The Game of Sophia: Economy, Ecology and Human Dwelling: Theological Issues to Inhabit the Land 9788893351140

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ROBERTO MAIER

THE GAME OF SOPHIA: ECONOMY, ECOLOGY AND HUMAN DWELLING Theological Issues to Inhabit the Land

Milano 2016

© 2016

EDUCatt

- Ente per il Diritto allo Studio Universitario dell’Università Cattolica

Largo Gemelli 1, 20123 Milano - tel. 02.7234.22.35 - fax 02.80.53.215 e-mail: [email protected] (produzione); [email protected] (distribuzione) web: www.educatt.it/libri Associato all’AIE – Associazione Italiana Editori ISBN: 978-88-9335-114-0 Edizione realizzata a scopo didattico. L’editore è disponibile ad assolvere agli obblighi di copyright per i

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tracciare i beneficiari.

copertina: rielaboarazione del “Tapis de la Creaciò”, cattedrale di Girona. Progetto grafico Studio Editoriale EDUCatt

CONTENTS

Prologue ......................................................................................................... 7 Introduction ................................................................................................. 13 CHAPTER I

APPROACH 1. Modern idea of subjectivity ................................................................ 19 1.1 Historical reasons for the definition of the modern subjectivity ............................................................................................ 20 1.2 Modern and post-modern forms of Cogito ................................ 24 2. Phenomenology as philosophical alternative to Cogito ................. 27 2.1 Perspective...................................................................................... 30 2.2 Otherness ........................................................................................ 32 2.3 Truth and history........................................................................... 33 2.4 Phenomenology and religious experience ................................. 39 CHAPTER II

THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION 1. Bible, theology and human invariance.............................................. 45 2. Creation.................................................................................................. 51 2.1 The genesis of Genesis .................................................................. 51 2.2 “Tob” ............................................................................................... 57 2.2.1 Effortless Creation ............................................................... 58

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The Game of Sophia: Economy, Ecology and Human Dwelling

2.2.2 Order and man ..................................................................... 61 2.2.3 Nomination ........................................................................... 64 Excursus: the Girona’s Tapestry of Creation............................................... 67 CHAPTER III

FALL AND REDEMPTION 1. Sin as imagination: farewell to the Garden....................................... 79 1.1 The sin is original but is not the origin ......................................... 81 1.2 The Snake and the Tree ................................................................ 82 1.3 Suspicion ......................................................................................... 85 1.4 Fear and possess ............................................................................ 88 1.5 Relationship between humans and nature after the sin .......... 93 1.6 The Universal Flood ...................................................................... 97 2. History of Salvation ........................................................................... 100 2.1 Attempts of a Garden ................................................................. 100 2.1.1 A land flowing with milk and honey .............................. 101 2.1.2 What if the Garden was still available? .......................... 106 2.1.3 Land and toledot: responsibility in time .......................... 108 2.2 Losing the land: exile and pilgrimage ...................................... 110 3. Conclusions ......................................................................................... 114 CHAPTER IV

THE DISCOVERY OF ORDER 1. Discovery of order and foundation of the world........................... 119 2. Order and language ........................................................................... 126 2.1 Full of merit, yet poetically man dwells................................... 126 2.2 Relationships as origin................................................................ 129 2.3 Language, voice and names ....................................................... 133 Excursus: the History of the True Cross.................................................... 139 4

Contents

1. 2.

Center, circle, cross...................................................................... 140 History of the True Cross in Arezzo......................................... 144 CHAPTER V

ORDER AS RESPONSIBILITY 1. Introduction......................................................................................... 159 2. Bernard of Clairvaux .......................................................................... 160 2.1 The whole of human experience ............................................... 160 2.2 God’s ordo and its seduction ...................................................... 163 2.2 Ordo Caritatis ................................................................................ 167 2.3 Regio dissimilitudinis .................................................................... 169 2.4 Cistercian architecture and linearity of love ........................... 173 CHAPTER VI

SOPHIOLOGY 1. God’s modern absence in the material world ................................ 179 2. God’s Sophia in Eastern Orthodox theology .................................. 183 2.1 God’s Sophia in the world and in humanity ........................... 183 2.2 Christ’s presence on earth: the Holy Grail ................................ 189 CAPITOLO VII

“CONVIVIUM” 1. Food and Convivium ........................................................................... 193 2. Phenomenology of a Convivium ....................................................... 194 2.1 Justice and Convivium: La Grande Abbuffata ............................. 198 2.2 Banquet, identity and gift: The Big Night ................................. 202 2.3 Family meal: Kramer vs. Kramer ................................................. 208 2.4 The mystical banquet: Babette’s Feast ........................................ 210 2.4.1 It’s nearly evening, the day is almost over ..................... 214 5

The Game of Sophia: Economy, Ecology and Human Dwelling

2.4.2 Fasting and eating: man is what he does not eat........... 215 2.4.3 Grace and Mercy will kiss ................................................ 220 Bibliography ............................................................................................... 223 Introduction......................................................................................... 223 Approach ............................................................................................. 224 The doctrine of creation ..................................................................... 225 Fall and redemption ........................................................................... 225 The discovery of order ....................................................................... 226 Order as responsibility ...................................................................... 227 Sophiology ........................................................................................... 228 “Convivium” (bibliography and filmography) ............................. 228

6

PROLOGUE

God took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden to cultivate and take care of it Gen 2, 15

What has theology to do with land? Why should theology be suitable for the understanding and comprehension of man inhabiting the planet? These are some of the questions that can’t be ignored, in the beginning of this text. Nevertheless, before this, we must agree about one fact: questions are appropriate for humanity. Questioning, asking, thinking, searching for truth is the key for any human act. Studying at the university, planning future activities, personal issues force you to act the most human of any operations: thinking. But what is thinking? We do not come into thoughts: they come to us. This is the right time for dialogue. We dispose ourselves peaceful to common meditation this does not exhibit the ambitious contrast of opinions neither tolerates the accommodating consent. Thinking is stiffen by the wind of the Thing. From this common experience might maybe rise

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The Game of Sophia: Economy, Ecology and Human Dwelling

a common act of thinking. So that anyone, 1 suddenly, can become the unsuspected teacher

Martin Heidegger is a giant in modern philosophy; he is so important that we can not ignore his works as Greeks could not ignore Plato. In this poem, Heidegger describes thinking as a common meditation, in which – as he states in another poem – an opponent, yet not an enemy, must be present. Thinking needs alterity, but alterity does not mean war: this is our starting point. In this sense, dealing with any of our questions leads us to recognize an otherness between theology, economics and agriculture: these sciences are in a sense opponent, but not enemies. Since thinking always means opposition, we might say that there is much to think about, avoiding ambitious contrast and accommodating consent. There was a time, in Western history, when theology was the queen of any other science: for many centuries any scientist would be a theologian or he would just not be a scientist. This time is far behind, so far that nobody even remembers. Understanding the reasons and the history of this forgetfulness might be interesting, and we will commit some of our attention to this. However, nowadays theology, economics and agriculture meet as perfect strangers, they know nothing about their past relation. This happens also with the persons we meet everyday: their ancestors might have been relatives to ours, centuries ago, but still we have nothing in common; we need to meet, to introduce ourselves, to take part to a dialogue2. Christian theology should not waste time to blame anybody (materialism, relativism, not even itself) for this state of things: difference is a chance to think,

1

Cfr. MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, Verlag Güntehr Neske, Stuttgart 1954 [my translation]. 2 This attempt of dialogue between Theology and other disciplines is the invite that Pope John Paul II gave to the Catholic Universities: POPE JOHN PAUL II, Ex Corde Ecclesiae. On Catholic Universities, LEV, Roma 1990.

