Salvation or Damnation, and where Ethics Fits in to all That

Abstract

Ignazio Silone’s novel Bread and Wine explores the complex nature of ethical decision-making in the context of Fascist Italy, a world in which lofty concerns of moral conduct seem the fodder of fools and idealists. Silone uses his central character, firebrand and part-time philosopher Pietro Spina, to plunge his readers into one man’s quest for goodness within the debauchery and despair of war-torn Italy. Pietro’s moral development through the context of his adventures illustrates the challenge of crafting any sound ethical code, and the ease with which one might be lost to cynicism or indifference. The road marks of Pietro’s philosophical evolution are explored through comparisons with Iris Murdoch’s work on moral vision, Elizabeth Anderson’s non-ideal theory, and the three crusaders of Samantha Vice, Ryan Preston-Roedder, and Vanessa Carbonell in their campaign for faith in humanity over cynicism. Sophie Zepf University of Portland zepf19@up.edu https://doi.org/10.7710/2155-4838.1179 Volume 9, Issue 1 Res Cogitans 2 | eP1179 Res Cogitans Ignazio Silone’s novel Bread and Wine takes the readers on a wild ride through fascist Italy, as seen through the eyes of Pietro Spina, a one-man revolution in a world of pessimists. One could present Pietro as a less romantic version of James Bond, in his travels as a secret Communist revolutionary, complete with a priest disguise, clandestine meetings, and lots of secret note-passing. Throw in a bunch of worldweary Italian peasants, and Silone has himself a novel! Unconventional as it may be, Pietro’s search for justice in the harsh climate of fascist Italy strikes a familiar chord within anyone who has tried looking for light in what seems to be the darkest hour. Throughout his adventures, Pietro’s own philosophical evolution sheds light on the real life complexities of exercising moral judgment. This complexity can be usefully unpacked by drawing on Iris Murdoch’s work on moral vision, Elizabeth Anderson’s non-ideal theory, and recent work urging the need for faith in humanity to combat the threat of cynicism. Through Pietro, Silone illustrates the challenge of crafting any sound ethical code, while still providing a ray of hope in the tale of a good man’s fight for justice and truth. Both Pietro Spina and Iris Murdoch are connected through their particular and unique sense of moral vision. Pietro Spina first enters the reader’s awareness as a sort of ghostly rumor, floating above the mundane chatter of the other characters’ lives. The novel begins with two men named Nunzio and Concettino visiting Don Benedetto, a wizened and world-weary priest who was once their childhood teacher. Their conversation quickly turns to Pietro, another former student. Pietro is given a larger-thanlife reputation as an exiled firebrand and proponent of revolutionary communism. As it turns out, Nunzio runs into Pietro on his way back home, and quickly learns that Pietro has returned, hell-bent on turning Italy away from its fascist course. Nunzio represents the sentiment of the average Italian when he dryly tells Pietro, “The ordinary person generally doesn’t have any choice at all. The conditions in which he lives are prefabricated for him” (Silone 32). Pietro responds, aghast, to this dour condemnation of life with a cry: “A man who thinks with his own mind and remains uncorrupted is a free man...If you are lazy, callous, servile, you are not free” (Silone 33). Unlike Nunzio, Pietro is afire with a moral vision for Italy beyond the daily misery enforced in a totalitarian state resting on the backs of a peasant population. He insists that more can be done to bring about a better world. In this initial verbal sparring, one can draw parallels between Pietro’s philosophy of morality and Murdoch’s notion of moral vision. Like Pietro, Murdoch believes that morality greatly depends on one’s point of view, in the sense that “will continually influences belief... and is ideally able to influence it through a sustained attention to reality... As moral agents we have to try to see justly, to overcome prejudice... to direct reflection” (Murdoch 39). Murdoch diverges from typical Western thought in her Zepf | Salvation or Damnation commons.pacificu.edu/rescogitans eP1179 | 3 conception of morality as a personal effort to see past one’s distortions or “fantasies” through the practice of unbiased reflection, which Murdoch labels as moral “attention.” Murdoch emphasizes the very personal, and thus biased, nature of morality. In the case of Bread and Wine, Murdoch would probably say that Nunzio is blinded by his complacency, particularly as a rich man in a position of social privilege, and cannot see the moral work waiting to be done. Like Pietro, Murdoch values the sort of personal reflection, or “thinking with one’s own mind,” which can help overcome the social conventions or personal neuroticisms which may blind us from moral truthseeking. As one might imagine, this