in the knowledge that “since our religion has no need, in order to grow, of our falsehood, therefore lies will be helpful to no one for long, and the Romans, a proud and greathearted people, reputed liars to be servile felons.” With comparable determination, Ammirato defends the Christian religion from the accusation that it had attempted in all ways possible to extinguish the pagan religion by eliminating its orders, its ceremonies, and its theology, and even, with Pope Saint Gregory the Great, by burning the works of historians and poets. Ammirato upholds the superiority of religion over state and exalts the moral worth of Christianity as a religion that teaches humility. “This man [Machiavelli] speaks of the Christian religion,” Ammirato writes, “as if it were a state policy, which right or wrong intends to pursue its thoughts; failing to consider, that since it is different from the ways of the world, it has different approaches than those used by the world, because the reputation of the Christian religion was poverty, humility, chastity, scorn for the things of this world, forgiving one’s enemies, ignoring wrongs done to one, and a willingness to submit to torture and martyrdom in order to win life and glory in the world beyond.” It was however the Jesuits, in the context of the Counter-Reformation, who perceived better than anyone else the subversive significance of Machiavelli’s idea with respect to Catholic orthodoxy. They accused him of dethroning God and Divine Providence from the government of the affairs of the world, putting in their place an impersonal fate and the inexorable influence of the stars. Pedro Ribadeneyra in his The Christian Prince (Principe cristiano) explicitly denounces Machiavelli for having spread the impious doctrine that takes political action out of the power of God and Divine Providence. In a world ruled by fate, political action could no History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago-London 1973, in particular pp. 116–39. Ibid. Ibid., book XXI, discorso 1. Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Trattato della religione e delle virtù che il principe cristiano deve avere per governare e conservare i suoi stati contro ciò che insegnano Nicolo Machiavelli ed i politici di questo tempo ovvero Il principe cristiano (1585), Italian translation di Otello Tavoni, introductory note by Paolo G. Caucci, Cantagalli, Siena 1978, l, II, chapter 4, pp. 24–25. See Gennaro Maria Barbuto, Il principe e l’Anticristo: Gesuiti e ideologie politiche, Guida, Naples 1994, pp. 249–76. Another prestigious Jesuit, Adam Contzen, emphasized that in Machiavelli’s view, fate is nothing more than the ineluctable influence of the stars on human affairs (“fatum . . . astrorum influxum appellat et fatum ex astris inevitabile”); Adam Contzen, Politicorum libri decem, in
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longer be subject to government by religion and its legitimate ministers on earth. Machiavelli is the Antichrist. Saint Hippolytus Martyr, wrote Ribadeneyra: depicts the Antichrist as a hypocrite and a master of just this kind of politics. He says that when the Antichrist shows himself to the world he will be merciful, humane, religious, a friend to justice and an enemy of corruption and gift-giving and gratuities; that he will not allow idolatry, that he will honor the elderly and the silverhaired, and he will hate dishonest people, those who squander, and rumor-mongers; he will welcome the poor, he will protect widows and children; he will act as a peacemaker, and he will compose disagreements; he will give gifts and distribute wealth, and he will feign in such an astonishing manner that, even though he will do everything imaginable to win the people’s favor and to become the ruler of the world, when the people themselves come to beg him to become their king, he will allow himself to be entreated, signify that he is unwilling, and that he scorns power and preferment, until he finally yields to their requests, accepts scepter and crown and crushes the world. Even in the heart of the Counter-Reformation, voices were raised to revive and defend Machiavelli’s ideas concerning moral and religious reform. Giordano Bruno, in The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (Spaccio della bestia trionfante), written in 1584 against Luther and his “most deformed” Reformation, invoked a “new civil and natural religion” as a remedy for the corruption of the world that had been brought about by bad religion. In Bruno’s narrative, it is Jove himself who felt the need for a reformation that might bring back to life a true religious sentiment and expel from heaven the beasts depicted in the constellations, replacing them with virtues, first and foremost justice, and thus restore the “jaded quibus de perfectae reipublicae forma, virtutibus et vitiis, institutione civium, legibus magistratu ecclesiastico, civili, potentia reipublicae, editio secunda auctior. sumpt. I. Kinckii, Cologne 1629, p. 9. See in this connection Prosperi, “La religione, il potere, le élites,” pp. 512–18. See Barbuto, Il principe e l’Anticristo, pp. 275–76. Ribadeneyra, Il principe cristiano, l, II, chapter 3, p. 19. Campanella too considered Machiavelli to be an inspiration to the Antichrist, see Barbuto, Il principe e l’Anticristo, p. 269. Concerning Campanella and Machiavelli see John M. Headley, “On the Rearming of Heaven: The Machiavellism of Tommaso Campanella,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 49 (1988), pp. 387–404. Michele Ciliberto made this point very clearly in his Introduction to Giordano Bruno, Spaccio della bestia trionfante, edited by Michele Ciliberto, Rizzoli, Milan 2000, p. 43.
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strength and enervated manliness.” Once the fear of God vanished, true religious worship also vanished from the world, and religion, instead of encouraging men to become heroes, rendered them similar to beasts. In contrast with the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, Bruno draws on and develops the humanistic and Machiavellian theme of rebirth through a return to the beginnings. In Bruno’s story, Jove recognizes the invincible power of fate that brings death and decay, but also states that fate gives the gods the power to rise again: “Let us prepare ourselves, then, let us prepare ourselves for our destinies; because just as Fate has not denied us the possibility of falling, so it has conceded us the possibility of rising again; therefore, just as we were ready to fall, so are we prepared to get back on our feet. We shall be able to depart without difficulty from that suffering into which through our error we have fallen, and from worse than that which could befall us, by means of reparation which lies in our hands.” Against Luther, who preached that men cannot become godlike and that all acts of heroism are “nothing more than cowardice,” Bruno revived the idea that men can be reborn, and in that rebirth become godlike, pursue justice, love the fatherland, and seek glory. It matters little that in order to become godlike men must become beasts because “he who does not know how to become a beast cannot maintain his superiority.” We must believe, Bruno has Jove say, that “for man to be divine it is fitting that he have of the beast, and that when he yearns to show himself deeply divine, he makes up his mind to let himself be seen in such measure as a beast.” Honor therefore should be accorded to Chiron the Centaur, a most just man who taught Achilles and showed the way upward to heaven. Machiavelli in The Prince had sketched out the image of the founder of states who knows how to be both man and beast and yet becomes godlike and wins God’s friendship. Bruno sets forth the same image in even more vivid hues. For him too it was the Romans who served as examples of men who made themselves similar to the gods, and the gods loved the Romans for their devotion to their fatherland, their magnanimity, justice, and mercy, and they rewarded them by elevating them above all other peoples. With their deeds, Bruno emphasizes, the Romans “knew how to conform with and resemble” the gods:
Bruno, Spaccio della bestia trionfante, pp. 97 and 113. English translation: Giordano Bruno, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, translated by Arthur Imerti, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE 2004, p. 94. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 108. Ibid., p. 123. English translation: Imerti, The Expulsion, p. 114. Ibid., pp. 116 and 302–304. English translation: Imerti, The Expulsion, pp. 109 and 269.
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by pardoning the subdued, overthrowing the proud, righting wrongs, not forgetting kindness, helping the needy, defending the afflicted, relieving the oppressed, restraining the violent, promoting the meritorious, abasing criminals and spreading terror and the utmost destruction among them by means of scourges and axes, and honoring the gods with statues and colossi. Whence, consequently, that people appeared more bridled and restrained from vices of an uncivilized and barbarous nature, more excellent and ready to perform generous enterprises than any other people that has ever been seen. And as long as such were their law and religion, their customs and deeds, such were their honor and their happiness. In these words we clearly hear the echo of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, which Bruno in all likelihood read in the edition published in London by John Wolf in 1584. Machiavelli and Bruno shared a radical criticism of the religion of idleness and the exaltation of a religion that would teach men to love the fatherland and perform good deeds on behalf of a civil way of life. The most grievous ills that men commit are those “which have a prejudicial effect upon the republic.” The gods wish to be loved and feared “for the purpose of benefiting mankind.” The gods detest sins that “bring them annoyance.” In the eyes of the gods a solitary and “useless” man is of less value than someone who works on behalf of a civil, “profitable conversation.” The “proud appetite for glory, out of which there results some good for the republic” is more worthy than the “sordid lust for money.” Someone who has “liberated his country and reformed a perturbed spirit” is more deserving of triumph than someone who “has healed a humble and useless lame man who, cured, is worth little, or no more than when he is infirm.” God does not allow “that statues be erected to good-for-nothings who are hostile to the state of republics and who, with prejudice to customs and human life, offer us words and dreams, rather than to those who raise temples to the gods, increase the cult and zeal for such a law and religion, through which are kindled magnanimity and ardor for that glory which is derived from the service to the fatherland and is to the advantage of mankind; whence there seems to have been instituted universities for the disciplines of customs, letters, and arms.” Bruno’s God, like Machiavelli’s God, loves and hates, rewards and punishes. While Machiavelli still believed it was possible to bring men back to the God that teaches virtue, Bruno did not believe it was worthwhile to attempt to draw Christianity back to its beginnings. He believed that its
Ibid., pp. 287 and 166. English translation: Imerti, The Expulsion, pp. 149–150. Ibid., pp. 164–66. English translation: Imerti, The Expulsion, p. 149.
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very beginnings were corrupt, and that Luther’s Reformation, rather than being a first step toward rebirth, was the final stage of degeneration. The return of the world to “its ancient countenance” cannot take place through a rediscovery of Christian principles, but rather by finding new religious beliefs in the ancient knowledge of the Egyptians and Romans. Even though he admits the usefulness of religious ceremonies, Bruno takes his distance from Machiavelli: he accompanies him for a good part of the way, and sets off toward a rational religion. Although with a lesser degree of philosophical robustness, Francesco Sansovino (1521–83) too keeps alive in his writings the teachings of Machiavelli on religion and political liberty. In his Concetti politici (1598) he writes that “it never happened that a respectable man lost his liberty, unless he lost it along with his soul. Indeed, everyone knows that it is a very difficult thing for those who were taught, raised, and born in liberty to live in servitude, since among all the things in the world, the finest is liberty: whose very name is an indication of virtue, just as servitude is an indication of unhappiness.” And he adds that “above all others, God loves free cities. Because it is in those cities, more than in all other kinds of government, that the common welfare is preserved, justice is administered more equitably, the souls of the citizens are more likely to engage in virtuous and honorable acts: and there is more observance and respect of religion.” Sansovino reiterates with Machiavelli that religion is necessary if one is to have good laws and good arms: “Arms, laws, and divine worship cannot be separated in a well governed city save with the destruction of some of them, while if joined together they preserve one another, supporting one another, whereas if by chance they are unbound, the one that might have seemed sufficient unto itself without its two comrades, quickly falls.” Without mentioning his name, he takes from Machiavelli the maxim that “of all the men who are praised, particularly praised are those who are the chiefs, and the founders of religions. At their side are those who have founded Republics or Kingdoms” and the consideration that “there was never an issuer of extraordinary laws in a people who did not avail himself of the assistance of God, because otherwise those laws would not have See Michele Ciliberto’s Introduction, Bruno, Spaccio della bestia trionfante, pp. 44 and 56–57. Francesco Sansovino, “Concetti politici,” in Propositioni, overo considerationi in materia di cose di Stato, sotto titolo di Avvertimenti, Avvedimenti Civili e Concetti Politici di M. Francesco Guicciardini, M. Gio.Francesco Lottini, M. Francesco Sansovini, Vinegia (Venice), Altobello Salicato, 1588, L. Ibid., CCXXII. Ibid., CCXLVII.
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been accepted. A prudent man knows many factors that do not possess sufficient reasons to persuade him and convince others. Thus wise men who wish to eliminate this difficulty, attribute everything to the hands of God. Thus did Lycurgus, thus Solon, and thus all the other lawgivers.” He also returns to the classical and humanistic theme of the great rulers who receive as their reward glory in the heavens: “The souls of warriors and valorous men, who are fated to die for the fatherland, for their children, and for their religion, once riven by cold steel from the ties of the physical body, are undoubtedly received by the clear star-spangled heavens, as to a haven of blessed quiet.” During a time in which principalities were triumphant, Sansovino rediscovered a number of elements of the old civil religion that developed in the context of the republican experiences. When examining the religion of Utopia described by Sir Thomas More, he notes that the inhabitants of that happy republic accept the Christian religion because they have understood that the “fashion of their way of life pleased Christ,” and they judged Christianity to be “very similar to their religion,” which gave them the determination to persevere “in that fashion of good living.” Sansovino recalls Machiavelli’s principle that it is republics above all that require religion: “Religion causes good orders, good orders bring good fortune, good fortune engenders the success of undertakings. However the observance of divine worship is the cause of the greatness of Republics, and where there is no fear of God, it is necessary for that Realm to be upheld by a Prince, who provides fear to make up for the absence, where there is no religion.” The ideas of Machiavelli concerning religion found especially fertile ground among the Italian freethinkers, first and foremost Giulio Cesare Vanini, who upheld a conception of nature as an incessant and unstoppable cycle of corruption and generation, without purpose and without divine guidance, in every way similar to that of Machiavelli. “Everything that is born”—writes Vanini
Ibid., CDIX, CDX. Ibid., DCCII. Francesco Sansovino, Del governo et amministratione di diversi regni et repubbliche, così antiche come moderne libri XXI. Ne’ quali si contengono diversi ordini, magistrati, leggi, costumi, historie, e altre cose notabili, che sono utili e necessarie ad ogni huomo civile e di stato, Venice 1578, in particular pp. 197–200. Concerning the idea of religious reform in the utopian thought of the sixteenth century, see Luigi Firpo, L’utopia politica nella Controriforma, in Contributi alla Storia del Concilio di Trento e della Controriforma, in “Quaderni di Belfagor,” Vallecchi, Florence 1948, pp. 78–108; Carlo Curcio, Utopisti e riformatori sociali del Cinquecento, Zanichelli, Bologna 1941; Idem, Utopisti italiani del Cinquecento, Colombo, Rome 1944. Sansovino, Concetti politici, CDXI. See in this connection Barbuto, Il principe e l’Anticristo, p. 285
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in any species you care to name, grows, lives for a set period of time, and finally progresses toward corruption: now, in order to ensure that this corruption is followed by a new birth, it is necessary that there be prior provisions that are contrary to the ones that tend toward corruption: and indeed if the mechanism of generation does not outweigh the mechanisms of corruption, birth will not ensue, since nothing can be generated unless there are adequate mechanisms at work in the matter, just as nothing can be corrupted unless the mechanisms for the conservation of the subject are themselves corrupted. This rule is not only true for men in particular, but also for cities, kingdoms, and religions. Vanini also shared with Machiavelli a high opinion of the pagan religion for its effectiveness in preserving and expanding the empire. False though it might have been, the religion of the Romans played its role quite effectively, not only because it promised eternal rewards to those who died on behalf of the fatherland but also because it set up simple mortals as gods to be worshiped, and in this way encouraged men to act in such a way that they might hope to rise to the status of “divine dignity.” It was therefore through the assistance of deities and “celestial bodies” that Romulus rose from shepherd to king, and Rome became “the capital of the world.” It was from Machiavelli, last of all, that Vanini derived the idea that great lawgivers persuaded the people that they had received the “sanction of the laws” from the gods, and especially the myth of an armed prophet who, unlike Christ, could impose his laws and emancipate peoples: “Christ always found himself helpless and all those who set out to defend the truth unarmed (says Machiavelli) died miserably. Moses, on the other hand, always proceeded armed.” Despite the intensity of the polemical attacks on the part of the political writers of the Counter-Reformation, the idea of the religion of virtue never disappeared entirely from the Italian intellectual milieu. It persisted as an ideal aspiration or as a memory, without however succeeding in becoming a point of reference for a full-fledged reform movement.
Giulio Cesare Vanini, Dei mirabili arcani della natura regina e dea dei mortali, in Le opere di Giulio Cesare Vanini tradotte per la prima volta in italiano, Eduardo Bortone, Lecce 1919, vol. 2, pp. 327–28. See also Giorgio Spini, Ricerca dei libertini. La teoria dell’impostura delle religioni nel Seicento italiano, Editrice “Universale di Roma,” Rome 1950. Spini, Ricerca dei libertini, p. 30 Ibid., p. 302.
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3. The Redemption of Italy and the Idea of Moral Reform in the Writers of the Eighteenth Century Machiavelli did finally become such a point of reference, however, in the eighteenth century, especially through the work of writers who considered the emancipation of the conscience to be a necessary condition for the political redemption of Italy. Their Machiavelli was both a critic of the bad education produced by the corrupt Christian religion, and the prophet of the moral renewal that takes place when a people rediscovers itself by rediscovering the principles of a free way of life, true religion, and justice. Among the first to focus on the necessity of a religion that could teach a love of the fatherland was Paolo Mattia Doria (1662–1746). In his Of Civil Life (Vita civile) Doria placed religion among the most important requirements in preserving good customs in a republic or a kingdom: “It is not possible to establish a law, or set up a custom, that will be accepted by a people, unless they perceive it to be a commandment from God and a consequence of religion.” He then adds, in a polemic with Machiavelli, that “it is certainly true, nonetheless, that this must be done rightly, and not with malice, as others have wickedly asserted, but rather with pure and sincere truth: because in the final analysis it is not that religion, as some wicked individuals have believed, is ordered by politics, but that politics is what a religion orders.” Following this criticism, Doria nonetheless urges the princes to cultivate a religion that teaches the peoples to love the fatherland: “The preservation of the fatherland must be in the peoples a firm and inviolable point of religion.” This religion must inspire veneration through its mysteries and ceremonies and especially the awe and fear of oaths. On the other hand, “badly administered sacrifices, ceremonies performed with a lack of reverence, priests with bad morals, oaths sworn too frequently, and the love of God neglected” all render religion weak and ineffective at “upholding the orders and the fatherland,” and when a religion is corrupt it is difficult to restore it to life in the hearts and minds of men. The second maxim that Doria advises is to ensure that peoples prefer the love of the fatherland “to the love of life, while keeping in mind that if the fatherland is destroyed, then possessions are not safe, nor is one’s life Doria Paolo Mattia, La vita civile distinta in tre parti aggiuntovi un trattato della educazione del principe, seconda edizione dall’Autore ricorretta, ed accresciuta, Daniello Höpper, Augsburg 1710, p. 145. Ibid., p. 146. Concerning the eighteenth-century interpretations of Machiavelli, see Mario Rosa, Dispotismo e libertà nel Settecento. Interpretazioni ‘repubblicane’ di Machiavelli, Dedalo, Bari 1964. Ibid., p. 147.
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secure, and everything else is lost.” It is moreover necessary to reward virtue, in such a way that the citizens are encouraged to pursue the good of the fatherland in order to satisfy their own private passions: “Wisely did the Romans, great masters in the art of governing, put into practice the distribution of so many crowns to their soldiers, so many laurel wreaths to their men of letters, so many triumphs to the generals of their armies, and so many temples to their lawgivers; because they turned in this manner personal interest to the benefit of the fatherland, and they encouraged men, through the love of glory, to suffer those immense efforts that all true virtues demand.” The cause of the love of the fatherland and the love of the prince is veneration. In order to obtain veneration, a prince must take great care to appear almost divine: “If princes, magistrates, or senators of the republic wish for the people to love the fatherland that they rule and govern, they should do their best to win that veneration, that allows them to be considered almost divine, and those human virtues that cause them to be seen as heroes.” Men always respect those virtues that resemble the perfections of God, because virtues trigger in them “that wonder that is fed by the divine virtues.” Magistrates, therefore, in order to attract the love of their subjects and citizens, should “demonstrate themselves to be almost divine in their virtues.” In conclusion, Doria comments, “true virtue” generates “a true love in the people,” “illustrious vices, or those mixed with virtue, create a love that originates out of a passion for glory; the hypocrisy of virtue produces a false love of the fatherland, which lasts only a short while, until it is uncovered, or until the vices grow to excess,” and “the uncovered vice causes open hatred.” The ideas of the Florentine Secretary concerning the religious and moral problem can be seen in the works of Pietro Giannone (1676–1748), and in particular in his Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples (Istoria civile del regno di Napoli), published in 1723, which the Jesuit Giuseppe Sanfelice judged to have been written in order to instruct and form an even more wicked prince than Machiavelli’s and in order to show “that the tree of civil life will also flourish more prosperously in that soil where the Christian religion no longer blooms.” Even more visible are the references to Machiavelli, even though Giannone never mentions his name, in his Discorsi
Ibid., p. 151. Ibid., pp. 153–54. Ibid., p. 156. Ibid., p. 167. See in this connection Giuseppe Ricuperati, L’esperienza civile e religiosa di Pietro Giannone, Ricciardi, Milan-Naples 1970, p. 311.
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sopra gli Annali di Tito Livio, a work that was written during the period of rediscovery of Machiavelli the republican between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century. Pietro Giannone points out that the religion of the Romans, despite the fact that it was false and superstitious, was effective in fostering civil and military virtues. The Christian religion, despite the fact that it was “true and certain” and that it taught “a far more perfect and pure morality” than did the pagan religion, is incapable of inculcating in the souls of the moderns the distinguished and sublime virtues of the Romans. For this moral decadence the Christians deserve to be considered the most wicked men on earth: despite being guided by the most perfect of religions, they choose to follow the path of corruption. But the “laxity and gravity of their customs,” Giannone emphasizes, springs from the superstitious, superficial, and hypocritical perversion of Christian teachings. “The greatest evildoers are those who, unfortunately, believe [in eternal life], flattering some in one way, others in another, and abandoning them all to divine mercy; indeed, these are freely willing to pass from religion to superstition, and cover their failings under specious pretexts, and conceal their ambition, avarice, and other vices beneath the cloak of hypocrisy and an affected humiliation and piety.” The thoughts of Giannone about ancient religion and the religion of the moderns are very close in their substance to the ideas of Machiavelli. Following in Livy’s footsteps, Giannone praises the religion of the Romans because it served “solely for the preservation and expansion of the republic,” to encourage the souls of its adherents to “truly arduous and magnanimous” undertakings, and was in short an effective way of “causing the citizens to observe their duties, among them the preservation of justice and concord; and bound by this tie, they could devote themselves not only to the preservation of the public good, but even to expanding it; and they should not abuse that trust, as some wicked men sometimes do, for their own convenience and private interest.” From these observations, Giannone concluded that “as far as the civil theology is concerned, princes ought not to neglect to maintain in their dominions that religion which
Ibid., p. 556. Ibid., pp. 771–72. Sergio Bertelli disagrees: “It is significant that a book like [Giannone’s] Discorsi sopra gli Annali di Tito Livio, whose title so closely mirrors Machiavelli’s commentary on the books of Livy, should in contrast differ so sharply from Machiavelli’s ideas. In Giannone’s view, there is no problem of the art of governing, to be understood and to be dissected in depth. The chapters that interest him are the ones in which Livy discusses the religion of the Romans,” in Opere di Pietro Giannone, edited by Sergio Bertelli and Giuseppe Ricuperati, Ricciardi, Milan-Naples 1971, Introduction, p. xix.
