1 Introduction

The Italian Jesuit Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio (1793–1862) has been given wide and diverse scholarly attention over decades. Although his fame has been perhaps overshadowed by that of his brother, the Italian patriot Massimo d’Azeglio, Taparelli’s role as a prominent intellectual of Italian Catholic conservativism, as well as his direct contribution to Catholic social thinking, has been widely acknowledged by scholars.¹

In addition to this rather well known aspect of Taparelli’s legacy, recent studies have cast a new light on his merits as a natural law theorist. According to Merio Scattola, indeed, Taparelli deserves particular notice in the history of European natural law, because of his efforts at assimilating Protestant natural law theories into Catholic thinking. It is quite odd, one might think, that a champion of Italian Catholicism resorted to Protestant doctrines of ius naturae to reform Catholic natural law – a branch of moral and legal reflection whose delayed development on the Italian peninsula, as Scattola observed, was striking in comparison with other European countries.²

As a matter of fact, Taparelli’s interpretation of Protestant natural law has a precise programmatic intent. Taparelli thought that only by engaging in a direct discussion of Protestant authors was it possible to rise to the challenge posed by the new values of liberalism. Along these lines, he believed that a modernized version of Catholic natural law (focused more on social solidarity than on its secularizing aspects) was going to provide a valuable framework to address those challenges. In fact, whereas Protestant natural law was excessively, or, rather, exclusively, relying on right reason as a source of obligation for natural law, Taparelli maintained that it was time that faith and revelation fitted into the natural law equation again. His Saggio teoretico di diritto naturale appoggiato sul fatto (1840–1843)³ thus constitutes a fundamental text that bears witness to this transformation and, more generally, provides evidence of a crucial, transitional moment in the history of the reception of Protestant natural law theories in Italy.

In this chapter, I will address the question of Taparelli’s reprise of the Protestant natural law tradition. Reacting against several attempts to resurrect Thomism within the Jesuit order,⁴ Taparelli suggested looking at the Protestant natural law tradition instead and, as it were, fighting the enemy from within. However, while Scattola thought that Taparelli’s turn to the Protestant tradition was a progressive stance to modernize the ‘backwardness’ of natural law on the Italian peninsula, I argue that there is more to Taparelli’s enterprise than this. More specifically, in seeking to integrate Protestant sources and themes in his doctrine of natural law, Taparelli wanted to address a much more compelling issue: how could love and divine grace become the object of legal obligation, while still leaving freedom as a fundamental feature of human life and, more specifically, of the social life of Catholics?

I will address this question by looking at Taparelli’s interesting reception of two crucial authors: Christian Wolff and Francisco Suárez. From this perspective, the originality of Taparelli’s contribution consists in correcting Wolff’s doctrine with that of a far more orthodox author of the Catholic natural law tradition, Francisco Suárez. In my view, first, Taparelli’s aim is to reinvent the language of Catholic natural law by borrowing Wolff’s already existing theory and make it more appealing and authoritative to his students and readers, by directly engaging with one of the most systematic authors, and yet one that was ‘easily’ translatable in Catholic terms. In search for a foundation for natural law, Taparelli acknowledged that Suárez’s concept of divine grace did not offer a compelling foundation for universal justice, as love is not something that can be imposed as a divine command but is only recommended by God. If there was a duty to love, people would not be free in the exercise of their will and, potentially, everything they would do ‘for love’ could be attributed to God. Taparelli perceives this as a problem and, instead, implicitly relies on Wolff to provide the duty to universal love (a typically Wolffian concept) as a foundation for universal justice. As I will show, however, Taparelli himself seems reluctant at times to fully acknowledge love as a foundation for legal obligation. The fact that this ambiguity could pose a threat to Catholic orthodoxy was perceived as difficult already by Taparelli’s superiors. Despite these ambiguities, Taparelli managed to create a compelling doctrine of international order, by replacing the ‘duty’ to love, which was hardly enforceable, with a more general and passive ‘debt of love’ that nations have towards each other.

This chapter consists of three main parts. In the next section I assess Taparelli’s scholarly and intellectual intentions. I then explain the reasons behind the choice of Christian Wolff as the main vector of Taparelli’s assimilation of Protestant into Catholic natural law. I claim that Taparelli makes use of the Wolffian concepts of perfectio, consensus and concursus as meeting points between the two traditions of Protestantism and Catholic theology. Furthermore, he consistently adjusts Protestant natural law by adding elements of the doctrines of Francisco Suárez, the early modern champion of the Jesuit tradition of ius naturae et gentium. In the following section I show how these choices impact on Taparelli’s reframing of international order and just war.

