Note 81 — Chapter XIX · FREETHOUGHT IN THE REMAINING EUROPEAN STATES

3. It is noteworthy, indeed, that the “New Science,” as Vico boasted, arose in the Catholic and not in the Protestant world. We might say that, genius apart, the reason was that the energy which elsewhere ran to criticism of religion as such had in Catholic Italy to take other channels. By attacking a Protestant position which was really less deeply heterodox than his own, Vico secured Catholic currency for a philosopheme which on its own merits Catholic theologians would have scouted as atheism. As it was, Vico’s sociology aroused on the one hand new rationalistic speculation as to the origin of civilization, and on the other orthodox protest on the score of its fundamentally anti-Biblical character. It was thus attacked in 1749 by Damiano Romano, and later by Finetti, a professor at Padua, àpropos of the propaganda raised by Vico’s followers as to the animal origin of the human race. This began with Vico’s disciple, Emmanuele Duni, a professor at Rome, who published a series of sociological essays in 1763. Thenceforth for many years there raged, “under the eyes of Pope and cardinals,” an Italian debate between the Ferini and Antiferini, the affirmers and deniers of the animal origin of man, the latter of course taking up their ground on the Bible, from which Finetti drew twenty-three objections to Vico.81 Duni found it prudent to declare that he had “no intention of discussing the origin of the world, still less that of the Hebrew nation, but solely that of the Gentile nations”; but even when thus limited the debate set up far-reaching disturbance. At this stage Italian sociology doubtless owed something to Montesquieu and Rousseau; but the fact remains that the Scienza Nuova was a book “truly Italian; Italian par excellence.”82 It was Vico, too, who led the way in the critical handling of early Roman history, taken up later by Beaufort, and still later by Niebuhr; and it was he who began the scientific analysis of Homer, followed up later by F. A. Wolf.83 By a fortunate coincidence, the papal chair was held at the middle of the century (1740–1758) by the most learned, tolerant, and judicious of modern popes, Benedict XIV,84 whose influence was used for political peace in Europe and for toleration in Italy; and whom we shall find, like Clement XIV, on friendly terms with a freethinker. In the same age Muratori and Giannone amassed their unequalled historical learning; and a whole series of Italian writers broke new ground on the field of social science, Italy having led the way in this as formerly in philosophy and physics.85 The Hanoverian Dr. G. W. Alberti, of Italian descent, writes in 1752 that “Italy is full of atheists”;86 and Grimm, writing in 1765, records that according to capable observers the effect of the French freethinking literature in the past thirty years had been immense, especially in Tuscany.87