8

Prologue

not a barrier. Yet, in this process, everyone must be aware that he might suddenly recognize an unsuspected teacher. But thinking also means accepting thoughts that come to us, says Heidegger; in this sense theology and agriculture are waiting together for thoughts to come. I will try to show how much the thought of agriculture, rising from the clods of soil, has come to me in the past years, and I will ask you to let theological issues come to you either: if this approach is possible, then it might be the right time for dialogue. There is no human thinking out of this dialogue, neither in theology nor in agricultural studies, nor in economics. This is why these notes do not represent our thinking, they might represent thoughts coming to us: thinking is always the dialogue that follows. School should be the right place for dialogue. We might start distinguishing two different kinds of thoughts coming to us: problems and issues. A problem is what must be solved. Science – we would easily state – mainly deals with problems. How can I use hydric resources in a particular territory? How can I guarantee nutrition to the cattle? How can I face a lack of liquidity? Any problem is connected with one – or more than one – solution and when this connection is settled, a scientific model can be adopted to solve similar cases. Of course this doesn’t mean that any problem can be solved: if it can’t, you need to learn how to live with it. Speaking of agriculture, speaking of land, it is obvious that there are many problems which are out of our reach: they might be tomorrow, but not today. If a particular terroir is not suitable for a vine variety, there is nothing you can really do, except choose to grow something else. Humans daily deal with acceptance of problems, even in common life or in inner life. Land, soil is a good example of what resists to human acts: it is in fact a source of problems. But there is another sort of thoughts that come to us: issues. An issue does not ask for a solution. Issues are just there, they come to you from time to time, they call your comprehension, they challenge your life. There is no way you will solve an issue: if you do, it disappears. Relationships are a good example of issues: when you care for someone his 9

The Game of Sophia: Economy, Ecology and Human Dwelling

presence can never saturate your desire. Scientific research is another good example: you do not really expect that a researcher finds what he is looking for. In a sense, science has its origin in issues, even when it solves problems. Now, even if issues do not have solutions, they might find answers, instead; “answer” means responsibility, since to answer means to respond. Human freedom might not be responsible for problems that can not solve, but we must respond to the issues of life. The etymological meaning of answer, in English, is ante-swear: it concerns a oath (-swear) done in front of someone (ante-) to rebut a charge. Issues are in this sense a charge revealed to humans, they declare that human being is not innocent in front of life, that we owe something to life, that we have debts. Issues accuse us, they wait for our voice to raise. A sense of debt towards life is written in how men answer to issues. In your university studies you will learn to solve problems, of course: “problem solving” is something you must exhibit in any curriculum. But studying means also dealing with issues. Choose any issue in the history of philosophy and you will understand what we are talking about. Being is an issue, otherness is an issue, good and evil are issues. Reflexion about issues has no end: since Parmenides questioned about Being, philosophy never ceased to investigate about it. You might write the history of philosophy studying what was told about Being starting from Parmenis, up to contemporary philosophers. Being is an issue, not a problem. But also the relationship between man and nature is an issue and also ecology or economy are issues. It is not a matter of “material” or “spiritual” facts: in both fields there is something to solve and something to answer to. There are philosophical problems and philosophical issues, scientific problems and scientific issues, as we said. Nevertheless, we might say that philosophy is the science of issues, it exists because humans decide to face issues. Similarly, theology is the science of all those issues connected with the act of faith. In front of issues you don’t just live with it, it is more likely that they live in you. From time to time you stutter an answer. Issues question life 10

Prologue

and life questions conscience, they challenge and provoke freedom promising no rest. Philosophy and theology should always gain their method from this incessant provocation and should always meet other disciplines raising the bid of thinking. Thinking becomes then the first way to be worthy of life, even knowing you will never solve your debt: we might say that humans think as long they recognize a debt towards life; thinking is dealing with a debt that can’t be solved. What debt are we talking about? Again Heidegger writes in a poem: We come too late for the gods and too early for Being. This is why man is a poem already begun. Moving toward a star. That’s all. Thinking is to concentrate on a unique thought that one day might stand still in the sky of the world. 3 Like a star

We are not the authors of the poem of our life, this is the first debt we must deal with. In the following pages we will try to think our debt towards soil. Theology, economics and agricultural studies will meet together in a dialogue, in a common responsibility towards land.

3

Cfr. MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (Stuttgart: Verlag Güntehr Neske 1954) [my translation].

11

INTRODUCTION

Dealing with ecology seems to be the new frontier for any human creation. Many and severe problems appear on the horizon and we know that sooner or later we will have to face them1. Scientists seem to spread in two fronts: some of them have a catastrophic view of future (nowadays it is the greatest part) and some others tend to reassure the population. Choosing between these two positions should be a matter of scientific evidences, not an ideological issue. However, despite they are obviously connected, problems are so many and so different that catastrophism or optimism can not be simply a rational answer. The dimension of risk shall be discussed about every single question, and the scenario is complex: greenhouse effect, global warming, GMO, energetic crisis, garbage, hydric crisis… each problem is searching for perspectives of solution. Nevertheless the frontline seems to be solid, giving to ecology the appearance of a faith, more than a science. On the other side also capitalism – the main opponent to ecology and the main suspect threat to the planet – has the same appearance: a blind belief towards the possibilities of the market to solve any problem will occur and, very often, a snobbish approach towards the ecological issues. So, for the greatest part of the population, to be ecologist or not to be ecologist has become a cultur-

1

On the 20th of November 2014 Pope Francis addressed a speech to the FAO organization. Quoting a proverb from his country, he said: "God always forgives; men forgive at times; but the Earth never forgives”.

13

The Game of Sophia: Economy, Ecology and Human Dwelling

al, political, philosophical choice, that has a very weak connection with any scientific research. Hidden behind the curtain of scientific hypothesis, two political and almost religious concepts of the world are facing each other: ecology and capitalism. When an opinion becomes a religion (with its rituality, ethics, and sacred texts) it often happens that the followers desist to question its presumptions. This is where this work would like to operate. Without taking part to the context about what is and what is not an emergency, we would like to investigate the encounter between humans and nature. The focus on the natural damages hides another side of this relation: what happens to humans, when they exploit the planet irresponsibly? Even if our possess did not damage the Planet, is it wise to exploit the land to our whim? Our main thesis is that, apart from the natural consequences, there are massive anthropological consequences that need to be considered. Even in the case that using the land as a storehouse had no dangerous consequences on our Planet (which is not true), this behavior might have dramatic consequences on human freedom, on our attitude towards life, on our social life. Human conscience – and not only nature – must be involved in the debate about the land. Choosing this approach, we are also able to abandon the habit of emergency. In the name of emergency choices are made avoiding a serious discussion about reasons: not by chance contemporary politics often uses tones of emergency, to gain an approval that otherwise would be very difficult to obtain. The reasons of emergency – economical crisis, global warming, terrorism, immigration – give no space to debate and to thinking. Our language has an interesting expression: when the situation is dramatic, a sudden and emergency solution is what we call “Deus ex machina”. It is well known that the Latin expression refers to the ancient Greek tragedy: the appearance of the god at the end of the play, impersonated by an actor falling in the stage thanks to a wooden winch, called the machina. The Latin word machina immediately recalls the modern machine, through which men subdue and dominate nature. The simplest example of 14

Introduction

machine is the lever, that can multiplicate the strength applied: not by chance the etymology of machina is magis, which refers to an increase2. Now, it is interesting to notice that the magia – magic – has the same origin. Machine, magic and emergency converge in the attempt to dominate, preventing the possibility of an authentic relationship with nature. The idea of increase is connected with a will of power, which, through a trick, can find a shortcut to the solution. Increase of power means (usually) a shortcut, a cut of time, an acceleration that makes the process in a way “unnatural”. Of course, we can’t say that a shortcut itself is evil, neither we can blame any emergency solution. But we must be aware that dwelling is also a matter of time, of patience, of listening and understanding. Emergency creates the perfect conditions to skip any consideration of time, any sense of responsibility, any education of human behavior. Education needs time. To face ecological problems we need a thorough knowledge of our role in the planet, so that we can avoid both utopia and pragmatism, and focus on the education of our senses and freedom, on a path of consciousness. In this sense I must declare, at the beginning of this work, a thesis that will be radically rejected. It is the idea that humanity is nothing more than a part of nature (or, possibly, the worst) and, as a part of it, should simply follow a natural pattern of behavior: a flattening of anthropology over ethology. I am aware that the idea of natural law has been an important chapter of Christian moral theology, but the meaning of nature has changed through history and it used to be something very different from the idea of a natural behavior3. Humans are – of course – also animals: as animals we are a part of nature, we are affected by natural processes as birth, repro-

2

Magis is the comparative of magnus, meaning “more”. P IERLUIGI LIA, Finalmente come Dio? Considerazioni inattuali sullo statuto morale della soggettività, Vita e Pensiero, Milano 2012, 209-222. 3

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The Game of Sophia: Economy, Ecology and Human Dwelling

duction, nutrition, and death. Despite this, we are not simply a part of nature, because we have choices. We can choose between good and evil, we can manage our choices and be responsible for them: this is the issue we must deal with. This is why humans do not simply feed, but they have dinner together; they do not simply mate, but they love each others. We might say that humans are humans as much as they dwell their distance from nature – the distance that is needed to look4 at it – and take responsibility for this distance. Nowadays it happens to meet curious ideas about mankind. It has been told that man is the cancer of nature, the most cruel between animals, since his violence does not depend on surviving but on choice. Despite some of these statements might appear true, humanity is not a natural phenomenon. We dwell in the land as a difference, we inhabit earth as newness: the presence of man radically denies that a mechanism is the fulfillment and the sense of creation. An unforgettable thought of the French philosopher Blaise Pascal perfectly explains this: Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him, the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity then, consists in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavor then, to think 5 well; this is the principle of morality

Freedom separates us from nature and gives us a responsibility towards it: as far as we can understand, no living creature can play

4

In English there is nothing like this, but the etymology of the Italian verb guardare (“to look”) comes from the word guardia, meaning “guard” in English. As if the first role of our look towards anything was its care and protection. 5 B LAIZE P ASCAL, Pensees 347.