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the people took in with their mothers’ milk, not only to keep them in the safety of a tranquil civil society, but also because the power of their traditional religion serves greatly in the context of military expeditions to encourage the soldiers to take on difficult and challenging exploits.” Against Machiavelli was raised nonetheless the critical voice of Giambattista Vico, who leveled against him the accusation of having failed to understand the role that religion had played in the greatness of Rome and in the birth and life of nations. “And here we find,” Vico explains, “the principle whose effects are narrated in Roman history, though neither Plutarch nor Machiavelli uncovered the basic cause: that religion was what brought about Rome’s greatness.” It was religion, based as it was on the augurs, that first engendered and subsequently kept alive magnanimity in the heart of the plebs and pushed the plebs to prove that they were just as worthy as the patricians in both war and peace. Hence the heroism and greatness of both the patricians and the plebeians, and therefore the greatness of Rome. Machiavelli saw this “great truth” only “in part,” when he identified as a cause of Rome’s greatness the magnanimity of the plebs, but failed entirely to grasp a more general truth, that republics are born and live through the intervention of Providence. Moreover, Machiavelli reasoned about the preservation of peoples, much like Hobbes did after him, “with malice toward God, with disrespect toward the princes, and with injustice toward the nations.” Nor did he perceive the gravity and wisdom that contributed so greatly to the glory of that republic: “Thus the cause which produced among the Romans the wisest jurisprudence in the world is the same that made the Roman Empire the greatest in the world. And it is the cause of the Roman greatness, which Polybius, in too general a sense, attributes to the religion of the nobles; Machiavelli, on the contrary, to the magnanimity of the plebs; and Plutarch, envious of Roman virtue and wisdom, to their good fortune.” That religion is necessary to the birth of civil communities and to their preservation, Machiavelli had clearly stated. Likewise, he had written that the Roman religion was founded on the augurs, and had been one of the causes, along with the wisdom of the decisions of the Roman Senate, of the greatness and glory of Rome. Vico instead chose to link Machiavelli Pietro Giannone, Discorsi sopra gli Annali di Tito Livio, in Opere di Pietro Giannone, pp. 749–51. Giambattista Vico, La scienza nuova prima, edited by Fausto Nicolini, Laterza, Bari 1951, p. 154. Ibid., p. 85. English translation: Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY 1968, p. 374.
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to the theorists of natural law who had ignored the role of religion in the birth and the life of states. He theorized the return of corrupt men from “premeditated malice” to the “primitive simplicity of the first peoples of the world,” and explained that this return meant becoming again “religious, truthful, and faithful” and rediscovering “piety, faith, and truth,” which is to say, the foundations of justice and “the graces and beauties of the eternal order of God.” He does not link, however, this intuition to the pages of Machiavelli, and he fails to sense the need for a religious reform. In his view, the Christian religion is the “best in the world,” it has given rise to a Europe that dazzles with “such humanity,” a culture that is notable for “ministering to the comforts of the body as well as to the pleasures of mind and spirit.” Why reform a religion that has produced such positive effects? If a reform is ever necessary, it will be Providence that produces it. The author who understood and absorbed Machiavelli’s urgent need for moral reform was Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803). He recognized the immense power of religion. Opinion “is the undeniable mistress of the world” because it guides the actions of humanity; but there is nothing that controls men more than religion, nothing “that more greatly impresses in them this or that opinion, nothing that more greatly inspires them to carry out great enterprises.” Against the “semi-philosophy” that dominated his century, Alfieri proclaimed that “to believe in God, after all, never harmed any people; indeed it aided many; it deprives strong-minded individuals of nothing; and it is a prop and stay for the weak.” For this reason, faithfully following the “divine Machiavelli,” as he liked to call him, Alfieri called the heads of religions, the prophets, the saints, and the martyrs, “superior men” who “deserve, even from the most irreligious of men admiration, devotion, and veneration.” It matters little that they, emulating Moses, who used religion to give “form, liberty, and existence” to the Jewish people Giambattista Vico, La scienza nuova. Giusta l’edizione del 1744, vol. II, edited by Fausto Nicolini, Laterza, Bari 1928, p. 15 Ibid., p. 152. As Luigi Russo made so abundantly clear, Alfieri was the herald “of that internal ethical liberty, a new and innovative world religion, which only was the yeast for all the enduring constructions and all the new orders that ensued.” He was anti-Christian in his criticism of that absolute and terrifying God that favored the tyrannies; he was most Christian indeed in his unyielding defense of the moral liberty of the individual and hence of peoples. Luigi Russo, Preface to Vittorio Alfieri, Del principe e delle lettere, edited by Luigi Russo, Le Monnier, Florence 1943, pp. 33–37. Ibid., pp. 236 and 42. English translation: Beatrice Corrigan and Julius A. Molinaro, The Prince and Letters, University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1972, p. 152. Ibid., p. 212. English translation: Corrigan and Molinaro, The Prince and Letters, pp. 123–25.
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brutalized by decades of servitude, happily made use of “the sublime veil of an inspired religion.” Alfieri criticized the Christian religion for having persuaded men to accept the absolute power of the prince or the tyrant. The pagan religion, he explains, “must have been, and in fact was, quite favourable to freedom, because it endlessly multiplied its gods, turned heaven into a kind of republic, and subjected Jove himself to the laws of fate, and to other usages and privileges of the celestial court. The Jewish religion, and hence the Christian and the Mohammedan, must have been, were, and still are much more favourable to tyranny, because they admitted one God alone, the absolute and dreadful Lord of all.” These are things, Alfieri comments, “which have all been discussed by others,” and it is therefore unnecessary to insist on them. Machiavelli had written about them in Discourses on Livy, and like Machiavelli, Alfieri accused the Catholic religion of being an enemy of liberty and of having taught men to think and live as slaves: “The Christian religion, which is that of almost all Europe, is not in itself unfavourable to a free life, but the Catholic religion is almost incompatible with freedom.” It teaches men to accept the more-or-less unbounded authority of a single man over the great questions of life, and in that way makes the peoples that accept that religion slaves for all time. With the practice of confession, and “the certainty of pardon for any iniquity whatever,” moreover, it encourages, rather than condemns, criminal and immoral behaviors, with the result that it prevents the formation of a true civil morality. Alfieri forcefully emphasized that the teachings of Christ are not contrary to a free way of life: Jesus Christ, “politically considered as a man, also desired by teaching through example, truth, and virtue to restore to his own people, and to many others at the same time, by way of a better religion, a political existence independent of the Romans who held them enslaved and debased.” He adds that “our own saints” who were also writers, such as Paul, Augustine, Chrysostom, and Jerome; those who taught with words and examples, such as Francis, Dominic, and Bernard; and finally those who died to testify to their faith, such as Lawrence, Stephen, and Bartholomew, triggered in many others a “burning desire to Ibid., pp. 211–12. English translation: Corrigan and Molinaro, The Prince and Letters, pp. 125–27. Ibid., p. 41. Alfieri, Of Tyranny, translated by Julius A. Molinaro and Beatrice Corrigan, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1961, p. 41. Ibid., p. 45. Alfieri, Of Tyranny, pp. 41 and 45. Ibid., p. 210. English translation: Corrigan and Molinaro, The Prince and Letters, pp. 123–4.
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imitate their virtue” and to bring back to life the authentic teachings of Christ. After the Catholic Church imposed on the whole world its servile religion, the path to win back liberty could only be that of religious reformation and of heresy. The excessive abuses of the Catholic Church, Alfieri explained, obliged “some peoples who were more wise than imaginative to curb it, stripping it of many harmful superstitions. And these people, later distinguished by the name of heretics, thus opened once more a path for liberty, which was born anew and flourished admirably among them after she had long been banished from Europe; this is proved to us by the Swiss, by Holland, by many cities of Germany, by England, and by new America.” He adds that the religious reformation that pointed the way for a number of peoples to a lasting liberty took the form of a return to the beginnings like the one about which Machiavelli had spoken: “Even the Christian religion, though a bitter enemy of worldly glory, is seen to have been if not a stimulant to liberty at least compatible with it and with happiness, and even with a certain greatness of nations in all those countries where it was somewhat modified or, more accurately, led back to its simple primitive principles. This is still evident among the Swiss, the Dutch, the English.” In his concluding chapter, which he entitled, in a tribute to Machiavelli, Exhortation to Free Italy from the Barbarians (Esortazione a liberar l’Italia dai barbari), Alfieri emphasizes that Italy can have a future as a republic and thus become once again free and great. The foundation for his prophecy is Machiavelli’s argument that there is no reason, save for vile cowardice, to believe that what has been done by men in the past can no longer be achieved by other men in the present, especially on the same soil. Italy, therefore, can rise again, if it is capable of rediscovering itself and resuming a life in accordance with the principles of the true Christian religion, as other peoples that enacted religious reforms have done. Reworking Machiavelli’s ideas, Alfieri interprets the rebirth of a people as the rediscovery of a forgotten religion and hands down this idea to the generations that would become the protagonists of the Risorgimento. The call for moral and religious reform in Italy became especially intense and widespread around the middle of the century. It was a movement,
Ibid., pp. 210–11. English translation: Corrigan and Molinaro, The Prince and Letters, p. 123. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 212. English translation: Corrigan and Molinaro, The Prince and Letters, p. 126. Concerning liberty as the cause and prerequisite for the greatness of peoples, see also p. 235: “Liberty moreover is the sole and the true existence of a people; since we find it to be at the root of all the great deeds achieved by men.”
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as Franco Venturi has written, that “did not constitute a new, revised, and improved edition of the Protestant reformation,” nor “was it the incipient Enlightenment revolution of the French post-Encyclopédists”; rather, it was “the discovery, on the part of a growing number of Italian intellectuals and politicians, of a new relationship with the church and the state, with peasants and citizens, with law and science.” The book that better than any other conveyed the spirit of the reform movement was Carlantonio Pilati’s Concerning a Reformation of Italy, that is, Concerning the Means to Reform the Worst Customs and the Most Pernicious Laws of Italy (Di una riforma d’Italia, ossia dei mezzi di riformare i più cattivi costumi e le più perniciose leggi d’Italia); published in 1767, this work by Pilati (1733–1802) was, in Venturi’s words, “a classic of the Italian Enlightenment,” and it had lasting and widespread repercussions in Italy and in Europe. Pilati, who spent nearly his entire life in exile, like so many other proponents of moral and religious reform, denounced religious corruption as the principal cause of the ills of Italy. The wicked examples set by the clergy, he explained, have ruined the customs of the Italians. With the Inquisition, the priests have deprived Italy of her finest minds; with the cult of the saints and their superstitious practices they have taught the Italians how to cover up the worst vices: “They [the Italians] abandon themselves to robbery, murder, and all other manner of harm to their neighbor, and then they make some pilgrimage to the sanctuary of their advocate saint, paying to say Mass in honor of their saint, as is customary to say, they make an offering of a few coins in the charity box on that saint’s altar, they celebrate that saint’s day, they say confession, and take communion on his behalf, and having done that, they fear nothing, secure in the belief that their saint will protect them from all perils, not only in this life, but in the life to come.” Despite the fact that he levels harsh criticisms of the corruption found in Italian religiosity, Pilati considered religion to be a force well suited “to keeping states both good and united, to holding peoples in subjection and quiet, and to inspiring a love of the fatherland in the subjects, along with a predisposition to do things that are useful to their neighbors, and to observe a reciprocal concord among them.” If Italy is to be reborn, it is indispensable to oblige the clergy to live in accordance with the Gospels and in keeping with the teachings of the apostles. He clearly states, adopting
Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore, Einaudi, Turin 1976, vol. II, pp. 315–16. Ibid., p. 288. Carlantonio Pilati, Di una riforma d’Italia, ossia dei mezzi di riformare i più cattivi costumi e le più perniciose leggi d’Italia, Villafranca (Coira) 1767, chapter 6. Ibid., chapter 10.
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Machiavelli’s advice, that this moral and religious reform could not be achieved through the power of the laws, but only through the persuasive force of words and examples: “The employment of laws in cases where customs and manners are to be reformed is an entirely tyrannical mode, from which can be hoped nothing other than to astonish and disgust the people without being able to conduct in the direction that is desired.” The ideas of the Jansenists contributed to a significant degree to the demands for religious and political reforms in the mid-eighteenth century. Writers linked to this school of religious thought denounced the corruption of the authentic spirit of Christianity in the superstitious and exterior practices of worship that had drained the religious cult of all serious moral and civil content and had driven Italy back into a sort of “religious infancy.” The priests, wrote Melchiorre Gioia (1767–1829), have encouraged all the feelings of esteem and respect for actions that are of no use to society and have therefore engendered and perpetuated “a scorn for political and social duties.” With their morality based on idleness, they have justified the worst forms of moral conduct and have further caused the poverty that afflicts so much of Italy. “The Protestant citizens,” wrote an Italian Jansenist in 1768, “are nearly all wealthy, and the Catholic citizens are nearly all poor. The reason for this disparity is that the Protestants have no monasteries, and so all of them set themselves to work on something or other, while the Catholics have monasteries, fomenting idleness and laziness which in turn engender poverty.” In the Jansenist tradition the demand for liberal and democratic reform of the political institutions sprang from a religious consciousness and awareness that rediscovered the authentic significance of the Christian word against dogma. Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750) wrote in 1748: All the laws that this divine master [Christ] has brought from Heaven, if you consider them carefully, were designed to make men happy. Happy primarily in spiritual terms . . . happy as well in the spheres of the state and temporal government. Thus, if in fact the teachings of the Gospel, so marvelously filled with charity and justice, were commonly implemented, we would enjoy a wonderful peace and concord in this lower world, and the princes would govern
Ibid., chapter 12. Ettore Rota, Il giansenismo in Lombardia e i prodromi del risorgimento italiano, in Raccolta di scritti storici in onore del prof. Giacinto Romano nel suo XXV° anno d’insegnamento, Successori Fusi, Pavia 1907, p. 385. Ibid. Ibid., p. 388.
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us gently, with more concern for the good of their subjects than their own interests. . . . Read and reread the holy books of the New Testament: you will find nothing in contrast with the wise temporal government of the people. Indeed, everything conspires to improve that government and to render easy the yoke of the Christian religion and to lighten its weight, with the abolition of so many rites and the obligation of so many costly sacrifices of the ancient law. . . . One of the principal goals of Christianity is the public utility and the good, both spiritual and temporal, of the faithful. . . . and therefore both ecclesiastical and secular laws must help one another to further, and not to hinder, this public good. The principles of Christianity, Muratori concludes, are more active and powerful than human virtues and serve to sustain good political institutions. Given their religious and moral convictions, it was natural that the Jansenists should consider Machiavelli, the republican who was an enemy of the popes, as their “dearest idol.” The name of Machiavelli appears often in their letters, and in Florence it was the Jansenists who edited, “in crocchio,” (‘in a group’) under the supervision of the Abbot Reginaldo Tanzini, secretary of Scipione de’ Ricci, bishop of Pistoia and descendant of Giuliano de’ Ricci, a new and important edition of the works of Machiavelli (Florence, 1782). Like other reformers before them, the editors of the new edition of Machiavelli’s Works looked with special favor on the pages that the Florentine Secretary had written concerning the religious problem, and in the lengthy preface they defend Machiavelli from charges that he was an intractable enemy of the Christian religion. “What he thought of religion can be seen in particular in chapter 12 of the first book of Discourses on Livy, where after establishing that religion is one of the fundamental principles of any well-regulated government, he judiciously assigns responsibility for the deplorable state of affairs in Italy to the corruption and the scorn of the Christian cult.” Machiavelli was hardly an irreligious man, the publishers remarked. He always wrote about religion in respectful terms and pointed to it as not only the most secure foundation for any well-ordered government, but also as the origin of the law and the moderation with which modern peoples Ibid., p. 496. The quote is from Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Raccolta di scritture concernenti la diminuzione delle feste di precetto, Lucca 1748, pp. 175 ff. Rota, Il giansenismo, pp. 505–506 Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, in Florence, printed at the expense of Gaetano Cambiagi Libraio (bookseller), 1782, vol. I, p. xxiii.
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treat their enemies in war, in contrast with the ancients. The same page in Discourses on Livy in which, to general outrage, Machiavelli had exhorted princes and the rulers of republics to show respect for religious ceremonies even if they considered them to be false, is a pearl of political wisdom, and if that advice had been taken, it would have spared the population the horrors of the wars of religion: “Although he might not have spoken with absolute theological rigor, which would be ridiculous to expect from a man of his profession, it does show how much importance he placed upon religion in good politics, if he took this point to the verge of superstition and scruples. For that matter, he was well aware that all changes in the area of religion were enemies of tranquility and public safety. Tragic experience fully justified his fears.” For the editors of the Cambiagi edition, Machiavelli deplored religious “decadence and corruption” and was a good prophet when he foretold the schism that would soon bloody all of Christian Europe. He did not theorize a return to paganism, even though he did admire the courage and spiritual strength of the ancient Romans. He recommended instead a renewed interpretation of Christianity in keeping with that religion’s authentic principles. He had written that the decadence of the ancient political virtues were not a product of Christian principles as such, but of the “false interpretations given of the precepts of the Christian religion.” Italian ideas about religious reform were powerfully influenced by the 1762 publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Contrat Social (Social Contract). In this book, Rousseau set forth a doctrine that differed sharply from Machiavelli’s ideas: no longer a return to the beginnings of the Christian religion, but rather the establishment, through the republic, of a civil religion based on new dogmas. Rousseau was raised in the republican milieux of Geneva where the intellectual heritage of Machiavelli remained quite strong. He sincerely admired the political thought of the Florentine Secretary. In a well-known handwritten notation published in the 1782 edition of the Social Contract, he wrote, “Machiavelli was a proper man and a good citizen; but, being attached to the court of the Medici, he could not help veiling his love of liberty in the midst of his country’s oppression. The choice of his detestable hero, Cesare Borgia, clearly enough shows his hidden aim; and the contradiction between the teaching of the Prince and that of the Discourses on Livy and the Florentine Histories shows that this profound political thinker has so far been studied only by superficial or
Ibid., pp. liii–liv. Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. I, Preface, p. liv.
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corrupt readers. The Court of Rome sternly prohibited his book. I can well believe it; for it is that Court it most clearly portrays.” From Discourses on Livy Rousseau took the idea that great lawgivers should place in God’s mouth the rules of civil life “in order to constrain by divine authority those whom human prudence could not move,” and he recognized that only men with great souls can persuade people that they have been inspired by God and thus establish enduring laws. He also borrowed Machiavelli’s accusation against the Christian religion of educating its followers to a servile mentality: “So far from binding the hearts of the citizens to the State”; the Christian religion “has the effect of taking them away from all earthly things. I know of nothing more contrary to the social spirit.” His invective, entirely built on Machiavellian themes, concludes with an unappealable condemnation: “Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favourable to tyranny that it always profits by such a regime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not much mind: this short life counts for too little in their eyes.” Rousseau, taking his distance from Machiavelli, excludes the possibility of an interpretation of the Christian religion in accordance with political virtue. He recognizes that every state, and a republic more than all the others, has need of religion, but he recommends a new religion, a civil religion based not on dogmas but on “social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject.” This is a religion that is to be established not with the power of words but with the force of laws. A republic can banish those citizens who do not believe and sentence to death those who, after publicly declaring that they believe, behave as if they did not. With the Social Contract then begins a new phase of republican thought concerning religious reform, a phase that overshadows the teachings of Machiavelli. The signals of a new way of thought are evident in the ideas of the Italian Jacobins. Girolamo Bocalosi, for instance, in his book Of the Democratic Education to Be Imparted to the Italian People (Dell’educazione democratica da darsi al popolo italiano, 1797), quotes the entire famous page written by the “great Nicolò [sic]” on the responsibility of the Christian religion for having weakened in the moderns their love of a free way of life and for having made the world weak, and then comments: “This argument of Machia
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contract Social, in Œuvres Complètes, edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Gallimard, Paris 1964, vol. III, p. 1480 (a). English translation: Social Contract, Translated by G. D. H. Cole, public domain, http://www.constitution.org/jjr/ socon.txt. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contract Social, in Œuvres Complètes, pp. 465–66; Italian translation, pp. 117, 200, 202–203. English translation: Social Contract, http://www.constitution .org/jjr/socon.txt.