2 Taparelli: A Jesuit and Public Intellectual Facing the Challenges of Modernity

Prospero d’Azeglio Taparelli was born in Turin in 1793.⁵ He belonged to a Piedmontese aristocratic family: his father, Cesare, was active in the Napoleonic Wars and, once the French took Piedmont, moved with his family to Florence, where he founded L’Ape, one of the first Catholic magazines of the peninsula;⁶ then, in 1807, a royal decree forced his family to go back to Turin. In 1809, Prospero was supposed to join, under a Napoleonic decree, the Saint Cyr military school, but he was subsequently relieved from attendance, as a result of his father’s influential political connections with the pope. He then moved to Rome and in 1814 joined the recently restored Society of Jesus,⁷ and changed his name to Luigi. Taparelli then became rector of the Jesuit collegium in Novara, and from 1824 to 1829 of Collegio Romano in Rome; after a period in Naples, he became a teacher at Collegio Massimo in Palermo (1833–1850). Sicily became, thus, his elective home.⁸ In 1850, he founded the influential magazine La civiltà cattolica, which is still published today.

Taparelli witnessed the troubles the Society of Jesus was facing at the dawn of modernity: what role should Catholics have in contemporary society? How could the recently restored Jesuit order react against the dangers of individualism and liberalism?⁹ Later interpreters such as Antonio Gramsci have condemned the politicization of Catholics as, paradoxically, an extreme form of secularization that was going to have a huge impact on Italian society.¹⁰ Irrespective of the accuracy of this historical reconstruction, the Jesuits were clearly trying to fill a void in post-Restoration Italy, as witnessed by the so-called ‘apostasy of masses’¹¹ and by the increasing absence of religion from social life. As we shall see, Taparelli’s reprise of natural law was instrumental in the creation of a new vocabulary of social justice capable of making sense of modernity. This vocabulary would ideally bridge the ‘liberal’ gap between individuals and God by acknowledging, rather, religion as the ultimate telos of society. Taparelli’s project was a successful one, according to Scattola, precisely because it ‘replied to modernity with modernity’.¹² Criticizing Johannes Messner’s thesis that Catholic social thinking was born as a reaction against liberalism, Scattola has claimed that it was, rather, a reaction against Protestantism and that this was visible from the language, agendas and argumentative structures used by authors such as Taparelli.¹³ This intellectual innovation, voiced by Taparelli’s project of emending natural law, would eventually, after 1848, enable Catholics to participate on an equal footing in debates with liberals and socialists.¹⁴

But this renewed, fervid engagement of Jesuits in society’s most controversial questions attracted its critics. One of the most ferocious was Vincenzo Gioberti, the Turinese clergyman, philosopher and author of Del primato morale degli Italiani (1843), in which he vindicated the historical importance and civilizational mission of the Italian nation. Although Taparelli was initially on good terms with Gioberti, their relationship started to creak under the weight of Gioberti’s acrimonious critique of modern Jesuitism, as expressed in his long essay Il Gesuita Moderno (1846). Condemning any attempt at resurrecting the order, Gioberti saw Jesuits as the enemies of civilization altogether. Furthermore, Gioberti criticized the Jesuits’ blind subjection to Church authority, while directly accusing Taparelli of confusing the duty to obey superiors with the general, prudential principle of agreeing with the ideas of the wisest.¹⁵ Gioberti is here quoting a letter that Taparelli wrote to him on 15 June 1845, where he says that a peculiar trait of Jesuits is docility: this consists ‘not so much in stating things one does not believe in, but rather in thinking according to the opinions of the wisest. When the Institute exhorts us to subject our intellect to it, it does not do so to induce us to commit an act of simulation, but, rather, an act of perfection’.¹⁶ Furthermore, Gioberti accused the Jesuits of pantheism. By acknowledging that God actively concurs in the realization of good acts, they secured their Catholic orthodoxy; nonetheless, they also acknowledged the primacy of human reason and will when it comes to moral deliberation and, by so doing, they ‘give man the dignity of a first cause’.¹⁷ This is pivotal in Taparelli’s reflection on natural law, as it calls into question the relationship between grace and freedom, as we shall see.

