Antonio Gramsci

Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks

The Church as an Institution and the Clergy as Intellectuals

1 Religion [1]

`In your travels, you may come upon cities without walls, writing, king, houses (!) or property, doing without currency, having no notion of a theatre or a gymnasium (for physical exercise); but a city without holy places and gods, without any observance of prayers, oaths, oracles, sacrifices for blessings received or rites to avert evils, no traveller has ever seen or will ever see'. Plutarch, adv. Col., 31. 1

Turchi's definition of religion (Storia delle religioni [A History of Religions], Turin 1922): `The word religion in its broadest sense denotes a relation of dependence that binds man to one or more superior powers on whom he feels he depends and to whom he renders acts of worship of both an individual and a collective nature.' That is to say, the concept of religion presupposes the following constitutive elements:

1. the belief that there exist one or more personal divinities that transcend earthly or temporal conditions;

2. men's feeling of dependence on these higher beings who totally govern the life of the cosmos;

3. the existence of a system of relationships (a cult) between men and gods.

Salomon Reinach in his Orpheus defines religion without the presupposition of a belief in higher powers as: `A sum of scruples (taboos) which impede the free exercise of our faculties.' 2 This definition is too broad and can encompass not only religions but indeed any social ideology that tends to make it possible for people to live together socially and thereby impedes (through scruples) the free (or arbitrary) exercise of our faculties.

It remains to be seen if one can also denote by `religion' a faith that does not have a personal god as object, but only impersonal and indeterminate forces. In the modern world, the words `religion' and `religious' are abused by attributing them to sentiments that have nothing to do with positive religions. Not even pure `theism' should be considered a religion since within it there is no cult, i. e. no peculiar given relation between man and the divinity. 3

2 Clergy and Intellectuals [1]

Is there an organic study of the history of the clergy as `class-caste'? To my mind this would be indispensable as both introduction to and condition of the whole of the rest of the study of the role of religion in the historical and intellectual development of humanity. The Church and clergy's precise de jure and de facto situation in various countries and eras, its economic functions and conditions, its exact relations with the ruling classes and with the state and so on and so forth.

3 Religion as a Principle and the Clergy as Feudal Class-Order

When the Church's role in the Middle Ages in favour of the lower classes is held up as an example, one thing simply gets forgotten -- that this role was not bound up with the Church as the expression of a moral-religious principle, but with the Church as the organisation of very concrete economic interests, which had to fight against other orders that would have wished to reduce its importance. This role was therefore of a subordinate and incidental nature, but the peasant was no less cheated by the Church than by the feudal lords. 4 One can maybe say this: that the `Church' as the organisation of the faithful preserved and developed given politico-moral principles in opposition to the Church as a clerical organisation, right up to the French Revolution whose principles were <exactly> those of the community of the faithful against the clergy as a feudal order allied with the king and nobility. On this account, many Catholics regard the French Revolution as a schism <a heresy>, i. e. a complete break between pastor and flock, of the same type as the Reformation, 5 though historically more mature since it took place on the terrain of secularism: not priests against priests, but faithful-infidels against priests. <The real point of rupture between democracy and Church is however to be located in the Counter-Reformation, when the Church needed the secular arm (in the grand style) against the Lutherans and renounced its democratic function.>

Q1§128.
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4 The Clergy as Intellectuals

Research into the differing attitudes adopted by the clergy during the Risorgimento, in a dependent relationship with the new religious-ecclesiastic tendencies. Giobertianism, Rosminianism. 6 Episode more characteristic of Jansenism. On the subject of the doctrine of grace and its conversion into a motive force of industrial energy, and of the objection raised by Jemolo to Anzilotti's correct thesis (but where did Anzilotti get it from?), cf. what Kurt Kaser says in Riforma e Controriforma [Reformation and Counter-Reformation] on the doctrine of grace in Calvinism and Philip's book which cites current documents on this conversion. 7