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velli’s is, I believe, unassailable.” Bocalosi theorizes not a religious reform, but a full-fledged revolution: he does not suggest a new interpretation of the Christian religion, but an entirely new religion that would completely destroy the principles, the language, and the rites of the old one. If it were possible, he writes, I would prefer “that we try to preserve all the pious ideas that men now have, nor would I modify anything about the way they now think, however superstitious, but I would want them all to become republicans.” The problem is that the Christian religion as such is unsuited to the education and formation of republicans and to the regeneration and renewal of a people: “I challenge any learned doctor with a degree in the study of Saints Luke, Mark, and Matthew to organize for me a republic of citizens who are moved by powerful zeal on behalf of the earthly glory of their fatherland based only on the precepts found in the writings of those three most reverend writers.” With Christian teachings, he continues, with an observation that smacks distinctly of Rousseau, we would have “men who would be moral and virtuous in the affairs of patience; but can we defend with patience alone our hearths and homes, our families, and the soil that gave us birth and gives us sustenance?” If it is possible to define the moral rules that teach us to be good citizens and good Christians with a new language that is more in keeping with democratic principles, “then why should we rely upon vehicles, voices, phrases, and names that must be associated with other names and other ideas, that only serve to perturb the system of democratic education and which, preserving as they do in our souls the age-old prejudices, they often guide us back to the age-old errors and servitude?” A radical political revolution must be matched by an equally radical religious and moral revolution. We must learn, Bocalosi warns, from tyrants how to destroy and from the church the methods that allowed it to reign uncontested throughout the world for centuries. The most detailed treatment of a plan for a religious revolution meant to establish a new theology of the Supreme Being and new forms of worship is found in the writings of another Jacobin, Enrico Michele L’Aurora. In the appeals published under the title To Italy in the Shadows Dawn Brings Light (All’Italia nelle tenebre l’aurora porta la luce, 1796) he denounced “the wickedness and ignorance of the ecclesiastics” who were guilty of having deceived for centuries the people with countless falsehood and of having preached a gospel of resignation: “If your kings tyrannize you, if Girolamo Bocalosi, Dell’educazione democratica da darsi al popolo italiano, in Giacobini italiani, edited by Delio Cantimori and Renzo De Felice, Laterza, Bari 1964, vol. 2, p. 144. Ibid., pp. 144–45 Ibid., p. 147
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the powerful oppress you, if the nobility holds you in contempt, and if the wealthy insult you, tolerate all this patiently: life is short, and God will avenge you by punishing your tyrants in the next world.” L’Aurora exalted the figure of Christ in contrast to the temporal power and the corruption of the church: “The Christ who founded the Christian religion had no realm, no money, and no possessions; He preached charity and poverty, and both He and His disciples lived and died poor mendicants; intent only on spreading their religion, they did not interfere in temporal matters at all, nor did they play any role in civil government, limiting their ambitions to the conversion of the gentiles and to persuading them to abandon idol worship and to adore only the one and supreme God.” From his praise of Christ, L’Aurora did not derive the idea of a reformation that might draw back religious practice to its first principles, but rather the idea, or the dream, of a rational religion that all peoples could accept. Matteo Galdi (1765–1821) expressed similar thoughts in his reflections on public revolutionary education. Like the other Italian Jacobins, Galdi began from the consideration that Christianity cannot be reformed. “However pure and innocent this cult may have been in its beginnings, it is now too corrupt to be drawn back to its proper boundaries, too many factions and religious wars would be ignited between the reformed and the reformers, too insolent, avaricious, and ignorant are its ministers to be able to be summoned back to the right way; Christianity ultimately has too many faults with humanity, it has caused too much bloodshed, encouraged too many wars and too much civil discord, it has been too closely allied with despotism, ignorance, and error, and so it always was and always will be the same, an enemy of truth and the republic.” It is from this premise that Galdi draws the conclusion that it is necessary to establish a completely new religion that he calls “teofilantropismo” (theophilanthropism), founded on the principle of the love of God and of our neighbors. Only the theophilanthropic cult can destroy superstition and put an end to the political influence of Christianity. Daughter of the republican revolution, the new religion is the only one that is consistent with the progress of the human spirit; it alone is capable of rendering universal the republic. Vincenzio Russo (1770–99), martyr of the Neapolitan republic, supported in turn, rather than a religious reform that would educate the
Enrico Michele L’Aurora, All’Italia nelle tenebre l’aurora porta la luce, in Giacobini italiani, vol. I, p. 173. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 176–77. Matteo Galdi, Saggio d’istruzione pubblica rivoluzionaria, in Giacobini italiani, vol. 1, pp. 242–43 Ibid., p. 242
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people to a different form of morality, a civil morality without religion. He theorized the possibility of uprooting religious superstition through the work of a censor who demonstrated to the people, with unequivocal facts and luminous words, that it is possible to achieve a different form of morality than that produced by theology. He was even convinced that the people would love the new morality and perceive it as being much closer to the truth and more in keeping with human faculties than the old religious morality. Russo admits that religion can be very effective politically and can stimulate men to act in ways that are beneficial for a civil way of life, but he emphasizes forcefully that good social institutions can obtain the same results with far less danger. It is not true, as Machiavelli believed, that it was the fear of God that gave ancient peoples the strength to perform the great deeds described in history books. If anything, then, it is advisable that those who govern democratic republics should set religion aside and work to eliminate it, allowing a rational morality to take its place. Vincenzio Russo explicitly criticized the “profound Machiavelli” for having spread the belief that political bodies, like natural bodies, are subject to a cycle of birth, growth, decay, and death, with no other remedy than to “draw political institutions back to their beginnings, and thus to restore them as it were to a new life.” This doctrine, aside from being dreary and sapping the enthusiasm of revolutionaries who aspired to create political institutions that would defy time, is false in that there is no reason to believe that social energies must necessarily decline, if they are upheld by good institutions and by good laws. With the proper provisions “political bodies can endure,” and therefore the friends of humanity can sacrifice themselves in order to create “a line of light that will shine for all future time on the happiness of the human race.” Giovanni Antonio Ranza (1741–1801), founder of the Republic of Alba (April 1796), was another sincere proponent of religious reform as an indispensable condition of republican liberty. In his appeal For a Republican Lombardy (Per la Lombardia repubblicana) he speaks explicitly of the need for a “religious reform” that would correspond “to the simplicity and dignity of a democratic government.” Such a reform would consist of a return to the equality and the democratic and apostolic conciliar liberty
Vincenzio Russo, Pensieri politici, in Giacobini italiani, vol. 1, pp. 321–22. Ibid., p. 373. “What was it that produced the greatest deeds, the sublime virtues of the Spartans, the Athenians, of the Greeks as a whole, and of the Romans? What gave humanity its greatest friends, its truest heroes? . . . Certainly not religion”: ibid., p. 376. Ibid., pp. 330–32.
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of the earliest centuries of the Christian church and would set itself the task of reforming abuses, rooting out errors, abolishing superstition, and preserving only those dogmas that are truly Catholic and apostolic; replacing casuistical morality with evangelical morality; instituting, in place of the ridiculous hodgepodge of ceremonies, multiplied endlessly over the course of sixteen centuries, a return to an original simplicity: converting the Latin singsong of the liturgy, incomprehensible to the people, into the Italian vernacular which is understandable to one and all; and last of all, exchanging the luxury and ill-conceived pomp of the sacred furnishings and functions for the modest propriety of the democratic Christians of the good old days in which the married ministers of the sanctuary, with hearts of gold and pure hands, sacrificed with clay vases and woolen garments; and the people, in unison with their sacred ministers in the social virtues, were the object of the admiration and envy of the sterner philosophers of the pagan religion! Gaetano Filangieri (1752–88) too theorized the necessity of a civil religion, though he followed the new path blazed by Rousseau rather than Machiavelli’s older path. The pages of the Social Contract and NicolasAntoine Boulanger’s Research into the Origin of Oriental Despotism (Recherches sur l’origine du despotisme oriental) had encouraged him to consider the religious experience as something other than a superstitious fraud; instead he saw it was a powerful force for social unification and a response to the demands of the multitudes. Religion is “so inherent to the nature of man, so necessary to the formation, perfection, and preservation of society, and so terrible in its degeneration” that it becomes a powerful political force. Filangieri made a distinction between the context of religion and that of politics. The former was assigned to the internal forum, that is, the interior convictions of individuals; the latter was assigned to the external forum, that is, one’s actions. It was from this foundation that Filangieri derived the idea of a civil religion that would be diffused out through the lodges of the Freemasons toward the elites and the populace at large, that would battle fanaticism and irreligiosity, and that would put an end, through legislative measures,
Giovanni Antonio Ranza, Della vera chiesa istituita da Gesù Cristo, in Giacobini italiani, vol. 1, p. 218. Gaetano Filangieri, Scienza della legislazione, 1, pp. 57–58; I quote from Vincenzo Ferrone, La società giusta ed equa. Repubblicanesimo e diritti dell’uomo in Gaetano Filangieri, Laterza, Rome-Bari 2003, p. 154.
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to the privileges enjoyed by the clergy and the existence of a church separate and distinct from the civil power as well as hostile to that power. In contrast with the Jacobin supporters of religious reform, Filangieri theorized a gradual transition from the old and superstitious religion to a new civil religion. Even in his plans, however, reform was neither a return to the beginnings of the Christian faith nor a project to be undertaken merely with the aid of words and examples, but rather the construction of a new theological and moral edifice. Unlike what its proponents fervently hoped, the Jacobin approach to moral and religious reform reinforced traditional religion and weakened republican regimes. The Jacobins made the mistake of believing that the institutions and laws of republics born out of revolution, with the aid of French armies, would be powerful enough to uproot from the minds of the people age-old religious beliefs and replace those creeds with new dogmas, new symbols, and new rites. They failed to realize that, as Machiavelli had taught, redeemers and founders can create new states, but they cannot create new religions. The defeat of the Jacobin republics prompted those who truly desired the rebirth of Italy to rediscover the wisdom of Machiavelli and set aside the works of Rousseau.
4. The Risorgimento and the Religion of Liberty The defeat of the revolutionary experience brought the most sophisticated political writers into direct contact with the problem of the absence in Italy of a public spirit capable of supporting republican institutions. They realized that even more than reactionary governments and the papacy, the true enemies of republican liberty were bad customs and bad religion. The revolutionary enterprise might be able to change governments and constitutions, but only a large-scale, long-term educational program could change customs and religion. It was Vincenzo Cuoco (1770–1823) who understood better than anyone else that the Italian problem was first and foremost a problem of public spirit. In a letter to Giovanni Battista Giovio dated 7 March 1804, truly enlightening in reference to the story that I am telling here, he explained
Ferrone, La società giusta ed equa, p. 153 Filangieri, Scienza della legislazione, 3, p. 369; Ferrone, La società giusta ed equa, p. 153. Among the supporters of religious reform were also such deeply religious thinkers as Bernardo Tanucci of Naples, who conducted a polemic against the curia in the name of social principles, employing—while never mentioning him by name, but in a transparent and evident manner— the words of Machiavelli. See Luigi Salvatorelli, Il problema religioso nel Risorgimento, Atti del XXXIII Congresso di Storia del Risorgimento Italiano (Messina, 1–4 September 1954), p. 9.
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that a better order, for him and for the fatherland, could never come about as long as the Italians remained “slothful and cowardly,” weak in their souls even more than they were weak in politics and arms. It is time—he writes at the end of the letter—to join to the glory of knowing how to say beautiful things also the glory of knowing how to achieve great things, because those nations that do not know how to do great things, sooner or later will forget how to say them as well, and the minds of men will shrink, their hearts will shrink, and since they have no true ideas of the beautiful and the great, they will create a mannered beauty, the beauty of the orator, the beauty of school, and there will be a collapse into the languid, the polished, and the false: just as the Greeks first declined into that decadence, followed by the Romans, and it is there that we seem to be hastening today. I think about these matters much as did Fabrizio Colonna in The Art of War written by our Florentine Secretary. Cuoco, who wrote in the same letter that “Machiavelli needs no defense,” was surely thinking of the last pages of The Art of War in which Machiavelli, through the words he placed in the mouth of Fabrizio Colonna, contrasted the corrupt Italian princes of his time, who dealt “with [their] subjects avariciously and proudly,” decaying in laziness and scorning any who showed them “any praiseworthy course,” with the great generals of antiquity who “lived and died gallantly,” adding that if in them, or in some of them, we can condemn “too much ambition for rule,” nonetheless “we shall never find any softness to condemn, or anything that makes men delicate or unwarlike.” Like Machiavelli, Cuoco also believed, or at least hoped, that Italy was “born to raise up dead things.” But that rebirth could only take place if in Italy a public spirit were formed, based on a love of the fatherland and on virtue. The true greatness of the fatherland, Cuoco explained, springs from the virtue of the citizens. Without that virtue, “neither cities nor men can ever be great.” This is once again Machiavelli’s lesson: “Every state has a fixed period to run. All small nations are destined either to grow or to perish. Those do not perish that devote their minds in a timely fashion to the scope of their future destinies; whence, when the course of events presents to them suitable occasions, they are not left helpless due to a lack of preparation. This was the cause of the weakness of the republic of the Venetians, which Machiavelli describes as
Vincenzo Cuoco, Scritti vari, edited by Nino Cortese and Fausto Nicolini, Laterza, Bari 1924, pp. 315–16. See Antonino De Francesco, Vincenzo Cuoco: una vita politica, Laterza, Rome-Bari 1997.
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a ‘lack of virtue,’ and which, to use his vigorous expression, ‘cut from them their legs for climbing to the sky.’” Italy’s problem was that there was no longer any trace of that virtue. If we had not been “rendered cowards by idleness,” Cuoco noted, we could accomplish great things, first and foremost conquer our liberty and become citizens instead of subjects. But we have been educated to the idleness that makes us cowards and weaklings by that holy religion which, “handed down from heaven in order to improve the human race,” has become, “through the abuse of many who have preached it, the source of new corruption.” God wishes us to wage eternal war on vices, “foremost among them the vice of abandoning the fatherland when it is in danger; this powerful God does not wish to be tempted in vain, and he does not help cowards and the weak.” If Italy was to be reborn, it would be necessary to return “to the ancient ideas and the ancient virtues” and replace the God of the corrupt religion with the God who commands us to be strong in order to be able to protect the fatherland. In his thoughts about the defeat of the Neapolitan Revolution, Cuoco rediscovers Machiavelli’s God and proposes his ideals to the generations who will play a leading role in the Italian Risorgimento. In those same years, Ugo Foscolo also retrieved from the past Machiavelli’s intuition concerning the need for a moral rebirth through a return to the beginnings. In his On Sepulchres (Sepolcri), Foscolo sketches out a lovely image of “that mighty one / who measuring the sceptre of the Prince, / strips him of laurels to reveal a brow / bedewed with tears and dripping gouts of blood.” In the prose he wrote between 1811 and 1816, he emphasized that religion is essential to the people. Without the restraint of a fear of God, the people soon fall under the power of despotism: “A people without religion will soon fall under the sway of an absolutely military government; and that government will be instable because, where there is no supernatural restraint, human restraints will be insufficient to prevent revolutions.” Employing a typically Machiavellian argument, he reiterates
Cuoco, Scritti vari, p. 7. Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., p. 59. “For the universality, the Gods are terror, but they are more frequently consolation: indeed they can only strike awe and terror into the few wicked and powerful, and instead they provide consolation to the weak and the unhappy, who amidst misery and injustice seek in heaven future comfort for the tears of the present. And the unhappy compose in all centuries the universality of the human race”; Ugo Foscolo, Della religione di Lucrezio, in Opere politiche e letterarie dal 1811 al 1816, in Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Ugo Foscolo, Le Monnier, Florence 1933, vol. 8, p. 360. Ugo Foscolo, Della servitù dell’Italia, ibid., pp. 227–28.
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that the problem of Italian liberty is first and foremost a moral and religious problem: “[Italy] cannot have liberty, because there is no liberty without laws; nor can there be laws without customs, nor customs without religion; nor religion without priests.” As long as the Italians continue to experience religion as an “outward ceremony,” they will not be able to hope to win their freedom. Political rebirth can only come about if the Italians, and first and foremost the clergy, realize that “all the institutions of the world, if they are to survive, must be drawn back to their beginnings; and that they should pay heed to the philosopher so unworthily proscribed by them, who was the first to utter and evidently prove this axiom: the religion of Christ is holy in and of itself, and it will endure eternally in its own essence; but, corrupted by men, and especially by the very men who administer it, it has become useless to any civil institution; and as we might say, nowadays more than ever before, more Catholic than Christian.” Who “the philosopher so unworthily proscribed by them” might be, at this point in history, it is not necessary to say. A few years later, J.C. Léonard Simonde de Sismondi (1773–1842), in his monumental A History of the Italian Republics: Being a View of the Origin, Progress and Fall of Italian Freedom (Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge), which enjoyed broad and lasting influence on the political ideas of the Risorgimento, focused on the destructive effects of a bad religious education on the moral sense of the Italians. Sismondi carried out his analysis in the light of Machiavelli’s ideas and leveled accusations against the monopoly over moral education that the Catholic Church obtained with the advent of the Counter-Reformation. He points out that it is impossible to state just how harmful a bad religious education (“une fausse instruction religieuse”) had been to the moral life of the Italians. In all Europe, the Italians are the people that have remained most faithful to the church and most devoted to religious practice. But they are also the people that observed less than any others the duties and virtues of the Christian faith. As a result of the education that they received from the church, the Italians have become masters of the art of silencing the voice of their conscience and of covering up with a surface devoutness the absence of an authentic moral sense. They have all learned not to obey their conscience, but rather to deceive it, and they are all masters in the art of accommodating their passions with indulgence, mental reservations, the intention of penitence, and the hope of imminent absolution. The great religious Ibid., p. 224. On Sepulchres, by Ugo Foscolo, translated by Thomas G. Bergin, Bethany Press, Bethany, CT 1971, p. 45.
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fervor of the Italians, in the final analysis, is by no means a way of encouraging uprightness; to the contrary, it is advisable above all to be distrustful of the most devout Italians. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, a number of devoutly Christian thinkers rediscovered the lessons of Machiavelli. Machiavelli, wrote Niccolò Tommaseo, for instance, deserves to be included among the Italian thinkers who thought deeply “about the religious and civil education of their brothers.” Tommaseo even acknowledged in Machiavelli the kind of virtue that, distilled to a state of purity through suffering, gives his words a divine power to “move human souls and profoundly change them.” Tommaseo relies on Machiavelli, along with Cicero and Vico, in his statement that religion is more powerful than princes, and that it has lost its power among the Italians only because “the priests wanted it to be fruitful for them more than for the people.” The Italian rebirth, then, could take place only through religion, never against or without religion. Every aspect of Italy that possessed greatness, Tommaseo admonishes, “is either itself religion or an effect of religion; it is either republic or else a remnant of republic.” It was pointless, and harmful, in Tommaseo’s view, to dream of a new religion that would take the place of the Christian religion. If we carefully examine the words of Christ, he emphasized in the dialogue Concerning Revolutions In Accordance with the Gospel (Delle rivoluzioni secondo il Vangelo), we see that He in no way prohibits “courage and a consciousness of magnanimous things.” It is the duty of the Christian to spare others suffering, eliminating that suffering or reducing it at the expense of one’s own suffering or danger; prevent the doing of evil. Hence the necessary consequence: raise up the oppressed, suffer and fight on their behalf; provided that out of our suffering or fighting it is certain, or highly likely, that their ills be alleviated. Another consequence: injustices, whatever their source, whether from princes or commoners, must be denounced and admonished; and, in cases Jean-Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi, Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge, chez Treuttel et Würtz libraires, Paris 1826, chapter 127, pp. 422–23. Against this thesis of Sismondi, Alessandro Manzoni objected that Catholic morality was by no means the cause of the moral corruption of Italy, if we concede that Italy truly is more corrupt than other nations. Alessandro Manzoni, Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica, edited by Franco Mollia, Garzanti, Milan 1985, p. 3. Niccolò Tommaseo, Dell’Italia, Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese (Utet), Turin 1920, vol. 1, p. 66. Ibid., p. 24.
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where it is necessary and possible, repressed. It is my sacred duty to further public liberty, inasmuch as that liberty tends to alleviate suffering and root out injustice. Patience teaches me to suffer my own ills, not to tolerate the ills afflicting others; and the patience that teaches us to withstand suffering does not teach us to tolerate crimes. And it must be said: oppressive taxes, corrupt and corrupting militias, education that is either distributed in a miserly or abusive manner, justice that is denied or delayed or unreliable, ecclesiastical liberties (liberties, I say, not immunities) that are violated; all these are crimes committed by kings. And therefore, repress them, punish them we must. The Gospels, the apostles, the Fathers of the Church, and countless other examples, Tommaseo points out, prove that the Christian faith teaches us a love of liberty. The Italian revolution can only be a “war of religion” that is engendered by love and by faith, not by hatred and blasphemy, because only a revolution sustained and reined in by the true Christian faith will bring liberation, not a new tyranny. Tommaseo found confirmation for his ideas in the pages in which Machiavelli explained that religion is the best means to instill in the souls of soldiers an extraordinary persistence and in the pages in which he warns that war must come to a halt at the thresholds of churches and sacred places. If an Italian revolution ever proves to be victorious, Tommaseo stated, and he was a good prophet, we can now say, the true difficulty will be to preserve the liberty thus won. The Italians must fear, first and foremost, themselves and the effects that centuries of oppression have had on their minds and their thoughts. The revolutions that have been led by men without religious faith can be adapted to other peoples; an Italian revolution can and must be only a political revolution inspired by a moral and religious reform. Even more revelatory of the new sensibility toward the problem of moral reform are the thoughts of Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) concerning the religion of virtue. Though without taking Machiavelli as his chief source of inspiration and intellectual guide, Leopardi adopted many of the Secretary’s ideas about Christianity, about the positive effects of ancient religion as a prod toward virtue and the love of the fatherland, and about the need for religion in the lives of republics. More than a simple rediscovery,
Ibid., pp. 25–26. Ibid., pp. 185–87. Ibid., p. 200, n.2
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Leopardi’s was a further development of civil religion, and it developed a theory of the rebirth of virtue and of the love of liberty based on a reappraisal of illusions and religion. Leopardi considered Machiavelli “the founder of modern and profound politics,” an example of that inventive way of thinking “that is typical of the south.” He considered Machiavelli to be an equal of those “extraordinary and great [men] who give with their creations an impulse to the human spirit and help it to achieve considerable progress.” At the same time, he described him as a man who was capable of freeing himself from the illusions of virtue, beauty, greatness, honesty, and the love of the fatherland, who taught that the world cannot be renewed and that we must adapt to it with a cold awareness. Is it not true—Leopardi has Machiavelli say—that virtue is the patrimony of the ass: that any young man, however well born and well brought up he might be, if he has just a pinch of brains, is obliged shortly after entering the adult world (if he wishes to achieve anything, and live his life) to renounce the virtue that he has always loved dearly; that this takes place in all cases and most inevitably; that even the most right-minded men, speaking sincerely, would be quite ashamed if they thought that they were incapable of other thoughts and other forms of behavior than those that they set out for themselves when they were young, and yet which are the only ones that can ordinarily be learned from books? But he also has Machiavelli say that: By my nature, and as a young man, to a greater degree than many others, and even down to the bottom of my soul, I was virtuous, and I loved beauty, greatness, and honesty, at first summarily, and later, greatly. Nor when I was a young man did I reject this impulse, indeed I sought opportunities to put these feelings of mine into practice, as are demonstrated by the actions I took against tyranny, and on behalf of the fatherland. But as a clever man, I quickly learned from experience, and once I had learned the true nature of society and of the times in which I lived (which may well have been different from the times in which you live), I did not behave like those foolish men who expect to change the world with their acts and their words, Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone di pensieri, in Tutte le opere, edited by Walter Binni and Enrico Ghidetti, Sansoni, Florence 1969, vol. 2, p. 508. Ibid., p. 434. Giacomo Leopardi, “Per la novella Senofonte e Machiavello” (1822), in Tutte le opere, vol. 1, p. 190. English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, p. 209.
