Faith and reason

There is considerable continuity between Manzoni’s Enlightenment background and his religious conversion. Significantly, he chose the evangelical branch of Christianity, a democratic and egalitarian variety. This continuity was already clear in his Inni Sacri, the work clearly indicating both his religious version and literary conversion. As the critic Francesco De Sanctis wrote, the source behind this work was “the idea of the century baptized with the Christian idea; the famous triad, liberty, equality, fraternity, evangelized; Christianity returned to its ideality and harmonized with the modern world”. Not only was the rationality of the Enlightenment perfectly reconcilable with the “system” of evangelical principles, but it also coincided with that system, as Manzoni, convinced as a scholar as well as a believer, explained in the introduction to the first part of the Morale Cattolica, giving further proof that he had arrived at his faith through long and searching intellectual labour (“by way of logic”, said his son-in-law Giorgini). In the Gospel “the intellect goes from truth to truth: the unity of the revelation is such that every small part becomes a new confirmation of the whole on account of the marvellous subordination to be found […]: everything is explained with the Gospel, everything confirms the Gospel”. The Promessi Sposi provides the closest bond between reason and faith. The two extremely humble and devout protagonists construct their well-being with trust in Providence, but also by using their ability to reason and interpret the things of this world (for example, it is the reasonableness, as well as the emotional spontaneity of Lucia’s words that go to the very depths of the heart and mind of the Innominato in his search for truth). On the other hand, evil (as with Don Rodrigo’s sordid scheme) is generated in societies – like that of the seventeenth century - whose institutions and laws are completely unreasonable (such as Azzecca-garbugli’s “edicts”, and torture) and are thus ridiculed from Manzoni’s bourgeois Enlightenment perspective.