Emilio Comba

Emile/ Emilio Comba was born on 31 August 1839 in San Germano Chisonehe was the son of Jean-Pierre Combe, a teacher at the Waldensian school, and his wife Jeanne Vinçon. As was not unusual after the decision of the Waldensian Tavola to pivot towards Italy, Emilio would Italianize his family name to Comba, while sometimes still using the French form in later life.  Taught by his father in his early education, he attended the Latin School of Pomaretto for a year and, after his father's transfer to the parish of Angrogna in 1852, Emilio transferred to the Waldensian College of Torre Pellice. During his high school years Comba gained a particular passion for historical studies, founding a literary circle (‘Balziglia’) with other students, and publishing a series of biographies on the popes.

After completing his studies at the College in 1859, he commenced the study of theology at the Ecole de théologie dell'Oratoire of Geneva, an ‘Awakened’ foundation which opposed the Enlightenment-inspired rationalism of the University theology faculty. Comba would be there from 1859 to 1862. One of the main forces for the teaching of history there was Jean-Henri Merle d'Aubigné, a disciple of Robert Haldane and the French Reveil, and a leading historian of the Reformation. It was from Merle d'Aubigné that he obtained his core understanding of Church History as ‘normed’ by primitive Christianity on the one hand, and the Reformation on the other. If, in Spini's words, it was from 'Merle d'Aubigné [that] he learned to look at historical work as a sort of apologetic preaching' (Spini 2002: 126), it was a praxis that he maintained in balance with his commitment to working from the sources. There was, as was not uncommon in much evangelical historiography, an assumption that there had been a consistent ecclesia spiritualis throughout the ages, mediated by such heterodox groups as his own Waldensian tradition, leading up to the Reformation. ‘This dual vocation as preacher and historian of Waldensianism and the Reformation in Italy characterized all of his subsequent activity’. (Pilone) This historiographical vision was at the core of the Waldensian attachment to the ideals of Liberal Italy, wherein the religious renewal of Italy would support and defend the political renewal being carried out under the dual revolution of Garibaldi and the House of Savoy. Only in such a renewed Italy would the religious and cultural freedoms of Protestants be assured. 

Returning to Italy in the spring of 1863, he was sent by the Waldensian Evangelization Committee to Perugia to take care of small groups of evangelicals that had arisen in Umbria. He then found himself in dispute with Archbishop Gioacchino Pecci (later Leo XIII), issuing a pamphlet Il Protestantesimo (1863) against Pecci’s attacks on evangelicals. These 'were the stormiest years of the Roman Question and violent clashes between evangelical preachers and Catholic priests were daily.' (Spini 2002: 126) Comba was consecrated pastor in Torre Pellice on 10 November 1863 and sent to the Waldensian communities of Guastalla and Brescia, where popular agitation against the local reactionary Catholic clergy was quite marked. In 1865 he married the young Susanne Vola (1839-1922), with whom he had Albino (1866, died at an early age), Emilia (1867, died at an early age), Albina (1869), Carlo (1870), Dora (1875 -1954, wife of the engineer Carlo Deker), and Ernesto (1880-1959, pastor and Moderator of the Waldensian Tavola).

In 1867 he was transferred to Venice to take care of the Waldensian congregation, formed the previous year. He remained there for five years, during which in addition to pastoral care he also dedicated himself to research in the Venetian Archives of the Holy Office. His pastoral work was busy, including the creation of a fairly large Waldensian church, to which was attached a school, for which he oversaw the purchase of Palazzo Cavagnis.  The profound archival work allowed him to publish a writing on Francesco Spiera (Francesco Spiera. Episodio della Riforma religiosa in Italia con aggiunta di documenti originali dall'archivio veneto del S. Ufficio, 1872), who died due to desperatio salutis after having renounced the evangelical faith.

In 1871 he was made a member of the evangelization committee of the Waldensian Church, a position he held until 1875 and subsequently from 1895 to 1897. Upon the death of Professor Giovanni Pietro Revel, in 1872, he was appointed professor of ecclesiastical history and practical theology at the Waldensian Faculty of Theology in Florence, a position he would hold for over thirty years. In his first years as a seminary professor, he was concerned with providing his students with up-to-date history and apologetics manuals, translating from German a Compendio di storia universale (1876), the Dieci lezioni sulle verità fondamentali del cristianesimo by the Lutheran theologian C. E. Luthardt (1876 ) and from the English La Chiesa Cattolica antica by the theologian W. D. Killen.

