In contrast to
Meinecke’s view that Machiavelli was a heathen, Maurizio Viroli argues that Machiavelli offered
a civic interpretation of Christianity that stressed its potential compatibility
with republicanism.
Religion is for Machiavelli utterly necessary to found,
preserve, and reform good political orders. He stated this view in the most
unequivocal manner. At the same time he knew very well that the only available
religion was the Christian. Had he believed and argued that Christian religion was
in its essence and hopelessly inimical to good political orders and above all
to republican liberty he would have been compelled to also believe and argue
that good political orders and republican liberty were impossible for the
moderns in general and for the Italians in particular, a conclusion that he
never entertained. Instead, he believed in, and suggested, the possibility of a
civic interpretation of Christianity similar to the one that he knew existed in
his Florence. . . .
Machiavelli was a realist of a very special kind, a refined
realist who displayed all his life some intellectual features that are normally
associated with political idealism and political prophecy. He regarded
knowledge of political reality as the most necessary requisite for effective
political action; he explained in the clearest possible manner that in all
times and all places political leaders are judged on the basis of the effective
results of their actions; finally he insisted on the necessity for any state to
have a strong and reliable military power. All these elements do situate him at
the center of the tradition of political realism. Yet we also find in his
political thought, and in his judgments on specific matters, a strong
inclination to make use of political imagination, in the sense that he was able
to imagine political possibilities that were very remote from reality. Not only did he believe that they
could indeed become true, but he was prepared to work to make them happen. For
him, political reality was made of many elements: passions, power, interests,
intentions, ability to simulate and dissimulate. More than a system of facts,
it was a world of uncertain and ambivalent signs, words and gestures,
accessible, only in part, through a work of interpretation. He was not at all
the champion of the view that politics is knowledge of reality and adaptation to it, but a writer who knew
that political reality is just not there to he observed. He believed that the
true realist, and the true political leader, is a person who is able to imagine
grand ideals, and to work, with prudence, to make them real. To live for great political and moral ideals in spite of the most
disenchanted awareness of the cruelty, misery, and baseness of the human world:
this was the conception of life that Niccolò Machiavelli practiced more than
preached, this was his religion.
* * *
Viroli is speaking at Colorado College in November, 2013. Machiavelli's God was published by Princeton University Press in 2010.
* * *
Viroli is speaking at Colorado College in November, 2013. Machiavelli's God was published by Princeton University Press in 2010.
