Luigi Taparelli on Cult, Culture, and Authentic Progress

By Thomas C. Behr

ABSTRACT: Luigi Taparelli, S.J. (1793-1862) played a fundamental role in the Thomistic revival and in shaping modern Catholic social teaching. He was famous in mid-nineteenth century Europe as the most distinguished (“notorious” to liberals) writer for Civiltà Cattolica. Known as the pope’s “think tank,” Taparelli cofounded this journal in 1850 at the request of Pius IX. Taparelli’s legacy was deliberately marginalized by Leo XIII (a student of Taparelli) as the Vatican sought to engage the “new things” of modernity precisely on terms of neo-Thomistic natural right that Taparelli had pioneered. The subject of this essay is a lecture by Taparelli from 1846, translated for Orestes Brownson’s Quarterly Review in 1848, that offers a unique insight into the author’s theorization of human nature and society, and the benefits, therefore, of Catholic cult and culture for human progress.

IT WAS IN THE WAKE of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire that Luigi Taparelli, S.J., elaborated his natural law theories on social order, including the principles of subsidiarity and of social justice, that have become pillars of modern Catholic social teaching. Taparelli’s major work, Theoretical Treatise of Natural Right Based on Fact (1840-43), was translated into French, German, and Spanish within a few years of its first publication and was widely used in Catholic universities and seminaries. ¹ Taparelli was among the most energetic promoters of the Thomistic revival, and his treatise was foundational for the development of Catholic social ethics. ²

Taparelli’s work, however, has been but little studied on its own terms. Misinterpretations and misunderstandings abound. He championed the unity of truth and the harmony of faith and reason in an age troubled by such divisive positions as traditionalist fideism and theological liberalism. His neo-scholastic approach to the natural law included use of principles from the social sciences as well as evangelical exhortations. This pairing of resources has characterized Catholic social teaching ever since Rerum novarum (1891) and can provide a bridge to normative social dialogue across sectarian and religious differences. Leo XIII and many of the theologians around him were in fact students or protégés of Taparelli. Cofounder of the “pope’s think tank” Civiltà Cattolica in 1850 and tasked by Pope Pius IX to spearhead the Church’s response to uncritical liberalism, Taparelli wrote hundreds of articles on a whole range of social, political, economic, and cultural topics. ³

The title of his work, “Natural Right Based on Fact” has been a source of confusion, from his day up to ours. ⁴ His philosophical method of abstract reasoning from empirical evidence to theoretical conclusions draws directly from Aristotle of the Nicomachean Ethics via the natural law reasoning of Aquinas and the later scholastics. Applying those abstract truths to the facts of life (concrete reality) is where Aristotle places the acid test of any theory of human practice. ⁵ If the facts do not match the theory, then the philosopher of ethics must return to the drawing board. For Aquinas, the more that contingent facts are complicated or distant from first principles in application, the more tenuous is the reasoning, the more debatable may be the appearance of truth to the observer, and the more exceptions there may be in particular application. ⁶ Human laws in fact must be adapted to the moral capacity of the persons to whom the laws are to apply. ⁷ Similarly, Taparelli insists that natural right starts with facts but then must be applied back to the facts, where the determination of right reflects the assessment of conflicting rights and the exercise of prudence given contingencies of concrete reality. Taparelli’s method moves from study of human nature, history and society, to abstract natural right as “thesis,” and then the prudential application in the midst of particular historical conditions and competing rights yields a “hypothesis” – a hypothetically just arrangement. “Natural right based on fact” reasoning has contributed to the prudential approach characteristic of Catholic social teaching. Issued two years after Taparelli’s death, Pius IX’s “Syllabus of Errors” represents the kind of clarity on theoretical principles that Taparelli insisted on, as the necessary starting point of any authentic dialogue, but it received harsh criticism from figures like Döllinger, Montalembert, and Acton. ⁸