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which was always impossible, but to the degree that it was possible, I changed myself. While in the imaginary dialogue with Xenophon, Leopardi presents a great and tragic Machiavelli who accepts the fact that the world cannot be renewed, in the Zibaldone he focuses his attention on the Machiavelli who says “if one wishes a sect or a republic to live long, it is necessary to draw it back often toward its beginning.” Leopardi feels a profound ideal tie with Machiavelli: “And I say in the same sense that if we wish to preserve men, that is, make them happy, we must draw them back to their beginnings, that is, to nature,” he writes in August 1820. In those same days he noted that man detached from nature is like a tree cut off from its roots. It can neither bloom nor bear fruit. Rather than moving forward along the denaturing path of limitless progress, it is therefore necessary rather to draw back toward first principles, otherwise there is a risk of the demise of humanity: “If we do not return backward,” our descendants will leave this example to their descendants, if they have descendants. To rediscover the true principles of man means returning to the illusions that push us toward virtue and heroism, to the good customs of ancient republics, in particular, those of the Greek republics prior to the Persian war, and of the Roman republic prior to the Punic wars. Those republics were “a state that greatly favored illusions, enthusiasm, etc.” Merit and virtue received their just rewards; the yearning for glory was a powerful engine driving men to achieve great deeds, everyone felt they were part of the whole, and there was not much reason for envy. That state, coming after the primitive monarchy, was certainly the best suited to man, “the most fruitful to life, the happiest.” Among the principles that humanity must rediscover there is that of the love of the fatherland, the true root of virtue. “There is no virtue in a people devoid of love of country,” he noted on 21 July 1822. Leopardi’s direct source was Montesquieu, but his way of linking love of the fatherland, political liberty, and public and private virtues is entirely in keeping with Machiavelli’s doctrine: “Wherever true and warm love of country has existed, and especially where most, that is amongst the free peoples, the customs were always as proud as they were serious, firm, noble, virtuous, honest, and full of integrity. This is a natural consequence
Ibid., p. 192. Leopardi, Zibaldone di pensieri, in Tutte le opere, vol. 2, p. 99. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., p. 187.
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of the love of country, of the sentiment that nations, and hence the individuals have of themselves, of liberty, of valor, of the strength of nations, of the rivalries that they have with foreigners, and of those great and constant and persuasive illusions that spring from all that is produced thereby.” However difficult this is for modern people to comprehend, to live with a love of the fatherland, and to be ready even to give one’s life for it, made the citizens of the ancient republics happier than the moderns. Along the path back to the principles of virtue and love of the fatherland, nonetheless, lies the formidable stumbling block of the Christian religion. Ancient religion taught its followers to love the public and temporal good, to live for the fatherland and to seek out glory. It also taught men to elevate themselves to a point “just below the gods” and to have a high opinion of human nature. Christianity, on the other hand, has lowered man considerably with respect to God and has fought and continues to fight the tendency to consider great men as divine beings; it rendered men inactive, contemplative, and willing to accept despotism. It calls those who suffer blessed, it preaches patience and endurance, making them useful and necessary. By principle, Leopardi makes clear, Christianity neither praises tyranny nor forbids its followers from fighting against it. But men who consider life on earth to be an exile and have no concerns other than “a fatherland situated in the other world” are more likely to tolerate tyranny than were the men who, in keeping with the “ancient religion” considered the earth to be their true homeland. These seem like the words of Machiavelli, but they are Leopardi’s. Leopardi nonetheless goes beyond Machiavelli, especially when he ponders the possibility of a rebirth through the rediscovery of the true principles of Christianity and of ancient virtue. Although Christianity, like all religions, is an illusion and bears the great responsibility of having made the world weaker and having enfeebled the
Ibid., p. 262. Ibid., p. 762. Ibid., p. 857. Ibid., pp. 1069 and 1056. It is worth pointing out that in the Crestomazia italiana Leopardi anthologized the page of the Florentine Histories in which Machiavelli described Lorenzo the Magnificent as a man who “was loved by fortune and by God in the highest degree” (English translation: Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, p. 362) and the page from the Vita di Castruccio Castracani [The Life of Castruccio Castracani] in which he attributed to the Luccan condottiere the saying that “God is a lover of strong men, because we see that he always punishes the powerless by means of the powerful.” English translation: Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, p. 555; see Giacomo Leopardi, La crestomazia italiana, edited by Angelo Ottolini, Hoepli, Milan 1926, pp. 219, 221. Leopardi, Zibaldone di pensieri, in Tutte le opere, vol. 2, p. 149. Ibid., p. 108.
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love of liberty, a rebirth and a return to the natural principles of a human way of life demands other illusions, that is, persuasions concerning the reality of things that can only be real and important with respect to another life. In order to engender and nurture illusions, religion is necessary. It alone is capable of establishing “a great many of those qualities that were proper to the men of antiquity or who were closer to nature, it satisfies our imagination with the idea of infinity, it preaches heroism, and gives life, body, reason, and foundation to thousands of those illusions that constitute the state of average civility, the happiest state of the social and incurably corrupt human being: a state in which as much is conceded to nature as is compatible with society.” The state of a Christian people is a state midway between the state of nature and the state of corruption: “Life, activity, the pleasures of domestic life, heroism, sacrifices, love of the public good, the private and public loyalty of individual and nations, public and private virtues, the importance placed on things, compassion and charity, and so on and so on. . . . All the illusions that rendered sublime the peoples of antiquity, and that render sublime children and the young, acquired new vigor and power in Christianity.” “Pure Christianity” has beneficial effects on the virtue of a people, as is shown by the example of the heroic resistance of the Spaniards to the French; corrupt Christianity on the other hand destroys good customs and takes a people away from the happy state of average civility, as is attested by the example of Spain in the “low times.” Like Machiavelli, Leopardi therefore identifies, as an alternative to the subservient way of life of corrupt Christianity, not a return to the “state of ancient civility” and to the ancient religion, but rather a return to the state of “average civility” and to “true and pure Christianity.” In the nineteenth century, the most surprising instance of an adoption and reelaboration of Machiavelli’s religion of virtue in opposition to the wicked religion of laziness was, in any case, that of Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–52), standard-bearer of the crusade to unify Italy under the aegis of the pope. Surprising because Gioberti knew perfectly well what Machiavelli had written about the role that the papacy and the Catholic religion had played in Italian history, and he specifically accused Machiavelli of having gravely damaged the patriotic spirit of the Italians because he considered the pope “to be a supplement to Italian civilization, indeed, an impediment, not to say a scourge,” and to have conceived the absurd idea
Ibid., p. 151. Ibid., p. 150. Ibid. Ibid., p. 155.
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of “renewing in the Christian age a set of institutions founded upon paganism.” Machiavelli was in Gioberti’s view the best example of the philosophical revival of the fifteenth century that was, basically, “a renewal of paganism.” For that reason, he held in scant consideration “the orders of Christianity,” and despite his wisdom, failed to understand that the true civil science is one that harmonizes “the profound study of events and men with the ideal illuminations, in keeping with the style of the Pythagoreans and the dictates of the Gospel, similarly steering clear of the atrocities and dreams, and working earnestly to improve human institutions, without aspiring to a chimerical perfection.” Machiavelli even seemed to regret the affirmation of Christianity, and in his political theory he separated the sacred element from the profane in his consideration of events. And from these premises, he finally and inevitably went so far as to theorize the absurd notion of Italian unity without Roman supremacy. Despite these criticisms, Gioberti is a supporter of Machiavelli’s idea that the true Christian religion preaches neither idleness nor detachment from the world, but rather virtue. Idleness, which Gioberti attributes primarily to the Jesuits, is a contradiction of the will of God, who “created man to do rather than to enjoy” and “cuts off morality from its roots.” Virtue, in contrast, is in keeping with the will of God, glorifies man and renders him divine, making him godlike, within the confines of his finite nature, and directing him along the path that leads to eternal life. The causes of the unfortunate predisposition of the Italians to idleness and to “cowardly indolence” are the “wicked rulers” and religion misunderstood as “ascetic quietism,” in a radical contradiction of the “evangelical principles.” These are Machiavelli’s ideas, and Gioberti explicitly acknowledges this: It should be no source of astonishment that Christianity, twisted and conceived in such a manner that its essence is inertia, is favorable to sloth; and that patience—a sublime virtue when it is conjoined with the evangelical activity, with faith enlivened by works, with an ardent love of one’s neighbor, with the worship of everything that can engender happiness and improvement—can become a source of vice when it is isolated from its intrinsic surroundings. And that is why Machiavelli, critical of the corrupt asceticism, which wishes you to be capable more of suffering than of doing something strong, adds that Vincenzo Gioberti, Del primato morale e civile degli italiani, edited by Ugo Redanò, Fratelli Bocca, Milan 1938–1939, vol. 1, pp. 40–41. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 42 and 72. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 109. Vincenzo Gioberti, Prolegomeni del primato morale e civile degli italiani, edited by Enrico Castelli, Fratelli Bocca, Milan 1938, p. 225.
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this disorder comes not from Christianity, but from the cowardice of the men who have interpreted our religion according to idleness and not according to virtue. The religion that Christ preached in Gioberti’s view emphasized “benevolent magnanimous” acts “of social virtue,” and of “civil humanity,” and command us to work for the victory in the city of human of liberty and on behalf of justice: [Christ] came and went, benefiting and carrying out in an immediate, extraordinary manner, worthy of the power that created the world, those same miracles of charity that in a natural and gradual way are carried out by the process of refinement and civilization that takes place over the centuries. That process, by improving the legal, judicial, and governmental orders, by abolishing the dominion of man over man and violent, capricious, despotic lordships, making wars less frequent and less terrible, by unifying the nations and increasing the brotherhood among and between them, by encouraging and expanding knowledge . . . glorifies and elevates to the heavens the sincere and just cooperators of the common good on earth. The most influential apostle of the religion of the fatherland in the Italian Risorgimento, Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72), did not perceive in the pages of Machiavelli the call for moral and religious reform. He was capable of distinguishing between Machiavelli and Machiavellianism, between the many “who have in their souls Machiavelli’s doubt, and the few who have his genius.” He inveighs against those mediocre courtiers “who study the secret of the third life of the nation in the pages written by Machiavelli on the cadaver of that nation” and against those who quote Machiavelli “to prove that politics knows no principles, but merely calculations of immediate utility.” He recognizes in him the prophet of the unification of Italy who served as something like an ideal bond linking Dante and Alfieri.
Ibid., p. 227 (italics in the text). English translation: Mansfield and Tarcov, Discourses, pp. 131–32. Ibid., pp. 228–29. See also references to Machiavelli that an Italian prince must “be a creator” and imitate Theseus, Romulus, Lycurgus, and Moses, on pp. 248–50. Giuseppe Mazzini, Agli Italiani, in Scritti politici, edited by Terenzio Grandi and Augusto Comba, Utet, Turin 1972, p. 578. Giuseppe Mazzini, Al conte di Cavour, in Scritti politici, p. 772. Giuseppe Mazzini, A Vittorio Emanuele, in Scritti politici, p. 814.
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He perceived the greatness of the man who suffered because of Italy’s corruption, but he considered his ideas inadequate to the needs of a rebirth of the fatherland: Nations are not regenerated with lies, Machiavelli, whom the false prophets of liberty have long imitated, profaning his knowledge, lived in a time when church, principality, and foreigners had extinguished an era of Italian life and after braving the greatest dangers on behalf of the fatherland and having undergone prison and torture to see if there might be some way of extracting a spark of action, proceeded, God only knows with what misunderstood and uncomforted pain, to undertake an anatomy of the cadaver, to mark its scars, to enumerate the princely, courtly, and priestly worms squirming within it, and offered that spectacle to the better posterity that he foresaw, just as the Spartan fathers led their young before the drunken Helot in order to teach them to avoid the shame of intemperance. And we are at the dawn of an era, stirred by the breath of a new life; and what could we ever learn from the pages of Machiavelli save for an understanding of the tactics of the wicked to avoid them and disappoint them? Peoples are reborn through virtue and the “religion of the true,” not by means of Machiavellian contrivances or Jesuitic cunning. The true masters that we should follow are Socrates and Jesus Christ, more than the disillusioned Florentine Secretary: No; we cannot revive through Jesuitism, we cannot regenerate a people with lies. Jesuitism is the tool of dying religions; lies are the art of a people condemned to servitude. Socrates and Jesus both died, at the hand of an executioner, a corporeal death, but their souls live on immortally, transfused from century to century in the finer life of ensuing generations. All moral and philosophical progress that has been achieved over the past two thousand years hearkens back to the name of Socrates, and an entire era of emancipatory civilization drew for fourteen centuries its auspices from the sainted name of Jesus: all of Machiavelli’s learning was nothing more than a funereal lamp that illuminated the tomb of the second life of Italy; and if the powerful anatomist of a period of shame and decay were to glimpse the pygmies who today busy themselves in imitating him
Giuseppe Mazzini, Ai giovani. Ricordi, in Scritti politici, p. 586. Ibid., p. 587.
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around the cradle of the third life, he would fume with a greathearted wrath against them. Mazzini senses that Machiavelli would be on the side of those calling for the rebirth of Italy but cannot establish the presence of a convincing theory of emancipation even in Machiavelli’s pages on the rebirth of religions and states through a return to the beginnings. He wrote to Pietro Giannone in December 1832: “There may exist between us certain differences in our political and literary beliefs; you perhaps believe that it is necessary in order to regenerate Italy to comply with Machiavelli’s prescription, and draw it back to the centuries whence come the origins of its civilization; I believe that all the efforts of valiant men cannot revive a period that has run its course, and that instead of wasting energy and strength on what is impossible we should look to Italy, take possession of the tendencies now brewing in it, and turn them to good purpose, as best we can.” Without accepting Machiavelli’s insights, Mazzini developed a complete theory of religion as a necessary means for the emancipation of a people from political servitude and from moral corruption. For Mazzini, religion is a faith that provides the strength to translate a moral ideal into concrete action, and as such it is a regenerator of peoples. It is therefore a source of the drive to act ethically, that is, to achieve a harmony between thought and action. Religion does not mean a system of dogmas or truths written in one holy book or another, but rather a sentiment, a principle that drives men to find new political and social forms, a concept that elevates an individual, purifying him of selfishness and making him capable of acting in history in order to achieve a moral idea. Mazzini is profoundly convinced that without a religious sentiment there has never been, nor will there ever be, redemption or emancipation: Man is higher than the earth upon which he stands. His lives on its surface, not at its center. His feet touch the soil, but his forehead is turned upward toward the heavens, as if he were trying to elevate toward them. High above, glittering in the clear sky or concealed
Giuseppe Mazzini, Alleanza repubblicana, in Scritti politici, p. 993. Scritti editi ed inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, Galeati, Imola 1909, vol. 5, p. 201. See Carlo Cantimori, Saggio sull’idealismo di Giuseppe Mazzini, Casa Tipografica Editrice G. Montanari, Faenza 1904. It is important to emphasize that Delio Cantimori, Carlo Cantimori’s son, was one of the first to perceive the link between Machiavelli and the proponents of moral reform in Italy. In the foreword to Eretici italiani del Cinquecento, Delio Cantimori acknowledges the encouragement of his Mazzinian father to venture into a study of the Italian heretics. See Delio Cantimori, Eretici italiani del Cinquecento, edited by Adriano Prosperi, Einaudi, Turin 2002, p. 7.
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behind storm clouds, is his polestar. From the depths of his soul he aspires to a future that he cannot hope to attain as things now stand, but which is the object of every pursuit of his life, the secret of his being, the guarantee of progress; and every great era of humanity makes that aspiration more intense, and spreads a new light on the concept that he forms of that future. Corresponding to that newly spread light is a social renewal—a new land made in the image of the new heaven. I do not know, speaking in historical terms, of a single achievement of the human spirit, a single important step taken along the path of the betterment of human society, that does not sink its roots in a strong religious belief; and I say that every doctrine in which an aspiration to the ideal is neglected, which fails to include, to the degree that its time allows, a solution to this supreme necessity for a faith, this everlasting problem of the origin and the fate of humanity, is and always will be powerless to bring to fruition the concept of a new world. It may succeed in shaping magnificent forms; but it will lack the spark of life that Prometheus brought to his statue from the heavens. For the emancipation of peoples religion has a much greater value than does philosophy. Evidence of this is the French Revolution, which Mazzini interprets as the victory of an ideal experienced as a faith over facts and lifeless institutions, and therefore as a manifestation of the most genuine religious spirit. The French Revolution, he writes, was “the work of Luther in the realm of politics,” and it is in this aspect that its glory and its power are to be found. However great his soul may have been, and
Giuseppe Mazzini, I Sistemi e la Democrazia, in Scritti editi e inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, Daelli Editore, Milan 1864, vol. 7, p. 334. In the letter he wrote to Francesco Bertioli in January 1833, Mazzini remarks: “I am not a Christian, in the sense of believing in the divinity of Christ, and other scenes of the sort: that I don’t accept any other revelation than that of Genius; that I believe that religion is a product, and an expression of Society, like literature, law, and politics, etc.: . . . that religion [is] subject to Progress like all things—that in this sense, I believe that Christianity is the first religion that is an expression of our civilization, of the modern world in opposition to antiquity—that Christianity has formulated for me the Dogma of Equality— and in this sense I am a Christian—that however I do not believe that Christianity preached anything other than Equality in the face of God, and individual improvement—that we are verging on the era in which we must preach Equality in the face of other men, and social improvement—that in this sense I am not Christian; but that proceeding progressively, society still under the domination of Catholicism, we cannot leap directly beyond Christianity, and preach pure Deism, which is my religion”: Scritti editi ed inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, vol. 5, p. 216. Giuseppe Mazzini, Dal papa al concilio, in Scritti editi e inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, vol. 7, pp. 234–35. Giuseppe Mazzini, Condizione e avvenire dell’Europa, in Scritti editi e inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, Rome 1891, vol. 8, p. 186. Like Mazzini, others during the Risorgimento worked on behalf of a moral and religious reform. Among them were the exiles who traveled to Malta and
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however profound his love of the fatherland, what Machiavelli lacked was the true religious spirit that is capable of regenerating a people. And yet, precisely as he is reiterating the distance that separates Machiavelli from the religion of truth, Mazzini writes words that summarize the concept of the religion of virtue that Machiavelli had outlined: Truth! The nascent Italy desires nothing else, and cannot live without it. The nascent Italy seeks in the present day its purpose, the rules governing its life in the future, a moral criterion, a way of choosing between good and evil, between truth and error, without which there can be no responsibility for Italy, and hence no liberty. Centuries of enslavement, centuries of selfishness, the only foundation of a slave’s life; centuries of corruption, slowly and cunningly instilled by a Catholicism devoid of any consciousness of a mission, have ruined, perverted, practically eradicated the instinct for the great and holy things, that God placed in Italy. . . . The nascent Italy needs to strengthen itself by acquiring an understanding of its own duties, its own strength, of the virtue undermined by sacrifice, of the certainty of triumph that lies in logic: and you give it a theory of interests, opportunities, fictions; a poorly understood Machiavellianism revived by pupils to whom Machiavelli, were he alive, would say: I was in the presence of a people’s tomb; you, fools, are in the presence of a people’s cradle. The nascent Italy needs men who incarnate in themselves the truth in which Italy must find its identity; let them preach that truth aloud, represent it in their actions, and profess it, whatever may happen, until they are in their grave. Without men of this sort, Mazzini concludes, and his words were tragically a prophecy that proved all too accurate, Italy will fall “beneath the yoke of the first foreign and domestic master who might choose to saddle it with tyranny, a weak, indecisive Italy, lacking confidence in itself or in others, with no notions of honor or glory, with no religion of truth, lacking the courage to translate it into action.” Toward the middle of the century, Edgar Quinet (1803–75) reopened the discussion in The Revolutions of Italy (Les Révolutions d’Italie) of the question of what role Machiavelli played in the history of religious reform in Italy. In the view of Quinet, a man who had received a Calvinist educaLondon; see Augusto Armand Hugon, Correnti evangeliche tra gli italiani in esilio 1840–1860, Atti del XXXIII Congresso di Storia del Risorgimento Italiano (Messina, 1–4 September 1954), pp. 29–36. Giuseppe Mazzini, A Francesco Crispi (1864), in Scritti politici, pp. 969–70. Italics in original.