Apart from theological reasons, there was also political scepticism behind this hatred for Jesuits, as their conservativism was perceived as a threat to Italian liberation movements. However, as a matter of fact, Taparelli and his fellow Jesuits joined revolutionary sides during the uprisings taking place in Palermo in 1848. Gabriele De Rosa has highlighted the uniqueness of this event, which was seen as such already by contemporary observers. Nevertheless, as the liberal movement was gaining momentum on the peninsula, Gioberti criticized the Jesuit involvement in the revolutionary cause. In his view, after the order was suppressed, the Jesuits were so afraid of disappearing from the social and political scene that their involvement in revolutionary uprisings was nothing but an instance of crass political opportunism.¹⁸

On the other hand, one of Taparelli’s fellow Jesuits in Palermo, Giuseppe Romano, vindicated the primacy of the Jesuits’ pedagogical mission to voice revolutionary ideas. Interestingly, he argued, many of those ideas were made available to students precisely through the teaching of natural law. In sum, revolutionary Sicilians owe their intellectual independency to Jesuits:

In Romano’s portrait, Jesuits were teaching free thinking rather than intellectual subordination to the Church’s educational, moral and social authority. Furthermore, natural law seemed to play a crucial role in providing students with such tools of intellectual emancipation. That the language of natural law was to give Catholics a new political vocabulary was very clear to Taparelli as well, and his Saggio rapidly became popular in Jesuit colleges and started being adopted as a textbook in many Italian universities. The question was, however, in what ways such political language was to be constructed to enhance social cohesion rather than to disrupt it. As a matter of fact, unlike Romano and his moderate attempt at modernizing the pedagogic mission of the Jesuit order and reconcile it with Gioberti’s invocation to Italian independence, Taparelli, as we shall see, had a much more cautious position on the issue, and was in general less enthusiastic about the role of natural law in voicing those kinds of disruptive claims.

Indeed, Taparelli did not think of national unification as the ultimate goal nor as the starting point of society. The state is just an organism that ensures and guarantees social development,²⁰ as he claimed in his famous Della nazionalità (On Nationality), which was printed in 1847 unbeknown to Taparelli himself.²¹ This short essay was supposed to be added to the new edition of the Saggio, and it was not meant to be published as a separate piece. As a result, Taparelli’s essay was misinterpreted as supporting Austrian dominion against Italian independence. In a letter to his brother, Taparelli expresses his concern that his political message is being deliberately misconstrued by his critics. He is also worried that application of natural law to concrete facts can be a double-edged sword, as general principles have different applications depending on the facts they refer to: indeed, ‘national questions should be reduced to principles of universal justice, and to the facts that make those principles concrete’.²² What are these principles of universal justice’, then, and on what intellectual and religious foundations do they rest?

3 Wolff versus Suárez: Love as Law?

Taparelli often makes clear in his Saggio, and elsewhere, that the most fundamental aim of his book is ‘to take Burlamaqui, Romagnosi and Bentham, and other similarly poisonous authors, away from the hands of young students’.²³ In the Introduction to the first edition, of 1840, Taparelli vindicates a new metaphysical foundation for the science of natural law, which he, with a distinctively Hegel-like flair, defines as ‘the science of the human heart in its long and dangerous journey from the shrine of individual conscience, to the structures of the social architecture it helps to build and sustain’.²⁴ It is necessary to combine philosophical empiricism and spiritualism into a new metaphysics capable of including facts within theory, rather than just focusing on one or the other exclusively.

Taparelli mentions the fundamental contribution of the French philosopher Victor Cousin in elaborating what he refers to as the novella metafisica.²⁵ Such metaphysics is an eclectic amalgam of doctrines, combining English and French empiricism²⁶ with German spiritualism, one that perfectly reflects the inherent diversity of human nature.²⁷ Whereas the spiritualists insist on focusing on the primacy of human reason over passions, empiricism does the opposite. Only eclecticism can combine the two elements and, ‘while acknowledging the primacy of human reason, it will neither forget nor blame human passions’. Accordingly, Taparelli concludes, ‘this is the kind of moral theory we support and develop in these pages’.²⁸

From this perspective, authors such as Burlamaqui and Johann Gottlieb Heineccius were potentially dangerous because their works were nothing but the expression of ‘decadent sensism’, according to Taparelli’s evocative formulation. In his view, Protestant natural law was either thinking of human life and reason as totally detached from the life of facts and from the structures of social life, or vice versa. Additionally, it lacked a teleological orientation towards good and moral perfection – in other words, God was the great, cumbersome absence from natural law (or was, at least, declared as such) ever since Grotius’s famous etsi Deus non daretur.