Despite Taparelli’s central role in the development of modern Catholic social teaching, his work is not widely known. During his twelve years of polemical writings in Civiltà Cattolica, 1850 to 1862, his articles earned him a reputation among liberal Catholics and Catholic Liberals as a reactionary, and Leo XIII was reticent to associate Taparelli’s name with Rerum novarum, the magna carta of Catholic social teaching. Thus there is a paradox in that Taparelli’s notoriety while alive became a cause for his obscurity in death. Although his Treatise was in circulation on the Continent, his only writing to be translated into English ⁹ was a lecture that he gave in 1846 at the Academy of Catholic Religion in Rome, entitled “The Influence of Catholic Prayer on Civilization.”

This lecture was published in Orestes Brownson’s Quarterly Review in the portentous year of 1848. ¹⁰ This presentation, on the relationship between Catholic prayer and civilization, might seem an unusual item to select from Taparelli’s natural law corpus, but Brownson understood the implications of the claims being made not just on the necessity of religion to have a stable social order (something that the American founders would have taken for granted, along with many European Enlightenment figures with varying degrees of cynicism) but more profoundly on how Catholic prayer uniquely prepares people for fulfillment and for flourishing in truth and social harmony. As Brownson writes in his brief introduction:

It is an essay which, if studied, will be found to be especially adapted to our times and country – to teach the truths which we need now more than ever, and to correct the folly and madness of those who are seeking to advance and to elevate the laboring classes by methods which leave out religion, and place reliance on humanity alone…. In a few words, and apparently without intending it, it refutes and utterly explodes all the systems of the Economists, Communists, and Associationists, ¹¹ the gods of this godless age, and renders ridiculous the loud shout of LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, in a merely humanitarian sense, which just now comes upon our ears with deafening force, from almost every land. ¹²

The purpose of the present article is primarily to present Taparelli’s argument as a turning point in nineteenth-century apologetics, not just in the face of rationalism and religious latitudinarianism but in response to the advancing march of laissez-faire liberalism and of revolutionary socialism. Taparelli anticipates the argument described generations later by William James on the surplus psychological energy that believers have in supernatural religious experience. ¹³ He adds that what James would later call the “over-beliefs” of Catholicism (James’s term for doctrines over above the basic “ideal type”) offer particular philosophical and moral direction that induce harmony and unity in society. Taparelli’s argument that the self-examination inspired by Catholic hope in salvation, encouraged by God’s fatherly love, inspires compassion and self-sacrifice for the common good. This contrasts dramatically with the spiritual disenchantment and “iron cage” of rationalism that Max Weber foresaw as the civilizational result of Calvin’s predestinarian asceticism. ¹⁴ Ideas have consequences for the constitution of every society, and the cultivation of certain ideas – of duty, self-sacrifice, honor – would seem to be essential to any sense of obligation in conscience to constitutions themselves. Describing the salutary consequences (sociocultural, political, and economic) ofCatholic prayer, Taparelli implicitly poses the problem that Brownson grasped immediately, that Pius IX well understood, and that Western liberal democracies have had to confront ever since: Can a policy of cultural indifference not help but lead to relativism, anarchy, and revolution?

The Argument

Taparelli had begun his treatise on natural right with the premise that a common ethos of life, a unity of consciences subordinated to objective truths in the metaphysical order, or at least in the natural order, is required for authentic human progress. ¹⁵ This dependence is based on his Aristotelian understanding of human nature as including material, social, and intellectual aspects.

