Bread and Wine (1936) by Ignazio Silone
“Do you remember the fantastic plans we used to make?”
“To me you seem to be recalling prehistory,” Nunzio said.
“When we went out into the world,” Pietro went on, “we found ourselves in a society that was totally unforeseen, and each one of us had to make his choice — to submit or to put his life in jeopardy. Once upon a time there may have been middle ways, but for our generation after the war they were closed. How many years have passed since then? Barely fifteen, and anyone who saw the two of us here now would never imagine that up to the age of twenty our lives ran parallel and we nursed the same dreams for the future.”
Nunzio seemed nervous and upset. “It’s true that we now belong to two different parties,” he said.
“Two different humanities,” Pietro corrected him.
— Ignazio Silone
Bread and Wine is Ignazio Silone’s moving 1936 novel of the Italian socialist resistance to fascism in the early twentieth century. After only recently adapting to the industrial age of the long 19th century, the agrarian proletariat found themselves confronting the challenges of an emerging global age in the years leading up to World War II. It was an era ushered in by disasters: from the natural (including devastating earthquakes in the teens and twenties that killed tens of thousands of Italians and a flu pandemic that ravaged Europe) to the man-made (most notably the mechanized horrors of the Great War and a global depression in the 1930s). In the face of a rapidly advancing mechanized (and weaponized) society and the advent of mass communication, the former institutions of authority — from a myriad of local and regional assemblies to the all-encompassing Catholic Church — were shaken to their core. Suddenly, the methods of power to subjugate the masses (consolidation of wealth, control of the means of production, allegiance to rigid social/economic hierarchies, vilification of individuality, restrictions on public spaces/speech, adoption of a ritualized/mystical folk mythos, and the exploitation of cultural in-group/out-group dynamics) were harnessed by nationalists in Italy towards a new political force: fascism.
Cast against this backdrop of a bleak modern age were the cafoni — poor, rural Italian peasants who, like their fellow working class brethren throughout Europe, were trapped by the threefold masters of fascism, communism, and capitalism. The hero of Silone’s novel, Pietro Spina, emerges from the peasantry to become a revolutionary, trying to balance the theory of Marxist intellectualism with the gritty reality of the day-to-day lives of the cafoni as they gradually succumb to the nationalist indoctrination of their new fascist masters. On the run from authorities and finding himself at odds with his communist comrades who are too rigidly adopting a similar type of authoritarian dogma, the atheist Spina must take the disguise of a Catholic priest and become Don Paolo Spada. Under this name, he lives among the cafoni, attempting to keep a low profile while simultaneously continuing his resistance to the Blackshirts. As the Catholic Church looks the other way when the political climate shifts to fascism (or, at worst, becomes complicit in its rise), “Don Paolo Spada,” ironically, becomes a saint-like hero to the cafoni as he tells them direct, honest truths that neither parrot the empty platitudes of religious doctrine nor placate the burgeoning fascists. In an age of “alternative facts” and magical thinking, the resistance fighter’s words become a source of comfort. In short, the atheistic revolutionary becomes the one who “keeps Christian honor alive in these parts” through acts of individual resistance to the authoritarian dogmas (political and theological) that had been crushing the spirit of the people. Through his resistance, Spina/Spada acts as the living embodiment of the most Christian virtue: individual sacrifice for the love of the oppressed.
Our love, our disposition for sacrifice and self-abnegation are fruitful only if they are carried into relations with our fellows. Morality can live and flourish only in practical life. We are responsible also for others.
If we apply our moral feelings to the evil that prevails all round us, we cannot remain inactive and console ourselves with the expectation of an ultra-terrestrial life. The evil to be combated is not the sad abstraction that is called the devil: the evil is everything that prevents millions of people from becoming human. We too are directly responsible for all this…
I believe that nowadays there is no other way of saving one’s soul. He is saved who overcomes his individual, family, class selfishness and frees himself of the idea of the resignation to the existing evil.
— Ignazio Silone
Spina/Spada comes to understand that it is not enough to be passive when confronting evil on earth while maintaining faith in some later mystical “better world” in the afterlife. That type of thinking has led to the hypocrisy of religious institutions buttressing the political regimes and economic policies that represent true evil precisely because they cause widespread harm. In this new century, a person’s faith must be placed in (and derive from) the people. If the prevailing social structure perpetuates evil, then the only moral action is to actively resist those institutions. Instead of symbolically celebrating the mythical sacrifice of past religious figures (the “bread and wine” of passive religious ritual), one must be willing to sacrifice oneself in the here-and-now to create that better world on earth by ensuring the safety of the masses against such overwhelming evil (in other words, breaking bread and sharing wine with those who depend upon it for their survival).
