Locating the Significance of Providence in Early Modern Neapolitan Political Thought

The increasing scholarly focus on Neapolitan political thought as well as on Vico's political philosophy has failed to encompass the Neapolitan intellectual context in its complexity.

Ever since Jules Michelet discovered Vico's Scienza Nuova in the first decades of the nineteenth century the scholarship has mostly concentrated on it as the key text of Neapolitan thought. However, this situation has changed recently and Vico's earlier texts have acquired more significance, as complementary to Vico's masterpiece for the development of the rhetorical and linguistic founda­tions of his political philosophy.

In re-evaluating his early works, Diritto Universale was the last to come under scrutiny by the academic community. Published between 1712 and 1713, this text presents Vico's understanding of Roman Law as the union of rheto­ric and jurisprudence. The originality of Vico's piece has been settled on his understanding of Roman law as a complex linguistic history.¹¹ And yet, it has not been studied as the paramount cultivation of philology, history and rhet­oric, which was started by the previous generation of Neapolitan jurists. Vico owed a great deal to Valletta's generation, whose political and legal thought he continued?²

In the scholarship there is no mention of the intellectual background of Diritto Universale. It has not been considered that Vico accepted Valletta's invitation to study the spirit of the laws over time, through which he minted his idea of the caducity of the laws. Nor that in dialogue with Valletta, Vico stated that the laws should be understood according to the circumstances in which they emerged.

According to Vico, some Neapolitan jurists had achieved the synthesis of private human interests in legal practice, especially Francesco Ventura to whom the Diritto was dedicated, but also Gaetano Argento and the great ^{[941] [942] Domenico Caravita, who had shown their skills in crucial European and local legal cases.[943] [944] [945] [946] [947] [948] In Vico's opinion, these outstanding Neapolitan jurists had found a way to reconcile private interests in their legal practice. Furthermore, they had succeeded in reconciling competing interests and statecraft?4 Vico con­sidered Giuseppe Valletta his most important predecessor. The reason was twofold: because Valletta created and shared the best library of the kingdom where they formed their minds, and because of his writings on Neapolitan and European developments on jurisprudence over the last decades of the sev­enteenth century. At a crucial moment for the kingdom in the aftermath of the Revolt of Masaniello, Valletta gained rapidly a prominent place in the city in the 1670s until he became a representative of the people?5 This position allowed him to have a privileged understanding of the developments of the government that he shared with Gregorio Caloprese and the members of dif­ferent Neapolitan academies, especially the Accademia Palatina of the duke of Medinacoeli (1698-1701)?6}

Regarding the place of Grotius in that Neapolitan context, scholarship has concentrated on Vico's intellectual background.

D'Andrea referred to Grotius in his Risposta al trattato delle regioni della Regina Cristianisssima sopra il Ducato del Brabante (1667), where he wrote on the conflict between France and Spain.^{[950] [951] [952] [953] [954] [955] He turned to Grotius on matters of international law. In this work Grotius's name appeared next to those of Vitoria, Molina, Mariana, Suarez and Vazquez de Menchaca.21}

The case of Valletta is the best documented. Ivo Comparato provided the evidence and gave exhaustive analyses of Valletta's uses of Grotius's texts in Valletta's Risposta ad amico, sopra le ragioni della cittd di Napoli per l’assistenze domandate alla fabrica della nuova moneta (1675),22 Disceptationes forenses (1677),2³ Intorno al procedimiento ordinario e canonico nelle cause che si trat- tano nel Tribunale del S. Officio nella Cittd di Napoli (1691-94)2⁴ and Discorso Jilosofico in materia TInquisizione, et intorno al correggimento della Filosofia di Aristotele (ca.1696).2⁵

In the first text, Risposta ad amico, Valletta referred to Grotius to argue that the monarch should guarantee that the exterior value of the coin coincides with the internal one, for matters regarding the coin belong to the field of natural law and the Prince had no discretional right over natural law.^{[956] [957] [958] [959] Like Grotius, Valletta argued that in the exchange of goods and commerce the coin maintains the stable value formerly contracted by the monarch and the peo­ple.}