In addition to preparing the courses, he wanted to give practical implementation to what had been a profound belief of his since his youth, namely the need for the Waldensian religious minority to seek contact with public opinion, above all with the most serious and prepared scholars, with the lovers of historical, ethical and religious studies. For this reason, in January 1873, with the collaboration of his colleagues Paolo Geymonat and Alberto Revel, he founded the periodical La Rivista Cristiana (edited until 1887, then resumed--in a new series--in 1899), in which he published many of his writings on the Reformation in Italy and Waldensianism.

In 1875 Comba published a number of monographs broadly appreciated for their erudite character: Baldo Lupetino, martire della religione e della libertà, Il marchese Galeazzo Caracciolo e Paolo Veronese innanzi al tribunale della Santa Inquisizione. Also in 1875 he became editor of the Historia della vita di Galeazzo Caracciolo, a late sixteenth-century document attributed to Nicolao Balbani, pastor of the Italian community in Geneva. At the same time as teaching and publishing, he oversaw the Waldensian Church in via de 'Serragli from 1874 to 1887.

Comba made time in his busy life to undertake a series of trips abroad to represent the Church and to study. In 1874 he stayed in Great Britain (and again in 1885, 1890 and 1896) and in 1880 he participated as a representative of the Waldensian Church in the second General Conference of Presbyterian Churches, held in Philadelphia, in the United States. In 1882 he was sent by the Evangelization Committee to Herrnhut, to visit the Moravian brothers, in order to strengthen their centuries-old relationships with this community. In 1884 Comba visited Grisons, where his brother (Adolfo Comba) was a pastor. The region was important to him because in the sixteenth century the reformed faith there had been spread by Italian exiles.

It was also in the 1880s that Comba came to full maturity as a historian. Spini notes that the rash of deaths among the 'awakened' generation of Italian Waldensians who participated in the 'surgical operation, certainly far-sighted and perhaps necessary, but drastic' which had shifted all publishing and the majority of theological training to Firenze in the 1880s, left Geymonat and Comba as the main continuing representatives of that tradition (Spini 2002: 86, 101). In 1878, the year in which Vittorio Emmanuele II died, Comba shocked traditionalist Waldensian opinion by proposing that 'the Synod be held outside the Valleys and - no less! - in Italian instead of French'. Comba was a champion of the Italian Liberal vision. (Spini 2002: 101) In 1880 the book Valdo e i valdesi avanti la Riforma saw the light, being made available in English translation by his brother Teofilo Comba. In 1881, he published the first of his major historical works: the Storia della Riforma in Italia, a work which earned him a doctorate in literature from Rutgers College in the United States of America.

Also in those years, Comba became editor of the Biblioteca della Riforma italiana (6 vols., 1883-1886) and published an Introduzione alla storia della Riforma in Italia (1881), reworked a few years later into a work which remained unfinished: I nostri protestanti (2 vols.:I, Avanti la Riforma; II, Durante la Riforma nel Veneto e nell'Istria, 1895-97). The latter was received with greater appreciation than the former, at least by the avantgarde of professional Protestant history from the 1930s, as represented by Giorgio Spini and Delio Cantimori. Volume 1 'nothing other than the remake of the Introduction he had brought to light ten years earlier', (Spini 2002: 131), while Cantimori considered Comba 'too apologetic to be able to be taken into account other than as a good collector of materials'. (quoted in Spini 2002: 131, n.40)   In all these writings he formulated a different interpretation of the history of the Italian Reformation, one which contrasted with the reading of traditional historiography, which saw the Italian Reformed movement as a phenomenon limited to a narrow circle of intellectuals. Instead, it was a continuous stream of protest reaching back to the Reformation and beyond to the early church: 'The historical vision of the two luminous peaks - primitive Christianity and the Reformation - separated by the black night of papal error, typical of Merle d'Aubigné and Réveil, is replaced by that of an initiatory chain gradually ascending upwards.' (Spini 2002: 131)