16

Introduction

this role, this is definitely our part. Moreover: we can’t pretend to abdicate this responsibility, we can’t pretend to look at reality outside human experience, we are chained to our point of view and for this reason we are the center of nature. It is not a matter of power or domination, it is simply our relationship with the soil, with the place and the time we are committed to. Even if ecology has often accused an anthropocentric approach to be the reason of the exploitation of nature, we must admit that men simply are anthropocentric, because each man is the very center of his perception of reality. The claim to solve ecological problems replacing the old anthropocentrism with a kind of “biocentrism” has to be, for this reason, rejected. Dealing with ecology means to take this unique place: ours. This is also the basic approach of the Laudato si’, the recent encyclical about ecology (or, to be precise, about our common home). Even if the pope criticizes the modern anthropocentrism, he does not ask to renounce to human role in creation: A misguided anthropocentrism need not necessarily yield to “biocentrism”, for that would entail adding yet another imbalance, failing to solve present problems and adding new ones. Human beings cannot be expected to feel responsibility for the world unless, at the same time, their unique capacities of knowledge, will, freedom and respon6 sibility are recognized and valued .

We are men, not gods, but neither animals. Between us and our world there is a relationship: not being simply part of nature, we must encounter nature. Heidegger again gives a definition of human being ad Da-sein, being-there: existence has something to do with the space. To be precise: space – he states – is a geometrical abstraction: human experience deals with places. Our life takes place – this English expression is very clear – and can never be separated to the soil. At the same time every human existence changes the world, since places

6

P OPE F RANCIS, Laudato si’, LEV, Roma 2015, 118.

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The Game of Sophia: Economy, Ecology and Human Dwelling

exist only thanks to men. It is not just a matter of natural change, building, pollution, exploitation. This change starts when a man opens his eyes and looks at the world around him: he gives an orientation starting from his point of view so that the world becomes ‘near’ or ‘far’, ‘in front of’ or ‘behind’, ‘over’ or ‘under’. Orientation is the first radical change that human presence operates. Words as ‘economy’ or ‘ecology’ show us this perceptions: we are men because we build a home, we are men because we transform the planet in a habitable place. We are men because we dwell. This is what we will be dealing with in the following chapters. We will try to understand human action of dwelling and to describe his relationship with the land. In the first chapter I will try to explain our method and its relationship with an important method of contemporary philosophy: phenomenology. This will give us the basis for our approach to human conscience when man stands in front of God’s revelation. But it might also give a shareable comprehension of freedom, that might be interesting both for believers and non-believers. In the second chapter we will try to understand what the Bible states about human freedom and about its relationship with the land. Of course the Bible does not have any book devoted to ecology or economy; nonetheless it has a vision of human drama and it does offer an anthropology. Studying the Bible and its claim of revelation, of course, is a complex operation; still, no one will not be asked to agree with Christianity, but to understand the vision of man proposed by the Bible and, possibly, to compare it with his personal point of view. In the last chapters I will introduce some main issues related to human inhabiting, searching for an anthropology even when facing some meaningful episodes from the history of Christian theology. Despite they come last, these issues are present on our background from the beginning.

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CHAPTER I

APPROACH

1. Modern idea of subjectivity The aim of our work is to understand the relationship between man and land. Living means to deal with the land, living means to dwell, our existence is chained to a single place just as it is immersed in a single age of history. Try to imagine what would have happened to your life if you were born in a different country, maybe in Syria, or in any other country afflicted by war, famine, poverty. What would have been of your ideas or beliefs? If you are honest, you can feel on your skin how profound this relationship can be. However, humanity can even dwell on highest mountains or in inhospitable deserts, on stormy shores or in the middle of impenetrable forests. Each place offers different challenges, different resources that people living elsewhere can barely imagine. At the same time – it is a common experience – each landscape leaves different marks in human behavior. Our common saying is meaningful: people living by sea are usually called sea dogs; we might expect a mountaineer to be rude and genuine or admire the severe nobility of some tribes living in the desert. Something like a genius loci1 has always played an important role in human culture. In modern times we seldom remember this relationship and its profound consequences in our life. Land is considered just a ware-

1

On this subject: CHRISTIAN NORBERG-SCHULTZ, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, Rizzoli, New York 1991.

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The Game of Sophia: Economy, Ecology and Human Dwelling

house where we can gain materials for our needs. Any ecological problem has his roots in the misunderstanding and denial of this relationship. Exploitation of resources, environmental impact, harming policies are all based on the forgetfulness of the depth of this relationship, where – as in any other encounter – something happens to the man and something happens to the land. If we could only remember how fundamental is for us and for our children the land we are dwelling in, we might feel responsible for its health and do whatever it takes to protect it. But, still, how can we forget it? What idea of man hides behind this forgetfulness? How could we change our way of living so much, that we deny an evidence of our experience? It is my opinion that the roots must be searched in the idea of subjectivity that characterizes the modern age. By modern I mean the historical definition that identifies 1492 (the discovery of America and the fall of the Caliphate of Granada) as the turning point. 1.1 Historical reasons for the definition of the modern subjectivity Centuries ago, Christianity attempted – and succeeded – in building the whole of Western culture. We might not share the reasons of this attempt, we might even fight them, but one of the most impressive results of Christian presence in Europe was this ‘whole’. Christian faith has been for centuries the leading actor of a cultural, spiritual, political view of the world; God was the authority pledging truth, justice, beauty. Kings ruled thanks to a sacred election, judges could decide about good and evil because of a Christian vision and the religion was not only something about a particular belief, but an entire and complex world of bonds. In facts, the latin word ‘religio’ means ‘to tie’, to create bonds. Of course this attempt occurred in many other ancient cultures, but in Europe, for more than a thousand years, since the legalization of Christianity, this whole was developed in any single corner of human life. Even nowadays, we must admit that we owe our language 20

CHAPTER I – Approach

to this Christian history. This whole, of course, was not made of compact matter: heresy, factions, disagreement were frequent. Think, for example, to the Investiture Controversy in the 12th century, when the world was broken at its highest level: between the Emperor and the pope. Nevertheless any division encouraged to think again, to think better the unity and its protocols. For many historical reasons this unity collapsed between 16th and in 17th century. The fight between Martin Luther (1483-1546) and the Roman Church started a crisis that not only afflicts nowadays the unity of Christianity, but definitely destroyed the Western whole. Of course this is an historical turning point: it has nothing to do with personal responsibilities. Everything was ready when Martin Luther published his ‘Ninety-Five Thesis’ in 1517: the cultural distance between Roman Curia and the German monk could not have been greater; it would be interesting to understand the reasons of this fragility in a period of great richness of the Roman Catholic Church, but it is out of the reach and of the interest of this work. We might simply suggest that any vision of the world, any whole ends when we take it for granted. In any case the profound breakage of the Protestant Reform was soon irreparable. Its history can be summarized in three irreversible passages2 . 1. In 1555 the Protestant and Catholic princes of the Holy Roman Empire meet Charles V in the city of Augusta. Trying to solve the religious – and, of course, political – crisis, it was decided that every single prince had the right to decide about the confession of his region: “cuius regio et eius religio" was the principle established by the Peace of Augusta. Of course, the peace did not last, but, still,

2

I owe this recognition – and much more – to the book of P. LIA, Finalmente come Dio? Considerazioni inattuali sullo statuto morale della soggettività, Vita e Pensiero, Milano 2012.