Taparelli’s strategic use of Christian Wolff as a source for his Saggio is an interesting example of how the history of the reception of natural law theories is one of constant hybridization of sources, which are adjusted, deconstructed and reassembled to make sense of the world in a creative yet normatively meaningful way. Although Taparelli denies being a follower of any philosophical innovation or system in particular,²⁹ scholars have identified Wolff’s impact on Taparelli’s theory of natural law.³⁰ Wolff, however, seems to be an occasional and implicit source in Taparelli’s texts – he is barely mentioned explicitly. But why precisely Wolff, and in what does the impact of his theory consist? Is it possible to retrace such influence on Taparelli or did Wolffian interpreters overemphasize the scope and significance of the German philosopher’s legacy? Why would Taparelli resort to a follower of Leibniz, with all the theological implications of such a choice, to rethink the foundations of natural law? Is not such a move not only counterintuitive but also distinctively anti-Catholic (think of Leibniz’s doctrine of pre-established harmony)?

But before turning to the discussion of divine grace and the duty to love, it is also important to emphasize Taparelli’s epistemic interest in reviving Suárez’s and Wolff’s philosophy, against the ‘decadent sensism’ of the Protestants:

For Taparelli, Suárez provided an example of epistemic unity, against the Protestant analytical tendency to separate different branches of human knowledge to construct an independent system of morality. Interestingly, Wolff’s philosophy presents a similar view of knowledge as an interconnected system held together by metaphysics. From this perspective, and against Scattola’s thesis of the ‘backwardness’ of Catholic natural law, Taparelli does not seem to think of Suárez’s doctrines as retrograde. Instead, he argues that the ‘analytical’ mind is a tendency to which even his contemporary fellow Catholics are falling victim (‘superficiality in research and disaffection for intellectual labour have made their way also into the heart of Catholics’), one that was exogenous to Suárez’s theological and political doctrines.

However, as many have observed, one of the most important innovations of Wolff consisted in the primacy he gave to psychology. Unlike Suárez, Wolff believed that ‘the soul and its affections are objects of metaphysics’.³² The importance of psychology not only to understand Wolff’s system but, generally, as a crucial part of the theory of natural law is emphasized by Taparelli himself.³³ Rational and empirical psychology become fundamental tools to understand the motives behind human action and to provide a foundation for the obligation of natural law accordingly. Such a foundation relies upon the concept of perfectio, also explicitly deployed by Taparelli in his Saggio.³⁴

In the following I will explain the importance of perfectio in relation to two other key concepts used by Wolff (and, later on, by Vattel)³⁵ and implicitly adopted by Taparelli: consensus and concursus. As far as consensus is concerned, Wolff claims that the aim of the intellect and the will is to be in agreement with each other, and therefore to tend towards perfectio, that is, moral good. The more they are in agreement with each other, the more intellect and will are consentanei to (‘in agreement with’) nature. Additionally, human beings must take care that their own actions are free and, in this respect, have an obligation ‘to perform intrinsically good actions’.³⁶ Indeed, such harmonious agreement among faculties creates consensus, which is a tendency of both the sensitive and the intellectual faculty towards the same object.³⁷Perfectio, thus, is the core of Wolff’s moral and legal theory and it has multiple meanings: (1) consensus of different faculties, as we already pointed out; (2) the purpose of human nature; and (3) the criterion for good moral action – good is what makes us perfect.³⁸

The harmonious agreement among faculties left unexplained why it is so important, and yet so difficult, as we experience from daily life, to achieve such consensus between reason and will. To overcome this potential dichotomy, Wolff relies on the theory of concursus, a multi-layered, pervasive concept used by Wolff to explain why and how we get from consensus to perfectio. There are at least three senses in which Wolff uses the term concursus, and they are all interconnected. First, Wolff speaks of a ‘concurrence’ between God and human actions.³⁹ As we have pointed out, divine intervention does not precede human action but is actually co-causal and concurrent with it. This is because, as the idea of perfectio emphasizes, man is meant to pursue moral good (both because it makes him perfect, and because this decision concurs with the divine plan).