The contribution of Catholic faith and institutions to the development of European civilization was not a new topic in 1846. The idea figures prominently in the widely disseminated works of Chateaubriand, ¹⁶ of de Maistre, ¹⁷ and later of Balmes ¹⁸ – all works with which Taparelli was very familiar. Differently from them, Taparelli presents in his lecture a pragmatic analysis of the sociocultural effects of Catholic devotions, specifically by analyzing how the cultivation of mental habits, psychological motivations, and social virtues takes place in the individual and how these foster the development of a philosophical disposition. His exposition anticipates, in surprising ways not only the psychosociological research of William James and Max Weber but also the keen empirical observations of Tocqueville on the character and function of religion in America. Taparelli’s thesis is this: “Catholic prayer, apparently only designed to obtain graces from heaven, is one of the most active causes of civilization and social welfare.” ¹⁹

Cultivation of Philosophical Habits

For Taparelli, “Catholic prayer embraces every elevation of the mind to God, excited by faith, animated by charity, aided by the Sacrifice and the Sacraments, guided by the authority of the Church, and directed chiefly to the end of supernatural eternal happiness, by means of good works.” ²⁰ When prayer thus conceived becomes a habit of the heart, he calls it the “spirit of prayer.”

In other words, then, Taparelli identifies three key elements of Catholic prayer – energy (faith, charity), unifying authority (sacraments, magisterium), and transcendental purpose (hope-inspired good works). He says, “Truth, certainty, [and] love, are principles of activity; external rites and presiding authority are principles of unity; [hope in] eternal life, to which Catholic prayer chiefly aspires, is a principle of generosity, and of entire sacrifice of paltry worldly interest.” ²¹ Other sects and faiths, Taparelli claims, risk being deprived of one or more of the principles that can work together toward personal perfection, social well-being, and authentic human progress.

Adopting reasoning from Bentham,²² Taparelli quotes “the best laws are those that without need of watching, sanctioning, or insisting, execute themselves, by themselves.” ²³ With Rousseau, he would agree that the moral teachings of Rousseau’s “fellow sophists” fail because they are devoid of feeling and efficacious sanction. Taparelli joins Jean-Baptiste Say in pointing out that “the great art of legislation consists, ‘not in willing the effect, but in effecting the will.’” ²⁴

Sounding very much like Adam Smith, Taparelli explains,

For [motivating the will]…it is necessary to attach to the act prescribed a ready and obvious advantage to the agent. A command thus given urges each individual to work with greater assiduity in seconding the secret intention of the legislator towards the common good, in proportion to the intensity of the individual’s desire of the private advantage hoped for, without need of commands and sanctions. …Now the hope of the Christian, of course, is in prayer. ²⁵

The specifics of Catholic devotions encourage the ready appeal of prayer in every occasion, with confidence that the author of life is intimately concerned with our true welfare. He elaborates the incentives and feelings involved when he writes:

The Catholic, so long as he remains unshaken in his belief that prayer is necessary to eternal salvation, and always a most useful, if not an absolutely certain, means towards temporal good, will ever be induced to pray; …whether he think of heaven or be stimulated by temporal want…. He is a man who feels a perpetual need of prayer, because by himself he can do nothing, because from God he hopes every thing. He is, moreover, comforted in this by the light in which faith presents to him his God, whom in charity he embraces….[T]he Catholic religion alone knew how to say to God, ‘My Father’…explained by the Apostle, where he says that God infused into us the spirit of his Son, crying in our heart, Abba, Father! Nor did he make himself only our Father, but elevated in such a manner the spiritual love and intimate confidence of the soul that [Catholic prayer] dared even (comforted by the language of the Canticles and of the Apocalypse) to address him as [a] spouse. ²⁶

Taparelli then looks to demonstrate that Catholic prayer is not only effective in its “self-executing” discipline, in Bentham’s sense, for cultivating energy, direction, and purpose in the individual, but is also the most efficient means of advancing civilization: Catholic devotions also prepare individuals for participation in harmonious social relations.