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The Game of Sophia: Economy, Ecology and Human Dwelling

the idea was set. What we can read in this principle is shocking, compared to the medieval unity. The temporal power – until then pledged by a spiritual unity – had now the power to decide about faith and religion. The prince, that somehow received his authority directly from God, had now the possibility to judge about spiritual matters and to decide about his nation. But there is something more: of course, the prince did not really pretend that the citizens changed their belief just because of his choice. His decision could only affect the public expressions of faith, while citizens would maintain their personal belief. The logic consequence was a separation between personal faith and its public expression: a division like this is much more profound than any political matter. Citizens could not express anymore their belief, faith was forced in the private sphere and public celebrations were potentially separated from personal ideas. In the Middle Age something like that would have been simply unconceivable. 2. Things got even worst than after the Peace of Augusta. Fights between Catholics and Protestants did not stop, political interests joined religious fury. Europe was destroyed by a century of war. The Thirty-Years War (1618-1648) can be remembered as one of the bloodiest conflicts in Western history, before the World Wars. Some technological improvement in weapons and in war tactic made this conflict particularly severe. The presence of enormous armies in Europe – particularly in Germany and Bohemia – for many decades meant the destruction of cities, the spoil of countrysides, death and famine3 . Not by chance, many decades after the end of the wars of religion Alessandro Manzoni still remembers the descent in Northern Italy of the German armies. Some cities in Central Europe lost something like one-third of their population.

3

GOLO M ANN, Wallenstein. His Life Narrated, Reinhart & Winston, New York, 1976.

22

CHAPTER I – Approach

Any european citizen could feel on his skin how unaffordable had become a unity based on religion; despite it lasted so many centuries, the present perception was that religion was a threat to the possibility of a peaceful life. The fracture of the whole was not anymore a theoretical problem, it became a matter of life and death. 3. These are the reasons of the remarkable luck of René Descartes’ philosophy. Living in this period of uncertainty, Descartes seeks the basis of a truth that could be as affordable as Christianity used to be, before the 16th century. Humanity could not trust on the religious synthesis of truth and reality: something sure, secure and reliable was necessary for Europe in the 17th century. Descartes’ method is perfect for a world that needs a new fundament of truth, but is also the fruit of an age of war and uncertainty. We might say that the project has a simple task: finding a principle of truth, that can possibly resist to any human discussion. An ‘objective truth’, that does not need the approval of the subject. An ‘absolute’ truth, not owing anything to external connections and historical torments. The method chosen is – comprehensibly – a process of doubt. Any man in history, of course, could doubt about truth: medieval men knew doubt, their faith and their trust towards God could vacillate 4; even in the peak of the Christian whole, we have witnesses of doubt, crisis of faith even rebellion towards the Church or God himself. But what Descartes proposes is something new. Doubt becomes a ‘method’ of knowledge. Rationality does not look for an answer: reality must be subject to human doubt, which is not anymore a fail, not even a right of rationality, but its main duty.

4

We can take as an example the surprising Liber de temptatione cuiusdam monachi, by Othlon de Saint-Emmeran, (It. tr.) OTLONE DI SANT’EMMERANA, La tentazione di un monaco. Liber de temptatione cuiusdam monachi, Mimesis, Milano 2007.

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The Game of Sophia: Economy, Ecology and Human Dwelling

‘Cogito ergo sum’, ‘I think therefore I am’, the famous Cartesian statement, means nothing but ‘dubito ergo sum’: ‘I doubt, therefore I am’. Doubt about what? About anything, of course. First of all about senses: how can we be sure that what I see is true? So many mistakes, fails, misunderstanding show that our sensibility is not affordable. The same could be stated about relationships, of course, or faith, or feelings. What can last to doubt? The fact that I doubt or, as Descartes says, the ‘Cogito’. Thought without any content, thought without any subject, pure thought, the act of thinking, the act of doubting, is the only space suitable for truth. 1.2 Modern and post-modern forms of Cogito The fortune of this philosophical idea was great. Not only because of its geniality, but because of the cultural environment to which it was destined. The ‘cartesian’ view of subjectivity has nothing to do with Descartes apart form the fact that the Cogito has been the best description of a greater historical phenomenon. The ‘man in the street’ is cartesian, even if he does not know anything about philosophy. Wars made doubt towards Christianity a reality and the research of a new universal truth, that anybody could share, a necessity in the devastated landscape of Europe. The cartesian subject is a solipsistic subject that carries the pretension of a self-foundation; a self-sufficient man that can define his own identity in an empty space, without any need of connection with the world or with other subjectivities. Any responsibility can be denied because the world around this unlimited and selfish freedom is just matter: a warehouse of materials, as we said, a res extensa. God himself – in Descartes’ definition – is nothing more than the First Cause, an axiom to explain the existence of the material world. Science, as an expression of rational and abstract thinking, has the lordship of this world, where, without answering to any superior authority, it has the right to operate and investigate in obedience to rational certainties, as its most powerful instrument. The impressive devel24

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opment of positive sciences in the following centuries owes to this vision its protocols and undiscussed authority. The idea of responsibility might come only on a second time, as the possibility to discipline the social coexistence. The ‘man in the street’, in our age, has a very trivial idea of freedom: we start to talk about ethical issues when our wish meets the limit of others’. The discussion about ethics usually arises to face the risk that my personal freedom could limit other’s decisions; or, to be honest, that others could limit mine. In this scenario, morality is replaced by the defense of personal rights, good and evil have no sense outside this. Not by chance we prefer an excessive recourse to law controversies and to tribunal solutions, rather than an effort for education. The great success and fast drop of Law faculties in the Nineties in Italy – after the ‘Mani Pulite’ scandal – might be an interesting phenomenon to be studied. The invocation of Law, as anyone can see, does not even slightly have the power to chance the corruption and decay of politics. Apart from courthouses, criticism and judgement can not be tolerated by modern subject: the constant refuse of religion eventually hides the decision that nobody can judge our actions, not even God. Modern subject is condemned to solitude. Moreover, the modern subjectivity has an evolution – or, we might say, an involution – in the post-modern age. Contemporary human condition leaves us alone not only with our rationality, but also with our feelings and passions. So that ‘I think, therefore I am’ easily becomes today ‘I feel, therefore I am’. Solitude is the great evil of post-modernity. The contemporary adventure of conscience was cleverly predicted by one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Nineteen Century’s drama: Henrik Ibsen’s ‘Peer Gynt5’.

5

HENRIK IBSEN, Peer Gynt, Nick Hern Books, London 1990.

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Peer Gynt is a young boy that spends his life with a simple intention: to ‘be himself’. With this aim, he lives an immoral life, following only his feelings and aspirations, answering to no one, never taking responsibility of any of his actions. In front of any trouble, Peer simply ‘goes all around’ and never faces his encounters, and neither the consequences of his actions: he seduces girls and leaves them waiting for him, he betrays friends, he changes his decisions, he tries different lives. Eventually, the day of reckoning arrives. Peer – old, after a long life of adventures and escapes – meets the mythological character of the “Button-molder”. In the Norwegian mythology this character is a sort of eschatological judge. He is in charge of melting – just as a tin button – any soul that never succeeded in being himself: despite the attempts he made, Peer will be melted, because he is no one. Answering to his protests, the Button-molder gives Peer some time to prove that he had been something: either a great saint or a great sinner. Peer, aware of all his evil actions, promises to be back with a list of terrible sins that he supposes to have committed. Unfortunately and unexpectedly, he finds no witness: evil has not left any mark in other’s life, and Peer was simply forgotten. At least, Peer meets Solvejg, a young girl that he once seduced and abandoned; Solvejg spent her entire life waiting for him. Despite Peer’s hope of blame, the girl does not condemn him: he left her, but she found a reason of life in the love she always kept for him. But at the same time Solvejg never stopped to guard him, since “in her faith, in her hope, in her love” Peer has always been the beloved one. Being loved, Peer finally finds his identity, his ‘true self’. The Botton-molder seems to be satisfied and leaves, still promising to be back at the next crossroad. Even if written at the end of Nineteenth Century, Peer Gynt is a powerful image of the last stage of the evolution of subjectivity in post-modern age. The only dogma left in our time seems to be ‘to be yourself’. But being ourselves without others condemns us to a life of experiment and, at the end, condemns us to admit that we have never really been anything. Just like an onion, we have many layers, but we are none of them: if we remove all of them, there is nothing left. 26

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Our greatest temptation is attempt. Trying any experience, traveling from one to another, gradually trying to increase the power of our emotions, seems to be the main goal6. No one can dare to judge us. The aim is unbearable if we exclude others from our existence, because, as Ibsen states, experiences do not guard our identity: only other’s glance can. Of course we can – as we do – spend our life ‘going all around’, avoiding to face truth; we can always grant to ourselves a way out from any situation and deny any judgement. Only death, which is part of any human experience (actually: the only certainty of human experience), is the last truth from which nobody can escape. Rising the emotional involvement in any experience, rising the power of emotions is the only temporary solution: at the end of an existence of experiments we might discover that this selffounding man is just empty. I think that the process that brought us here starts when the Modern Age establishes its protocols. What in the next paragraphs I will suggest, is different view of man.