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tion, Machiavelli’s thought had an intellectual and political foundation in the defeat of Savonarola’s religious reform. In his opinion, Savonarola had committed the error of applying to the ills of Italy the remedies of the early church and had preached the message that aid should be sought only in God, that his listeners should arm themselves with the sword of prayer and await a miracle. Machiavelli, on the other hand, attempted to revive Italy from its moral death by means of a politics carried on “without God, without providence, without religion, neither pagan, nor Christian.” He tenaciously insisted upon the idea of “founding and preserving the fatherland without God and separate from God.” Because of the wicked example set by the papacy, the Italians were not only morally corrupt but also devoid of any sense of remorse or shame. In the face of this total moral depravity, Machiavelli did not raise the banner of a moral and religious reform but rather an appeal for a redeemer who would employ force to bring about a rebirth. His violent and impassioned theory left no room for the art of conquering the human soul with religion. Sustained by a love of the fatherland equal to that of the great men of antiquity, Machiavelli accepted neither the death of Italy nor a sense of Christian resignation. He attempted to make an heroic intellectual effort to find a cure for the ills of Italy in both political intelligence and in force. He felt no pity for the corpse he wished to revive. He showed in an unmistakable and irrefutable manner the absolute incompatibility between Roman Catholicism and liberty, and on this awareness based his exclusively political therapy for the rebirth of Italy. A few years later, Jules Michelet (1798–1874) pronounced a similar verdict in The History of France (Histoire de France, 1855). The prophet of the rebirth of Italy through religious reform was Savonarola, and his defeat provided proof that it is not possible to reform the Catholic Church by drawing it back to its beginnings, and that democracy and Christianity are incompatible. Machiavelli understood Savonarola’s defeat with great lucidity and took a radically different approach to the salvation of Italy. Seeing that God was doing nothing for Italy, he invoked a politics without God: if heaven turned a deaf ear, then he would invoke hell. Jacob
Edgar Quinet, Les Révolutions d’Italie, in Oeuvres d’Edgar Quinet, Hachette, Paris, 1895, Book II, pp. 3–4. See in this connection the study by Gennaro Maria Barbuto, Ambivalenze del moderno. De Sanctis e le tradizioni politiche italiane, Liguori, Naples 2000, and in particular pp. 21–27. Quinet, Les Révolutions d’Italie, pp. 6–8. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., pp. 55 and 57. Jules Michelet, Renaissance et Réforme. Histoire de France au XVIe siècle, preface by Claude Mettra, R. Laffont, Paris 1982, p. 92.
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Burckhardt (1818–97), in turn, reinforced in his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) the image of an Italy caught between an absurd call for moral and religious reform inspired by the ideals of the Middle Ages, and the clear-eyed but excessively cold diagnosis offered by Machiavelli. Savonarola, wrote Burckhardt, had brought together in his preaching both patriotism and moral and religious regeneration. His remedy for Italy’s moral corruption, however, was a theocracy in which men bowed down to God and lived for the salvation of their souls. Machiavelli also knew that Italy’s ill’s consisted of a particular kind of moral corruption, but he failed to realize that its cause was the individualism that had driven Italy outside of “the limits of morality and religion.” The ideas of Quinet, Michelet, and Burckhardt on Machiavelli and the failed religious reform in Italy were adopted and developed by Francesco Fiorentino (1834–84) who, in his 1868 book on Pietro Pomponazzi (1462– 1525), focused on the profound similarities of religion of the Mantuan philosopher and those of the Florentine Secretary, Pomponazzi’s contemporary. In his De incantationibus, written in Bologna in 1520, Pomponazzi stated that religions, including the Christian religion, are subjected to natural cycles of birth and decay, determined by the influence of the celestial movements on human affairs: “And let the truth be told, if religions are born and die in a necessary alternation caused by the revolutions of the stars, it is inevitable that the time will come as well for the Christian religion; and Pomponazzi makes no secret of the matter, indeed he foretells the imminent waning of faith, and the diminishing frequency of miracles; and the end of that religion will be nigh when faith and miracles will have ceased entirely.” The influence of the stars also affected both the founders of religions and the great lawgivers, justly called “sons of God.” And the latter, in order to carry out their work, made use of miracles and religion, just as Machiavelli had maintained. With the difference that, while Pomponazzi considered religion to be an “instrument of virtue,” Machiavelli considered it to be an “instrument of the regime.” For that reason, Machiavelli, who was an especially knowledgeable critic of the “decay of religion in Italy,” refused—or was unable—to become a promoter of religious reform. When it emerged onto the Italian political and intellectual Jacob Burckhardt, La civiltà del Rinascimento in Italia, translation by Domenico Valbusa, Introduzione di Eugenio Garin, Sansoni, Florence 1980, pp. 394–95. English translation: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, by Jacob Burckhardt, translated by S.G.C. Middlemore, Macmillan, New York, 1890. Francesco Fiorentino, Pietro Pomponazzi. Studi storici su la scuola bolognese e padovana del secolo XVI, Le Monnier, Florence 1868, pp. 61–62 Ibid., pp. 416, 470. Ibid., p. 471.
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scene, the possibility of reform vanished with the pyre that consumed Savonarola: Girolamo Savonarola lacked neither enthusiasm, nor learning, nor personal integrity of customs for his role as an apostle, yet all the same he failed in his undertaking due to a shortage of faith among his followers. The Florentine people might in a moment of great exaltation applaud the fervid sermons of the Friar of San Marco and make a bonfire of the monuments to worldly vanity and corruption; but after rethinking matters, they could not approve of that barbarous destruction; they sensed that art was their life, their glory, and that they could not abandon that art to follow Savonarola on his flight to a life devoid of beauty. And so, while religious reform took root in Germany and in other nations of northern Europe, the Italians instead abandoned themselves to criticism and to irony, and with their criticism and their irony they remained servants of popes and princes. The manifold reflections on the failure of religious reform in Italy were given an effective summary in the pages of Francesco De Sanctis. Once the attempt at religious reform advocated by Savonarola proved to be in vain, what remained for De Sanctis was the scientific path identified by Machiavelli: “The Renaissance came, and science truly believed that it was capable of restoring life: the science was called Machiavelli, Campanella, and Sarpi; and the life was Cesare Borgia, Leo X, and Philip II.” But “thoughts remain thoughts, and facts remain facts.” Both Machiavelli and Savonarola wanted to reform Italy. Savonarola “relied upon enthusiasm for his reform”; Machiavelli relied on science: “Savonarola employed fanaticism; uncomprehending and intolerant wrath: Machiavelli employed the tolerance that understands and absolves . . . the tolerance of the scientist . . . the irony of the man who is above anger.” The former failed because he wanted to enact a de facto replacement of social indolence with the indolence of monasteries, the latter failed because science lacked the power of redemption and wound up feeding the spirit of intelligent adaptation to corruption that celebrated its triumph in the man depicted by Guicciardini, wholly absorbed in the care of his “particulare”:
Ibid., p. 453. Francesco De Sanctis, “La scienza e la vita” (1872), in De Sanctis, L’arte, la scienza e la vita: nuovi saggi critici, conferenze e scritti vari, edited by Maria Teresa Lanza, Einaudi, Turin 1972, p. 320. See, in this connection, Barbuto, Ambivalenze del moderno. Francesco De Sanctis, “Conferenze su Machiavelli,” in De Sanctis, L’arte, la scienza e la vita, pp. 56–57.
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To restore the Middle Ages and obtain a reform of customs and conscience through a religious and moral restoration was the conception of Savonarola. The Council of Trent adopted this same conception, and refined it: it was the one most easily understood by the masses and most easy to present to them, for the common people looked to the past for their remedy. But Machiavelli, looking at the corruption, saw it from another and a higher standpoint. Pensive and ill at ease in the middle of the Italian carnival, he saw this corruption of Italy as nothing else than the Middle Ages in putrefaction—dead in men’s consciousness, but still surviving in forms and institutions— and far from wishing to plunge Italy back into the past and to revive the Middle Ages, he took his share in destroying that past. In De Sanctis’s view, Machiavelli attempted to find the essence behind the appearance, and raised the banner of Italian unification and of the separation of church and state. In this sense, he begins the tradition that later continued with Sarpi, Giannone, Mazzini, Gioberti, and Cavour. He was not however the promoter of a genuine religious reform. If he had any religion, it was that of the fatherland, and because of his deep and abiding love of the fatherland, Machiavelli deserves earthly glory. On the day of the liberation of Rome, De Sanctis set forth a sincere and moving eulogy: What Machiavelli looks to see is whether he is a man; his aim is to revive the roots of the plant called “man,” which is drooping. . . . The seriousness of earthly life with its instrument, which is work; its objective, which is one’s country; its principle, which is equality and liberty; its moral link, which is the nation; its agent, which is the State, autonomous and independent. . . . Scholasticism dies: science is born. This is the real Machiavellism; alive, indeed young, even today. Developed, corrected, simplified, and in part realized, Machiavellism is the program of the modern world, and the great nations are the nations that come nearest to realizing it. Let us be proud of our Machiavelli. Whenever a part of the ancient building crumbles, let there be glory to Machiavelli, and whenever a part of the new is built, let there be glory to Machiavelli! Even as I am writing these words the bells are ringing far and wide, unceasingly, telling that the Italians are in Rome: the temporal power is falling, the people are shouting, “Long live the unity of Italy!” Let there be glory to Machiavelli!
De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana, p. 476. English translation: History of Italian Literature, translated by Joan Redfern, Harcourt, New York 1931, p. 542. Ibid., pp. 511–12. English translation: Redfern, History of Italian, pp. 584–85.
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De Sanctis admired Machiavelli the patriot but looked with suspicion, good liberal that he was, on the religion of the fatherland and the elevation of the state to a divine principle. “Country to Machiavelli,” he writes, was a god, higher even than morality, and higher than law. . . . God had come out of Heaven and descended to the earth. . . . Liberty meant the participation, in some degree, of all the citizens in public affairs. The rights of man did not enter as yet into the code of freedom. Man was not as yet an autonomous being, an end in himself: he was the instrument of his country, or what was even worse, of the state . . . the individual absorbed into society, or as they called it then, “the omnipotence of the state.” Machiavelli puts these ideas forward not as things discovered or analyzed for the first time by himself, but as things accepted by long tradition and backed by classical culture. They have the spirit of ancient Rome in them. . . . In ancient times “liberty” had meant the sharing by citizens in the government, and this was the sense in which Machiavelli had understood it. But in modern times, besides this question of political liberty there is also the thing called “liberty of conscience.” The fatherland of Machiavelli is, in short, a divinity that suffocates, that “absorbed religion, morality, and individuality”; and his state is not content with being autonomous itself, but “wants to cut away autonomy from everything else.” With his state, and with a leader, Machiavelli believed he could found the Italian nation, failing to realize that it was necessary also to “re-create the people, re-create thought, re-create man, the Roman man of whom he dreamed.” If political reform were to become a reality, it needed to be accompanied by a religious reform that could recognize in an unambiguous manner the value of the individual. With the end of the Risorgimento, the scholars who were linked intellectually to that period disagreed on the significance of the works of Machiavelli, in particular concerning his thoughts on the topic of religion. Gino Capponi, the bard of the late Florentine Republic, considered Machiavelli to be a man without religious faith and, as such, a faithful reflection of Italy: “Nor was religion dead in his thoughts, nor in the thoughts of Italy: he revered it as an elevated thing, he loved it as something Italian; then he assailed it out of indignation at the misrule that he saw besmirching it; and with vices he cancelled it from his heart. Thus was Machiavelli
Ibid., pp. 480–81 and 545. English translation: Redfern, History of Italian Literature, pp. 547–48, 624–25. Ibid., p. 512. English translation: Redfern, History of Italian Literature, pp. 584–85.
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and thus was Italy.” Pasquale Villari (1827–1917), who wrote his book The Life and Times of Niccolò Machiavelli) (Niccolò Machiavelli e i suoi tempi, 1877–82) with the ambition of understanding both the vices of Italy “against which we struggle today,” as well as the virtues of Italy, “which helped us to rise again,” claims that Machiavelli never thought about religious matters and “was a still greater Pagan, as is abundantly proved by every page of his works. It is proved by his boundless admiration for antiquity; his indifference to religion; his hatred towards the Papacy; by the way in which he spoke of Christianity, especially when comparing it with Paganism; and finally by the peculiar language he frequently employed and that demonstrated his mode of thought with singular lucidity.” Machiavelli felt and showed with words and actions his “ardent and irresistible love for liberty, his country, and even for virtue,” but he had the great shortcoming of having sent Italy, directing it away from Savonarola, toward a political redemption without religious reform: Italy had become incapable of a religious reformation similar to that accomplished in Germany. Instead of springing towards God, as Savonarola had predicted; instead of seeking strength in a new conception of faith, she aimed at a re-composition of the idea of the State and the motherland. She saw in the sacrifice of all to the universal good the only possible way of political and moral redemption. The unity of the regenerated country would have inevitably led to the re-establishment of morality, would have rekindled faith in public and private virtue, and discovered a method of sanctifying the purpose of life. This idea, vaguely and feebly felt by many, was the ruling thought of Machiavelli, the shrine upon which he offered up his entire existence. Oreste Tommasini (1844–1919), in his monumental work The Life and Writings of Niccolò Machiavelli in Their Connection with Machiavellism, (La vita e gli scritti di Niccolò Machiavelli nella loro relazione col Machiavellismo, 1883–1911), on the other hand, explicitly refutes the allegations of Machiavelli’s paganism and emphasizes the fact that the “the Risorgimento (‘resurrection’ or ‘rebirth’) of faith” through a “religious reformation, brought about and attained through any means possible,” was “among the most vibrant
Gino Capponi, Storia della Repubblica di Firenze, G. Barbèra, Florence 1875, vol. 2, p. 369. Pasquale Villari, Niccolò Machiavelli e i suoi tempi, 3 vols., Le Monnier, Florence 1877–1882, vol. 2, pp. 272–74. English translation: The Life and Times of Niccolò Machiavelli, translated by Linda Villari. Haskell House Publishers, New York 1969, vol. 2, p. 92. Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 381–82. See also Villari, La storia di Girolamo Savonarola e de’ suoi tempi, 2 vols., new ed., Le Monnier, Florence 1887–88, vol. 1, p. lxiii. English translation: Villari, The Life and Times, vol. 2, p. 517.
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and personal of Machiavelli’s aspirations,” even if “his exhortation was not understood, was not taken into consideration, and had no echo in Italy.” In Tommasini’s view, Machiavelli was free of any theological prejudice and believed that divinity was honored through works, which was also an idea shared with men such as Cromwell, Robespierre, Garibaldi, or Mazzini, and is the way Americans see things. Machiavelli saw that the true problem afflicting Italy was a bad religious education: These truly are the Gravamina italicae nationis [Lamentations of an Italian Nation] that only Machiavelli raised up and handed down to posterity, lacking confidence that his contemporaries would pay him heed, pained that they refused to understand. If the Italians only knew themselves as well as they know those with whom they have dealings, they would be the foremost men in the world: but their consciences allow themselves either to be deceived or corrupted. Christianity failed to enliven them sufficiently, theology perverted them; it even persuaded them that it was wicked to call wickedness wicked; so that their conscience lacked even a secure moral sentiment. Dante was not enough to revive and bring salvation to their conscience; and—“What are you getting me into, father?”—the anguished cry of Lucrezia in La Mandragola [The Mandrake] is the symbolic exclamation of the deceived conscience of an entire people, and the cry of all Italy is perpetual. Machiavelli “does not touch faith, but he wants it solid, simple, and practical, and he girds it, and penetrates it, with virile charity.” He recommended only one thing to the Italians: to gather together all of Italy under the rule of a single chief; this cannot happen, until faith is reinvigorated and the priesthood loses every last shred of overlordship upon the peninsula. Unity brings internal and external emancipation. He wanted this thought, which contains the aspiration and the crucial pivot of the Italian resurgence, to become the sentiment of the people, because a deeply felt necessity, whatever the difficulties and obstacles placed along the path of its attainment, will persist in the souls becoming a faith, committing the people to battle, finding its martyrs, winning victories, and achieving its logical and ineluctable effects, all the more vast the less Oreste Tommasini, La vita e gli scritti di Niccolò Machiavelli nella loro relazione col machiavellismo, Loescher, Rome 1883–1911, vol. 2, pp. 706, 694 (I quote from the facsimile reprint, Il Mulino, Bologna 1999). Ibid., vol. 2, p. 706. English translation: Sices and Atkinson, The Comedies, p. 225.
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imminent they may prove to be. This truly became the solid faith of Italy. The long history of meditations on moral and religious reform had its high point in the 1920s and 1930s, when Italian fascism brought to vivid life the truth of Machiavelli’s prophecy that a people made morally weak by bad education and corrupt religion will become easy prey to wicked men. The awareness that fascism sank its roots into age-old moral ills, and that a liberation from that regime would only be possible through a moral renewal of the Italians, encouraged the birth of the concept of a “religion of liberty.” This concept, which more than any other encouraged the moral and political resistance to the Fascist regime, emerged in thoughts about Machiavelli or thoughts that took Machiavelli as a specific point of reference and departure. The chief mastermind behind the development of Machiavelli’s God into the principle of a religion of liberty was Piero Gobetti (1901–26). Gobetti sensed a profound spiritual link to the Florentine Secretary. “We,” he wrote, speaking in the name of the founders of the journal Liberal Revolution, “feel that we are strangers to the spirit of the Gospels” and yet close “to the despair of the Old Testament”; our enthusiasm for actions, responsibility, and altruism spring not from faith but from despair; we are aware “everything is cruelly equal.” Gobetti sensed within himself the same passions and beliefs that he had perceived in Machiavelli: We are no longer heroes, even if it were with the optimistic cunning of Don Quixote; but rather we are disinterested historians (artists) in the sense of Machiavelli who was able to find the same ethical nature (praxis) in Callimaco, in Castruccio Castracani, and in Duke Valentino, and to discuss with the same engagement and the same indifferent serenity the enterprise of La Mandragola [The Mandrake] and his own legations; his objective in both cases was to ensure that cunning and activity (serene, heroic, ethical) would prevail against the inert optimism of a Messer Nicia (have you never noticed that Fra Timoteo is a sympathetic character for M.?). Gobetti found Machiavelli’s God through the guidance of Alfieri, whom he had studied for his baccalaureate thesis at the University of Turin. Like Machiavelli, who wrote in favor of political action even though he was well aware that in his own lifetime no one would be able to put into practice
Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 710–13. Piero Gobetti, Per una società degli apoti, in Opere complete di Piero Gobetti, vol. 1, Scritti politici, edited by Paolo Spriano, Einaudi, Turin 1969, p. 412.
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his teachings and his exhortations, Alfieri wrote in favor of political action, prompted by a pessimistic serenity. He did not act out of faith, but because “he had no faith.” In Alfieri, “the ideal does not illuminate from without, hovering on high, unattainable, but rather springs from action, and lies in the very despair with which one accepts the ineluctable consciously, firmly renouncing all illusions and falseness, which are born only of weakness and selfishness, one rediscovers the austere criterion of virtue in the unselfishness of solitude.” Alfieri, in Gobetti’s view, was able to rediscover a “truer and more vigorous Machiavelli” than the Machiavelli who was a pure technician of government, and he was above all able to “rethink his intrinsic spiritual consistency.” Gobetti, following in Alfieri’s footsteps, emphasizes that the God that commands liberty as a moral principle is the necessary presupposition of political liberty. Alfieri sees no meaning in “a political liberty that is not based on an internal liberty—which would be understood as strong feelings.” Alfieri’s God is the same God that Machiavelli had opposed to the God who teaches us to be servile and who deprives peoples of the strength to achieve great things, who inspires the creators of religions, and who lives on, not in the Christ who teaches humility, but in the Christ who is a “creator of political liberty.” It is on this God that Gobetti founded the religion of liberty, as opposed to the religion of the servile, which must inspire a people of citizens capable of fighting on behalf of liberty because they must, and not because they are sure of victory. A religion that “is no longer a source of comfort for the weak, but of security for the strong, no longer a cult of a transcendent activity, but of our own activity, no longer faith but responsibility”; a religion “that excludes interests and calculations, that demands, as Alfieri writes so effectively, fanaticism in the founders, and in the founders enthusiasm of sincerity, and in one and all that complete ardor for which there is no break between thought and action.” Gobetti identifies this religion of liberty as the content of the Italian intellectual and moral reform. Harking back to the judgment of De Sanctis on which I commented at the beginning of this book, Gobetti wrote that “our Reformation was Machiavelli, an isolated individual, a political theorist. His concepts failed to find a social terrain upon which to establish a foundation, or men that could live them. Machiavelli is a modern
Piero Gobetti, La filosofia politica di Vittorio Alfieri, in Opere complete di Piero Gobetti, vol. II, Scritti storici, letterari e filosofici, edited by Paolo Spriano with two essays by Franco Venturi and Vittorio Strada, Einaudi, Turin 1969, p. 126. Ibid., pp. 93–95. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 129. Ibid., pp. 132, 128.
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man because he founded a conception of the State that rebelled against the transcendent, and conceived of an art of politics as the organization of the practical, as well as professing a religiosity of practical action understood as spontaneity of initiative and economy.” In the first chapter of Rivoluzione liberale, Gobetti borrows the same concept with a significant modification: Machiavelli “professes a civil religiosity as spontaneity of initiatives and economy.” In order to attain its political reform, Italy needs this civil religion or religion of liberty, the religion that Machiavelli taught us with his refinement, as a “citizen who is an expert in historical contingencies,” not the “noisy program” of the peasant Luther. In the years in which fascism seemed to be invincible thanks to its powerful weapons and techniques of persuasion, the demand for moral reform resurfaced in the writings of a few who, like Carlo Rosselli (1899–1937), refused to resign themselves to lives of servitude. The Italian problem,” writes Rosselli in Socialismo liberale (1928–29), is essentially the problem of liberty—but liberty understood in the fullest sense: as spiritual autonomy, as the setting free of the conscience for individuals, and as the organization of the social world (meaning the building of the state) and relations among groups and classes. Without free men, there is no possibility of a free state. If consciences are not set free, there is no possibility of social classes being set free. This is not to reason in a circle. Liberty begins with the formation of the individual and ends with the triumph of a state whose members are free individuals, equal in rights and duties, a state in which the liberty of each is the condition and limit of the liberty of all the rest. Rosselli takes from Mazzini the need for moral renewal as an indispensable requirement for liberty, but it is the same requirement that Machiavelli had set forth: “Now it is sad to have to admit this,” he writes, “but nonetheless it is true: in Italy the training of the individual, the formation of the individual as the basic moral unit, is still to a large extent unaccomplished. Because of poverty, indifference, and a long-standing resignation, most Italians still lack a sharp and deep-rooted sense of autonomy and responsibility. The state of subjection that lasted for centuries makes the average Italian vacillate between the habit of servility and anarchic revolt even today. The concept of life as a struggle and a mission, the notion of Piero Gobetti, La rivoluzione liberale. Saggio sulla lotta politica in Italia, in Opere complete di Piero Gobetti, vol. 1, pp. 923–24. Carlo Rosselli, Socialismo liberale, edited by John Rosselli, Introduction and Critical Essays by Norberto Bobbio, Einaudi, Turin 1997, p. 111.
