Manzoni poeta teologo (1809-1819)

The phrase "poeta teologo", apart from the technical sense, is here assumed after Vico to mean the category of the wise who founded (or brought back) the civilization of nations making it emerge from barbarism. A scrupulous reader of the "Scienza nuova", the young Manzoni draws from it the definition of a possible role for humanities, on the background of a Europe ravaged by the Napoleonic Wars and reduced to an immense battlefield. Thus the present essay examines Manzoni's ten-year-long production, from "Urania", where a well aware Manzoni wears the "bende" and the "manto" of the theologian poet for the first time, to the second "Pentecoste", where he announces the advent of a new age of freedom and peace. The "Inni Sacri" and the "Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica" have an outstanding importance in our monograph, but great care is also taken over both the brief idyllic season marked by the rhapsody "A Parteneide" and the preface to "Vaccina", and the first draft of "Conte di Carmagnola". Either the political themes of an incipient Risorgimento or the more essentially literary themes about poetics and canon meet the theological and moral ones (the vexata quaestio of Manzoni's alleged jansenism is related to the latter). It eventually comes out the noble and meditative portrait of a man in quest, whose clear and uneasy conscience gradually considers the knots of human behaviour, between Nature and Grace, impulse and virtue, submission and freedom, in saint Augustine's perspective of the construction of the civitas Dei, a community of saints: an itinerarium mentis new to a large degree, surprisingly found among the folded papers which fill Manzoni's writing desk and library.