Ubi est mors victoria tua?
ubi est mors stimulus tuus?
(1 Cor. 15:55)
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s fatherland,” proclaimed the Roman poet Horace.[1] Such was the sentiment shared by Niccolò Machiavelli in his exaltation of the fatherland (patria), expounded especially strongly in his critique of Christian religion, culminating in Discourses on Livy II.2. Machiavelli perceived a corrupted attitude among the citizenry toward their patria and laid blame at the foot of the altar: “For, had they borne in mind that religion permits us to exalt and defend the fatherland, they would have seen that it also wishes us to love and honour it, and to train ourselves to be such that we may defend it.”[2] While castigating the religion of his day as the source of weak and “effeminate”[3] attitudes toward the patria, he also claimed the mantle of Christian morality to argue that it was permissible and, indeed, laudable to defend and fight for the fatherland.[4] On this latter point, Machiavelli could have located vigorous support in the writings of many great minds throughout the history of Christendom. Yet, at the same time, he deliberately avoided doing so, and especially avoided the fact that a robust conception of the sacrifice and the virtue of dying for one’s patria had developed and reentered the social imagination over the course of the Middle Ages. This is likely no accident, as this conception was anything but Machiavelli’s own. To suffer death for one’s patria presupposed fighting for and defending it. Death inherently occupies a space between the temporal and the eternal; it is inescapably eschatological, inextricably bound up with questions of salvation, sacrifice, and martyrdom in Christian theology and imagination. For both Machiavelli and the medieval mind, sacrifice for the fatherland was a means of attaining glory—albeit in radically different ways.
Continue reading “Machiavelli’s Secularization of Glory”