Second, such concursus happens when there is consensus among human faculties, as we have seen, namely when intellect and volition concur towards the same object (which makes it a stable desire).

The third interpretation that Wolff gives to the term concursus is strongly related to the previous two. Wolff uses concursus for our concrete engagement in other people’s moral decisions (concursus hominis ad actiones alterius), which is something he claims often happens in reality.⁴⁰ Such engagement might produce consensus, in cases where we manage to convince other people to adopt behaviour to pursue perfection, or a clash of views and arguments, in which case we do not reach consensus.⁴¹

We often find echoes of Wolff’s conceptual vocabulary in Taparelli’s Saggio, despite his few direct references to the German philosopher.⁴² On these rare occasions, Taparelli rejects Wolff’s idea of founding natural law on the principle of perfection, arguing that there is no such thing as perfectio if it is limited in scope to human affairs only. For their lack of transcendent afflatus, Wolff’s and other Protestant doctrines of natural law end up reducing morality to interest. A ‘limited good’ cannot in itself provide a valid foundation for legal obligation – a greater good is needed for that, Taparelli argues.⁴³

Despite this apparent rejection of Wolff’s doctrines, Taparelli engages in a silent rehash of Wolffian terminology, by toning it down with Suárez’s philosophy whenever it appears too heretical, and, in turn, by re-reading Suárez in a distinctively Wolffian fashion. The fundamental metaphysical role of the law in Taparelli’s project is to bridge the Protestant divide between reason and will, rationality and revelation.⁴⁴ As he observes: ‘truth acts on intelligence, and good acts on the will; law then is a power based on truth and good. As everyone sees, such power is irresistible to the human mind, since the latter cannot but consent to the truth’ (giacché essa non può non consentire al vero).⁴⁵ As such, Taparelli affirms, the human mind has two faculties, knowledge and will. Whereas the former is the object of logic and metaphysics, psychology deals with the study of human will (moral philosophy is, instead, the science that deals with ‘establishing the rules of human action’). By stressing the importance of psychology (in the Wolffian sense of the term), Taparelli moves on to argue that natural law consists of natural principles that demonstrate how man should make moral use of the faculty of will.⁴⁶

According to such natural principles, Taparelli observes, everything in nature tends to something, according to the will of the Creator. When someone or something achieves the purpose they tend to, they then fulfil perfection, which essentially means ‘completion’. When the tendency towards which one orients his will is good, that is called rectitude.⁴⁷ This is observable not only in individuals, but also in societies and in humankind as a whole, because God has designed all of these to constantly strive for higher degrees of perfection.⁴⁸ Most importantly, such perfection can be achieved only within society, which provides human beings with the appropriate means for self-perfection. If more human wills strive for the same object (achievement of perfection), this social unity produces a ‘unity of mind’, which is the natural principle of ‘honest living’.⁴⁹ In other words, if perfection ultimately consists in tending towards the same common good and truth (provided one knows what such things are), perfection lies in the folds of social consensus.⁵⁰ The Wolffian triad of concepts discussed above is operative here and evidently aimed at constructing the very fabric of Taparelli’s social solidarity.

The sociological claim of observing social facts, rather than founding natural law on mere abstraction, is also reflected in Taparelli’s rejection of the ‘state of nature’ doctrine.⁵¹ Such doctrine is dismissed as a fictio iuris, ‘and I don’t like to build the most sacred and important aspects of human interaction on a fiction’, Taparelli eloquently writes.⁵² Society would only be a disconnected plurality of individuals were not they all tending towards a common goal so as to produce the social consensus that is necessary to achieve truth and goodness. Only if individuals know the truth and aim towards the same good can there be unity between them (they must share, in other words, ‘unity of purpose deriving from unity of knowledge’).⁵³ Taparelli presents an interesting and apt example of a group of papyrologists struggling to interpret the same papyrus in a coherent manner. They all know said papyrus and aim at its correct interpretation, but if they do not ‘join their wills together by expressly showing their intents, so as to show that they all have a common one’, their union will never amount to a proper society.⁵⁴ Human society means the ‘concurrence [cospirazione] of many people to the achievement of the same common good, known and searched for by all of them’. The term cospirazione seems to hint again at another example of the typical Wolffian overlap between consensus, concursus and perfectio, which Taparelli explains cannot really be achieved in a state of nature: men need to know, agree and then intentionally tend towards the same actual purpose, not towards a vague, fictional one.