2. Phenomenology as philosophical alternative to Cogito The modern idea of subjectivity, in fact, is not the only possible way of thinking man. Despite ‘the man in the street’ is cartesian, as we stated, many symptoms nowadays show that the project is failing. Even before our present times, in the Twentieth Century, different voices rose to declare that this subjectivity is not as good as we might think; many thinkers refused to give up to the idea of man as an unrelated subject.

6

This dogma is often connected in a paradoxical way with another dogma: ‘to be happy’. Anyone can make experience of how these two aims hardly go together: there are times, in life, when we can’t simply be happy being ourselves or we can’t be ourselves being happy.

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Notably, a modern philosophical movement – one of the most important of the 20th century – questions about human experience abandoning the claim of the foundation of an absolute truth. Blossomed in Germany, where it was founded by Edmund Husserl, and grown in France, Phenomenology crossed the Century and developed in many different contexts, often very far from Husserl’s first studies. This branch of European philosophy is in fact spread over the great spectrum of philosophical issues, covering almost any important theme: Martin Heidegger’s main interest is ontology, Maurice Marleau-Ponty especially deals with anthropology, Max Scheler with ethics, Paul Ricoeur with language, Emmanuel Lévinas with relationships. The number of contemporary philosophers using a phenomenological approach is so high that we could not consider this movement as a school; the variations are so conspicuous that we might not even consider it a method. What we might say is that philosophy, since the appearance of phenomenology, has not been the same: something unforgettable happened. Using a neutral definition, I would say phenomenology is an invitation to ‘think otherwise’. Western contemporary theology has been also influenced by this movement and, mainly in France, important exponents of phenomenology chose to move very close to theological issues, so that French phenomenology has been accused to be a crypto-theological movement7 . We will soon have the chance to meditate on this encounter between phenomenology and Christian theology. But what precisely is, phenomenology? We might find in all the different context and authors a common interest: to built a science (aspiring universality) involving a radically subjective approach that seeks to offer “an account of space, time and the world as we live

7

DOMINIQUE JANICAUD, Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française, Eclat Editions, Paris 1992.

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them”8 . All our knowledge of truth, our reflection, our activities take place in a context and phenomenology refuses to abstract from this context. “All my knowledge of the world is gained from my own particular point of view”, stated Marleau-Ponty9: the ‘point of view’ is what we call conscience, human experience and perception. Phenomenology denies that knowledge can exit the context of human experience: this presumption characterized the greatest part of western philosophy, and characterizes modern science too, to which phenomenology wants to be an alternative. At the beginning of the 20th century, actually, Europe experienced a profound sense of renewal in many cultural fields. Art, music and poetry rethought their protocols, their language, their purposes. Philosophy – often not seen – grabs the change and contributes to lay the foundation of a new knowledge, where human experience can not be ignored anymore. Phenomenology could be considered the prophet – or in a sense the éminence grise – of this change that concerns so many regions of contemporary culture: it is not by chance that different phenomenologists take interest in music, poetry, art, architecture and human customs. Even if the ‘man in the street’ remains nowadays perfectly cartesian, new protocols have been written and the value of experience is again in the center of our attention. In the impossibility to describe the history and the consequences of this attempt to ‘think differently’, I will try to focus on some phenomenological inspirations. I am aware about the fact that this attempt is a simplification, but I believe it is worth for our path.

8

M AURICE MARLEAU -PONTY , Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, London 1962, vii. 9 M AURICE M ARLEAU-P ONTY, Phenomenology of Perception, ix.

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2.1 Perspective “All my knowledge of the world is gained from my own particular point of view”. This statement by Merleau-Ponty we mentioned before, connects knowledge to a singular space-time (hic et nunc) to which human consciousness is somehow chained. Examples can be found in many contexts of life, but the idea of perspective is immediately related with the sense of view. When I look at a house, for instance, I always see a part of the building (the facade) even if it is obvious for me to state that it is ‘the house’ what I actually see. If a friend of mine stands in the backyard, he will obviously stare at the same house even if he sees something very different from what I see. What is ‘the truth’ of the house? We might say both our views, and we might even say that ‘the truth’ of the house emerges from the meeting of our two views, through the encounter and narration of our different experiences. This simple remark shows us not only an incontrovertible truth about our knowledge, but also the fact that we will never reach universality but through a personal and historical unique experience of comprehension, and through the responsibility of our encounters. The assumption of a precise point of view, in other words, is not a lack of knowledge, but all the knowledge we can reach, and accepting this is the first step to the truth. Truth, in this sense, is not simply an ‘objective matter’, truth depends on my perception. Every man builds his world, as a result of his peculiar point of view; every man has his truth. We might complain that this ideas condemn us to relativism, but there is no way out from this evidence: I can never conceive myself from the outside, pretending that I had a superior point of view. I am, through experience, the source of my knowledge. But, nevertheless, the emphasis on the subject does not mean at all a return to the solitude of Descartes’ Cogito: despite I am the absolute

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source of perception (the ‘zero-pointpoint 10’ of knowledge), I can never separate myself from the act of knowledge: my experience of myself is neither distinct from, nor the condition for my experience of the world. My knowledge is always connected to my body, through which I meet reality, so that I do not have any experience of myself if not as an experience of myself experiencing the world. The world, the land I am living in, always appears to my consciousness as ‘my world’: the idea of a totality which I belong to (the way we usually think at ourself) is not an original perception, but an abstraction. To my perception – from which I can’t be absolved – the world is always not simply the stage of my experience, but, since I can never meet myself separated from my experience, it plays an important part on the definition of my identity. A man is not like a set of tires that can be used on different circuits with similar results: the land we are dwelling in is an actor of the definition of ourselves, since conscience is the result of the experience of my world. In fact, my identity is not the possibility, but rather the result of my experience, in which the land plays an important role. Our being-and-having a body has another consequence on knowledge: the mystery of perception is not as much the outside, but rather the inside. I, myself, am a mystery to my knowledge. We usually figure rationality as a spot of light exploring the world, so that darkness is outside so that, as soon as I approach objects, they are enlightened. Phenomenology points out how this is just a partial model of human experience: the deepest darkness is exactly in the center of our perception; the deepest darkness is in ourselves, it is ourselves because, being the zero-point of experience, we never meet ourselves. We live without the chance of looking ourselves living 11.

10

The concept of Null-Punkt is one of the main ideas in Husserl’s thought. In Luigi Pirandello’s novel Uno, nessuno e centomila (One, No One and One Hundred Thousand) the impossibility of looking at ourself and the ambiguous re11

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2.2 Otherness Our body states something else, however. Since to exist we, ourselves, must be (and have) a body, then existence is not simply an empty exercise of abstract freedom: existence has something to do with the life of the body. Moreover, having-and-being a body means that I present something to the others, I am a material object for their perception: I am ‘the other person’s other person’. Alterity, otherness, relationships are important issues of phenomenology, introduced by different scholars and authors. On these topics phenomenology marks one of the greatest distances from the traditional philosophy. Cartesian Cogito and the order of values that characterizes the modern vision, erase the experience of alterity through the methodic doubt and create an unrelated, solipsistic subject. Eventually, this unrelated subject will meet other unrelated subjects to whom he contends the space of living. Obviously in this vision others are only an incident (or even a threat) to my possibility of being. Experience and perception can tell a different story about identity. Human identity, indeed, emerges from an experience of proximity, not only because others are an essential presence in my world, but also because they participate in a very peculiar way to the birth of my consciousness. As we already stated, human experience is the place where identity emerges; among all different contexts of human experience the meeting with others is eminently important, different form any other experience. The eminence of this encounter hides in man’s glance: while you look at another man you understand that he is looking at you and at once you understand the existence of another perspective, in which you play a role. The mystery of glance is the

lationship with the mirror is one of the main themes of the protagonist, Vitangelo Moscarda.

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coming to life of another world, ‘his world’ of which, being seen, you are a part. Since phenomenology concerns the complexity of human experience, we might go further: the birth of any human consciousness happens thanks to experiences that involve the presence of others12. Some examples might be useful. Every human being exists in force of an act of care: a baby comes to life from his mother’s womb, grows in force of his parent’s attentions, learns his name because others repeat it continuously, discovers language because others elect him as an interlocutor and answer to his call. Without these primordial experiences, human life is impossible: without other’s bodies our body would not exist, without other’s words our language (and, being language the instrument of thoughts, our thinking itself) would not exist. Psychoanalysis discovered how deeply imprinted in our identity are these primordial events. These few notes explain enough – for the moment – the importance of encounters in knowledge and comprehension of truth, but we will have to examine in depth all the consequences of this vision. 2.3 Truth and history It is easy to understand that one of the problems of modern philosophy after Descartes is the lack of credit towards history. Since the universal truth corresponds to clear and distinct ideas and since experience does not take part to their formulation, history might become simply irrelevant. By history we mean the role of events, facts, their influence on ideas, the weight of discussion and experiences of pain and joy: the modern view of an absolute truth does not consider their pertinence in knowledge.