These facts document the process of dissolution of the American religious spirit. Calvinism becomes a secular religion, that of the Rotary Club, just like the theism of the Enlightenment was the religion of European freemasonry, but without the comic-symbolic apparatus of the masons and with the difference that the Rotarian religion cannot become universal -- it is typical of an aristocracy of the elect (the chosen people, the chosen class) that has been and continues to be successful. It functions by a principle of selection, rather than one of generalisation, by a naive and primitive mysticism typical of those who do not think but work like the American industrialists: a principle which may contain within itself the seeds of even a very rapid dissolution. (The history of the doctrine of grace may be of great interest for illustrating the different ways that Catholicism and Christianity adjust to different historical epochs and different countries.)

American facts reported by Philip from which it turns out that the clergy of all the churches, on certain occasions, has functioned as a public opinion in the absence of a middle-ground party and the press belonging to such a party.

5 The Social Origin of the Clergy

The social origin of the clergy is important for estimating its political influence. In the North the clergy [is] popular in origin (artisans and peasantry) while in the South it [is] bound more to the `men of standing' [galantuomini] and the upper class. In the South and the islands the clergy, either individually or as representative of the Church, has quite considerable landed property and goes in for usury. As much as a spiritual guide, the clergy often appears to the peasantry in the guise of the landowner weighing in heavily on the rent (`the interest due to the Church') and as usurer having the weapons of the spiritual as well as the temporal power at his disposal. For this reason the southern peasants want priests from their own village (because they are known, less harsh, and because their family -- in offering a certain target -- comes into play as a conciliatory element) and on occasion they demand the electoral rights of parishioners. Such episodes in Sardinia. 8 (Remember Gennaro Avolio's article in the single issue of La Voce on the southern clergy, which mentions the fact that the southern priests live openly with a woman and have demanded the right to marry.) The territorial distribution of the Popular Party indicates the greater or lesser influence of the clergy and its social activity. In the South 9 (on top of this one must bear in mind the weight of the various fractions: in the South, Naples etc.) the prevailing force is that of the right, in other words the old conservative clericalism. Recall the episode of the Oristano elections in 1913. 10

6 The Clergy, Church Property and Analogous Forms of Landed or Non-Landed Property

The clergy as a type of social stratification must always be taken into account in analysing the composition of the ruling and possessing classes. In a number of countries, national liberal forces have destroyed Church property, but [have
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been] powerless to stop similar and even more parasitic types being recreated because their representatives did not and do not carry out even those functions -- charity, popular culture, public assistance etc. -- that the clergy formerly used to do. The cost of these services certainly used to be a huge one, yet they were not a complete liability. The new stratifications are still more of a liability, since it cannot be said that a function of the following sort is normal: to save 1,000 lire a year, a family of `savings producers' consumes 10,000 lire, forcing malnutrition on a dozen peasant families from whom ground rent and other usurious profits are extorted. Look at whether these 11,000 lire, if put into the land, might not allow a greater accumulation of savings, on top of an increase in the standard of living of the peasants and thus in their intellectual and productive-technical development.

To what extent in the United States is there being formed Church property in the full sense of the term, as well as property of simply an ecclesiastical type? And this notwithstanding the new forms of saving and accumulation made possible by the new industrial structure.

7 Religion [2]

The contradiction created by the non-believing intellectuals who have arrived at atheism and `life without religion' through science or philosophy, but nevertheless maintain that religion is necessary for social organisation -- it is said that science is against life, that there is a contradiction between science and life. But how can the people love these intellectuals, consider them elements of its own national personality[?]

This situation is reproduced in Croce, though less scandalously than has happened in the case of some French intellectuals. (Taine is a classic example, creating the various Maurras of integral nationalism.) 11 I think Croce somewhere makes a disdainful reference to Bourget's Disciple, 12 but is this not the argument that Bourget is really dealing with, albeit with that rationalistic consequentialism typical of French culture?