Individuals are first prepared for society by living in the family. Both of the spouses in a marriage, by “free election” and “harmonious cohabitation,” educate and assimilate themselves as individuals, but this in itself is not a sufficient guarantor of social unity. Considering concerns that Rousseau and other
Enlightenment progressives had raised about the antisocial potential of isolated families, with their “peculiar ideas, peculiar interests, peculiar objects,” Taparelli warns: “Would you destroy these? Then will you destroy the family, or of a certainty its liberty and welfare.” ²⁷

The question then for him is: “in virtue of what authority will society bind the mind and the heart? …Religion alone is able to prepare [individuals in society] for reciprocal attraction by the affinity of moral doctrine grounded upon the authority of her infallible teachings.” ²⁸

The solution to the tension between individual egoism and self-sacrifice required for pursuit of the common good in society is in the spirit of Catholic prayer. Taparelli makes the case that Catholic prayer fosters the necessary philosophical disposition for civilizational advancement. And here I quote extensively from his argument:

[F]or the Catholic, to teach prayers and to teach meditation are words that mean nearly one and the same thing. Now where is the difference between meditating and philosophizing? To ponder the truth and certainty of principles, to develop accurately each of their consequences, to measure their practical application, – this is what the Catholic means by meditation. To this inward process the Church invites us, when she invites us to prayer, proportioning the means to every capacity. To the rude and unripe she gives the Rosary, or the Way of the Cross, to the instructed the sublime aspirations of the Psalms, or the itinerary of Bonaventure, Anselm, and Ballarmine. The lessons are different, but the mastery is common to all. ²⁹

The Church, …in order to teach prayer, teaches how to meditate, and teaching meditation teaches the people to philosophize, perfecting their natural logic by a perpetual application of the most sublime truths. ³⁰

This is to say, an interior development of the intellectual virtues accompanies the contemplation of principles of the faith as they apply to personal inspirations and resolutions in practical life. Moreover, the approach of the Catholic to prayer and means of engaging in contemplative prayer are not restricted to spiritual adepts or elites; rather, Catholic prayer has a richness and depth that meets Catholics where they are culturally.

He elaborates on the wonderfully deep implications – the metaphysical, anthropological, and ethical implications – that the Catholic in the spirit of prayer contemplates, without any formal instruction in philosophical or theological concepts. Catholic prayer engages the Catholic who prays directly in the work of speculative and practical reason:

The prayer of the Catholic essentially aspires to the kingdom of God, and to the order of justice through which it is obtained…. [T]he Catholic is well aware that no temporal good can be prayed for with propriety, if it be foreign to his final end; whence his first glance, when he goes to prayer, is towards his Father who is in heaven, of whom he asks his kingdom, a kingdom of happiness in heaven, a kingdom of order on earth. This petition is essentially coupled with notions of the most sublime metaphysical truths and natural ethical maxims. For he to whom those that pray address themselves is the universal Creator, Preserver, Provider; were he not such, they would not pray to him. The occasion of prayer is the conflict between the terrible dualism of good and evil, moral and physical, which continually reminds them of the first parents’ fall, – that first source of sin, misery, and weakness of their own powers, – and the mercy of God the Restorer, the grace wherewith he comforts them, the necessity of their cooperation, and of that final reward which, crowning their victories, will justify in full the ways of Providence. The existence [of God the Creator] and [his] retributive justice, immortality, the liberty of man, his sin, his punishment, his restoration, his feebleness, his elevation through grace, – are not these, in brief terms, the main dogmata of Catholic metaphysics and ethics? ³¹

Taparelli explains how the Catholic is habituated in prayer to consider his own highest interest in “the reign of justice and order” among men: “Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Lk 6:31); “Give, and it will be given to you” (Lk 6:38); “Forgive, and you will be forgiven” (Lk 6:37); such that, as Taparelli says,

To revive so unceasingly in the breasts of a whole society sentiments of obedience and love, and to revive them at the feet of a common Father, in the act of petitioning for what is most ardently desired, and as a condition necessary to obtain it, – what is this but to bind that society with the strongest ties that can join together men of understanding and will? ³²