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liberty as a moral duty, and the awareness of one’s limitations and those of others are all missing.” By a surprising but not inexplicable coincidence, Antonio Gramsci too explores, in his reflections on Machiavelli, the idea of moral and religious reform. Gramsci interprets The Prince as the work in which Machiavelli first explained how a political leader needed to be capable of guiding a scattered and dispersed people to founding a new state by encouraging and organizing its “collective will”; then he exhorts his readers to action with the impassioned cry of the Esortazione. Gramsci identifies in Machiavelli, “in nuce,” the constituent elements of an “intellectual and moral revolution” understood as a “religious question or a conception of the world.” From these elements he develops the belief that the modern prince, the Communist Party, “must and cannot fail to be the originator and organizer of a reform both intellectual and moral,” capable of developing “the collective national will toward the achievement of a superior form of modern civilization.” One of the factors in Machiavelli’s conception of the world, or religion, is the principle “to lose one’s soul in order to save the fatherland or state.” Gramsci describes this principle as “an element of absolute secularism” in the face of religion of the dominant conception, which in turn responded by depicting Machiavelli as “a diabolical apparition.” While for Gobetti moral reform was individual and internal, Gramsci’s was set forth by a collective political subject: “The Prince takes the place, in the consciences, of the divinity of the categorical imperative, he becomes the foundation of a modern secularism and a secularization of all life and the relationships of everyday existence.” In those same years Croce developed the idea of the religion of freedom in The History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (Storia di Europa nel secolo XIX). He singled out the religion of freedom in the liberal, democratic, and national movements that flourished in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century. That religion brought together and harmonized the long history of freedom and proved its power with the example of its “poets, theorists, orators, writers, propagandists, apostles, and martyrs.” It was capable of penetrating into the souls of the people, moving them to action and sacrifice: “The heroic figure, who spoke to the hearts, was that
Ibid. Antonio Gramsci, Note sul Machiavelli, sulla politica e sullo Stato moderno, Einaudi, Turin 1949, pp. 3–4. See Benedetto Fontana, Hegemony and Power: On the Relation between Gramsci and Machiavelli, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1993. Gramsci, Note sul Machiavelli, p. 8. Ibid.
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of the soldier-poet, the intellectual who is capable of fighting and dying for his ideas; a figure who did not linger in the raptures of imagination and the paradigms of education, but who appeared in flesh and blood on the battlefields and the barricades all over Europe. The ‘missionaries’ were accompanied by the ‘crusaders’ of liberty.” The liberal idea is a new religion because it is a conception of reality and it has a conformable ethic. It has no need of “personifications, myths, legends, dogmas, rites, propitiations, expiations, priestly classes, pontifical paludaments, and things of that sort”; it condemns the weak man of letters and the dreamy philosopher, servile mindsets and the adulation of the courtier; it refuses to “separate the man from the citizen, the individual from the society that shapes him and which he shapes”; it exhorts its audience to a love of the fatherland; it instills a sense of duty; it demands the pursuit of truth; it requires engagement in action or at least a desire for action; it teaches us to look on defeats as opportunities to show or reaffirm the power of liberty. The religion of liberty, Croce points out, brings together manifold religious and philosophical aspirations, and believes that it “represents the finest impulses,” that it is “purification, exploration, and reinforcement of the religious life of humanity.” Among the aspirations and requirements brought together by the religion of liberty, there is also that of those who sought to bring about a religious reform that would first and foremost teach a civil morality capable of upholding a faith in liberty. Croce does not consider Machiavelli to be a forerunner of the religion of liberty, but rather a man who displayed the “evident signs of a stern and sorrowful moral conscience,” and he mocks those who engage in “so much idle talk about Machiavelli’s immorality.” He also explains, better than anyone else could have aspired to do, that when discussing political action that founds and sustains states, Machiavelli quite frequently speaks of the State in a religious tone, as when he recalls the saying that one must be prepared for the sake of the State to lose not only one’s reputation, but also the salvation of one’s own soul; or as when he looks back, with ill-hidden envy, at the pagan religion, which exalted, as the highest good, honor in this world, extolling human glory, and praising greatness of spirit, strength of body, and all the virtues which make man powerful; whereas the Christian religion, by showing the truth and the real way to the world beyond, despises
Benedetto Croce, Storia di Europa nel secolo decimonono, Laterza, Bari 1932, p. 24. Benedetto Croce, Etica e politica, edited by Giuseppe Galasso, Adelphi, Milan 1994, p. 293.
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this world, and praises abjection, setting contemplative men above the others, and endurance above action. Croce goes so far as to write, in his commentary on the passage that “the States must from time to time be called back to their principles,” that “Machiavelli becomes religious in dealing with the art of the State.” He considers Machiavelli’s religiosity not as a complete theory, but rather as a state of mind. The theory set forth by Machiavelli the political writer, whatever the state of mind of Machiavelli the man, was for Croce pure politics, that is, politics as the terrain of force and utility. Therefore Croce fails to perceive in the pages of Machiavelli the urgent need for a moral reform based on the idea of a God that is the principle of virtuous action. When fascism, the true progeny of bad religious education, dragged Italy into the tragedy of the war, it was the religion of liberty that aided the country’s moral and civil rebirth: a religion without churches and without a Messiah, which instilled in the souls of the many the idea of a “human fatherland in which all free men recognized themselves and understood one another in the same language,” and gave them the strength to live and die for an ideal. Piero Calamandrei understood this clearly: “There are those who have spoken of a ‘collective soul,’ there are others who have spoken of ‘Providence’; perhaps we should speak of God: of an unknown God that is inside each and every one of us.” The Resistance had a “religious character” because religion is “seriousness of life, commitment to moral values, consistency between thought and action.” How and why a people, or at least the best among them, succeeded in being reborn from the moral death of living in servitude, appeared to Calamandrei and to others as a “miraculous and mysterious event.” Miraculous and mysterious, it certainly was,
Ibid., p. 294. Ibid., p. 296. In Rinascimento riforma e controriforma, the third part of his Storia della filosofia, published in 1930, Guido De Ruggiero writes: “The inspirational motif of the Reformation [the return to the beginnings] was by him [Machiavelli] luminously foreshadowed; indeed, it is surpassed by his rationalist explanation. The return to the origins, in fact, had not transcendental and divine significance, but was rather a norm for any human pursuit, which is inevitably purest and most authentic at the source, because it is closer to the spontaneity of nature. It is only that nature, on its own, does not deploy its own reflection, its returning upon itself: the naturalism of Machiavelli is not even conceivable without a higher principle—virtue—which activates it, in the same time that it surpasses it”; Guido De Ruggiero, Rinascimento, riforma e controriforma, 4a ed., Laterza, Bari 1947, vol. 2, p. 70. See the review of the book by Felice Alderisio, Machiavelli. L’arte dello Stato nell’azione e negli scritti, in Conversazioni critiche, Fourth Series (Serie quarta), Laterza, Bari 1932, pp. 15–17. Piero Calamandrei, Passato e avvenire della Resistenza, Grafica Milano, Milan 1954, reprinted in Scritti e discorsi politici, edited by Norberto Bobbio, vol. 1, Storia di dodici anni, La Nuova Italia, Florence 1966, book 2, pp. 49–52.
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but if we set it within a broader historical span, we can also interpret it as a sign of the tenacious presence of the religious ideal of rebirth that spread throughout Italy along with republican liberty and experienced its highest moments during the Risorgimento. Evidence of this can be seen in the fact that, once Italy began to be reborn, those who were protagonists and witnesses to that rebirth rediscovered the authentic significance of the ancient message of Machiavelli. Luigi Russo, who dedicated his book Machiavelli (1945) to Nello Rosselli and Leone Ginzburg, two anti-Fascist martyrs, captured in unrivaled fashion the leading role that the Florentine Secretary had played in the history of Italy’s moral and religious conscience. Russo explained that those who had truly kept alive the profound significance of Machiavelli’s lesson were men like Mazzini and Alfieri, who understood that the problem of liberty in Italy was first and foremost question of moral reform. Savonarola, the much mocked unarmed prophet, writes Russo, remains ideally vindicated by the anti-Machiavellian political thinkers who “struggled to establish the value, alongside the ‘effectual reality,’ also the ‘ideal reality,’ alongside the earth, heaven, how things ought to be alongside how things are, and finally to purify, brighten, and entirely humanize the savage nature of the Machiavellian centaur.” And above all Savonarola is vindicated by Italian history, “when the unity of the peninsula, an abstract prophecy at the turn of the sixteenth century, became a concrete standard at the end of the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century, only because pure politics became also poetic and religious agitation, and the friar’s prophetic pathos returned in the words of an Alfieri and a Mazzini.” To Russo, political action that become prophecy and poetry in order to redeem peoples and found states was not the antithesis of the politics that Machiavelli had theorized, but rather a truer expression of that politics: “After a cold dissertation on the arts of the lion and the fox, at the end of the short treatise, he steals the colors, the images, and the style of his much satirized adversary [Savonarola], from the polemical idol of his fantasy, and speaks as a prophet, himself describing such biblical notions as a sea that has parted, a cloud that showed the path, a stone that has poured forth water, the heavens that have rained down manna, and he calls to his aid the voice of a poet; because he knew that ‘many times poets are filled with Luigi Russo, Machiavelli, 3rd ed., Laterza, Bari 1949. The dedication, dated 1945, reads: “I dedicate this book to the memory of my friends Nello Rosselli and Leone Ginzburg, my close companions in our literary labors and our political beliefs, at a time when their tragic sacrifice begins to appear to be illuminated by the light of liberty and peace.” Ibid., p. 8.
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divine and prophetic spirit.’” Machiavelli becomes a prophet because he knows that “without prophetic pathos, without moral renewal, without civil conscience,” a principality, and to that much greater a degree, a republic, will remain a mere utopia, nothing more than yet another imaginary republic. It is the force of his political realism that obliges him to seek and imagine a God that commands civic virtue. The history of Italy’s aspiration to moral and religious reform is not over, and will never be concluded, except perhaps once it appears completely futile. There will be times, as there were in past, when that reform will appear possible and within reach; there will be other times in which it will seem to be distant or unattainable. One of the periods in Italian history in which the hopes for a moral reform were most widespread and powerful were the years that witnessed the foundation of the Italian Republic and the drafting of the Italian Constitution. In one of the debates that clearly expresses the hopes and fears of that time, the debate over the ratification of the peace treaty signed in Paris on 10 February 1947, the name of Machiavelli emerges once again. It was Luigi Einaudi—one of the leading figures, with Croce, of Italian liberalism—who cited Machiavelli’s name, in his speech to the council on 29 July 1947. Benedetto Croce, a few days earlier, had spoken strongly in favor of not signing that peace treaty; Einaudi responded with an argument entirely inspired by a faith in liberty that he, a secular speaker, couched in religious language: the only course of action that appears before us is the preaching of the good word. We know what this good word is: it is the idea of liberty versus intolerance, cooperation versus brute force. The Europe that Italy hopes to see, and for whose creation Italy must fight, is not a Europe shut off to anyone, it is rather a Europe open to one and all, a Europe where people can freely uphold their differing ideals, in which the majorities respect minorities and themselves promote the aims of those minorities, to the very furthest point at which they remain compatible with the survival of the community as a whole. On behalf of the creation of this Europe, Italy must be ready to sacrifice a part of its sovereignty.
Ibid. Ibid., p. 5. Luigi Einaudi, Interventi e relazioni parlamentari, vol. 2, Dalla Consulta nazionale al Senato della Repubblica (1945–1958), edited by Stefania Martinotti Dorigo, Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, Turin 1982, pp. 691–92.
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We must learn from Machiavelli, Einaudi explains, and not from Machiavelli “meditating in solitude in the exile of his rustic Tuscan village on the theorems of pure political science,” but from Machiavelli “the man,” from Machiavelli “the citizen of Florence” who “had no fear, certainly, of turning to the people, whom he believed to be ‘capable of truth,’ capable that is of grasping the truth and moving away from false prophets when ‘some good man gets up who in orating demonstrates to them how they deceive themselves.’ Yes. Nowadays it is necessary that once again good men stand up, as Niccolò Machiavelli hoped, to show the peoples of Europe the path of salvation, persuading them to shatter the futile idols of the omnipotence of impotent states, of totalitarianism, ally of nationalism and fierce enemy of the liberty and independence of nations.” In the words that Einaudi, a man not given to flights of rhetoric, spoke at a very serious moment for Italy’s future, we see the return of the Machiavelli who had perceived the need of men endowed with that quality of moral integrity that gives their words the power to persuade and liberate; men who felt for the fatherland a religious sentiment of charity, much as he did. The idea of religious reform set forth by Machiavelli in his writings was directed toward the education of men of this kind, because he knew that only men who lived in accordance with a religion that commands its followers to love liberty and to be strong in order to win and defend that liberty would be able to redeem Italy from its moral servitude. Einaudi’s words on Machiavelli, entirely sustained by a faith in liberty that allowed him to glimpse, in the wake of the tragedies of war and Fascism, the possibility of a Europe of free peoples, can surprise, and should surprise us; but they allow us to understand, once again, that Machiavelli has been living in Italian history as the advocate of a moral and religious reform, and reminds us that in order to be free, we need the aid of that god of his.
Ibid., p. 691.
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INDEX
Acciaiuoli, Donato, 46n82, 94 Adams, John, 26 Adolphus, Gustavus, 12 Adriani, Marcello Virgilio, instructions to Machiavelli concerning Giampagolo Baglioni, 108–9 Aemilius Lepidus, 160 Alamanni, Andrea, 41 Alamanni, Luigi, 41 Alberti, Leon Battista, 45; on love of the fatherland, 51 Aldobrandini, Piero, 131 Alexander III (pope), 185 Alexander the Great, 230 Alfieri, Vittorio, 9, 10, 286–87, 292; criticism of the Christian religion, 251n149, 252; on religion and moral reform, 251–52, 251n149; on the teachings of Christ, 252–53 Allocuzione fatta ad un magistrato (Allocution or Address to a Magistrate [Machiavelli]), 62, 120–21 Altoviti, Niccolò, 202 Ambrogini, Angelo, 93 Ammirato, Scipione, 239–40 Annales (Tacitus), 110 Annali della Repubblica di Genova (Giustiniani), 224 antiquity: great men of, 27, 37, 38, 80; influence of on political revolutions, 26; political virtue of, 9; rebirth of, 25–26 Apologetics (Rosselli), 227–28 Apostles, the, 2, 5, 23
Appius Claudius, 200, 203 Apuleius, 75 Aquinas, Thomas, 46, 47 Arendt, Hannah, 26; on Machiavelli’s love for his fatherland, 36n36; on Machiavelli as the spiritual father of the American Revolution, 25 Arezzo, Florentine control of, 191 Arienti, Sabbadino degli, 44 Aristotle, 46, 56, 140, 157, 200; on the common good, 47 Art of War, The (Machiavelli), 8, 12, 13, 36, 68, 103, 186, 229; attempts to instill new attitudes in the young in, 139–40; Caterina Sforza in, 114n81; Fabrizio Colonna in, 187, 190, 264; and the idea of renovation, 84; Machiavelli’s reasons for composing, 106; use of the laudatory genre of rhetoric in, 135–36 atheism, 14n28 Athens, under the tyranny of Pisistratus, 138–39 Attilius Regulus, 48 Augustine, 45, 91, 252 Baglioni, Giampagolo, 108–9, 184 Bandini, Pietr’Antonio, 212 Banquet, The (Dante), 48, 66–67 Baxter, Richard, 13 Becchi, Ricciardo, 100 Belfagor (Machiavelli), 142–43 Bellanti, Lucio, 33 Berlin, Isaiah, 3 Bernard, Richard, 11
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index Bernardino, Piero, 81 Bertelli, Sergio, 249n143 Biondo, Flavio, 40, 44 Blessed Spirits, The (Gli spiriti beati [Machiavelli]), 189 Bocalosi, Girolamo, 258–59 Boccaccio, 73 Boccalini, Traiano, 238 Boccella, Enrico, 227 Bonfadini, Vilio, 227 Boni, Bono, 94, 131 Bonifacio, Bernardino, 231 Bonsi, Domenico, 201–2 Borghini, Vincenzo, 213 Borgia, Cesare, 42, 65, 114n81, 120, 257; effective use of silence and secrecy by, 116–17; mythologizing of by Machiavelli, 114–18 Bornato, Gregorio, 228 Botero, Giovanni, 233–35; blame for the ruin of Italy on emperors and not the Catholic Church, 235; on the decline of states due to heresy, 234; rejection of Machiavelli’s ideas on religious reform, 233–34 Boulanger, Antoine, 262 Bracciolini, Iacopo, 126 Bracciolini, Poggio, 44, 79, 80, 126, 155 Brandolini, Aurelio, 53, 135 Brucioli, Antonio, 221–22, 222n41 Bruni, Leonardo, 51, 55, 78, 155n4; on eloquence as an aid to the fatherland and to Christian religion, 90–91; on liberty, 160; on writing concerning history, 125–26 Bruno, Giordano, 9; defense of Machiavelli’s ideas concerning moral and religious reform, 241–44 Brutus, 201, 204 Buondelmonti, Giovanni, 96–97 Buondelmonti, Zanobi, 13, 135 Burckhardt, Jacob, 280–81 Busini, Giovanbattista, 211
Cambi, Lamberto del Nero, 168–69 Campanella, Tommaso, 236–38; attacks on Machiavelli, 236; on the necessity of religious worship in republics, 236–37 Campano, Giovanni Antonio, 54 Canigiani, Bernardo, 95 Cantimori, Delio, 87n226, 209–10, 211, 276n233 Canto degli spiriti beati (The Blessed Spirits [Machiavelli]), 84 Capponi, Capone, 96 Capponi, Francesco, 60 Capponi, Gino, 58; on Machiavelli as a man without faith, 283–84 Caracciolo, Antonio, 212 Carducci, Baldassarre, 99 Carducci, Francesco, 220–21 Carnesecchi, Piero, 212 Casa, Francesco della, 108 Cassimati, Giovanni, 227 Castiglione, Bernardo da, 212 Castracani, Castruccio, 43n64 Cato, 52 Cavalcanti, Bartolomeo, influence of Machiavelli on his thought, 219–20 Cavalcanti, Giovanni, 157 Cavour, Camillo, 282 Cerretani, Bartolomeo, 82 Chabod, Federico, 122n104, 208–9, 210n4 charity (caritas), 2, 10, 45–47, 50, 56n119, 67–68, 76, 95, 207, 230; charitable love as disinterested affection, 46; Christian conception of, 46; in contrast to eros, 46; as the foundation of love for the fatherland, 46–47, 68, 162–63; as the foundation of patriotism, 49; as the fundamental concept of the Christian religion, 53–54, 55–56, 56n119; Hercules as a symbol of, 56n119; identification of with agape as opposed to amor, 45–46; love of the fatherland as a form of charitable love, 46–47; political and moral effects of, 47 Chipman, Nathaniel, 20–21 Christian Prince, The (Principe cristiano [Ribadeneyra]), 240–41
