Contributi di Carlo Sabbatini

SOMMARIO: 1. Panizza, un suddito infedele - 2. Scalpori e processi - 3. La pietra dello scandalo - 4. Un “teologo [...] eretico pittore di immagini sacre” - 5. Una scelta [quasi] obbligata - 6. Una foresta di simboli performativi - 7. Ordine religioso e ordine politico: l’ecosistema del processo - 8. Un “martire” a processo - 9. Martedì 30 aprile 1895, ore 19: la condanna - 10. Panizza sulla censura - 11. Morale religiosa come morale sessuale - 12. Manicomio, prigione, fuga - 13. “Un uomo fuori dal mondo”: ontologia di un blasfemo - 14. Istituzioni che succhiano il sangue.

The broken mirror of Liebeskonzil: a case of blasphemy in the Wilhelminian Empire

ABSTRACT: In 1895, due to the publication of the play Liebeskonzil, the writer Oskar Panizza was sentenced to one year imprisonment for blasphemy. Starting with such exemplary conviction, the essay reconstructs some aspects of the writer's existential and creative path, treating his vitriolic satires of religion as an access key to the political and social situation during the Wilhelminian Empire, where press laws and targeted use of crimes such as lèse majesté, obscenity and profanity, highlight the tenacity of Government, right-wing parties and Catholic Centre Party in pursuing the common purpose of silencing the opponents of the status quo.

SOMMARIO: 1. “La grande tragedia del popolo ebraico” - 2. Il superamento della scissione tra religione, filosofia e politica - 3. La “terza forma di religione” e la ricostruzione dell’ethos pubblico.

Notes on religion and political Gestalt in the young Hegel

ABSTRACT: The young Hegel identifies in the Jewish theocracy a model based on the split between divine and human, finite and infinite which confines man in an irrecoverable subordination and separation from nature and the rest of mankind. Hegel contrasts it with the idea of the Greek polis and its religion as a strengthening of ethical and political unity. Christ hasn’t succeeded in bridging the rift which marks not only the Jewish culture but also reproduces itself in modern intellectualism, which proceeds by separations and oppositions and culminates in the abstractness of modern law. Christ founded a community of love, renouncing the confrontation with reality, supinely accepted; nevertheless, the Christian idea of incarnation, together with the Greek suggestion of the unity of the being as a whole, seems to be decisive for the Hegelian attempt to think of the philosophical unity of opposites, indicating a way that is also religious (as visible union of the community in the cult) and political (as sacrificing of that which is particular and egoistic). In the transition from the Frankfurt to Jena, Christianity is recovered by Hegel as a premise for a new religion that ought to overcome the oppositions of modern intellectualism and rediscover the unity of the popular ethos.

SOMMARIO: 1. In forma di premessa - 2. L’immensa maggioranza degli spiriti -  3. Una forma particolare della speranza: religione e libertà tra dispotismo e repubblica - 4. Dal dogma teologico al dogma della maggioranza -  5. Quale religione? - 6. Contro la patologia del dubbio - 7. Polvere intellettuale: il metodo filosofico tra America ed Europa - 8. Chiesa e Stato tra America e Francia - 9. Democrazia e Cattolicesimo americano - 10. Una democrazia cristiana: Stato e Chiesa nell’ ‘ultimo’ Tocqueville.

“A salutary yoke on the intellect”: Religious Dogma and Political Freedom in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

ABSTRACT: The essay examines the relationship between religion and politics in Tocqueville's thinking, with particular attention to the synergy between Christianity and the development of democratic institutions, studied by the author in the United States. In the two volumes of Democracy in America, he observes that the doctrine of Christianity, subject to a process of popularization characteristic of American social dynamism, constitutes an essential connective tissue, through which the principle of equality permeates custom, law and institutions. This stabilization function finds a fundamental premise in the separation between spiritual and temporal sphere, which allows the former not to be bent to the conveniences of the second and, above all, not to be subjected to attacks which, as in the French Revolution, have confused and condemned it with its institutional form under the ancien régime. Such a circumstance, according to Tocqueville, has deprived society of the fundamental ethical background that unites it, neglecting above all the powerful egalitarian message that he identifies as a general character of Christianity and in particular of Catholicism, which he thinks even more appropriate to the democracy as the Protestant faith and which, by acting on custom, would enable the establishment and development of an indigenous democratic model also in France.