IGNA-?,IO SILONE
sleep. He got up again, sat down at the table, reopened his notebook
and wrote:
"Is it possible to take part in political life, to devote oneself to
a party, and remain sincere?
Has not truth for me become party truth? Has not justice for
me become party justice?
Have not party interests ended by deadening all my discrimina-
tion between moral values? Do I, too, not despise them as petty
bourgeois prejudices?
Have I escaped from the opportunism of a decadent church to
fall into bondage to the opportunism of a party?" ,
Now consider what Spina has tried to escape and what he found
necessary to reject. It is nothing less than the Marxist party!
No wonder the old priest was more stf::adfastin his ethical mystic-
ism than the young revolutionary in the philosophy of Marx! Pietro
Spina has fled the revolutionary party. Don Benedetto has fled the
church. But God can accommdoate himself to personal relationships
while social revolution insists on political relationships. God is at least
as accessible outside as through the church. But can the revolution
be attained without the revolutionary party? The instruments for pro-
ducing prayer can be seized by the single individual. The instruments
of economic production are not so portable.
But the revolutionary party, according to Spina, destroys one's
enthusiasm by destroying discrimination between moral values which
it regards as petty bourgeois prejudices. An absolute contradiction.
Without the party, one's efforts are incommensurable with the revolu-
tion, can breed only despair. On the other hand the party destroys
enthusiasm. It is necessary to choose and Spina chooses ethics against
politics.
What are we to think of this? In one sense Spina is surely
justified. There are class values and moral values and the relation-
ship between these values h".s very likely not been made sufficiently
preciseby Marxists. I do not intend to analyze these relationships here
nor can 1. I take it for granted that
some
moral values are indivisible
from the class values of the proletariat and others are not. But truth
and justice are not merely petty bourgeois prejudices. Perhaps the
mostprofound thing in
Bread and Wine
is the recognition that what
moral values
do
to an individual has some bearing on our determina-
tion of what moral values are. Now just as there are class values and
moral values there is collective inspiration and individual inspiration.
When a collectivity faces the realization of its historical role, as the
Russianproletariat did in 1917, it swells with an ecstacy vast enough
to lift the individual far higher than his own powers of personal en-
thusiasm. Even the poor peasants of Fontamara, as we have seen,
37