Calamandrei, Piero, 291–92 Calvin, John, 208, 231 Calvinism (Italian), 230–32 Cambi, Giovanni, 202
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index Christian religion. See Christianity Christiana paradoxa (Brandolini), 54 Christianity, 6, 19, 208, 218, 245, 253, 255–56, 257, 258, 260, 284; as an ally of liberty, 120, 253, 253n158; charity as fundamental concept of, 53–54; and civil life, 24, 222–24; corruption of from its beginnings, 243–44; decline of republican Christianity, 58–61; as detrimental to virtue and love of the fatherland, 271–72; discords internal to, 40, 40n53; interpretation of in colonial America, 21–22; and liberty, 25, 120, 253, 268; and paganism, 182–83; as a religion of virtue, 20, 52–53, 232–33, 268–69; reform/ renewal of, 9, 208–11, 210n4; renovation and charity as fundamental elements of, 2, 84–88; republican Christianity, 16, 25, 43–61 passim, 64, 65, 219–20; as servitude, 20; as a source of sloth and vice, 273–74; as weakening a free way of life, 258–59 Christians, 249; Christian oratory, 91–92; and citizenship, 7, 8n14, 51, 222–23; and the defense of liberty, 98; duty of, 22, 267–68; duty of to love and serve the fatherland, 49, 61; ethics of, 49; love of the fatherland as defining Florentine Christians, 3; pursuit of God’s true glory by, 43–44; superiority of Christian love for the fatherland, 49–50; “true” Christians, 2, 19, 258 Chrysostom, 252 Church of Santo Spirito, burning of as an act of God, 152–53 Cicero, 2, 15n32, 56, 56n119, 125, 135, 140, 157, 158, 160, 161, 267; on honesty and utility, 130; rules of concerning the subdivision of oration, 129; on speaking so that listeners use their imagination, 136 citizen(s), 24, 160, 163–64; citizens becoming princes, 173–74; mastery of rhetorical eloquence as a duty of, 89–90; role of in the well-ordered republic, 155–56, 155n4; service of to religion, 235–36; as soldiers, 189,
189n140; virtue of leading to the greatness of the fatherland, 264–65. See also Christians, and citizenship civic religious modalities, 56n120 civil communities, 156–57, 158 Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples (Istoria civile del regno di Napoli [Giannone]), 248 “civil life”: identification of with mixed government, 158; and the liberty of a city, 158–59; as a synonym for “political life,” 157–58 “civil piety,” 51 Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, The (Burckhardt), 280 Clement VII (pope), 35, 214 Cleombrotus, 52 clergy. See priests Clizia (Machiavelli), 28, 42, 63; Nicomaco in, 140, 206–7 commonwealths, 15n32 Concerning a Reformation of Italy, that is, Concerning the Means to Reform the Worst Customs and the Most Pernicious Laws of Italy (Di una riforma d’Italia, ossia dei mezzi di reformare i più cattivi costumi e le più perniciose leggi d’Italia (Pilati), 254 Concerning Revolutions in Accordance with the Gospel (Delle rivoluzioni secondo il Vangelo [Tommaseo]), 267–68 Concetti politici (Sansovino), 244 Considerations (Considerazioni [F. Guicciardini]), 217 Consiglio Maggiore (Major Council), 97, 118, 164 Contarini, Gasparo, 83 Contzen, Adam, 240–41n110 Conversano, Giovanni, 44 Cose fiorentine (Guicciardini), 169–70 Council of the Eighty (Consiglio degli Ottanta), 96, 99, 118 Council of Pisa, 97 Counter-Reformation (in Italy), 5, 209, 214, 266; attacks against Machiavelli during, 232–41; defense of Machiavelli’s ideas of moral and religious reform during, 241–46
297
index Court, Pieter de la, 17 Cox, Virginia, 132–33n150 Crestomazia italiana (Leopardi), 271n213 Crispoldi, Tullio, 227n63 Croce, Benedetto, 10, 293; development of the idea of a religion of freedom, 289–90; on Machiavelli’s religious tone when speaking of the State, 290–91 Cromwell, Oliver, 12, 285 Cuoco, Vincenzo, 9, 263–65 Cyrus, 64, 65, 101–2, 123, 176, 239
Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze (Dialogue on the Government of Florence [Guicciardini]), 58–59 Dialogo della mutatione de Firenze (Cerretani), 82 Dialogue on Religion (Dialogus cui titulus est religio [Boccella]), 227 Dialogus de libertate (Rinuccini), 156, 160 dilectio (reasoned affection), 45 Diotima of Mantinea, 39 Discourses Concerning Government (Sidney), 15 Discourses on Cornelius Tacitus (Discorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito [Ammirato]), 239–40 Discourses on Livy (Machiavelli), 8, 12, 16, 17, 18, 63, 65, 86, 86n224, 112, 134n152, 150, 170, 173, 189, 217, 227, 228–29, 243, 256, 257; ambitious nature of, 135; and the causes of sects, 197; concerning Coriolanus, 197, 200–201; concerning the death of Manlius Capitolinus, 68–69; discussion of Christ in, 42; discussion of freedom in, 138–39; expurgated version of, 214; and the “legend of the fortress,” 110–11, 111n76; Machiavelli’s reasons for composing, 106, 134; on men who “have become gods,” 66; passage concerning Caterina Sforza, 109–10; on the religiosity of the Germans, 85–86; on respect for religious ceremonies, 257; subversive ideas of, 24; “That a Good Citizen Ought to Forget Private Injuries for Love of His Fatherland,” 68; treatment of religion in, 231; use of commonplaces in, 138; use of the laudatory genre of rhetoric in, 135, 136; use of metaphor in, 134, 137 Discorsi sopra gli Annali di Tito Livio (Giannone), 249, 249n143 Discursus florentinarum rerum post mortem iunioris Laurentii Medices (History of Florence and Other Selections [Machiavelli]), 43n64, 66, 121, 199–200 Divine Comedy (Dante), 76–77
Dall’Onda, Desiderio Pasolini, 111n76 Dante, 48, 66–67, 121; on rebirth and renewal, 76–77 David, 62, 127, 144, 229 De bono communi (Girolami), 47 De bono pacis (Girolami), 46–47 De dignitate hominis (Oration on the Dignity of Man [Mirandola]), 56 De incantationibus (Pomponazzi), 280 De institutione (Quintilian), 125 De inventione (Cicero), 130 De libero hominis arbitrio (Bornato), 228 De nobiliate legum et medicinae (Salutati), 177 De optimo cive (Sacchi), 162–63 De Oratore (Cicero), 106 De ratione scribendi libri tres (Brandolini), 135 De regimine principum (Lucca), 47 De reipublicae institutione (Spinola), 222–23 De studiis et litteris (Bruni), 90–91 De Tyranno (C. Salutati), 157 De vita solitaria (Petrarch), 48–49n Del libero arbitrio dell’Huomo (L. Guicciardini), 213, 213n12 Della Ragion di Stato (Botero), 234 Della religione (Ficino), 54 Dell’ingratitudine (Tercets on Ingratitude or Envy [Machiavelli]), 68 Democritus, 56n119 Diacceto, Bernardo di Carlo da, 96 Dialogi (Brucioli), 221
298
index Domenichi, Domenico de’, 54 Doria, Paolo Mattia, 247–48 Duke of Athens, 145–46, 148
that makes men godlike, 48–49; Roman use of caritas or pietas to describe, 46; as similar to love for a woman, 69–70n162; as the true root of virtue, 270–71 Fermo, Francesco Gentile da, 226–27 Ferreri, Zaccaria, 82 Ficino, Marsilio, 38–39, 54–55, 56n119, 95 Filangieri, Gaetano, 262–63 Fiorentino, Francesco, 280–81 Florence, Republic of, 31, 34, 43, 58, 82, 83, 104–5, 121, 146, 150, 218–19, 220; Christianity of, 164; civil discord and factional strife in, 145; civil religiosity of the Florentines, 57n123, 98–99; decline of the Christian faith in, 169–70, 212; dual nature of Machiavelli’s love for (placing the good of the Republic above the practice of religion and love for the Republic over individual good), 36–37; expansionist policies of toward Pisa, Siena, and Lucca, 190–92, 191n151; factions within, 105; God as a friend to, 97, 98; as the new Jerusalem, 166, 167; political rhetoric of concerning faithfulness, 115n84; religious and moral reformation in, 82–83, 163; revolt of the Ciompi in, 195–97; threats against by Cesare Borgia, 115–16; war with the papacy, 78; wars of to regain Pisa, 60 Florentine Histories (Machiavelli), 8, 33, 40, 44, 68, 84, 112, 172, 185, 227, 229, 257; consideration of the consolatory power of religion in, 150–51; on corruption and sects, 196–98; description of Lorenzo the Magnificent, 271n213; expurgated version of, 214–16; on free cities, 173; oration to the Duke of Athens in, 145–46, 148; oration based on the theme of necessity, 149–50, 150n204; orations based on the themes of compassion and the fear of God, 148–49; possible reference to the Protestant Reformation in, 87n226; revolt of the Ciompi in, 195–97; teaching of political
education, 134, 207, 290; Christian, 85, 235, 247; democratic, 259; moral, 5, 135, 216, 222, 266; pagan, 85; as persuasion, 106; public, 260; religious, 6, 10, 85, 153, 222, 224, 266, 267, 285, 291 “Eight Saints” (Otto Santi), the, 36, 169 Einaudi, Luigi, 293–94 eloquence. See rhetorical eloquence Epicharis, 110–11 Epistola al Duce, al Senato, e a tutto il popolo di Genova (Giustiniani), 224 Erasmus, 56n119, 223, 224, 229, 233 Essay upon the Constitution of the Roman Government (Moyle), 15 Europae speculum: or, A view or survey of the state of religion (Relazione dello stato della religione [Sandys]), 224–25 Exhortation to Free Italy from the Barbarians (Esortazione a liberar l’Italia dai barbari [Alfieri]), 253 Exhortation to Penitence (Esortazione alla penitenza [Machiavelli]), 62–63, 67–68, 143–44 Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, The (Spaccio della bestia trionfante [Bruno]), 241–42 Ezekiel, 75n179 Fabius, 68, 201 Fabricius, 48 faith: and civic humanism, 55; and the morality necessary for good government, 21–22 fascism, 286, 288, 291 fate, 242; influence of the stars on, 240–41n110 fatherland, love of, 51n99, 172, 222, 224, 234; among the ancients, 86–87n; cause of, 248; Christian love of the fatherland, 49–50; divine character of, 47–48; as a duty, 51; as a form of charitable love, 46–47, 68, 162–63; as love of the common good, 47; as a love
299
index Florentine Histories (continued) wisdom and the love of liberty in, 144–45; technique of contrast used in, 150; use of deliberative rhetoric in, 145–46 Florentines, 145; compromise of with rebellious cities, 126–27n119; disrespect of for justice, 194–95; opinion of German Christianity, 80 For a Republican Lombardy (Per la Lombardia repubblicana [Ranza]), 261 force, use of when words fail, 146, 146n190 Foscolo, Ugo, 9, 265–66, 265n194 First Decennale (Decennale primo [Machiavelli]), 29, 42; on Savonarola, 101 free will, 29, 29n10, 88, 164, 213n12 French Revolution, the, 277
God, 1–2, 16, 30, 38, 39, 46, 52, 61, 120, 150, 235, 243, 279–80; command of to love justice, 94–95; as the creator, 95; development of Machiavelli’s God into a “religion of liberty,” 286–87; fear of, 22, 265–66; free will as God’s greatest gift to mankind, 29, 29n10; as a friend to wicked men, 152, 152n208; friendship of, 64–65, 97, 234; glory of, 66n149; God as charity, 55; God in the consciousness of Florentines, 2–3, 223; God’s love of civil government, 57–58; God’s love for free cities, 244; God’s love of justice, 51, 51n99, 95, 121, 123, 161; God’s love for those who love their fatherland, 4–5, 121, 223; God’s love for those who possess glory, power, and immortality on earth, 43, 43n64, 64–65, 120, 242, 265, 271n213; God’s love for those who possess virtue, 24; God’s pardon for a prince’s cruelty, 117–18; as hope and refuge for the downtrodden, 40–41; justice as an attribute of, 96; as lawgiver, 221–22; love of by humans, 47; man’s duty to, 50; role of in civil government, 163–65, 234; signs of God’s friendship, 123; use of extraordinary events by as warnings or punishments, 152–53; viewed in the republican tradition of Florence, 2, 7, 167–68; views of in colonial America, 21n54 Godfrey of Bouillon, 233 Goineo, Giovan Battista, 229 Golden Ass (L’Asino [Apuleius]), 29–30 Gramsci, Antonio, 289 Grazia, Sebastian de, 1, 2, 69–70n162 Great Council (Consiglio Grande), 99, 121 Greek republics, 270 Greeks, 13n22, 179n107, 227, 261n184, 264 Gregory XI (pope), 4, 35, 36 Groto, Luigi, 227 Guicciardini, Francesco, 4, 33–34, 34n31, 41, 58–60, 63, 169–70, 216n21; condemnation of the Protestant Reformation, 218; denunciation of the
Galdi, Matteo, 260 Gallican Council (1511), 82, 87n226 Garin, Eugenio, 79n198 Genoa, Republic of, 222–23 Germans, “ancient goodness” of, 181–82 Germany, free cities of, 179 Gianni, Astorre, 148 Giannone, Pietro, 248–50, 282; on civil theology, 249–50; praise for the religion of the Romans, 249 Giannotti, Donato, 218–19 Giles of Rome, 157 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 282; on Machiavelli and the religion of virtue, 272–74 Giovio, Giovanni Battista, 263 Giovio, Paolo, 211 Ginzburg, Leone, 10, 292, 292n278 Girolami, Remigio de’, 46–47 Giustiniani, Agostino, 223–24 glory: defense of earthly glory by Italian humanists, 44–45; desire for earthly glory as unworthy of a Christian, 43–44; human desire for, 43; Machiavelli’s interpretation of, 65–67; as a reward for the pursuit of virtue, 14 Gobetti, Piero, 10; on Machiavelli’s God, 286–87; on moral reform, 289; on the religion of liberty, 287–88
300
index corruption of the Church, 184n123, 216–17, 216n23, 217n24 Guicciardini, Luigi, 60, 73, 212–13; oration of based on commonplaces and clichés, 146–48
Inglese, Giorgio, 36 Inquisition, the, 80, 213, 221, 226–27, 230, 254 “instrumentum liberatis,” 6 “instrumentum regni,” 5, 6 Istoria Fiorentina (P. Bracciolini), 126 Italian city-states, 25 Italian Risorgimento, 9–10; and the religion of liberty, 263–94 passim Italy, 10, 123, 208, 209, 218, 279, 280, 284; fascism in, 286, 288, 291; lack of public spirit in, 9; need for a true religion in, 9; wickedness of Italians due to religious corruption, 225, 254, 255. See also Italy, redemption and moral reform of in the writers of the eighteenth century; reform, moral and religious Italy, redemption and moral reform of in the writers of the eighteenth century, 247–63 passim; during mid-century, 253–54; importance of the preservation and love of the fatherland to Italy, 247–48; lack of virtue in Italy, 264–65
Hannibal, 64, 65, 187, 188 Harrington, James, 12–13 Hercules, 230; as the symbol of charity, 56n119 Histories (Tacitus), 112–13 history: as the best source of political wisdom, 125–28; power of to instill a love of virtue, 125 History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (Storia di Europa nel secolo XIX [Croce]), 10, 289–90 History of France, The (Histoire de France [Michelet]), 279 History of the Italian Republics, A: Being a View of the Origin, Progress and Fall of Italian Freedom (Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen age [Sismondi]), 266 Hobbes, Thomas, 250 Holy League, 97 Holy Scripture, 51 Holy Spirit, 52 honesty. See utility/honesty debate Horace, 136 humanism, 226; and charity, 45–47; civil/ civic humanism, 24, 55, 93, 211; Italian/ Florentine humanism, 10, 44, 94 humor/laughter, and classical rhetoric, 140–41, 140n172 Huss, John, 80
Jacobins (Italian), 9, 258–59, 263 Jansenists, 255–56; idolization of Machiavelli, 256 Jerome of Prague, 80 Jesus Christ, 2, 10, 18, 52, 61, 76, 237, 245, 246, 260; charity of, 53, 67; Christ’s kingdom, 14; as a “creator of political liberty,” 287; laws of, 255–56; as representative of the divine idea of virtue, 54–55; teachings of, 207, 252–53, 274 Jews, 23 Jolaus, 75 Julius II (pope), 82, 97 Julius Caesar, 65, 198 Junius Brutus, 201 justice, 2, 11, 51n99, 161, 207; as an attribute of God, 96; disrespect for among the Florentines, 193–94; as a divine virtue, 94–96; as the highest virtue, 51; promotion of, 94; religious significance of, 96–97, 120
idleness, 180, 224, 228, 265; morality based on, 255; religion of, 6, 9, 12, 20, 42, 86, 180n112, 207, 218, 243, 273, 277 immortality, 52, 222; Machiavelli’s search for, 39–40; role of the heavens in, 42–43; yearning for and the desire to become godlike, 38–40 Index of Forbidden Books, 212, 214, 226, 232; reasons for Machiavelli’s works being placed on, 238–39
301
index Kendall, Samuel, 21–22
cioè di Paolo IV Pontefice Massimo [Caracciolo]), 212 Life and Times of Niccolò Machiavelli, The (Niccolò Machiavelli e i suoi tempi [Villari]), 284 Life and Writings of Niccolò Machiavelli in Their Connection with Machiavellism (La vita e gli scritti di Niccolò Machiavelli nella loro relazione col Machiavellismo [Tommasini]), 284–85 Lippi, Domenico, 127–28n123 Livy, 8, 68, 69, 126–27n119, 159, 179, 188 love, 38–39. See also charity; fatherland, love of; love, erotic love, erotic, 69–75; erotic passion as an essential part of love, 73–74; metaphor of the golden nets, 71–72n168; power of, 70–71; surrendering to, 72–73 Lucca, Tolomeo da, 47, 158 Lucius Manlius, 188 Lucrezia (La Riccia), 72n169 Luther, Martin, 56n119, 80, 82, 208, 216, 216n21, 241, 244, 288 Lycurgus, 39, 175, 176, 200, 245, 274n225
Lactantius, 91 Latini, Brunetto, 156 L’Aurora, Enrico Michele, 259–60 lawgivers, 15, 18–19, 20, 43n64, 177, 245, 246, 248, 258; as lovers of God’s wisdom, 221; as similar to God, 176; as “sons of God,” 280 laws, 160–61, 203–4, 244, 255; administration of punishment for breaking the law, 200–201; Christian law, 235; defense of, 201; and freedom, 173; respect for, 201–2; the rule of law, 170–71, 199–200. See also lawgivers Leighton, Alexander, 11 Leo X (pope), 66n150 Leopardi, Giacomo, 9; critique of Christianity, 271–72; on love of the fatherland, 270–71; on Machiavelli and virtue, 269–70; opinion of Machiavelli, 269; on the religion of virtue, 268–69 liberty, 138, 237, 253n158, 269, 288; civil liberty, 160; defense of, 97–98; as equality ensured by law, 160; inseparability of from Christianity, 25, 120, 253, 268; examples of free people (the Romans, Etruscans, Samnites, and German free cities) as profoundly religious, 179; examples of those corrupted (Italians, French, and Spanish) without religion, 179–80; in Italy, 266; love of, 138–39; and the Kingdom of God, 12n20; political liberty, 56n119, 155–56, 159–60, 173, 174–75, 180, 244; political liberty as God’s gift, 26, 220; religion of liberty, 9–10, 170–77, 286; religious/spiritual liberty, 22, 56n119; republican liberty, 20; and virtue, 16. See also Italian Risorgimento, and the religion of liberty Libri della famiglia (Alberti), 45, 51 Libro del poema chiamato Città di Vita (Palmieri), 161 Life and Deeds of Gian Piero Carafa, Pope Paul IIII (Vita et gesti di Giovan Pietro
Machiavel républicain (Anonymous), 17 Machiavelli, Bernardo, 46n82, 106, 127–28n123 Machiavelli, Guido, 69 Machiavelli, Ludovico, 41 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1, 140, 208, 227–28n65, 291n275; address of to Giampagolo Baglioni, 108–9; on the ancient goodness of the German people, 181–82; as the Antichrist, 241, 241n112; on the arrogance of the nobility, 194; on the art of politics, 288; as an atheist and pagan, 3, 18, 211–12, 272, 284–85; audience with the king of France, 108; belief in astrology, 30; belief in free speech, 17; belief in the occult and in intelligent presences, 30, 30n14; books of his owned by those under interrogation by the Inquisition, 226–27; charges of heresy against,
302
index 212–14, 213n12, 216; on charity, 67–68; as a Christian, 1n, 2–3, 17; on Christian and pagan morality, 3–4; comments on the actions of Pier Soderini, 203–4; comments on the death of Paolo Vitelli and the condemnation of prominent Florentine citizens, 202–3; condemnation of Florentine expansionist policies, 190–92; criticism of church/papal corruption, 84–85, 193, 272; criticism of by Dutch political thinkers, 16–17; on democracy, 13; desire of to end the temporal power of the popes, 183–84; development of political myths by, 109–21 passim; disdain for confession, 28; disdain for the ideas of hell and purgatory, 27–28; on erotic love, 69–75; familiarity with sexual passion, 73–74; familiarity with the art of rhetoric, 106; familiarity with the Protestant Reformation, 87–88, 87n226; on fear and corruption, 197–98; on the founders of cities/ governments and lawgivers as similar to God, 176–77; friendships of with women, 72n169; on government by the aristocracy, 172; indifference of to the salvation of his soul, 33, 34–35; inspiration of his political writings, 7–8; interpretation of extraordinary events as punishments or warnings from God, 152–53; invocations of Christ in his writings, 42; invocations of God in his letters, 41–42; and libertinism, 19n45; love for his fatherland (the Florentine Republic), 3, 4, 35–37, 35n34, 39–40, 68–69, 69–70n162, 74; love of and search for immortality, 39–40; loyalty of to the house of Medici, 124; as a man who lacks faith, 283–84; as the Martin Luther of Italy, 6, 208, 209; as a master of ars dicendi (art of speaking), 118; on military discipline and a soldier’s oath, 186–87; on military virtue, 12; mythologizing of Caterina Sfroza, 111–14; mythologizing of Cesare Borgia, 114–18; on the nature of