The men around the table ate and drank.
“Bread is made of many grains of corn,” said Pietro, “so it means unity. Wine is made of many grapes, so it means unity too. Unity of similar, equal, useful things. Hence truth and fraternity are also things that go well together.”
“The bread and wine of Holy Communion,” an older man said. “The wheat and grapes that are trampled on. The body and the blood.”
“It takes nine months to make bread,” old Murica said.
“Nine months?” exclaimed the mother.
— Ignazio Silone
One of the main themes of Silone’s novel — that which Spina/Spada must grapple with in his personal writing and interactions with the cafoni — is reconciliation: between theory and practical living, between faith in institutions (including the party) and faith in people, between spiritual renewal and bodily security, and between individual sacrifice and communal strength. Perhaps the most important of those is faith, an issue tackled by many post-Marxist philosophers during and after World War II, and one which Silone offers as the primary metaphor of his novel (the bread and wine of the title). For Silone, the Kierkegaardian leap of faith still constitutes belief as the acceptance of the unreasonable; however, the perception of rationality (and reality) has been inverted, so that the choice to make that “leap” is no longer confined to the spiritual realm. In a world where ordinary discourse has moved beyond reason — where “alternative facts” and magical thinking are not the harbingers of personal leaps of faith, but the concrete norms of public rhetoric — then the power of belief must necessarily shift from (private) acceptance to (public) resistance. When irrationality becomes the norm, its acceptance becomes expected — and is quite often demanded! — by the masses who support those in power. The leap of faith made by Spina/Spada is one that must be made by all critical thinking people during times of widespread authoritarian rule where the public and private spheres are equally regulated, and represents a “faith” in reason, facts, truth, and virtue. It is the “unreasonable belief” that rationality (in the form of individual, public resistance) will prevail in the face of mass irrationality, what Silone terms the “collective stupefaction” of fascism.
Ignazio Silone
Silone’s novel is a defining text of the emerging democratic socialism of the mid-twentieth century, but also a fictional counterpart to the post-Marxist engagement with Kierkegaard’s philosophy and religious thought. If we, like the atheist Spina/Spada, accept the former but not the latter, then we must also heed what those post-Marxist thinkers — from Lukács to Adorno and beyond — have concluded about faith: that the political and theological crises of the twentieth century have dislodged faith as the cornerstone of any spiritual doctrine. Indeed, for Adorno, faith was an illustration of so-called negative dialectics. Both are born of suffering, but for Adorno (if not so much, perhaps, for Silone) the twentieth century response to fascism and Stalism had disintegrated or fractured faith from theology and reconstituted it as that which (paradoxically) must be both utilized and overcome through engagement with the historical, which Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith” rejects, according to Adorno, who positions Kierkegaard’s faith as “leaping” outside or beyond the historical. In a sense, faith is suffering — an existential truth certainly shared by writers and thinkers across a spectrum of centuries and ideologies, including Silone, Adorno, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Camus. Even if Silone’s ultimate message in 1936 is not as bleak as Adorno’s post-war perspective, both writers chronicle the same point at which truth borne out of suffering “leaps” away from spirituality and toward “the denunciation of illusion” (to quote from The Dialectic of Enlightenment).
For Silone, that denunciation is symbolized in bread and wine, reconstituted symbols of Christian religious faith that now represent a more earthly communion: the peasants who are trampled upon — like wheat, like grapes — and who are redeemed in their suffering through a unifying, life-sustaining collective force: the socialist resistance to fascist ideology. Like individual grains of corn or grapes, they combine to form a new united corpus — let us call them the Corpus Cafoni — whose bonds represent a faith in human unity when humanity is at its bleakest and most divisive.
In Bread and Wine we see the same set-pieces that have been constructed in our own century around a uniquely American backdrop, even if their ultimate arrangement and performative function have been refashioned to suit the dramaturgy of Trumpism. We might look to Silone’s novel as a text of both comfort and moral orientation as the institutions meant to safeguard our rights are continually placed under siege. Through the testament of Spina/Spada, we come to see that “thoughts and prayers” are meaningless unless we are willing to take action. Our faith must be placed in present realities rather than in spiritual myths, dogmatic institutions, or divisive nationalistic rhetoric. Personal sacrifice in the form of public resistance is required to ensure the safety of the most vulnerable citizens, fostering unity against the divisive forces of power that would rather hope for passive acceptance of their ideology. Only in this active resistance can a renewed faith in a unified humanity fight the violence and lies inherent in the “collective stupefaction” of fascism.
Trump Fiction 