Taparelli argues that the proper foundation of natural law (and of social cohesion more in general) can only be a duty to love, and by so doing introducing the ideas of charity and social justice into the language of rights. This, however, is no less problematic than acknowledging such a foundational role of perfection. In this sense, the Protestant ethics of perfectibility is compatible with Catholic teleology towards common good: one could easily find in Suárez a similar general drive of perfectio.⁵⁵ However, the question of whether love provides a basis for legal obligation entails a discussion of grace and the role of God in human affairs that is at the exact crossroads between the two traditions of thought. Additionally, it poses a question of distributive justice, as we will see in a while.

Love is a controversial foundational principle for natural law. If we hold Wolff’s doctrine of concursus to be true, God might be held potentially and co-causally accountable for human deeds of love. Additionally, love cannot realistically be a foundation for law because, according to the traditional dichotomies between perfect and imperfect rights and between commutative and distributive justice, one can only demand respect of mutual obligations. In contrast, acts of love, charity and kindness are simply imperfect duties whose respect is highly recommended to maintain social order, but cannot be imposed by a sovereign. This traditional view of imperfect duties has, somehow, disqualified their legal significance. As a matter of fact, many authors of the natural law tradition seem to attach a value judgement to the dichotomy between perfect and imperfect rights. For example, according to a trajectory of authors that culminates in Emer de Vattel, imperfect rights need to be activated and turned into positive agreements to become perfect obligations, for which it is possible to demand respect.⁵⁶ There must be, in other words, a corrective to the constitutional ‘deficiency’ of imperfect rights.

Let us address this problem through the eyes of Taparelli. As mentioned, arguing for the primacy of love in providing a foundation for natural law raised the issue of co-causal attribution of human deeds to God.⁵⁷ This problem was exactly what caused Wolff’s exile from the University of Halle, and its implications for the doctrine of grace were obvious to Suárez.⁵⁸ In book II, chapter 11 of his De legibus, Suárez asks whether ‘the natural law imposes as an obligatory mode of action that mode which springs from the natural love of God, or from charity?’⁵⁹ Suárez claims that love is inessential to the achievement of individual moral principles, ‘since the latter do not all impose, as an obligation, the love of God’. Accordingly, humans must be in complete control of their actions, so as to avoid misattributions of responsibility: ‘nor […] can it be shown that God has laid down for men as ordained for a supernatural end, any special command always to discharge or to observe the precepts of the natural law, out of this sort of love or this reference of one’s acts’.⁶⁰ That the purpose of perfection includes the desire to acquire the love of God does not mean that love is to be considered as a natural law precept. Love is not imposed as an obligation but, rather, is a moral guide designed by God to help us direct our behaviours.

Wolff, on the other hand, in his Ius naturae acknowledges a universal duty to love and formulates it as the positive version of ‘the golden rule’: ‘universalis omnium hominum amor: uniquisque alterum quemcunque amare debet tantum seipsum’.⁶¹ Moreover, ‘we are obliged to charity by the very same law of nature’.⁶² This is also true of love among nations, and not just allies.⁶³ However, he argues, ‘it is against charity and not justice, if one nation fails in its duty toward another. Therefore although it does no wrong, nevertheless it sins’.⁶⁴

The international implications and further articulation of the duty to love will be discussed in more detail in the next section of this chapter. As a general context for Taparelli’s reflection, it is useful to recall a letter that his spiritual father Jan Roothan sent him after having read the first edition of his Saggio. Roothan has two major concerns: first, that the obligation to do good (‘il principio: si deve fare il bene’) seems to give rise to confusion as far as the difference between command and advice is concerned. To remedy this, Roothan recommends changing this principle into a more general ‘order should be maintained’ (si deve serbar l’ordine).⁶⁵ Second, Roothan shows some anxiety concerning the role of grace and God’s intervention in human affairs. ‘The expression “participation in divine being”, when referring to creatures, and man in particular, seems dangerous, now that pantheism is so in fashion. Unless one explains it according to Aquinas, it seems to me, through similitude’.⁶⁶ It is useful to recall that the accusation of pantheism was also at the very core of Gioberti’s critique of the Jesuits. By acknowledging that God actively concurs in the realization of good acts, Gioberti claimed, the Jesuits perverted the ontological order of beings by giving man ‘the dignity of a first cause’.⁶⁷