shame, 182–83; opinion of Savonarola’s sermons, 100–101; oratory and rhetoric of, 99–109; poem of concerning San Torpè, 63; as a prophet, 292–93; as a puritan, 12–13, 14; reading of the Bible by, 127–28, 127–28n123; on reformation and renovation in the church and in Florence, 6–7, 84–88; republicanism of, 172, 175–76; respect for the rules of classical rhetoric, 129; on the revolt of the Ciompi, 195–97; on the rule of law, 170–71; service to the Florentine Republic, 34, 34n32, 35; Spinoza’s opinion of, 17–18; technique of deliberative style used by, 126–27n119, 130, 145–46; as a “true lover,” 39–40; as unaffected by the religious impulses of the Renaissance, 4n5; use of historical examples in his writing, 126–27, 126–27n119; use of humor in his plays, 140–41; values of pagan morality, 4; vision of history as cyclical, 28–29; work of with the Minorite Friars of Capri, 33–34, 37–38; writing and rhetorical duties of as secretary of the second chancellery, 106–7, 118. See also Machiavelli, Niccolò, interpretation of the cosmos; Machiavelli, Niccolò, and the religion of virtue; Machiavelli, Niccolò, views of religion Machiavelli, Niccolò, interpretation of the cosmos: fickleness of Fortuna in, 32; God as creator of the universe, 32; God’s influence in, 33; influence of the stars on fate, 240–41n110; occult power contained in the heavens, 32–33; population of (Fortuna, God, the heavens), 30; role of Fortuna in, 31–32; role of the heavens in, 30–31, 42–43 Machiavelli, Niccolò, and the religion of virtue, 6, 8–9, 20, 52–53, 57–58, 61–75 passim, 154, 268–69; 272–74, 278; belief of that God welcomes pagan rulers into the ranks of the blessed, 62–63; on Italy and the friendship of God, 61–62, 65
303
index Machiavelli, Niccolò, views of religion, 13–14, 85–88, 238–39, 250–51, 256–57; belief of that without religion republics are corrupted, 151–52; consolatory power of religion, 150–51; in cultural and political contexts, 227–29; as an element of a “wellordered” state, 5, 6n10; influence of among Italian Calvinists, 230–32, 230n73; influence of among Italian evangelists, 229–30; as intrinsic “to the soul of the people,” 5–6; mocking of religion by Machiavelli, 141–43. See also Machiavelli, Niccolò, and the religion of virtue Machiavelli (L. Russo), 10, 292 “Machiavellian Atheists,” 11 Maelius, 201 Malatesta, Battista, 90 Malatesta, Galeazzo, 90 Mandrake, The (La Mandragola [Machiavelli]), 27–28, 75n177, 85, 213, 285, 286; criticism of the decline of religion in, 141–42; Nicea in, 140 Manetti, Giannozzo, 51–52, 94–95 Manlius Capitolinus, 201 Manzoni, Alessandro, 267n197 Marano, Manusso, 227 Marchand, Jean-Jacques, 118n92 Marcus Curtius, 48 Marcus Pomponius, 188 Martelli, Ludovico, 213 Martelli, Mario, 66n150 Maximilian I (Holy Roman Emperor), 80 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 9–10, 209, 211, 277–78n236, 282, 285, 288, 292; beliefs of concerning Christianity, 277n234; on the French Revolution, 277; on the Jesuits and Machiavelli, 275–76; on Machiavelli and religion of virtue, 278; on the rebirth of Italy, 276; recognition of the Machiavelli/Machiavellianism distinction, 274; theory of religion as necessary for the emancipation of a people, 276–78 Medici, Cosimo de’, 166, 196, 198 Medici, Giovanni de’, 111 Medici, Giulio de’, 43, 121
Medici, Lodovico de’, 111 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 66n150, 95, 271n213 Medici, Salvestro de’, 196 Medici regime, 58, 160 Menchi, Silvana Seidel, 226n59 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 75 Micanzio, Fulgenzio, 225–26 Michelet, Jules, 279–80 Minuta di provvisione per la riforma dello stato di Firenze (Machiavelli), 121 Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della, 56, 83 Monaci, Lorenzo de’, 158 monarchy/monarchies, 6n10, 8, 19, 69, 102n46, 158, 159, 171, 174, 178, 185, 204, 270; as an enemy of Christ, 17n37; hereditary, 157 Montesquieu, 19, 270 Moralia (Plutarch), 113 morality, 14, 21, 215, 230, 235, 261, 273, 280, 283, 284; based on idleness, 255; casuistical, 262; Catholic, 267n197; Christian, 3, 53, 161, 166, 231, 233; civil, 252, 261, 290; evangelical, 262; pagan, 3–4; “pure,” 249; Roman, 53 More, Thomas, 224, 245 Moses, 7, 11, 13, 18, 50, 101–2, 105, 176, 222, 239; charity of, 61; and the friendship of God, 61–62, 64n145, 65, 123; God as his teacher, 63; killing of those who worshipped the golden calf, 63–64 Moyle, Walter, 15 Muratori, Lodovico Antonio, 255–56 Neapolitan Revolution, 265 Nero, 110, 111 Nero, Bernardo del, 54, 58–59, 202 Nesi, Giovanni, 55, 78–79; on love for the fatherland, 55–56 Neville, Henry, 13, 14 Nicodemism, 230 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 46, 46n82, 47 Numa Pompilius, 176–77, 186, 188, 217, 222, 229, 230, 236 Of Civil Life (Vita civile), 24 Of the Democratic Education to be Imparted to the Italian People
304
index (Dell’educazione democratica da darsi al popolo italiano [Bocalosi]), 258 Of Elegancies (Valla), 91–92 Of the Perfect Chancellor (Del perfetto cancelliere [Piccolomini]), 228 On Sepulchres (Sepolcri [Foscolo]), 265 Opus Posthumus (Spinoza), 17 Oratio de caritate (Nesi), 55 Oratio de humilitate (Nesi), 55 Oratio pro pace Italiae (Domenichi), 54 oratory: deliberative oratory, 126–27n119, 130, 145–46; the “good man” as the true orator, 135; honesty and utility as the objects of, 130–34. See also rhetorical eloquence Orco, Ramirro de, execution of, 117, 117n88 orders and customs, reform of, 198–207; corruption as originating from orders that nourish sects, 198–99; restoration of law as an achievement bringing glory, 199–200 Ovid, 75
Pisa, 60, 108, 190, 192n154 Plato, 54, 56, 95, 161, 200 Platonism, “popular,” 55 Plato redivivus (Neville), 14 Plutarch, 102n46, 113 Pocock, John G. A., 24–25 poets, 292–93 political constitutions, reformation of, 15–16, 20–21 political debates, 132, 132–33n150 political revolution, and republican Christianity, 25, 26 political wisdom, history as the source of, 125–28 Politics (Aristotle), 157 Politike Discoursen (de la Court), 17 Polybius, 17, 179n107, 250 Pompey, 65 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 33, 280–81; on the influence of stars on religion, 280; on the natural cycles of religion, 280 Pontano, Giovanni, 33 popes, 81; temporal power of, 183–84. See also papacy, the Porcari, Stefano, 183–84 praise, of others, 135–36 Predica sopra Aggeo (Sermon on Haggai), 56–57 Price, Richard, 23 priests, 9, 14, 80, 81, 166, 167, 221, 222, 224, 232; corruption of, 237, 238, 267; and the ruin of Italy, 254, 255; taxes on, 168; tyranny of, 216; veneration of, 161; violence of, 217n24; wickedness and ignorance of, 259–60 Prince, The (Machiavelli), 8, 40, 122–34 passim, 199, 210, 227, 257, 289; criticism of the Exhortatio, 122, 122n104; dedicatory letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici, 123–25; on God’s pardon of a prince’s cruelties, 117–18; importance of the Exhortatio to, 122–23; importance of Rhetorica ad Herennium to understanding the structure of, 132–33n150; irony in, 128–29; Machiavelli’s claim that the writing of was similar to painting, 136–37; Machiavelli’s reasons for composing,
paganism, 5, 86, 181, 257, 272, 273, 284; Christianity and, 182–83; pagan morality, 3–4. See also religion, pagan Palmieri, Matteo, 45, 51, 55, 131–32, 161 Pamphilia, 75 Pandolfini, Filippo, 95 papacy, the, 14, 78, 81, 97, 169, 123n184, 263, 272–73, 279 Papal States, 4 Papirius Cursor, 201 Paruta, Paolo, 235–36 Paterno, Giovanni Antonio, 227 Payson, Phillips, 22 Perna, Pietro, 231; determination to distribute the work of Machiavelli, 231–32 Perry, Joseph, 21 persuasion, and political action, 101–2 Petrarca, Francesco, 43 Petrarch, 48–49n, 84; on the myth of rebirth, 77–78 Piccolomini, Bartolomeo Carli, 228–29 Pilati, Carlantonio, 254–55; on the rebirth of Italy, 254–55; on wicked clergy, 254
305
index Prince, The (Machiavelli) (continued) 105–6, 122; on persuasion/oratory backed by force of arms, 101–2; Rhetorica ad Herennium as the hidden plot of, 134; rhetorical structure of, 122–24, 129; strict compliance of to the rules of ars poetica, 122; translations of, 8, 231; understanding the content of, 129–30; use of deliberative oratory in, 126–27n119, 130; use of historical examples in, 125–28, 126–27n119; utility/honesty debate in, 130–34, 132–33n150, 134n152 principalities, 196–98 Pro Cluentio (Cicero), 160 Protestant Reformation, 87–88, 87n226, 208, 222n41, 244, 291n275 Providence (divine Providence), 49 Provision of the Ordinance of the Militia (Provisione della ordinanza [Machiavelli]), 186–87 Pucci, Giannozzo, 202 Puritanism, 35n67
83; sources of, 75, 75n179; through the power of faith, 77 Regimine Principum Libri III (Giles of Rome), 157 religion, 88, 136, 217, 261n184, 265–66, 272, 280; as both “instrumentum regni” and as the profound life of the people, 5, 235; as a brake against unjust wars, 189–90; civil religion, 10, 25, 98–99, 232, 245, 250–51, 261–62, 269; consolatory power of, 150–51; customs and religion, 177–85; decline of under Emperor Arnulf, 235; founders of, 19; of liberty, 9–10, 170–77, 286; as a means and an end, 6; as more important in republics than monarchies, 178; as necessary to the creation of good laws and good armies, 186, 244; as necessary for the emancipation of a people, 276–78; pagan, 99–100, 182–83, 246, 249, 252; primacy of caritas to, 55–56; and public liberty, 20; puritan views of, 11–12; “Religion of Benevolence,” 23; religion of Utopia, 245; religion, war, and social conflict, 185–98 passim; religious freedom, 17; similarities between religion of Machiavelli and the religion of colonial Americans, 23–24; as stronger than laws, 178; superiority of over the state, 240; superstitions as source of religious authority, 18; as a teacher of civil virtues, 54. See also Christianity; idleness, religion of; Machiavelli, Niccolò, and the religion of virtue; Italian Risorgimento, and the religion of liberty; Machiavelli, Niccolò, views of religion; reform, moral and religious; rhetoric, and civil religion; republican government, and religion; Romans/Roman Empire, religion of Renaissance, the, 281 republican government, and religion, 25, 154–70 passim, 176, 204–7, 207n202, 217, 220–21, 244, 250–51; effect of religion on citizens of the republic, 163–64; equation of with liberty, 175;
Quinet, Edgar, 278–79 Quintilian, 125, 131, 135; on narrating a story as if painting a picture, 136 Quintus Fabius, 68 Ragguagli di Parnaso (Boccalini), 238 Ranza, Giovanni Antonio, 261–62 reform, moral and religious, 75–88 passim, 78n194, 206–7, 253–54, 263, 263n189; charity as the power behind reform, 77; comparison of Italian customs to the “good” customs of the Germans, 79–81; failure of, 281–82; in Florence, 82–83; fundamental principle of, 76–77; heresy and aspirations for religious reform, 211–32 passim; and liberty, 286–89; Machiavelli’s role in, 209–11, 210n4, 251, 278–81; meaning of (reformation and regeneration), 75–76; need for, 208–9; and new forms of worship, 259–60; New Testament calls for, 76, 76n186; the phoenix as symbol of, 75–76; Savonarola’s call for,
306
index love of the fatherland and love of religion, 162–63; necessity of the Christian religion as the moral essence of a republic, 163; religion as a bulwark against tyranny, 163; religion as necessary to the preservation of government, 162, 236–37; religion and political power, 225–26; role of government in the care of religion, 161; union of religion and republic as part of God’s divine plan, 166 republicanism, 16, 17, 159; Anglo-Saxon, 24; Florentine, 24; history of, 26 republics, 139, 161; aristocratic, 138; importance of free speech to, 156; as the kingdom of Christ, 12; moral foundation of, 53; popular, 138; renewal and religious reform of, 204–7; and respect for the law, 203–4; role of the citizenry in, 155–56, 155n4; as selfgoverning political communities, 154–55; self-government and the rule of law as fundamental principles of, 156–57; survival of, 10–11. See also republican government, and religion Research into the Origin of Oriental Despotism (Recherches sur l’origine du respotisme oriental [Boulanger]), 262 Revolutions of Italy, The (Les Révolutions d’Italie [Quinet]), 278–79 Rhetorica ad Herennium (Cicero), 106, 107n67, 130–31, 132, 133; as the hidden plot of The Prince, 134; importance of to understanding the structure of The Prince, 132–33n150 rhetorical eloquence, 104n52, 107n68; and civil religion, 89–99; flourishing of in a free society, 93; humor and classical rhetoric, 140–41, 140n172; importance of rhetorical eloquence inseparable from Christian truth, 89–90; laudatory genre of, 135–36; Machiavelli’s criticism of superficial eloquence, 102–3; as the necessary foundation of civil life, 93–94, 104; oration in front of the Signori (protestation de iustitia), 94; and philosophy, 92; political life as
the venue for, 94; political rhetoric of the Florentines, 115n84; power of to conceal evil intentions, 104–5; praise for civil, poetic, and religious eloquence, 92; public councils as natural venue for, 97; religion’s use of persuasion instead of demonstration, 91–92; rhetorical figure of the interrogation, 147; technique of changing readers/listeners into spectators, 136; use of amplificatio and extenuatio rhetorical devices, 107–8, 107n67; use of in defense of liberty, 97–98; use of in motivating soldiers, 103–4; and wisdom, 134–53 passim Ribadeneyra, Pedro, 240–41 Ricci, Giuliano de’, 35; and the expurgation of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories, 214–16 Ricordi (F. Guicciardini), 216, 217 Ricordi (Rinuccini), 160 Ridolfi, Niccolò, 202 Rienzo, Cola di, 77, 84 Rinuccini, Alamanno, 93, 156, 158, 160; on justice, 96 Ritratto del vero governo del Principe (Rosello), 230 Rivoluzione liberale (Gobetti), 288 Robespierre, 26, 285 Roman Catholic Church, 2, 8, 9, 14n28, 153, 214, 266; abuses of, 253; corruption of, 24, 79n198, 168–69, 179–80, 216–17, 216n23, 217n24; defense of by Giovanni Botero and Paolo Paruta, 234–36; and everyday morality, 17 Roman law, on the status of a free individual, 159 Romans/Roman Empire, 21, 23, 179n107, 181, 185, 193, 205, 227, 257; defeat of at Cannae by Hannibal, 187–88; as examples of men resembling the gods, 242–43; expansionist policies of, 191–92; greatness of Rome due to religion, 250; greatness of Rome as God’s design, 16; incompatibility of with freedom, 252; liberty as the Romans’ source of virtue and power,
307
index Romans/Roman Empire (continued) 16; religion of, 207, 234, 249, 250; the Roman Republic, 26, 220, 270 Rome, 138, 150, 165, 174, 186, 212, 217, 246; attempted restoration of the republic, 77 Romulus, 64, 65, 101–2, 176, 217, 239 Rosello, Lucio Paolo, 229–30 Rosselli, Carlo, 288–89 Rosselli, Nello, 10, 292, 292n278 Rosselli, Tiberio, 227 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 9; on Christianity, 20; on civil religion, 257; on Machiavelli, 257–58; Machiavelli’s influence on, 258 Rucellai, Cosimo, 36, 135–36 Rucellai, Giovanni, 82 Rules for an Elegant Social Circle (Capitoli per una compagnia di piacere [Machiavelli]), 28 Russo, Luigi, 122n104, 292n278; on Machiavelli as a prophet, 292–93 Russo, Vincenzio, 260–61; criticism of Machiavelli, 261
Sasso, Gennaro, 5 Savonarola, Girolamo, 7, 18, 30, 60, 99, 100–101, 128n124, 166n53, 176, 279, 280, 281; call of for renewal and reform in the church, 83; on charity and humility, 85n221; on civil government, 158; on civil government and religion, 163–67; defeat of, 279; on the four principles of good government, 164; on religion and virtue, 56–57; on the restoration of the Middle Ages, 282; vindication of by Italian history, 292 Scioppio, Gaspare, 238–39 Scipio Africanus, 65, 188, 229; as a divine man, 66–67 Sforza, Caterina, 107, 109–10, 111–12, 114n81; factual versus mythical interpretation of, 111–14; and the “legend of the fortress,” 110–12, 111n76; Machiavelli’s sources concerning, 112–14; virtue of, 114 Sforza, Francesco, 151–52 Sidney, Algernon, 15–16; on good men imitating bad princes, 16; on political constitutions, 21 Signoria, 96, 98, 105, 108, 145, 146, 195, 202; instructions of to Machiavelli, 106–7 Sismondi, J. C. Léonard Simonde de, 266–67, 267n197 Sixtus IV (pope), 53 Social Contract (Contrat Social [Rousseau]), 20, 257–58, 262 Socialismo liberale (C. Rosselli), 288 Socrates, 52 Soderini, Gonfalonier Pier, 97–98, 118 Soderini, Francesco, 114, 115 Solon, 39, 176, 200, 245 Sommario della istoria d’Italia (F. Vettori), 80 Somnium Scipionis (Cicero), 94, 223 Spagnuoli, Giambattista, 44–45 Speculum belli sacri (Leighton), 11 speech, freedom of, 156 Speroni, Sperone, 232–33 Spinola, Ludovico, 222–23 Spinoza, Baruch, 17–18 Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu), 19
Sabellico, Marc’Antonio, 56n119 Sacchi, Bartolomeo (Platina), 53, 162–63 Sallust, 160, 228 Salutati, Barbara, 73, 140 Salutati, Coluccio, 43, 50n94, 55, 78, 157, 177; on charity, 49; on Christian love of the fatherland, 49–50; on the importance of rhetorical eloquence, 89–90; on liberty, 160; on man’s duty to God, 50 Sanctis, Francesco De, 6, 208, 209, 211; eulogy of for Machiavelli, 282; on the failure of religious reform in Italy, 281–82; on the religion of the fatherland, 283 Sandys, Edwin, 224–25 Sanfelice, Giuseppe, 248 Sansovino, Francesco, 244–45 Sarpi, Paolo, 224–26, 282; influence of Machiavelli on his beliefs concerning priests and religious corruption, 224–25 Sartorio, 229
308
index St. Bernard, 252 St. Dominic, 86–87, 100, 206, 207, 252 St. Francis, 86–87, 100, 144, 206, 207, 252; emulation of by preachers, 101 St. Gregory the Great, 62, 240 St. Hippolytus Martyr, 241 St. Jerome, 144, 252 St. Matthew, 144 St. Paul, 23, 44, 57, 92, 95, 144, 182, 252 St. Peter, 62, 144 Stout, Jeffrey, 6n10 Strozzi, Alessandro, 212 Strozzi, Filippo, 37, 209 Studio Fiorentino, 93
Treatise of the Three Imposters, The: The Life and Spirit of Master Benedict de Spinosa (Traité des trios imposteurs [Anonymous]), 18–19 Tresor (Book of the Treasure [Latini]), 156 Trissino, Alessandro, 230 Tuscans, 138 Tuscany, storm that ravaged it as an act of God, 153 tyrants/tyranny, 157, 163, 170, 194n164, 252, 271; of priests, 216. See also Athens, under the tyranny of Pisistratus University of Florence, 93 utility/honesty debate, 130–34; honesty as secondary to security, 134n152; relationship between the useful and the honest, 132; utility as meaning both security and honesty, 132–33
Tacitus, 110–11 Tanucci, Bernardo, 263n189 Tanzani, Reginaldo, 256 Tebalducci, Antonio Giacomini, 31 Tegli, Stefano, 231 Ten of Liberty and Peace, 114, 131, 218 Ten of War, 148 “teofilantropismo” (theophilanthropism), 260 Theophrastus redivivus (Anonymous), 18 Theseus, 64, 65, 101–2, 102n46, 123, 239 Tinkler, John F., 132–33n150 To Italy in the Shadows Dawn Brings Light (All’Italia nelle tenebre l’aurora porta la luce [L’Aurora]), 259–60 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 25, 25n67 Tommaseo, Niccolò, 267–68, 284–86; on the duty of Christians, 267–68; refutation of Machiavelli’s paganism, 284–85; on virtue in Machiavelli, 267 Tornabuoni, Lorenzo, 202 Tractatus politicus (Political Treatise [Spinoza]), 17–18 Tractatus theologico-politicus (Theologicopolitical Treatise [Spinoza]), 18 Trajan, 62 Trattati nove della prudenza (Piccolomini), 228 Trattato dell’umiltà (Savonarola), 85n221 Treatise on the Government of the City of Florence (Trattato circa el reggimento della città di Firenze [Savonarola]), 158, 163, 164
Valdes, Juan de, 228 Valla, Lorenzo, 52; on the eloquence of ancient books, 92–93; on oratory and persuasion, 91–92 Vanini, Giulio Cesare, 245–46 Varchi, Benedetto, 211 Venice, Republic of, 158; weakness of, 264–65 Vergerio, Pier Paolo, 229 Vernacci, Giovanni, 41 Vettori, Francesco, 4, 34–35, 37, 38, 69, 71, 72n169, 85; indecisiveness concerning love for a woman, 73; on the message of Christ, 81; on the Roman papacy, 80–81 Vettori, Piero, 60 Viaggio in Alamagna (F. Vettori), 85 Vicenza, as a latter-day Athens, 56n119 Vico, Giambattista, 250–51, 267 Villari, Pasquale, 284 virtue, 18, 52, 130–31, 207, 264–65, 269; charity as the highest virtue, 47, 53; Christianity as a religion of, 20, 50, 54–57; duty of man to elevate himself through, 56; elements of civil virtue, 54; joining of Christian virtues with civil virtues, 24–25; justice as the
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index virtue (continued) highest virtue, 51; and love of the fatherland, 270–71; necessity of in establishing and maintaining liberty, 16, 97; political virtue, 53; as a principle for government, 19; public virtue, 22; as strength in the face of danger, 52; “true virtue,” 248; of women, 113–14, 114n81 Vitelli, Paolo, 202 Vitellozzo, Vitelli, 115–16 Vita di Castruccio Castracani (The Life of Castruccio Castracani [Machiavelli]), 41 Vita civile (Palmieri), 51, 161 Vivanti, Corrado, 40n53, 87n226 Volusius Proculus, 110 Vulgate, 76
religion as a brake against unjust war, 189 War of the Eight Saints, 4 Weinstein, David, 56n120 “Where the Guard of freedom May Be settled More Securely, in the People or in the Great” (Machiavelli), 171–72 Words to Be Spoken on the Law for Appropriating Money, after Giving a Little Introduction and Excuse (Parole da dirle sopra la provisione del danaio, facto un poco di proemio et di scusa [Machiavelli]), 118–20, 118n92 Works (Machiavelli [Cambiagi edition]), 256–57 Wortman, Tunis, 22
war, 185–98 passim; just and unjust war, 60, 199; the Christian soldier, 223;
Zibaldone (Leopardi), 270
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