Antonio Rosmini

Works

• 1830A New Essay concerning the Origin of Ideas

  Argues that all knowledge presupposes a single innate idea, the idea of being, given to the mind and applied to sensations in judgement.

• 1848Of the Five Wounds of the Holy Church

  Written in 1832–33: names five ills of the church, among them the separation of clergy and people in worship and the dependence of bishops on secular power.

Position

Rosmini is on the map as a Catholic philosopher who answered Locke, Kant and German idealism with a system of his own. Against the empiricism of Locke and Condillac, which derives too much from the senses, and against Kant’s many a priori forms, he argued that the mind needs only one innate element: the idea of being, indeterminate and merely possible, intuited by nature and applied to sensations in a primal judgement that yields knowledge of real things. On this basis he built an encyclopedia of the sciences, from psychology and ethics to law and politics; in the “Philosophy of Right” the human person is subsistent right, the ground of all rights, which no state may absorb. His proposals for church reform made him suspect to conservatives, and his doctrine of ideal being was attacked as ontologism, and by Vincenzo Gioberti as psychologism. Bertrando Spaventa and Giovanni Gentile read him as an Italian counterpart to Kant and a forerunner of idealism, Gentile in his thesis “Rosmini e Gioberti” (1898); many neo-Thomists saw him as a danger, while John Paul II named him in the encyclical “Fides et ratio” (1998) among thinkers who joined faith and reason. His late, posthumously published “Theosophy” develops a metaphysics of being in three forms: ideal, real and moral. The map lists him under German Idealism and its heirs because Spaventa and Gentile read him as a forerunner; Rosmini himself rejected Hegel’s dialectic, and histories of Italian philosophy usually place him, with Gioberti, in Catholic spiritualist philosophy rather than in idealism.

Life & context

Antonio Rosmini-Serbati was born on 24 March 1797 in Rovereto, then part of Habsburg Tyrol, into a noble family. He studied theology at Padua, was ordained priest in 1821 and took his doctorate in 1822. Encouraged by Pope Pius VIII to devote himself to writing, he published the “New Essay concerning the Origin of Ideas” in Rome in 1830, followed by works on moral philosophy, anthropology and politics and the “Philosophy of Right” (1841–45). In 1828 he founded the Institute of Charity, a religious congregation, at Monte Calvario near Domodossola; Gregory XVI approved it in 1839. A friend of Alessandro Manzoni, he lived from the 1840s mainly at Stresa on Lake Maggiore. In 1848 the Piedmontese government sent him to Rome to negotiate a concordat and a confederation of Italian states; Pius IX intended to make him a cardinal, but after the pope’s flight to Gaeta Rosmini lost favour, and in 1849 “The Five Wounds of the Church” and his draft constitution were placed on the Index. An examination of all his works ended in 1854 without censure. He died in Stresa on 1 July 1855. In 1887–88 the Holy Office condemned forty propositions from his writings; in 2001 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared the reasons for that condemnation overcome, and in 2007 he was beatified.

Further main works

• Principles of Moral Science (Principi della scienza morale, 1831)
• The Philosophy of Right (Filosofia del diritto, 1841–45)
• The Constitution according to Social Justice (La costituzione secondo la giustizia sociale, 1848)
• Theosophy (Teosofia, posthumous, 1859–74)