12

On this subject: JAMES MUMFORD, Ethics at the Beginning of Life. A phenomenological critique, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2013, 95-118.

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The model of history that modern thought developed is the idea of ‘progress’: knowledge can be reached through a dialectical development, where a thesis meets its antithesis and can reach a new and more perfect synthesis. Somehow the scientific idea of evolution, in Charles Darwin’s works confirms this possibility of a linear historical gain. No matter how approximate this scientific theory is in fact, an optimistic faith in progress has in fact leaded Western culture for many centuries and soon captured the attention of the ‘man in the street’, despite everyday life often denies it: we all pretend that what will come tomorrow will fatally be the improvement of yesterday, just as a new smartphone with its ancestor. However, everyone basically knows that history is not linear, that events usually destroy the quiet evolution of rationality and that ideals often collapse in collision with happenings. The distance between truth and history was clearly defined in the 18th Century by the German philosopher Gotthold Ephreim Lessing, one of the most outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment era. The formulation of the problem has been known as the ‘Lessing’s Ditch13’ and involves a consideration about Christ’s miracles, traditionally considered affordable proofs of Christian reliability14.

13

GOTTHOLD EPHREIM LESSING, On the proof of spirit and power, in Philosophical and theological writings, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2005, 83-88. 14 To be honest, the relationship between Christian faith and Jesus’s miracles has never been that simple. Many centuries before Lessing, in the greatest poem of Christianity, the Divine Comedy, Dante seems to be aware of the complexity of history. During his ascent to God, in Paradise, Dante’s faith is under examination, in front of Saint Peter (24th canto). One of the questions that Saint Peter addresses to the pilgrim is about the evidences of his faith. Now, miracles written in the Scriptures can not prove anything, because “The Truth that must be proved / – And nothing else – asserts that they were so”, says Saint Peter. Tho whom Dante responds: "If without miracles the whole world turned / To Christianity," I said, "that miracle /A hundred times is greater than the rest: / “For poor and fasting you went in the field / To sow the good seed of the plant that once / Had been a vine and now’s become a bramble”. Historical

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This was more or less the traditional reasoning: Jesus performed many miracles in his life (included his Resurrection) and his disciples witnessed their truth. He also stated to be God’s Son. Since those miracles are evidence of his supernatural being, we must believe in what he stated and, therefore, we must believe he is God himself. Lessing’s problem lays not on the possibility that Jesus really performed miracles: even if we can reach – through witnesses – a good certainty that Jesus made supernatural acts, this is and remains an historical truth. Now, any historical truth has a great strength of persuasion for all its spectators, but it wastes all its power in front of those who could not assist to the event. Unless miracles do not happen in front of me, he says, even if I believe to the witnesses, I can not reach any certainty about the absolute truth of God’s nature. “Casual historical truths can never be the proof of necessary rational truth”: the passage between these two different levels of truth is a profound ditch that can not be crossed: “That, then, is the ugly great ditch which I cannot cross, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make that leap” 15. The passage, states Lessing, is logically impossible because it violates one of the main laws of logics, the Aristotelian prohibition of a μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος, (metàbasis eis allo génos): a transition from an order of concept to another. Lessing criticism towards the relationship between miracles and absolute truth is much deeper than it seems. In fact Christian faith lays on revelation (Christ’s life, death, resurrection) and its revelation is eminently ‘historical’. Christian’s claim, in other words, is precisely that an historical human existence reveals the truth of God. Stating the impossibility to cross the ugly ditch, Lessing undermines the possibility of Christian religion itself (and, moreover, of all the three proof is, for Dante, not only in some historical supernatural event, but in the living experience of God’s People; the evidence is possible only through the living experience of the Church that Dante experiments himself. 15 GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSING, On the proof of spirit and power, 87.

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great revealed religions: Hebraism, Christianity and Islam). The interesting fact is that Lessing’s way of thinking is perfectly comprehensible and all in all easily shareable to anyone. The ‘man in the street’ would agree in a blink with the German philosopher, because he shares with Enlightenment the idea that an absolute truth, unrelated to any historical event, has the greater possible grade of certainty. The problem that Lessing underlines is unresolvable for modern cultural protocols because historical truth is considered casual while rational truth is necessary. The connection between historical truth and its hic and nunc is seen as an insurmountable weakness. But it is not just a matter of philosophy: any man undergoes the weakness of his historical experience; human freedom is insecure, we hesitate in front of the possibility to be responsible of the truth and we often seek for someone or something that absolves us from this responsibility. The perfect black and sharp parallelepiped that appears in Kubrik’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” is an interesting image of what humans seek, thinking about truth. In a chaotic and confused world, the possibility of perfection becomes the perfect idol: truth must not subject to change and confusion, truth is awaited as the possibility to be liberated from the complex and troubled drama of life. Human expectations towards truth are against its historical involvement. Only a drastic change of these protocols can reopen the bond between history and truth. This revolution indeed occurs where new credit is given to experience. Phenomenology claims to be dealing with a rational truth, claims to be a science, without denying history. This possibility lies in what we might call a ‘human invariance’: human experiences, although unique and personal, are nevertheless universal. Universal experience, in fact, does not exist else rather then in singular and personal experiences; universal truth does not exist rather then in unique encounters with life. The ‘ugly great ditch’ can be crossed as far as we admit that there is no objective truth or ‘absolute’ truth: truth is not an object, it has always to do with an encounter between subject and object, an encounter that is each time unique and at the same time the realization of a universal truth. 36

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Truth has to be thought rather as a process, as the process of freedom itself, as the condition of possibility of human existence. Denying absoluteness does not mean falling in ‘relativism’ (which is the great fear of modern Christian ethics16 ): history (this is the gamble of phenomenology) produces evidences of universality to anyone who wants to focus his attention on what actually happens in human experience. These evidences are not the result of an effort to adapt practical experiences to a theoretical model, but the result of an attentive observation of life. ‘Human invariance’ – this is how I define this process – should be the only possible modern correction to ethical and theoretical relativism. I am aware that this correction might seem extraordinarily weak, compared to centuries of moral reflection based on the idea of a natural law, but it shows a different strength. First of all the evidences of experience are capable of being understood, whereas traditional moral reflection seems to be at a great distance from post-modernity. In front of some Christian moral positions, the greatest part of western population does barely understand the problem, and finds no reason to share the solution. A phenomenological approach to moral issues might be, if not convincing, at least capable to be understood. But there is a second reason of strength. Post-modern man refuses to deal with models. The figure of subject has been so strongly emphasized that the idea of ethics as imitation of models is unthinkable. Of course this is a paradox in modern knowledge: while truth still is

16

“Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine", seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires”. JOSEPH R ATZINGER, Homily for the Mass “Pro eligendo Romano Pontifice”, 2005 (the whole text can be found here: http://www.vatican.va/gpII/ (http://ww documents/homily-pro-eligendo-pontifice_20050418_en.html)

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thought as absolute, when it is time to come to personal choices and behaviors everything is and must remain possible. This paradox in humanity (the coexistence of theoretical rationality and ethical and psychological lack of rules) has the appearance of a wound that needs to be healed by an attentive care. The risk of a complete loss of rationality is an alarming presence in new generations. But what if life in its development could give us the evidences we need? Think about the life of a growing man. The beginning of human consciousness coincides with a time of recovery of family models. Still, every man needs to go through the refuse of his parent’s model to built his identity and personality. A young man becomes adult when he settles his own identity and for a part of his life this fatally means to be ‘against’ his past. This process of distancing from models coincides with the discovery of personal freedom and possibilities. But there also comes a time, in everyone’s life, when you discover, being an adult, that your parents lived ‘the same as you did’. The fulfillment of human growth stands in this discovery. After you reject their model, you eventually understand that your parents experimented the same doubts and hopes, the same fears and aspirations that you felt. This discovery of universality at the end of the process is completely different from the imitation of models in the beginning. The first coincides with human ripeness, the second with a phase of the process. The distance between the first and the second kind of universality was well defined by one of the most interesting philosophers and phenomenologist of the passed century: Emmanuel Lévinas. In his first great text, ‘Totality and Infinity’, he distinguishes between the modern idea of ‘totality’ – in which clearly echoes the ‘totalitarism’ – and the discovery of ‘infinity’ as the infinite possibilities of human freedom. Considering and understanding human behavior means accepting to deal with ‘infinity’ and rejecting the temptation of ‘totality’. In the analysis of this infinity, nevertheless, we can find the paradigm of universality, not as an assumption, but as a result of living.

