Giovanni Papini: Nietzsche, Secular Religion, and Catholic Fascism

Abstract

The article considers the religious politics of Giovanni Papini, an Italian, avant-garde intellectual of the early twentieth century whose spectacular conversion to Catholicism after World War I ultimately produced a distinct and little studied form of Catholic fascism that was anti-clerical rather than clerical. It argues that his early Nietzschean commitment to creating a secular religion for Italy was not contradicted by his Catholic turn but in some ways actually advanced by it since his idiosyncratic Catholic faith functioned more like a secular than a traditional religion. In Papini's vision, Jesus was an overturner of values much like Nietzsche, and his religious ideal involved a synthesis of Jesus with Dionysianism. In the 1920s, however, the vision remained abstract because Papini had no clear politics. The picture changes in the 1930s when he adopts the Catholic fascism that he hopes will advance a new Latin–Catholic civilization. Yet, even then, Papini's religious views, although Catholic, entailed a commitment to creating a ‘new man’, one that he hoped might be advanced by fascism's quest for empire. The article concludes that these complexities complicate the usual sharp separation between fascist ‘political religion’ and Catholic ‘traditional religion’ and, thus, that this relation needs to be rethought.