This essay considers religion in Pirandello’s oeuvre from a historical point of view, that is to say, as firmly anchored in a post-Copernican modernity in which, as philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed, “God is dead,” and relativity came to be understood as scientific fact in the wake of Albert Einstein’s investigations. The essay asks whether a consistent meditation on religion can be found in Pirandello’s oeuvre and therefore considers several works, among them, The Late Mattia Pascal; Shoot!; Lazarus; and One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand. Particular focus is given to the ways in which these writings demonstrate Pirandello’s interest in mysticism, a non-dogmatic Catholic Modernism, and his rejection of any transcendent God, a belief which corresponded to his humoristic view of life more generally, tied as they both were to his uneasiness over life’s lack of certainty.

On a cultural level, the Italian Renaissance lifted Europe into a new era of humanism that glorified humanity and shifted attention to the present needs and desires of people. Erasmus translated this humanistic attitude into scholarly pursuits that revealed the frailties and needs of the human authors of Scripture. All of these forces eroded the authority of the Church, leading to dramatic confrontation, both from inside and outside the Church. The Protestant Reformation took advantage of the rift between Christian monarchs and the papacy, successfully fragmenting the unity of Western Christendom. However, it was Copernicus who used the strategy and tools of reasoned arguments to arrive at his heliocentric theory of planetary motion. This bold assertion successfully demonstrated a truth arrived at through reason that differed from the conclusion supported by the authority of the Church. As a result, reason triumphed over faith, and the age of science began. While psychology remained obscured within philosophy and religion during this time, the enduring questions still perplexed scholars and were about to be addressed directly over two centuries of philosophical inquiries prior to psychology’s formal definition as a distinct science.

Can we 'see' photons, black holes, curved spacetime, quantum jumps, the expansion of the universe, or quanta of space? Physics challenges appearances, showing convincingly that our everyday vision of reality is limited, approximate and badly incomplete. Established theories such as quantum theory and general relativity and investigations like loop quantum gravity have a reputation of obscurity. Many suggest that science is forcing us into a counterintuitive and purely mathematical understanding of reality. I disagree. I think that there is a visionary core at the root of the best science. Where 'visionary' truly means formed by visual images. Our mind, even when dealing with abstract and difficult notions, relies on images, metaphors and, ultimately, vision. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, science is not just about making predictions: it is about understanding, and, for this, developing new eyes to see. I shall illustrate this point with some concrete cases, including the birth of quantum theory in Einstein’s intuition, curved spacetimes and quanta of space.

In 1632, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-642) was placed on trial by the Roman Inquisition for daring to claim that the Earth moved. Since then, many people have interpreted this encounter as a battle between science and religion. The story of how Galileo arrived in front of the Inquisition, however, is both more complicated and more interesting than one of simple conflict. When Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-543) suggested that the Earth moved around the Sun in his De revolutionibus of 1543, he launched a debate about more than the structure of the universe. His work called into question the legitimacy of traditional beliefs, and ultimately led Galileo to argue that he, not the theologians of the Catholic Church, had the right to study and interpret the natural world. It was a far more radical position than those taken by other astronomers, like Tycho Brahe (1546-601) and Johannes Kepler (1571-630), who proposed models of the cosmos inspired by religious faith. More than anything, Galileo’s story centers around a single question: Who should have the authority to proclaim the nature of reality?

The birth of physics can be traced to the Copernican, Galilean and Newtonian revolutions of the seventeenth century. The Copernican picture of the world was to replace the geocentric Ptolemaic model. Tycho Brahe's innovations in observation brought about an order of magnitude improvement in the determination of the motions of the planets. These observations resulted in the formulation of Kepler's laws of planetary motion, which were to be crucial in Newton's discovery of the laws of motion.At the same time, Galileo's pioneering telescopic discoveries provided support for the Copernican picture of the world.