As a vehicle useful for mastery of the interior life, Taparelli points to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, in use since the sixteenth century and widely practiced in his day by religious communities and Church prelates as well as by lay individuals and groups in parish missions. Taparelli asks, “[W]hat are the Spiritual Exercises but a course of Christian moral philosophy fitted to the comprehension of the public?” ³³ As he explains,

[The Catholic multitude] are taught, in the first place, the logic of meditation, hearing the rules first, and then the meditation in practice. The subjects to be meditated upon are a compendious but solid and touching system of morals, natural and Christian, reduced to the rigor of science. For, beginning with the axiom which forms the basis of all practical sciences, ‘The action must be determined by the intention, as the means by the end,’ the Exercises proceed to develop to the popular comprehension the duty that binds us to obey the Creator; the woeful results which have followed, and still follow, from disobedience; the necessity of God’s intervention to give us examples of life, doctrines of law, and the powerful aid of grace. ³⁴

External Bond of Social Perfection

Taparelli had as his political ideal the Catholic confessionalstate – not of any particular form of regime but as a society with essential agreement on the main truths of creation, human nature, and human destiny. The abstract natural rights regarding political organization in every case must be hypothesized to take into account concrete historical reality and conflicting rights. But Taparelli surely would have been amazed at how far the political discourse has gone, from enlightened toleration of differences to the supremacy of diversity among the last standing public “virtues.” ³⁵ However, the trajectory leading to a tyranny of relativism would not have surprised him. If, in the realm of theory, perfect political “union” can be based only on a consensus concerning ultimate ends, the ultimate common good, of a society, it was clear to him at the other extreme that it would be an illusion, or even deception, to think that a harmonious society could be built upon philanthropic ideas of toleration, even less so upon dogmatic
relativism. He says,

I cannot understand society without union, nor union without a bond, nor a bond of intelligent beings without truth…. The existence of unity in contrast I can understand, if there be a higher power to combine the parts; but the idea of unity derived only from [diversity] seems to me incomprehensible and contradictory. ³⁶

Heterogeneity of interests and of beliefs certainly in modern times is the normal state of the world in concrete reality, and tolerance can well be a working principle of social flourishing. But “unity in contrast” requires intellectual/ spiritual assent and obligation to some higher law by the social parts, down to individuals – some higher authority that carries with it some supervalent energy and purpose. Trading off the energy, authority, and purpose of Catholic faith comes at a cost:

How wretched those societies that drew back their lips from this fount of perfection! Do they need help for the poor? Then recourse must be had to a tax for paupers, as voluntary alms-giving has ceased…. Do they need a check upon the overflow of population? The marriage must be countermanded, for the idea of virginal perfection is out of date…. Laws upon laws, and new laws upon new laws, and salaried officers to see that they are observed, and salaried inspectors to watch over the officers, and freedom of complaint to keep straight the inspectors, and repeated punishments. Alas! What a complication of social machinery to obtain in a bungling manner, and by compulsion, what would be effected by the spirit of charity spontaneously and to perfection! ³⁷

While “perfection” is the standard aimed at, Taparelli notes that harmony in society requires a proper balance between individual thought and abilities with a respect for order and common purpose. This balance can be determined and imposed from the outside so to speak, by political force, or from the inside by spiritual disposition and moral habituation. Taparelli takes it as an axiom of human behavior that men will be governed by conscience or by bayonets. It is from the internal perfections offered by the Catholic spirit of prayer that the perfection of external harmony is made possible, through gentle and most effective means:

Human society is a union of men, that is to say, of organic beings endowed with intelligence and volition, for a common object or good. Its perfection, therefore, must consists in a perfect union of perfect men, for a perfect end, to be gained by a perfect operation: intellectual, moral, and material…. Can [a society founded on some practical advantage] be called humanly perfect, or perfectly human, while it excludes from the association the most proper object of the noblest of man’s faculties, Absolute Truth, – while it excludes the dearest interest of man’s will, Eternal Good? ³⁸

