IGNA<:JO SILONE
35
failure. Look what has become of his students, they are all supporters
of the fascist regime. "I tried arguing with some my former pupils.
I took the trouble of refuting point by point the ideology of the dic-
tatorship, that obscene hash of inanities concocted out of the spurious
erudition of a handful of drunken doctors and propounded in the
name of the state. It took me a long time to find out that I was
wasting my time because those to whom I spoke did not take the non-
sense seriously themselves. Nevertheless they are faithful servants of
the dictatorShip, they compete desperately for the honors it has to
bestow, and outvie each other in acts of devotion to it at every oppor-
tunity." The only one of his pupils whom he can admire is Spina,
and he cannot be consoled by this because he knows whatever good
Spina has done "was not because of his religious education but against
and in spite of it." But the young man confesses his own doubts, dubs
himself a bad revolutionary and remarks that it was a religious im-
pulse that had brought him into the revolutionary movement, even
though once within the movement, he rid himself of religious ideas.
Perhaps his religious education has made him a bad revolutionary, but
without it would he ever have ever become a revolutionary~ "Should
I ever have taken life seriously?" he asks. The old priest develops a
mystical justification of revolutionary activity. "Might not the ideal of
social justice that is animating the masses today be one of the
pseudonyms the Lord is using to free Himself from the control of the
churches and the banks?"
What is most important to remark about this wonderful scene, in
which the conversation moves back and forth between the two
speakers like a despairing shudder of the human spirit, turning first to
one man and then the other, testing the capacities of each in turn
for reassurance, confidence, affirmative and genial words, is that the
old priest is stronger and more steadfast, and in the end his ethical
mysticism prevails. "The evil I see around me," says Don Benedetto,
"is deeper than politics. It
ic;
a canker. You cannot heal a putrefying
corpse with warm poultices. There is the class struggle, the town and
the country, but underlying all these things there is man, a poor,
weak, terrified animal." When the young revolutionary asks "What
is to be done?" the priest answers: "What our country lacks is not
the critical spirit. ...
Perhaps what it lacks is men ....
No word
and no gesture can be more pen.uasive than the life, and, if necessary,
the death, of a man who strives to be free, loyal, just, sincere, dis-
interested. A man who shows what a man can be."
With these words of Don Benedetto the waverings of Pietro
Spina end. Henceforward he is no longer an anxious interrogator but
a resolute servant of an ethical ideal. "A Christianity denuded of all
religion and all church control" can justify his continuing that work