Kant's position on God and religion between the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. 13

8 Past and Present [1]. Fables. Points on Religion

Current opinion runs thus: religion ought not to be destroyed unless there is something ready to substitute for it in people's minds. 14 But how is one to understand when a substitution has taken place and the old may be destroyed?

Another way of thinking linked to the above. The people, rather the `common people' as one says in these cases, need religion. Naturally, no one thinks they form part of the `common herd', but that each of their neighbours is common, and they therefore say that it is necessary for them, too, to pretend to be religious, so as not to perturb the minds of the others and cast them into doubt. Thus it is that many people no longer believe, every one of them being persuaded that they are superior to the others because they no longer need superstition, but every one of them is persuaded that they have to show they `believe' out of respect for the others.

9 Cultural Questions. Fetishism

How to describe fetishism. A collective organism is comprised of single individuals who form the organism in so far as they are given and actively accept a hierarchy and a particular leadership. If each one of the single members considers the collective organism to be a body extraneous to themselves, it is obvious that this organism no longer exists in reality but becomes a phantom of the intellect, a fetish. It is to be seen whether this very widespread way of thinking is not a residue of Catholic transcendentalism and the old paternalistic regimes; it is common to a series of organisms from the state, to the nation, to the political parties etc. It is natural for this to occur in the Church since, in Italy at least, the toil of centuries that the Vatican has devoted to annihilating any trace of internal democracy and intervention by the faithful in religious activity has been totally successful and this way of thinking has now become second nature to the believer, although it has also, as it happens, determined that special form of Catholicism typical of the Italian people. What is amazing -- and characteristic -- is that this sort of fetishism is reproduced through `voluntary' bodies, not of a `public' or state variety, such as parties and trade unions. One is led to conceiving the relationships between the individual and the organism as a dualism, and to the individual's adopting an external critical attitude towards the organism (if the attitude is not one of enthusiastic and acritical admiration). In any case, the relation is fetishistic. Individuals expect the organism to act, even if they do nothing and do not reflect that, since their attitude is widespread, the organism is of necessity inoperative.

It is further to be recognised that, since a deterministic and mechanical conception of history has wide currency (a common-sense conception bound up with the passivity of the great popular masses), single individuals (seeing that, despite their non-intervention, something nonetheless happens) are led to think that in actual fact there exists above them a phantom entity, the abstraction of the collective organism, a species of autonomous divinity that thinks, not with the head of a specific being, yet nevertheless thinks, that moves, not with the real legs of a person, yet still moves, and so on.

It might seem that some ideologies, such as that of (Ugo Spirito's) actual idealism through which the individual is identified with the state, 15 ought to re-educate the consciousness of single individuals, but it appears that this does not in fact come about since the identification is merely of a verbal and verbalistic nature. Thus it is to be said of any form of `organic centralism', founded on the presupposition -- true only at exceptional moments when popular passions are running high -- that the relation between the governors and the governed is given by the fact that the governors work in the interests of the governed and therefore `must' have their consent, in other words the identification of the individual with the whole must occur, the whole (whatever organism that may be) being represented by the rulers. It may be considered that, just as for the Catholic Church, such a concept is not only useful, but necessary and indispensable, since any form of intervention from below would splinter the Church (which may be seen in churches of a Protestant type), while for other organisms the vital question is not one of passive and indirect but active and direct consent, and hence that of the participation of single individuals, even though this gives an impression of disintegration and chaos. A collective consciousness, which is to say a living organism, is formed only after the unification of the multiplicity through friction on the part of the individuals; nor can one say that `silence' is not a multiplicity. An orchestra tuning-up, every instrument playing by itself, sounds a most hideous cacophony, yet these warm-ups are the necessary condition for the orchestra to come to life as a single `instrument'.