Roothan here suggests that Taparelli corrects these passages accordingly, and in fact they seem particularly nuanced in the later editions of his Saggio. Roothan is referring to a passage in Taparelli’s text where the question of whether God can change divine law is addressed. Taparelli criticizes Pufendorf’s claim that God could have made such law otherwise, just as he could have made man different from what he actually is. Such an argument implies, for Taparelli, that God is not a necessary being and is, therefore, himself subject to the will of some more necessary being (a clearly heretical position). Rather, he suggests that God made man in his own image, and in such a scenario mere participation in the divine being automatically makes divine law more understandable and enforceable for humans. In the 1844 edition of Saggio, Taparelli adds a footnote to keep Roothan’s concerns at bay. The footnote clarifies that ‘when we say that a limited being participates in the infinite, we do not mean this as if he was a particle of it, as dreamt by pantheists; rather, we say so because the effect must necessarily have its being in the cause from which it derives’.⁶⁸

This, however, highlights a controversial conceptual issue with which Taparelli was clearly grappling, as shown by the many oscillations in his vocabulary.

4 Taparelli’s Influential Saggio teoretico di diritto naturale appoggiato sul fatto: Nations and International Law

Scholars have welcomed Taparelli’s contribution to international law as one of the first Italian precursors of the League of Nations, or praised the balance between tradition and historical dynamism that Taparelli puts forward in his legal theory based on facts.⁶⁹ His originality consists precisely in bridging the gap between natural reason and the ‘possibilities of historical reason’, by envisaging a theory of international legal order based on moral obligation and the political necessities of interaction.⁷⁰

In stressing the differences between the universal, natural society of mankind and the factual political unity of different nations gathering together, Taparelli also makes use of Wolff’s conceptual vocabulary. Famously, Wolff conceived of the international society as a civitas maxima, a community governed by a fictional legislator and aimed at the promotion and achievement of communal perfection.⁷¹

To this effect, Taparelli uses the Italian adjective etnarchico to refer to Christianity as an ‘ethnarchy’, a society based on faith in both the Church and the Gospel. The ‘ethnarchic society’ is, thus, an institutional arrangement among nations, based on the idea that ‘a natural principle of unity existed in Europe, according to which peoples are meant to join forces towards the achievement of a common good of order and justice’.⁷² However, as both Suárez and Wolff well observed, there is a huge leap between perfection as a shared purpose and love of perfection as a legal obligation. This holds particularly true at the international level, where one nation’s ideas of love and perfection do not necessarily coincide with another’s convictions. Massively intervening to change that would amount to a violation of sovereign equality, which is why the duty to love is framed by Taparelli essentially as a debt, rather than as an obligation. By recurring to this subtle (again, Suárezian) distinction, Taparelli manages to acknowledge the obligatory force of love, although in a more nuanced and passive way (as the very term ‘debt’ suggests), without necessarily demeaning its legal significance.

As mentioned, it is Suárez who distinguishes debitum (‘ought’) from obligation. As a matter of fact, ‘in his view, we are not obliged to do good and avoid evil before any command and prohibition. But he recognizes a moral requirement before any command and prohibition; for natural goodness and badness tell us what we ought (debere) to do’.⁷³ For Taparelli, this ‘ought’ is and should be the foundation for natural law, and that is where he corrects Suárez with a touch of Wolff’s Protestantism – if love is not a duty, it surely is a debt we owe to society. Suárez ascribes debere to the realm of morality:

Taparelli, perhaps following Roothan’s suggestion to shift focus from common good to order, argues that international order has to be achieved for ‘a debt of international love’ (‘debito di amore internazionale’, but also clarifies that ‘debitum’ is not just a passive obligation:

Taparelli acknowledges that this duty calls into question a matter of ‘higher historical importance’, that is, it asks to what extent a proactive promotion of Catholicism can be included in this duty to promote common good among nations. In principle, he claims that no intervention in another nation’s affairs for religious reasons is allowed per se; it is possible to intervene only in defence of the oppressed.⁷⁶ What are, then, the ‘active’ international obligations deriving from the debt of international love? Taparelli seems to take a step back and concede that ‘I would be a fool if I had the ambition to deduce the laws of war from the principle of love and justice’.⁷⁷ Rather, war is, according to nature, a violent defence of order, that is, a just reaction against disorder.