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We can’t pretend that universality stands behind our shoulders: it is in front of us, as a promise. 2.4 Phenomenology and religious experience As we already stated, phenomenology, particularly in France, was accused of a ‘theological turn’ that is supposed to have brought it too far from its original aim and method. True or not, the accusation shows how deep is the connection between faith and the consideration of human experience. I would like to briefly point some possibilities connected to this relationship. a. First of all let us see this connection ‘ex parte philosophiae', from a philosophical point of view. 20th century can be considered the age of the ‘death of God’. I refer – as everybody knows – to Nietzsche’s declaration in his work Also spracht Zarathustra17, where the philosopher takes the responsibility to announce what everybody already knows: atheism and nihilism, with a great part of western culture, seem to agree about the end of an era in which religion played an immense part in the scenery of European worldview. Many years passed and – even if the prophecy was apparently fulfilled – something unexpected happened: the human experience of faith did not disappear. On the contrary, spirituality is still part of human life. Of course someone could simply consider this a residue of superstition (and, indeed, this can be partially true), but the phenomenon of faith does not survive only in children or in uneducated pockets of population, but also in perfectly educated grown-up persons. Of course, Christianity has lost much of its power and followers, but theology still seats between other humanistic disciplines, even if often in a peculiar position. Many 17

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Thus spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, Penguin Classics, London 1978.

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western people still ask for religious marriage, baptize their children, look for a religious education. The collapse of the number of believers does not seem to be and to be considered (by the ‘man in the street’) as the result of rational reflection, but more often as the result of the weakness of religious institutions and their credibility. The management of the ‘sacred’ might not anymore be a prerogative of Christianity – since many religious movements, even very bizarre ones, contend it to the traditional institutions –, but still the post-modern era registers an important request of sacred, sometimes even to irrational forms of it. For this reason it is incredibly interesting for philosophy to try to understand and describe the protocols of the act of faith. The reflection does not need to express an opinion about God’s existence, but only about the inner workings of this possibility for human freedom. Since faith is a very peculiar form of the exercise of freedom, staying in front of a very peculiar form of evidence, the analysis of faith can not avoid seducing the scholars in its understanding. The operation of the act of faith soon became a prime issue for phenomenology18. b. Ex parte theologiae, the discovery of phenomenology is also particularly fruitful. Christian theology deals with revelation: life, relationships, acts of Jesus are considered the epiphany of God’s true face. This means that for Christian theology ‘all we know about God’ is what Jesus told us through his life; now, for many centuries – being the entire western world naturally Christian – theology did not need a deep investigation of the protocols of the act of faith. Even in this situation, a reflection about faith was not completely omitted, particularly in the medieval period, when a new

18

It might be just a chance, but it is still surprising to realize how many of Husserl’s disciples – despite their master’s clear atheism – followed a religious path. Edith Stein – saint and martyr for the Catholic Church – is only the most famous of many religious conversions that occurred in Husserl’s entourage.

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idea of individual blossomed around the 12th century19 . Still, in the beginning of 20th century, manualist theology could easily avoid the issue: God’s existence was granted by cultural perception of reality and could simply be strengthened by a philosophical reasoning: Christianity only needed to add some features to his existence, acquiring them from revelation and especially from the Gospels. When atheism and positivism distressed this system, the first and most obvious answer of theology was to reinforce the issue of God’s existence through philosophical reasons, creating the branch of theology known as ‘Apologetic’. When apologetic theology started the effort of writing the protocols of the act of faith, leaving behind the dialectic intent, soon discovered how this analysis could be useful to understand what faith really is. This was the passage from apologetic theology to ‘fundamental theology’, whose aim is the understanding of the complex drama of the encounter between revelation and human freedom. This passage discovered how the authenticity of the act of faith was a main issues for Jesus himself. The role of the debate between Jesus and the Pharisees in the Gospels and in Jesus’ life – and above all the accuse of blasphemy as main reason of his conviction – suggests that there is a ‘true’ act of faith and a ‘false’ one: a true religion and a false religion, depending not on the lack of divine revelation, but on a deficiency of human response. Theology agreed that al least some of the reasons of modern philosophy’s rejection towards religion could be approved by an attentive evangelical criticism and used as theoretical weapons against pharisaic presumptions. The idea that “Christianity is a faith, not a

19

On this topic: ARON GUREVICH, The Origins of European Individualism, WileyBlackwell, Oxford & Cambridge 1995. See also COLIN MORRIS , The Discovery of the Individual, 1050-1200, University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1972.

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religion” became more and more popular, starting from Evengelic theology and particularly Karl Barth’s20 and Dietrich Bonhöffer’s polemic against the religious man, with their profound roots in the thought of Søren Kierkegaard. It soon reached also Catholic theology and even became recurring cliché in Sunday’s preaching. Nevertheless, this well known statement suggests a demanding revision of religion: this is something about which Christians do not seem to be fully aware. An example might be the flattering interest for Christianity of a part of public opinion rising in defense of Western identity. The contemporary crisis of the Western society, the current emergency of migration, the fear for fundamentalism are often reasons to support religion not for its message, but as a tradition that must be preserved. Despite the illusion of a growing consent, Christian conscience needs to recognize the trap. Nevertheless, the idea of the difference between faith and religion, the issue of the ‘true religion21’ has been unforgettably established and it opened an important chance for theology and for Christianity to discover how deeply revelation is connected to human response. The fascinating encounter with the Revelation reproduces the same experience of the first disciples who met Jesus. The analysis of the act of faith and the questioning about human conscience in front of Revelation soon became one of the most im-

20

Karl Barth was an outstanding theologian in Protestantism of the 20th century. He is the major exponent of Dialectic theology. Faith should be the effort of considering God as the totally Other, practicing obedience towards his otherness. To do this Faith must constantly defend God’s otherness from the religious temptation, which pretends to grab God’s mystery and to manage the experience of sacred. 21 The issue of ‘true religion’ is well described in Saint James’ letter (1,27): «Pure, unspoilt religion, in the eyes of God our Father, is this: coming to the help of orphans and widows in their hardships, and keeping oneself uncontaminated by the world». ‘Agape’, love, is the judgement parameter of religion, for the New Testament.

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portant places to understand, describe and judge faith – separating it, for example, from superstition, need for reassurance, defense of tradition. Approaching the phenomenology of human experience and its complexity helps theology to think the act of faith as a ‘human act’ among others and not as a supernatural and odd exercise of freedom; at the same time, it allows Christianity to judge about its own quality.

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CHAPTER II

THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION

1. Bible, theology and human invariance Having settled the fundaments of our method, in this chapter we will approach the Christian anthropology, focusing on the relationship between man and the land. We will be trying to suggest how Christianity might be interesting not only for believers, but for anyone who intends to go beyond the modern idea of subjectivity. Doing this, I will take advantage to explain some of the main issues in contemporary theology. For many persons, sure enough, theology is a perfect stranger. I can’t make a history of theology, but I can neither pretend that its aims and problems are known enough. What I will try to do is to go through my path and – at the same time – to describe the horizon. It happens something similar when you visit a foreign country: while you visit singular places – streets, cathedrals, museums – focusing on buildings or picturesque views, you can still turn off your GPS for a while and grab a map. It is the only way to understand how the country really is: how far are the mountains or the coast, in which direction is the capital, where are the main industrial or natural resources… making a virtue out of necessity you can still understand much more than you simply visit. This is why before starting our journey we need a demanding training: whatever it costs I will try to give both the schedule and an approximate map of the environment we will cross. As for the schedule it is quite simple: we will start from the Bible, then we will question about some issues in the relationship between 45

The Game of Sophia: Economy, Ecology and Human Dwelling

man and the land he lives in; in a second moment we will meet some chosen theologians, that dealt with the way man dwells; even outside theology, we will meet some experiences in Christian spirituality, involving art, architecture and other expressions of believers’ life. As for the method, it is more complicate. If we want to understand Christian vision – admitting that there is one – of the relationship between man and land, it might seem obvious to start from the Bible – considered by Christianity as the strongest authority, being inspired by the Holy Spirit – and to move then to theology. Nevertheless this choice needs to be explained. I would like to face two questions, in the beginning. The first one is: ‘how will we read the Scriptures?’ and the second is ‘what are we looking for?’. Any act of thinking faces – in a sense – these questions: the aim and the method. 1. As for any text, there are many ways to study the Bible; since 1950’s biblical science suggested different methods of interpretation: the history of the Bible’s redaction, the study of symbols, a narrative approach… any of this interests suggests one or more methods. The presence of different methods of interpretation is, of course, a treasure, since all together they are able to give us a complex comprehension of the text. To be precise: plurality of methods is a treasure as far as one method does not demand to be ‘the true one’, as it often happens. When this occurs – as it occurs for scientific research in almost every academic institution – you are often forced to side with one. Personally, I will try to spare your patience, keeping you out from the debate1 . This is why I will simply suggest that we read the Bible ‘as if it was the first time’.