10 The Conception of Organic Centralism and the Priestly Caste

If the constitutive element of an organism is enshrined in a rigidly and rigorously formulated doctrinal system, one has a leadership typical of a caste or priesthood. But is there still a `guarantee' of immutability? No, there is not. Formulas will be recited by heart without changing an iota, but real activity will be quite different. One must not conceive of `ideology', of doctrine as something artificial and superposed mechanically (like clothes cover the skin, and not like the skin which is produced organically by the entire biological animal organism), but historically, as an incessant struggle. Organic centralism imagines it can construct once and for all an organism that is objectively perfect right from the start. This illusion can be dangerous, because it makes a movement sink into a quagmire of personal academic disputes. (Three elements: doctrine, `physical' composition of the society of a given historically determined personnel, real historical movement. The first and second elements fall under the control of associated and deliberative will. The third element reacts on the other two and determines the incessant theoretical and practical struggle to raise the organism to ever higher and more refined collective consciousnesses.) Constitutionalistic fetishism. (History of the constitutions approved during the French Revolution. The constitution voted in by the Convention in 1793 was deposited in an ark of cedar wood in the precincts of the Assembly and its application suspended until the end of the war; even the most radical constitution could be exploited by the Revolution's enemies and hence the necessity for the dictatorship, i. e. a power not limited by fixed and written laws.)

11 Arms and Religion

Guicciardini's claim that two things are absolutely necessary for the life of a state: arms and religion. This formula of his can be translated into various other, less drastic, formulas: force and consent, coercion and persuasion, state and Church, political society and civil society, politics and morals (Croce's ethico-political history), 16 law [diritto] 17 and freedom, order and discipline, 18 of, with an implicit judgement of a libertarian flavour, violence and fraud. In any case, in the political conception of the Renaissance, religion was consent and the Church was civil society, 19 the hegemonic apparatus of the ruling group that did not have an apparatus of its own, in other words did not have a cultural and intellectual organisation of its own, but felt the universal ecclesiastical organisation to be such. The only reason we can consider ourselves out of the Middle Ages is the fact that religion is openly conceived and analysed as `instrumentum regni' [`an instrument of the kingdom'].

The Jacobin cult of the `supreme Being' is to be studied from this point of view. This institution thus appears as an attempt to create an identity between state and civil society, to unify by dictatorial means the constitutive elements of the state in an organic and a wider sense (the state, properly speaking, and civil society) in a desperate search to have the whole of the life of the people and nation in one's grip, but it also appears as the first root of the modern secular state, independent of the Church, which seeks and finds all the elements of its historical personality within itself, within its complex life form.

12 Past and Present [2]. The Spread of Christianity

A reflection that one often reads is that Christianity spread through the world without the need for arms. It is not in my opinion correct. One can say this up to the moment when Christianity became the state religion (in other words up to Constantine's time) but, from when it became the outward way of thinking of a dominant group, its fortunes and its expansion cannot be distinguished from general history and hence of wars; every war has also been a religious war, without exception.

Q8§97.

13 Conflict Between State and Church as Eternal Historical Category

On this subject, cf. the corresponding chapter in Croce's book on politics. 20 One could add that, in a certain sense, the conflict between `Church and state' symbolises the conflict between any system of crystallised ideas representing a past phase of history and present-day practical necessities. The struggle between conservation and revolution etc., between what has been thought and the new thought, between the old that does not want to die and the new that wants to live, and so on. 21

Q6§139.
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14 History of the Intellectuals. Struggle Between Church and State

Different character that this struggle has assumed in different historical periods. In the modern phase, it is the struggle for hegemony in popular education, or at least this is the most salient characteristic to which all others are subordinate. By this token it is the struggle between two categories of intellectuals, the struggle to subordinate the clergy, as a typical category of intellectuals, to state directives, in other words to the dominant class (freedom of teaching -- youth organisation -- women's organisation -- professional organisations

Antonio Gramsci: Reformation and Counter-Reformation