It is vain, therefore, that modern philanthropic toleration would fain hope to establish universal association amongst men, removing the discrepancy of intellects by tolerating every doctrine…. Prayer, then, forms in the breasts of Catholics an habitual inclination to consider the association of all men in the arms of the Heavenly Father as the acme of social perfection. Pater noster, – adveniat regnum tuum! We, who pray in unity of spirit, cling with all the people of all ages to the same formularies of the same language…. And if such be the spirit of private prayer, how much more evidently social will the spirit of public prayer appear! …Could man ever conceive a thing more divinely social than the Catholic Sacrifice, where the common banquet, the most natural symbol of closest intimacy, presents all men with superangelic bread…identical with that which during eighteen centuries has been broken and distributed amongst Catholics under the name of Communion? ³⁹

Thus the unity of common identity and common pursuit is found at the foot of the altar, and harmony in society is not dependent on leveling all interests and estates, with unjust and immobilizing regulations, but founded on the common pursuit of individual perfection and assisted by prudent spiritual direction in the office of the priest. Taparelli writes: “The function of impelling each one with discretion of energy to the perfection of which he is individually capable can be exercised only by the Catholic priesthood, and nowhere better than in the act of reconciliation, when the heart, repentant of its faults, wishes to make due reparation.” ⁴⁰

Taparelli still had hope for European political society reconnecting with its religious foundations. One faith, one Church, one spirit of Catholic prayer would make possible a perfection of society and universal civilization – in theory. His natural right theorizing based on fact was specifically motivated by the necessity in revolutionary Europe of coming to terms with the sociocultural realities of world historical development.

Taparelli’s contribution to the development of modern Catholic social teaching includes what we have seen is his dialectical method of reconciling theoretical right with concrete facts of time and place. We have a case study of how theory, abstract natural right, is instantiated in historical facts requiring practical application of principles in context, from Taparelli’s own life. When he found himself in the middle of the 1848 revolution in Palermo, he penned a manifesto on “Liberty of Association” in which the theoretical rights of the Church had to be reconciled with the de facto antireligious hostility of the new regime. In those concrete circumstances, the best that could be achieved was respect for the freedom of association. Such is the nature of an imperfect political union. ⁴¹

Taparelli explained in his treatise that in pluralistic societies where ultimate ends are contentious, unity (under authority of higher law) must rest upon the highest common denominator derived from human nature and the nature of society itself. Any society more than an accidental agglomeration of isolated individuals must have some common end, some common good – the good of each person,
pursued in common with others – that can direct common action, a higher purpose that can “combine the parts.” Natural felicity he takes as that denominator. For that end, the common good is the protection of the exercise of inalienable human rights: the sine qua non of any society. Respect for these rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is the minimum condition that makes any (free) society a society. ⁴²

Taparelli argues that the Catholic spirit of prayer, with the energy of faith and love, the unity of sacraments and magisterium, and the hope eternal reward, corresponds perfectly to the composite nature of the human person and to the needs for the complete flourishing of economic, social, and political life. Taparelli would suggest that any system of belief, worldview, or ideology that substitutes for any of those parts revealed, meditated, mastered, and applied in Catholic devotions – the specifics of Catholic faith – leaves a weakened substitute upon which to build a truly free society, one of ordered liberty, and is left all the more subject to disintegration from entropic egotism.