He published in numerous Italian and foreign magazines, such as the Bulletin de la Société d'histoire vaudoise, the Archivio storico italiano, the Archivio veneto, the Nuova Antologia, Ruggiero Bonghi’s Coltura, a regular column on Italian affairs in the Revue Chrétienne of Paris, la Revue de théologie et philosophie in Lausanne, and the Bulletin de la Société de l'histoire du protestantisme français. A marked anti-Crispi editorialist, he was highly critical of Italian adventurism in Ethiopia: after the disaster of Adua (Adwa, where Ethiopian forces defeated the invading Italian force on 1 March 1896), 'Comba intervened to declare that that war was unjust, Italy was wrong, Menelik was right.' (Spini 2002: 142)

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, he published several works dedicated to Waldensian history, such as the Histoire des vaudois d'Italie depuis leur origine jusqu'a nos jours (1887) and the popular Storia dei valdesi (1893). Of the former, Spini notes that this was his coming of age as a source-based historian:

He wrote it in French because he was convinced that in Italy there was no interest in religious history, but he had at least one favorable review in a very important Italian magazine - the Archivio Storico Italiano - and that from such a talented scholar as Felice Tocco. It was indeed a serious work, conducted with a sure mastery of the sources and updated with the most recent studies, including from international sources. (Spini 2002: 130)

Comba 'followed carefully' the work of international scholars of Waldensianism, such as Edouard Montet (Histoire littéraire des Vaudois du Piémont, 1885) and Karl Muller (Die Waldenser und dire einzelnen Gruppen bis zum Anfang des 14. Jahrhunderts, 1888). Subsequently he reworked the matter in a larger work that remained unfinished, the Histoire des Vaudois. Only the first two volumes were published: Histoire des vaudois. Introduction (1898) and De Valdo à la Réforme (1901). In these works he debunked numerous legends which traced the origins of the Waldensians back to the apostolic era, to the Constantinian era or to the Carolingian era with Claudius of Turin (to whom Comba dedicated a monograph, 1895). On the occasion of the bicentenary of the repatriation of the Waldensians he published a monograph on Enrico Arnaud (1889).

His voluminous historical research also extended to archives abroad. In 1890 he worked in the archive of the counts of Waldburg-Truchsess in Königsberg in Prussia, important for the history of Piedmont and the Waldensians, since Count Friedrich Ludwig von Waldburg-Truchsess, a faithful friend and protector of the Waldensians, had been ambassador at the court of Turin from 1816 to 1844. His historical works did not gain great traction in Italy (though Spini notes he had some impact on liberal Catholics such as Baldassare Labanca - Spini 2002: 69), finding wider recognition abroad: the University of St. Andrews (Scotland) awarded Comba an honorary doctorate in theology after the publication of Waldo and the Waldenses before the Reformation (1889). 

Having retired for a holiday to Guttannen in Switzerland, Comba died suddenly on 3 September 1904, full of honours from within his own tradition. In addition to his published works, and those (such as that 'skilled and far-sighted man of ecclesiastical government' Ernesto Giampiccoli, 1869-1921) who he had built up in the faith, Comba left behind some sixteen volumes of documents. Pietro Chiminelli, editor of Bylichnis on the eve of the Fascist take-over of Italy, listed Comba as one of the transformative figures in Italian Protestant historiography. To Chiminelli, Comba was an internationally-translated activist who both worked in the churches and archives of Chiminelli’s own native north-east, and was a prime mover behind the historiographical efforts of the Society for Waldensian Studies (SSV). His work in the Venetian archives three decades after von Ranke (whose method-forming Die römischen Päpste, 1834-36 was built on Venetian sources) was not only continuous with German influence on Waldensian intellectual life, but had shown the value of original source work to the formation of a national, post-enlightenment historiography. Shirakawa likewise places Comba in the broader European tradition pioneered by von Ranke and others, who reframed history around the emerging nation states. Comba was an enthusiastic supporter of Cavour and the Liberal tradition in Italy which brought about national unification:

Comba relied on a genealogical narrative structure inherited from the early modem protestant historiography in presenting his national history. By recasting its composition according to a category of the nation, he transformed a confessional genealogy of the true church into a national one. (Shirakawa 2023: 865)

His children established a continuous line of contributions to Italian society. Their daughter, Albina Benvenuta (1867-1942) married James Dudley Cargill (1871–1961), with whom she had two children (Mabel Pasley Cargill, 1899–1988; and Richard Emil Dudley, 1942–1968). Their son, Carlo (1870-1951), 'was a pediatrician of such high repute that it was possible to state that, thanks to the treatments he introduced, infant mortality had even halved, dropping from 4.5 to 2.2%. He was also a municipal councilor in 1914, 1920 and 1923: in 1920 he was also councilor for hygiene'.(Spini 2002: 149) Another son, Ernesto Comba was a teacher at the Waldensian Theological School and a well-known and  authoritative exponent of the Waldensian pastoral body.

