Ovi Magazine Issue #24: Nationalism - Published: 2013-01-31

When Spiritual Chaos Begets Political Unity: How Fr
followers throughout many centuries, any credibility
it still may have had had finally been defeated by
human reason. Incarnating Reason, Beelzebub leads
the modern nation that was formerly plagued by the
sentimentality and irrationality of the church. There
is a certain vulgarity about Satan that serves as shock
value, too. Clearly with the intention of instigating
the Church into reacting to his poem, the poet
refers to many intellectuals in the religious sphere
who were considered heretics and were executed
by the Church for following a rational pattern of
thinking. Among these rebels, Martin Luther is
listed, a historical figure whose doubts about the
authenticity of the Catholic Church led him to found
what is known today as the Protestant religion. The
poem ends with the image of the steam engine, an
invention of the devil, promising Italy prosperity,
defeating the backwardness of the Church, carrying
the united nation into the modern world, and leaving
behind a trail of steam to cloud its Christian past
so that it would fall into oblivion. Satan, the active
rebel with his own personal agenda, was used as a
tool to provoke conservative minds into thinking
about Italy’s future in a modern world.
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Could the legacy of Carducci have existed if
he were not affiliated with masonry? Carducci
himself found his alliance with masonry necessary
to prove his love for his homeland, to push the
nationalist agenda, and to undermine the power of
the clergy. He was not discreet with his belief that
the Christian establishment served as an obstacle for
the consolidation of the divided Italian regions. If
the question “Was it necessary for masonic society
to exist in order to unite Italy?” was posed to him,
Carducci would have probably responded “yes.”
Carducci was initiated in the Loggia Galvani of
Bologna and also became a member of Propaganda,
another masonic lodge in Rome in 1886. However
Angelo Martelli’s book reveals that in many letters
Carducci discloses his faith in the existence of God
and that masonic membership did not demand an
obligatory renunciation of one’s religion from birth.
Contrary to other records on admissions to the
masonic society, Martelli expresses that the mason
was free to practice any religion he pleased. Because
of its scandalous nature, the book theorizes that
Carducci’s bold symbol of Satan to represent progress
overshadows any traditional religious beliefs he may
have had, especially toward the end of his life. Pope
Pius IX, certainly felt that the dominion of Christ had
been attacked by masonic projects. In an encyclical