A Review of Italian Modernism

The future historian of Modernism will be much embarrassed by the contradictory appreciations and misjudgments which are to be found in our contemporary literature on this subject. One book presents Modernism as a movement of the Latin mind, distrusting individualism and laying stress upon the corporate element in religion; another writer, on the contrary, characterizes Modernism as “a spirit of anarchy, of individualism, of personal distinction and culture.” To some writers Modernism is the greatest spiritual movement ever produced inside the Catholic Church, while to others it is an insignificant and useless dream of a few not completely developed minds. Consequently some of them outline the development of Modernism as an anecdotic history without a real unity in purpose, while others conceive of it as of a system of theology derived from certain fixed and definite philosophic premises.