Читать книгу The Complete Works of Malatesta Vol. III - Errico Malatesta - Страница 13

Translated from “Sulla via di Damasco,”

L’Agitazione (Ancona) 1, no. 1 (March 14, 1897).

“To listen to him, you’d think he had been touched and revivified by the breath of the truth which earlier hid itself from him, like some unknown deity wrapped in a cloud. That cloud then dispersed by the blast of a rush of ideas and, having looked the new truth in the face, a long sigh welled up from the depths of his chest and he felt like he had received a calling to a more expansive, broader life.”

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Osvaldo Gnocchi Viani carries on in the same vein for a good ­column-full of such prose in which he talks about Him, the great convert, as he ­deserves.122

* * *

Like a new Saint Paul, “He no longer has his former faith.”

He too was startled by a vision on the road to Damascus.

Remember? A voice from on high called out to the apostle, saying: Saul, Saul, why dost thou persecute me? And the Apostle, thereafter known as Paul, stricken by the truth that had hitherto been beyond his knowledge, was converted and received his baptism and became the most ardent propagator of the faith.

You are right, Osvaldo: He has been converted, been baptized and become an apostle of the new… Milanese church: and he too will pen his epistles from Rome to the faithful from various… constituencies, questing for one that might lead him to… martyrdom in Montecitorio:123 a martyrdom, in fact, a lot gentler and more profitable than that suffered by the apostle Paul.

…

You are right, Osvaldo: all you socialist sheep are right. But bear this in mind: that the primitive Christian church went into decline and turned into the Catholic Church, complete with all its brutishness, at the very point when men who, up until that point, stood for differing and opposing doctrines, were reconciled with one another.

The adherents of the new church climbed to the highest, most lucrative levels of the State; the orthodox, the honest disciples, were driven out of the Christian community as heretics.

Catholicism’s victory marked the ruin of Christianity: there was no more talk of the principles of love, equality, and justice, which the Master, the meek workman from Nazareth, had preached to the multitudes!

Would your victory, you electoral socialists, not likewise mark the ruin of the unadulterated, true principles of socialism preached by your very own teachers, whom you today ignore?

May the future, of which even now you claim to be the masters and arbiters, prove us wrong here.

In the meantime, we, the heretics of today, shall stick sure-footedly to the old path!

122 Osvaldo Gnocchi Viani, “Fra due litiganti,” Lotta di Classe 6, no. 8 (February 20–21, 1897). The quotation above differs somewhat from the original, though the differences are minor. Gnocchi Viani was a prominent figure of Italian socialism, dating back to the days of the First International. His reference is to Saverio Merlino’s shift.

123 Montecitorio is the name of the palace in Rome that hosted the Italian chamber of deputies.