sort of moral effort is a continual journey, not simply a onetime epiphany. Murdoch continually emphasizes that morality is an eternal struggle which requires relentless effort to improve our clarity about reality, and our ensuing moral options within that reality. Pietro Spina represents this very journey in a literal sense, as his travels though Italy act as a mirror for the evolution of his moral philosophy in life. Pietro is initially very ill, and takes on the disguise of a priest to evade capture from the Italian police, or carabinieri. He travels to a small rural town called Pietrasecca to convalesce, and in the process gets to know the local peasant population. Pietro’s experience there draws many parallels to an example put forward by Murdoch herself illuminating the nature of personal moral improvement. He starts off with a great disdain for the superstitious ignorance and political complacency of the peasants. At one point he declares, “I feel like a chunk of rotten meat surrounded by flies” (Silone 69). His position as a priest make him privy to simple lives of the peasants, and their inability to think beyond survival for the next harvest, or even the next day. He spends all his time buried in his communist papers. In the same way, Murdoch presents the image of conflict between a mother and a daughter-in-law, M and D. M originally thinks D is a simpleton with poor manners. However, the key part comes in when M thinks, “Let me look again” such that M “reflects deliberately about D, until gradually her vision of D alters... The change is not in D’s behavior but in M’s mind” (Murdoch 17). In the same way, Pietro truly begins his moral journey in Pietrasecca, as he changes his opinions about the worth of the local people. The key to both Pietro and M changing their minds is their effort to extend “loving attention,” in Murdoch’s words, towards the situation in which they find themselves. Pietro for once allows his emotions to influence him when he comes to befriend a young woman in Pietrasecca named Christina (with a wee bit of infatuation to help things along...). After conversing in depth with Christina, he finds, “In this lovely Christina I have found many features of my own adolescence... the same infatuation with the absolute, the same rejection of ...ordinary life, even the same readiness for self-sacrifice” (Silone 87). PiVolume 9, Issue 1 Res Cogitans 4 | eP1179 Res Cogitans etro’s eventual reexamination of his opinion of the peasants emphasizes Murdoch’s point that increasing mental maturity can help people throw off prejudices which dilute one’s understanding of reality. Both Murdoch and Pietro are very deeply invested in the concept of freedom. While Pietro’s passions are subsumed within a greater vision for Italy, one could say that he ultimately pursues the same moral vision as Murdoch, what she calls the “Good.” Murdoch places the Good as the “single perfect transcendent non-representable and necessarily real object of attention” to which humans gravitate (Murdoch 54). According to Murdoch, the Good is a sort of Platonic perfect ideal which lies at the heart of humanity’s curious, questioning nature. The Good is transcendent in the sense that, if one “sees” the Good properly, it draws one onwards in the journey away from natural selfishness towards a “magnetic perfection” of moral truth. In the same way, Pietro’s slow dawning of compassion for the locals makes him to start to question his entrenched views on Communism as the solution to all life’s problems. He asks himself, “Is it possible to take part in political life... and remain sincere? Have I then, escaped from the opportunism of a decadent Church only to end up in the Machiavellism of a political sect?” (Silone 88). As of yet, Pietro does not have any of the answers to these questions. However, as Murdoch might say, he at least begins to ask the right questions. As Pietro slowly begins to move away from his original Communist intentions towards a more spiritual awakening, one could argue that he follows an evolution similar to that of Rawlsian justice. Like Rawls, Pietro starts out with an ideal theory of justice, wrapped in the fiery cloak of Communist revolutionary grandeur. When he first begins to talk with the working-class Italian peasants, called the cafoni, he is shocked by their lack of concern for the status of Italy and the oppression of the government. Pietro insists, “Don’t you think that one day the landowners might be expropriated and their land given to the poor? ...Don’t you think that one day laws might be made by you in favor of all?” (Silone 130). Like Rawls, Pietro is a visionary who wishes to reach for perfection, for someday, even if that day has not yet arrived. Both believe that justice is intrinsically linked to the concept of fairness, and societal distribution of all benefits and burdens should be fair for all citizens, who are all of equal worth. Rawls believed that one could come up with these rules to structure society if one start