Collegio Mellerio Rosmini - Domodossola (VB)

The Mellerio – Rosmini College is one of the most ancient and prestigious cultural institution in Piemonte.
Founded in the 1818 thanks to a donation by the Count Giacomo Mellerio, from the 1838 the school and the college and the education of the students were entrusted to the wise guidance of the Rosminians. Thanks to the Rosminians’ hard work, the College was soon enlarged and the little college founded in the 1818 was enlarged and after few years become one of the most famous and prestigious multi – functional educational institution in Italy.
In the 1875, as the number of students interested in attending the Rosminian’s lessons, the College and the School were moved in the current huge structure, which can host more than 400 boarders.
From the 1875 untill the Nineties, many famous and historical personages attended the Domodossola’s Rosmini College, like the poet Clemente Rebora, general Raffaele Cadorna, general Giovanni Chiossi, the explorer Ambrogio Fogar and the scientists Giorgio Spezia and Piero Angela.
In the 1998 the Administration of the College was given to the “Rosmini College Cooperative”, a new society founded by some teachers of the high school, which is working now with the goal to maintain the school and renew and relaunch the structure throught the organization of many cultural initiatives, especially for foreign students.

ANTONIO ROSMINI - SERBATI
(Rovereto 25/03/1797 – stresa 1/7/1853)

Antonio Rosmini – Serbati was born in Rovereto, Italy, in the 1797.  He belonged to a noble and wealthy family, at an early age he decided to enter the Catholic Church.
After studying at Pavia and Padua, he took orders in 1821. 
In 1828 he founded a new religious order, the Institute of Charity, known generally as the Rosminians.The members might be priests or laymen, who devoted themselves to preaching, the education of youth, and works of universal charity--material, spiritual and intellectual. They have been working in Italy, England, Ireland, France Wales, New Zealand, Kenya, Tanzania, India, Venezuela, and America. In London they belong to the historical church of St Etheldreda, Ely Place, Holborn.
His works, “The Five Wounds of the Holy Church” and “The Constitution of Social Justice”, aroused great opposition, especially among the Jesuits, and in 1849 his pamphlet were put upon the Index. Rosmini at once declared his submission and retired to Domodossola and then to Stresa, where he died.
Before his death he had the satisfaction of knowing that his works were reaccepted, that is, proclaimed free from censure by the Congregation of the Index.  Twenty years later, the word “dismissed” (dimittantur) became the subject of controversy, some maintaining that it amounted to a direct approval, others that it was purely negative and did not imply that the books were free from error. The controversy continued till 1887, when Leo XIII finally condemned forty of his propositions and forbade their being taught.
In 1848 Rosmini took part in the struggle which had for its object emancipation from Austria, but he was not an initiator of the movement which ended in the freedom and unity of Italy. In fact, while eager for the deliverance of Italy from Austria, his aim was to bring about a confederation of the states of the country, which was to be under the control of the pope.
The most comprehensive view of Rosmini's philosophical standpoint is to be found in his “Sistema filosofico”, in which he set forth the conception of a complete encyclopaedia of the human knowledge, synthetically conjoined, according to the order of ideas, in a perfectly harmonious whole. Contemplating the position of recent philosophy from Locke to Hegel, and having his eye directed to the ancient and fundamental problem of the origin, truth and certainty of our ideas, he wrote: "If philosophy is to be restored to love and respect, I think it will be necessary, in part, to return to the teachings of the ancients, and in part to give those teachings the benefit of modern methods" (Theodicy, a. 148). He examined and analysed the fact of human knowledge, and obtained the following results:

1. That the notion or idea of being or existence in general enters into, and is presupposed by, all our acquired cognitions, so that, without it, they would be impossible.
2. that this idea is essentially objective, inasmuch as what is seen in it is as distinct from and opposed to the mind that sees it as the light is from the eye that looks at it
3. that it is essentially true, because being and truth are convertible terms, and because in the vision of it the mind cannot err, since error could only be committed by a judgment, and here there is no judgment, but a pure intuition affirming nothing and denying nothing
4. that by the application of this essentially objective and true idea the human being intellectually perceives, first, the animal body individually conjoined with him, and then, on occasion of the sensations produced in him not by himself, the causes of those sensations, that is, from the action felt he perceives and affirms an agent, a being, and therefore a true thing, that acts on him, and he thus gets at the external world, these are the true primitive judgments, containing the subsistence of the particular being (subject), and its essence or species as determined by the quality of the action felt from it (predicate).
5. that reflection, by separating the essence or species from the subsistence, obtains the full specific idea (universalization), and then from this, by leaving aside some of its elements, the abstract specific idea (abstraction)
6. that the mind, having reached this stage of development, can proceed to further and further abstracts, including the first principles of reasoning, the principles of the several sciences, complex ideas, groups of ideas, and so on without end
7. finally, that the same most universal idea of being, this generator and formal element of all acquired cognitions, cannot itself be acquired, but must be innate in us, implanted by God in our nature. Being, as naturally shining to our mind, must therefore be what men call the light of reason. Hence the name Rosmini gives it of ideal being; and this he laid down as the fundamental principle of all philosophy and the supreme criterion of truth and certainty. This he believed to be the teaching of St Augustine, as well as of St Thomas, of whom he was an ardent admirer and defender.