A few years later, Valletta published a compilation in the Disceptationes of his best juridical works. Written one decade after the Risposta of his â€?praecep­tor meus', D'Andrea, Valletta's Disceptationes was an attempt to continue the renewal of the Neapolitan legal practice that Vico would celebrate two decades later in his Diritto Universale. The Disceptationes included different legal cases that Valletta wanted to share with his Neapolitan colleagues to expand their knowledge of the intellectual sources and commentators of Roman Law?⁹ Valletta was convinced that samples of real cases deeply embedded in eru­dition could thrust further the developments of legal practice and juridical science. Regarding these legal cases, in private correspondence with Antonio Magliabechi in the 1670s, Valletta expressed his intention to publish his Disceptationes to make available the new elements of European political and juridical culture.^[960] According to Valletta and D'Andrea, their renewal included the diffusion and application of new models offered by Europeanjurispru- dence and the history to the southern kingdom. In Comparato's analysis, the accomplishments of their innovations in legal practice were primarily meth­odological and consisted of the application of new conceptual instruments^¹ However, even if they initially declared their intention to avoid the discussion of the principle of authority their approach led inevitably to its deconstruction.

For Comparato, there is enough evidence to establish the continuity between D'Andrea's Risposta and Valletta's Disceptationes. While the first piece, in 1667, already demonstrated D'Andrea's mastery of European juridical literature, nat­ural law and international law,3² Valletta's work confirmed the selection and showed the interaction of European and Neapolitan counterparts thereof.33

The display of mastery of European sources in Valletta's legal practice was also a way to show his superiority as an interpreter and executioner of the law in Neapolitan law courts. For instance, in a legal case on the succession right in Naples, Valletta found the opportunity to refer to Alciato, Cujas, Bodin, Godefoy and Grotius.3⁴ Likewise, in other cases, Valletta referred to Grotius's erudition on Latin texts and his elegant and cultured jurisprudence^⁵

Ultimately, the institution of his erudition in the Disceptationes established his authority as a legal commentator of his time, a time that he considered as primitive and dominated by natural law, which was still a valid reference in legal practice. Valletta quoted almost literally a passage from De iure belli.36 In this excerpt, Valletta argued for the need to defeat the primitive elements of society: early forms of property (that according to Cicero were not natural but occupational), primitive laws and forms of commerce:"

After redefining legal practice, a more significant challenge came in 1688 when the Roman Inquisition opened a case against the former members of the already closed Accademia degli Investiganti, known as the trial of the atomists- atheists (1688-1697). In those years Valletta and Serafino Biscardi, the later fis­cal to the Royal Court of Auditors, pronounced against the procedures of the Roman Inquisition, in particular torture. There was an antecedent piece on this topic: in 1668 Domenico De Rubeis, who happened to be another reader of Grotius and had written against torture in his Forensium certaminum spec­imen.^[961] In this manner, a certain idea of the caducity of primitive laws, and principally of torture as primitive element of legal practice, went in crescendo until the end of the century.

By around 1696 Valletta wrote the manuscript �Al Nostro ss.Mo Padre Innocenzo xii intorno al procedimento ordinario e canonico nelle cause che si trattano nel Tribunale del S. Officio nella Citta di Napoli’.^[963] This manuscript became immediately well-known as a defence of the libertas philosophandi of the members of the Accademia degli Investiganti, still under process by the Roman Inquisition.

The Discorso, as this text was known, was an extremely sophisticated piece that aimed at settling the achievements of the Investiganti in the history of Western philosophy. It circulated in several versions before its publication in 1732. Curiously enough, the authors discussed therein are not introduced, giv­ing the impression that it was written for an audience fully emerged in the contexts of the discussions of the Investiganti. However, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum had forbidden most of them, and this made it a key piece for the intellectual history of the circulation of forbidden texts in Naples.