In conclusion, it is interesting to note that Taparelli was a student of the experiment in pluralistic political union in the United States of America and had admiration for the effort here to maintain, in truth, freedom of religion and the deference that is required for the self-governance of religious institutions. The United States was thus far from a perfect union in Taparelli’s eyes (as he observed events through the 1850s), but a “more perfect” one compared with the radical secularizing policies of most of liberal Europe. Taparelli ridiculed the shibboleth taken up in Europe of “a free church in a free state” as the answer to presumed religious conflict in the nineteenth century – particularly in his own state of Piedmont in Risorgimento Italy. He deconstructed just how the liberal version of separation of church and state aimed at marginalization of Catholic faith and enervation of Catholic institutions. He revealed how the ideology of toleration facilitated the expansion of modern state power. ⁴³

If a version of “separation of church and state” in the newly minted United States held out some prospect of “unity in contrast,” it is essential to remember just how deep and broad was the religious culture of the founders and first generations of Americans. All together, if imperfectly, the respect of those generations for Providence and higher law – discoverable, they believed, even in the book of nature – their understanding of limited, republican government, of liberty constrained by law, of public virtue based on private virtue, of the wisdom of the ages, provided the energy, unity, and purpose that made the progress of American civilization possible. A lesson that the ancient theorists of the political cycle and of the luxury cycle understood from their study of history and human psychology is that those beliefs that could be called the constitution before the constitution, those habits of mind and virtues of self-control that make unity in contrast possible, can be lost in as little as one generation. In the 1850s, Taparelli admired what he saw as the church and state interdependence that he saw in American political discourse and verified in constitutional jurisprudence. There would have been reason to hope that evangelization would always be possible where the Catholic spirit of prayer was allowed to flourish. But Taparelli was also shrewdly sensitive to the corrupting character of state power and to the siren call from the “gods of [that] godless age” – laissez-faire capitalism, revolutionary communism, and utopian socialism. He doubted that the American experiment in church-state interdependence could long be successful.

About the Author

Thomas C. Behr is assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. An early version of this paper was presented at Mount St. Mary’s University during the spring conference of the American Catholic Historical Association in April 2018.

