This volume is St. Alphonsus’s Verità della Fede, written in his old age and published in 1767, when a flood of impious books was pouring out of Enlightenment Europe and he resolved to answer them. It is translated here from the Italian. So far as we have been able to determine, the work appears in English for the first time; the one exception is the appendix refuting On Preaching, which was included in the nineteenth-century Centenary edition of the saint’s collected works.
The translation
Scripture is given in the Douay-Rheims, with the reference in the text. Where Alphonsus quotes the Latin of Scripture or of the Fathers, we give the Latin and then an English rendering, except where he has already given the sense in his own words, as he often does. His own paragraph numbers are kept throughout. The chapter arguments that stand beneath each chapter title are his.
His authorities
Alphonsus cites from wide reading and from memory, and he is not always exact. He gives a date a few years wrong, assigns a work to the wrong Father, calls a bishop of Tunnuna a bishop of Tours. We have let these stand as he wrote them. To correct them silently would be to hand the reader a book that never existed, and to correct them in footnotes would be to fill the margins with a scholar’s quarrel over a work meant for reading. In two places only, both in his chapter on Islam, where his account could mislead a modern reader on a plain matter of fact, a short note marked [Ed.] gives the correction. Where a name or a reference matters to his argument, his own text carries it.
Alphonsus supplied brief lives of the men he refutes, of Bayle and Lucretius, of Hobbes and Spinoza, of Locke and Voltaire and Mohammed, as notes beneath his text. These are given here in the body of the work, where he placed several of them himself, so that the reader meets each man where the argument first turns to him. A small number of the author’s own explanatory notes are kept at the foot of the page.
The controversies of his age
Alphonsus wrote to refute, and he wrote in the manner of the eighteenth century, which was not a gentle one. Besides the materialists and the deists who are his chief adversaries, the third part of this work argues against the Jews, against the Mohammedans, and against the churches of the Reformation, and it argues in the blunt idiom of its time. We have preserved these pages exactly as he wrote them, softening nothing and omitting nothing, preferring to present the saint as he wrote rather than as he might be rewritten.
The reader therefore has before him a book of 1767, and not a book about 1767. It seemed to us better that he should meet it plainly than that an editor should decide beforehand what he ought to see.
On footnotes
Apart from those two notes, we have added no scholarly apparatus. Alphonsus names his authorities in his own text, and the references to Scripture are given as they occur. A critical edition would want more; a book meant, as this one is, for reading would be the worse for it.