The Discorso included a history of ancient and contemporary commentar­ies on the bible and the Church Fathers published all around Europe. Two of the most complicated matters of this account were the theological matters on the immortality of the soul and God’s providence. For instance, for Valletta Democritus was a crucial source for the history of the notion of providence. He presented Democritus’s idea of providence as an imaginary force of nature formed by human’s needs that gradually discloses to the human mind over time. At the core of this account emerged an argument on the utility of main­taining providence and the Catholic Church as the foundations of politics to overcome and set aside the problem of scepticism. This concern is already present in Valletta's Risposta ad amico where he expressed his intention to reformulate the political foundations of the State and the civil laws, put at stake by what he called the inflation of opinions that circulated in his time. Valletta aimed to establish a universal principle to tackle scepticism and the multiplicity of the bilateral relations mediated exclusively by the sovereign - as was the common practice in the Spanish monarchy.^{[964] [965] [966] For Comparato, scep­ticism was another reason to look at Grotius's theory, for it allowed Valletta to start the reconstruction of the foundations of his theory of the State without making crucial decisions on topics related to confessional matters at the begin­ning of his enterprise^2}

Central in the Discorso and derived from the problem of scepticism was Valletta's discussion of appetitus societatis. The multiplication of opinions regarding human nature that resulted in man's unsociability was Valletta's main concern. He conceived humans as unsocial beings. In his discussion of their moral capacity, humans in the state of nature had no capacity to sign a contract or to establish a civil state, nor to maintain their bonds to natural laws. They lacked the rationality needed to understand natural laws and the distinction between natural law and ius civile. Essentially, at the beginning of time, for Valletta, human beings had no moral faculty for individual freedom^³ Thus despite the choice of Grotius's theory, Valletta did not share his account of sociability. This phenomenon can be explained by one of two factors: either Grotius was indeed D'Andrea's choice, as Comparato has suggested, or Grotius's theory was useful for Valletta to initially structure his political theory, while he began departing from Grotius in the following decades during which Valletta became more aware of the kind of theory he wanted to build.

Ultimately, the constant element in Valletta's enterprise was to find the presence of an immutable element in civil life, which he found in a constant external thread, superior to positive law. With this immutable element Valletta intended to build a new set of norms to regulate the performance of the Prince and the public institutions of the State.

The thread that Valletta needed was a universal idea of justice to measure the economic and political disorders of the kingdom with the Spanish mon­arch and the barbarity of the Roman Inquisition with the Pope.^{[967] [968] These were the bilateral relations that he constantly fought. To build this political vision, Valletta's proposal consisted of creating a system based on a historical and uni­versal analysis of the law to undergird norms sufficiently truthful to make them evident and intrinsically binding. The element capable of providing stability to the new system and set of norms was his newly minted notion of providence understood as human needs over time. This was his solution to the problem of human sociability and the lack of appetitus societatis brought to Naples by the �inflation of opinions'.}

This explanation is supported by the rhetoric employed in Valletta's text, the aim of which was to persuade the reader of the utility of maintaining the authority of the church, and to warn against the imprudence of the academics who entered into matters of faith. In open confrontation with the Inquisition, this was also a rhetorical invitation to the church to avoid mixing �such delicate matters of theology' with politics. Actually, in his account of natural philoso­phy, Valletta invalidated theological texts by arguing their lack of reliability.

In the Discorso, the idea of the impossibility of grasping an indisputable and universal idea of truth is found, forging Valletta's preference for a discussion on providence. He wrote at great length on the poverty of the human intellect to understand such difficult matters of truth. This is undoubtedly the strong­est argument of the text, for Valletta argued that the price that human beings had to pay for the liberty of their intellect, the libertas philosophandi, was the recognition of the abyss that separated them from the knowledge of GodΛ⁵ As is evident by the tone of this statement, this was a rhetorical invitation for the development of a philosophical position in order to obtain more liberties, such as the liberty to investigate and, more importantly, political liberty. It is in this sense that the Discorso can be considered as an argument for the separation of matters of faith from matters of politics in line with Grotius's Erastianism, and in line with the texts of his contemporaries Di Fusco and Caravita.

By 1691 to 1695 Valletta was put forward as a representative of the square of the people, one of the most important functions in the City of Naples, and as the advocate of the poor. By this period Valletta was convinced of his incorpo­ration to a Republic where honesty and prestige ruled, that is to the Republic of Letters.^{[969] [970]}

In his seminal work, Comparato affirmed that since his early work the Risposta Valletta turned to Grotian natural law, which had already circulated in Naples long before the revisions of Hobbes, Pufendorf and Spinoza, and the English political doctrines. In hindsight one can say that Grotian natural law anticipated a specific way of writing about politics that would have found its full expression in the mature Enlightenment, and on particular themes for the kingdom, mainly the law, justice, and the coin, on which the most vivid and thoughtful minds of the new century focused their efforts.

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