Principle Works

1872 - Francesco Spiera. Episodio della Riforma religiosa in Italia con aggiunta di documenti originali tratti dall'archivio veneto del S. Ufficio (Roma and Firenze: Claudiana, 1872).

1875 - Baldo Lupetino, martire della religione e della libertà. Racconto storico del secolo decimosesto narrato secondo manoscritti inediti della S. Inquisizione (Firenze and Roma: Claudiana, 1875).

1880 - Valdo ed i valdesi avanti la Riforma. Cenno storico (Firenze: Arte della Stampa, 1880).

1881 - Storia della Riforma in Italia narrata col sussidio di nuovi documenti (Firenze: Arte della Stampa, 1881).

1887 - Histoire des Vaudois d'italie, depuis leurs origines jusqu'à nos jours. Première partie: Avant la Réforme (Paris and Torino: Loescher, 1887).

1889 - Enrico Arnaud, pastore e duce de' Valdesi (1641-1721). Cenno biografico (Firenze: Claudiana, 1889).

1893 - Storia dei Valdesi. Parte I: Da Valdo alla Riforma (Firenze: Claudiana, 1893).

1895 - Claudio di Torino, ossia la protesta di un vescovo. Cenno storico (Firenze: Claudiana, 1895).

1895 - I nostri protestanti, vol. 1: I. Avanti la Riforma (Firenze: Claudiana, 1895)

1897 - I nostri protestanti, vol. 2: Durante la Riforma nel Veneto e nell'Istria (Firenze: Claudiana, 1897)

1898 - Histoire des Vaudois. Nouvelle édition complete, vol. I. Introduction (Firenze: Paris and Losanna: Claudiana-Fischbacher-Bridel, 1898)

1904 - Histoire des Vaudois. Nouvelle édition complete, vol.  II. Première partie. De Valdo à la Réforme (Firenze: Paris and Losanna: Claudiana-Fischbacher-Bridel, 1904)

On the life and ministry of Emilio Comba:

“B. P.”, ‘Il Prof. Emilio Comba D. D.’, L'Italia Evangelica n. 37 (10 September 1904).

Biagetti, S., Emilio Comba (1839-1904) storico della Riforma italiana e del movimento valdese medieval (Torino: Claudiana, 1989).

Luzzi, G., E. Bosio, ‘Il Prof. Dott. Emilio Comba’, La Rivista Cristiana ns. (September 1904).

Meille, A., Il Prof. Emilio Comba (Firenze: Claudiana, 1904).

Shirakawa, Taro, ‘A Waldensian Pastor Between the Confessional Myth and National Genealogy History and Religious Reform in Emilio Comba (1839-1904)’, Church History 92 (2023): 865-885.

Soggin Vöchting, A., ‘Bibliografia degli scritti di Emilio Comba’, Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi n. 118 (1965): 79-113.

Vinay, V., ‘Emilio Comba’, Dizionario biografico degli italiani vol. 27 (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1982), pp. 531-532.

Vinay, V., Facoltà valdese di Teologia (1855-1955) (Torre Pellice: Claudiana, 1955).

Sources:

Chiminelli, Pietro, Bibliografia della storia de la Riforma Religiosa in Italia: Contributo alla storiografia religiosa italiana (Roma: Casa Editrice Bylichnis, 1921)

Pilone, Luca, ‘Emilio Comba’, in Dizionario Biografico dei Protestanti in Italia, https://www.studivaldesi.org/dizionario/evan_det.php?secolo=XIX&evan_id=265.

Shirakawa, Taro, ‘A Waldensian Pastor Between the Confessional Myth and National Genealogy History and Religious Reform in Emilio Comba (1839-1904)’, Church History 92 (2023): 865-885.

Spini, Giorgio, Italia Liberale e Protestanti: gli invisibili (Torino: Claudiana, 2002)