Order, however, can arise only from a proper society with an overarching authority. Taparelli claims that there is an international authority, otherwise there would be no proper society, strictly speaking. How do nations come together to form an international society? Taparelli argues that:

Such authority is essentially polyarchic, made of multiple authorities rather than just one (this resembles Suárez’s idea of ius inter gentes).⁷⁹ The purpose of such society is different from the one pursued by domestic politics, insofar as it is given by the very same reason behind the international union, and consists in achieving happiness through the defence of oppressed nations, and in promoting cooperation towards universal good. The most perfect of these ethnarchic societies is Christianity,⁸⁰ to which Taparelli devotes a whole section, as we will see.

Thus, in Taparelli’s formulation, just war amounts, if conducted to fulfil the debt of international love, to an act of international love.⁸¹ War is an act of love because it aims at restoring order; ordered societies can declare just war against disordered societies. International disorder amounts to an offence that can be legitimately redressed by war. However, Taparelli observes:

So the conundrum returns. Love cannot be commanded, and neither can perfection. Is Taparelli leading his own argument to a dead end? He seems to address this point when dealing with his critique of Grotius:

If Grotius’s natural law was a science of false deduction without a heart, Taparelli suggests that it is the emotional side of humans (values of love, charity and empathy) that makes their lives complete, precisely as much as it makes natural law more perfect and complete as a result. To promote Catholicism, Taparelli argues that using persuasion is a better strategy than force, as a nation only has a duty towards its own citizens, whereas the debitum of international love does not necessarily amount to a duty to command.⁸⁵ Additionally, charity bears witness to faith, according to Taparelli. His own speculations would not be of much use, he argues, if they did not invite people to a more honest realization of what their interests truly are: ‘oh, how just a little unity of faith and charity could solve troubles much more than conflicts of power! And, without this unity of faith and charity, what is the point of interest, if not of dividing peoples and triggering war among them?’⁸⁶

A very apt example of Taparelli’s point comes from his essay Della nazionalità, where (again, against Gioberti) he discusses the relationship between barbarism and civilization.⁸⁷ When asked whether it would be right for France to surrender to Algeria, Taparelli replies that this would not be right, not because it is against nature that uncivilized, barbarous and non-Christian nations conquer civilized ones. Rather, the French people should not be submitted to Algeria because the French were the ones who received the offence in the first place, with war being an attempt at mending such offence.

Taparelli concludes with the suggestion that it is highly urgent in his time to reuse these ideas ‘on the rough outline of an international society presented by Europe’.⁸⁹ ‘Social love’ is crucial, because it makes us want for others what we desire for ourselves. Love and altruism produce order among nations.

Taparelli considers that the application of his theories to reality is far from being achieved. However, the society of Christians shows that it is actually possible to live under the rule of love, provided one turns it into a legally binding concept. The originality of Taparelli’s social doctrine of natural law lies in his account of love as a debt, rather than as a duty. People who are in debt are required to give by law. It is, however, our free choice as individuals and as a society to choose God as a ‘creditor’ in the first place.⁹¹

5 Conclusion: From Love to Order

If one takes the implications of Taparelli’s doctrine of international love seriously, despite its ambiguities, a number of questions arise. First, his insistence on social love as a typical feature of Christian societies echoes Ludwig Feuerbach’s critical claim that Christianity’s assertion of a close relationship between love and faith ends up impairing the very concept of universal love. It is impossible to be at the same time outside of the Catholic faith and within the circle of Christian love – remember Feuerbach’s attack against the falseness of the precept ‘love your enemy’.⁹² While Taparelli’s idea of social justice relied on the proactive role of Catholics in society, it theoretically implied a social consensus of religious acolytes, one that automatically excludes those who are outside it.

Proactive promotion of these values is a debt that Christians owe to society and nations to each other. Grace is, in other words, no longer a gift: it becomes disposable social currency. But there is, to this day as much as in Taparelli’s times, a question of values. While respect cannot be demanded from acts of mercy, caritas and kindness, Taparelli aptly transforms these ‘imperfect duties’ into debts that members of a society have to fulfil to achieve their perfection and get closer to God. From this perspective, Taparelli’s fear was that, if all sorts of individualistic values were being introduced in the political space, this would eventually favour a certain laissez-faire that resembled the logic of the market and commerce.