The Morale Cattolica

Manzoni wrote the first part of Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica, published in Milan in 1819, as a polemic response to Swiss historian Simonde de Sismondi (1773-1842) whose History of the Italian Republics in the Middle Ages (1818) had pointed to Catholic morality as a cause of corruption among Italians and the decay of their republics. Canon Luigi Tosi eagerly encouraged Manzoni to write the work, and paid considerable attention to the draft, making his own changes too. Manzoni cogently refutes all of Sismondi’s accusations, defending Catholic morality as “the only morality that is holy and reasoned in each of its parts” and relating it to the teaching of the Gospels. Sismondi had not in fact attacked the morality of the Gospels, but the Church as an institution and its actions in society, and thus he compared the discussion between himself and Manzoni to a duel between two swordsmen fighting in the dark. The importance of the Osservazioni lies in Manzoni’s efforts to clarify the concept from the standpoint of a believer, explaining the principles of faith in the light of reason. The work also offers in-depth analyses of the human mind prior to the marvellous psychological portraits of his characters in the Promessi Sposi. As well as being Manzoni’s first attempt at serious prose writing, the Osservazioni influenced the poetics of his tragedies, and in particular the Adelchi: an ideal world is outlined, one that is in perfect harmony with the principles in the Gospels, but this ideal world is contrasted with History, where evil (Adelchi’s “do wrong or suffer wrong”) triumphs. In Opere varie (1855), Manzoni published the second part of the work, which contains a long critical appendix on the utilitarian theories of the English jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832).