1. Most complete edition, edited and expanded by the author: Saggio Teoretico di Dritto Naturale Appoggiato sul Fatto (Rome: Civiltà Cattolica, 1855).[↩]
2. Ernest L. Fortin, Human Rights, Virtue and the Common Good: Untimely Meditations on Religion and Politics (Ernest Fortin: Collected Essays, Vol 3), ed. Brian Benestad (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publ., 1996), 191-222.; and Gerald McCool, Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 1989), 81-87.[↩]
3. Francesco Dante, Storia della ‘Civiltà Cattolica’ (1850-1891). Il laboratorio del Papa (Rome: Edizioni Studium, 1990); and Paul Droulers, “Question social, Etat, Eglise, dans la ‘Civiltà Cattolica’ à ses débuts,” in Cattolicesimo sociale nei secoli XIX e XX. Saggi di storia e sociologia (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letturatura, 1982).[↩]
4. Thomas C. Behr, Social Justice & Subsidiarity: Luigi Taparelli and the Origins of Modern Catholic Social Thought (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2019), 61-68.[↩]
5. Nicomachean Ethics 10.[↩]
6. Summa theologiae I-II, q. 94, a. 4[↩]
7. Summa theologiae I-II, q. 94, a. 2[↩]
8. See Thomas C. Behr, “The 19th Century Historical and Intellectual Context of Catholic Social Teaching,” in Catholic Social Teaching: A Volume of Scholarly Essays, ed. Gerard Bradley and Christian Brugger (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2019), 34-65: 45-47. Liberals decried the explication of the “Syllabus” by Msgr. Dupanloup, who had explained the thesis and hypothesis distinction, as benighted medieval obscurantism.[↩]
9. See “Appendix” in ibid., 201-31, on “Subsidiarity” excerpts from the Theoretical Treatise, and also Luigi Taparelli, “Analisi critica dei primi concetti dell’economia sociale,” Civiltà Cattolica, s. III, vol. VIII (1857): 546-59, and vol. IX (1858): 17-34. English: Luigi Taparelli, “Critical Analysis of the First Principles of Political Economy,” trans. Thomas Behr, Journal of Markets and Morality 14, no. 2 (2011): 613-38.[↩]
10. Brownson’s Quarterly Review 2, no. 3 (1848): 345-79.[↩]
11. From Fourier’s (1772-1837) term for his theory of historical stages, culminating in “Compound Association” or “Harmonism” of utopian socialist phalansteries. Fourierism impacted utopian socialist movements in America and was adopted by the struggling transcendentalist utopians of Brook Farm in Massachusetts from 1844 until their bankruptcy in 1847. Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in NineteenthCentury America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).[↩]
12. Brownson, 345[↩]
13. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–1902 (New York, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902).[↩]
14. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London & Boston, Unwin Hyman, 1930); original in German, 1905.[↩]
15. Saggio, “Introduzione.” Note that three major pastoral letters issued by Gioacchino Pecci (the future Pope Leo XIII) as he was preparing for retirement, from his diocese of Perugia, “The Catholic Church in the 19thCentury” (1876), and “The Church andCivilization” in two parts, 1877 and 1878, reiterate this Taparellian theme on the prerequisites of authentic human progress: rejection of radical secularization, of unchecked profit motive, and of idolatry ofstate power. Thomas Behr, “The 19th Century Historical and Intellectual Context ofCatholic Social Teaching,” in Catholic Social Teaching: A Volume of Scholarly Essays, ed. Gerard Bradley and Christian Brugger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 34-66, 54.[↩]
16. Especially Génie du Christianisme (1802); see Georges Bertrin, “François-René de Chateaubriand,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 3 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908), available at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03640a.htm.[↩]
17. Especially Du Pape (1819); see Georges Bertrin, “Joseph-Marie, Comte de Maistre,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 9 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910), available at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09554a.htm.[↩]
18. For example, Protestantism Compared with Catholicism in Relation to European Civilization (1842-45); see Francis Siegfried, “Jaime Luciano Balmes,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 2 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907), available at http:// www.newadvent.org/cathen/02224b.htm.[↩]
19. Brownson’s Quarterly Review 2, no. 3 (1848): 347.[↩]
20. Ibid., 349[↩]
21. Ibid.[↩]
22. Taparelli, “Influence of Catholic Prayer,” 350. Citing “the beastly and filthy [Bentham], but in practical matters keen sighted,” Taparelli could detest the “Epicurean naturalism” of someone like Bentham, while appreciating his (misguided) intellect.[↩]
23. Ibid.[↩]
24. Ibid.[↩]
25. Ibid.[↩]
26. Ibid., 351.[↩]
27. Taparelli was highly sensitive to the radical socialist claims of Rousseau, Beccaria, and Mazzini (further advanced by Marx and his heirs) that social unity required the abolition of the traditional nuclear family. Behr, Social Justice & Subsidiarity, 115 n., 138 n.[↩]
28. Ibid., 354.[↩]
29. Ibid., 355.[↩]
30. Ibid., 355-56.[↩]
31. Ibid., 356-57.[↩]
32. Ibid., 368.[↩]
33. Ibid., 360.[↩]
34. Ibid.[↩]
35. Lest we forget, it was already Immanuel Kant in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” who states his prince will give “complete freedom” in religious matters while “renouncing the haughty name of tolerance” – so long as the prince has “a numerous and well-disciplined army.” See Isaac Kramnick, The Portable Enlightenment Reader (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 6-7.[↩]
36. Taparelli, “Influence of Catholic Prayer,” 374[↩]
37. Ibid., 376.[↩]
38. Ibid., 362.[↩]
39. Ibid., 366[↩]
40. bid., 376.[↩]
41. Taparelli, “Sulla libertà di associazione,” in Gabriele De Rosa, I Gesuiti in Sicilia e la Rivoluzione del ‘48 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1963), 211-45.[↩]
42. Taparelli, Saggio teoretico, secs. 360, 740, 745, 746; Behr, Social Justice & Subsidiarity, 50, 80, 190.[↩]
43. Anticipating the argument raised in A. J. Conyers, The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit (Dallas: Spence Publishing, 2001).[↩]