1

For a basic approach to Catholic interpretation of the Bible I suggest the document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission The interpretation of the Bible in the Church (April 15, 1993). You can find it in English online here http://catholicresources.org/ChurchDocs/PBC_Interp-FullText.htm

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To explain my choice, I take advantage of the experience of an outstanding Spanish poet: Miguel de Unamuno. Living in one of the roughest periods of Spanish history, Unamuno is not only a poet, but an “exemplary figure in our age: the violent contradictions of his thought reflect and predict the violent contradictions of our culture”2. Contradictions characterize both his thought and his existence and presence in the not less contradictory Spanish society in the beginning of 20th Century. Unamuno’s main effort is to built a personal, sharpened and noble experience of humanity, carrying the weight of human fragilities and contradictions. Doing this, he elects one of the most important Spanish literary characters, Don Quixote, as the main interlocutor of all his production, studying and writing about Cervantes’s novel for his entire life. Unamuno’s approach to Don Quixote could be the model of our encounter with the Bible, at this point of our proposal: each time he approaches the novel, he does that as if it was the first time, as if he was the first reader. The poet himself explains that when you are in front of a Classic you should deal with it as you do with the Bible. Quixote is not a simple character created by Cervantes and the study of the author’s intentions is not ‘the’ truth of Quixote. As far as the knight becomes an icon of Spanish culture, he earns an independence from his creator: his interpreters have rights on him not less than Cervantes: Any generation coming in succession, added forth something to Don Quixote, so that he progressively transformed and became enormous. (…) And if Cervantes resuscitated and came back in our world, he would have no right to complain against this Quixote (…) since it would be like if a mother, looking at her son gaining goals that che

2

F RANCES W YERS, Miguel de Unamuno: the Contrary Self, Támesis Books, London, 1976, ix.

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The Game of Sophia: Economy, Ecology and Human Dwelling

would never imagine, demanded to bring him back to his childhood, 3 feeding him again at her breast or even holding him in her womb .

The model of this dynamics is the Bible; he writes: If the Bible has an inestimable value, this is due to what was built on it by generations of men who, reading it, have found peace for their spirit; and everybody knows that there is not a fragment of the Bible that has not been interpreted in hundreds of different ways, depending by the interpreter. This is an enormous value. The less interesting thing is to know if the authors of the different books of the Bible real4 ly meant what theologians, mystics, commentators read in them .

Following Unamuno’s suggestion we will join the multitude of commentators and read it ‘as if it was the first time’: in a sense, we must overturn our intent. We will not read the text to understand it, but to understand us in front of it. The effort will be to put ourselves into play in front of the text, questioning it about our experience and our age: in this sense we are the ‘first readers’. This is not a privilege of a sacred text: any great literary work, any ‘Classic’ deserves this approach. In fact, we will do the same with other writings and artworks. This leads us to the second question. 2. What you might find in the Bible is not a definition, a concept, a clear and distinct idea of truth: Bible is mainly made of stories, tales, poems, prayers and ancient laws. And, of course, in the Bible there is not an essay about agricultural science. So what kind of truth are we looking for in the Bible? But, deeper: can we really find truth in a book? Can the truth about humanity, about God, about land be written? Can the issue of the land be definitively explained, clarified and closed? Can any issue be written? We introduced our itinerary pointing out that issues do not ask for a so-

3

M IGUEL DE UNAMUNO, In viaggio con don Chisciotte, Medusa, Milano 2013, 47 [my translation]. 4 M IGUEL DE UNAMUNO, In viaggio con don Chisciotte, 48 [my translation].

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lution, they quest for an answer: the fact that the authors of the Bible answered to the issue of land does not authorize us to use their answer, to let them pay for our debt; the same happens with thinkers of the past. Answering to the issue of land is our responsibility, it belongs to us; moreover we can pay our debt only answering to this land we are dwelling, in this season of human history. The characters of the Bible, prophets, kings, patriarchs lived many centuries ago and the books were written ages ago. The exploitation of the land in the 5th century B.C. was completely different from our extensive cultivation, using land resources had nothing to do with our abuse of the planet which is inconceivable for ancient times. How can their answer be useful for modern age? Of course, when we read a text – a fortiori if we believe it was inspired – we must trust the authors. But what exactly do we trust? We trust them not to tell us lies, of course. But, besides, we trust that they lived a profound relationship with the mystery of life. And, still, how can this interfere with our age, if our world, conditions of life, technology and habits are so distant? Is there anything we can find in the Bible even close to be the same as today? Humanity. Humanity is the same. It is one of the most amazing discoveries that any reader does, when he runs into a Classic: true characters struggle the same fights, suffer the same pain, taste the same sense of life and, in a word, live the same experience we are now living. We already called this the ‘human invariance5’. Despite in ages everything changes – even the language to under5

The term invariance nowadays is mainly used in statistics. It indicates something that remains unaltered during a transformation. In statistics and in probability theory, variance measures how far a set of results is spread out. Using this term in a philosophical sense, I would like to point how human experience could be variant but, at the proof of life, actually shows universality. Carrying this word a statistic echo on the background, it allows us not to think to the universality of human experience as a postulate, but as a discovery full of wonder.

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stand life – human freedom shows an invariance. Men suffer, love, trust, fear in the same way through history; they might not suffer for the same facts, love the same experiences, fear the same enemies, but there is something surprisingly universal in the exercise of human freedom. Beyond this, it often happens that their experience makes you understand yours, so that sometimes, in front of a poem, you would say: “I felt exactly the same, but I wasn’t able to say it”. When we read Greek Tragedy, when we read the Bible, when we read Dante or Shakespeare we can touch human invariance. This invariance can’t be grabbed in a definition, in a model: it simply happens, when you discover that other men suffered as you suffer, rejoiced as you rejoice, hoped as you hoped, despaired as you sometimes despair. Its revelation is punctual, historical, personal. It is not a matter of imitation: you obviously know that in no way you can imitate Oedipus or Moses or Hamlet, as if you could live their life; still, you discover that they lived as you are living. This discovery follows your experience, it does not preexist your freedom: its aim is not to teach you how to live. To the contrary: if you want to understand human invariance you need to live your own experience and respond to your own issues. This is the only way to deal with truth: to respond, to be responsible for it. Universality lays at the end of experience and not simply as its axiom. On human invariance lay the fundamentals of our trust towards the Bible. Of course, a believer might find something more profound in the fact that Scriptures are inspired, but this never denies this anthropological aspect: on the contrary, the idea of the inspiration would sharpen our comprehension of human freedom in its relationship with the mystery of God and challenge even more our responsibly. This is how we will meet some biblical pericopes with an anthropological significance about man dwelling in the land.

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2. Creation 2.1 The genesis of Genesis We begin our approach to the Bible inquiring the doctrine of creation, which has in chapters 1-3 of the book of Genesis its summit. We must not forget, however, that parts of this doctrine are spread all over the Bible. Some books in the Wisdom tradition, some passages of the Prophetic tradition and even some parts of the Gospels have important messages about God’s act of creation and man being a creature. Still, the Bible does not share our modern perspective. Creation seems to be, in modern times, the cliché argument of the existence of God6. On one side, creation is considered a proof to God’s existence (someone must be the author of reality); on the other side Darwin’s theory of evolution and other scientific hypothesis are considered evidences of the fact lack of any ‘intelligent design’ for reality. We must admit that these arguments are not as important as they seem. Descartes identified God as the First Cause of the existence, but Descartes’ God is ‘usless’, he is only a ‘bump’, as Pascal says: his participation to creation has nothing to do with his identity or with Christian Revelation. Regarding the Bible, we must admit that Pascal is right: the Scriptures are interested in God’s identity, they are not committed in the demonstration of his existence. This is why the issue of creation appears very late in the history of the Bible’s redaction. 6

“Our modern Western mentality is characterized by a transcendence that stands “behind our shoulders”. This is how, generally, we think the explanation of things, the reasons of facts: which is the cause, what pushes and influences us? And it is in the same way that we think also God: something that stands before, in the beginning, from which everything comes (…). We seldom think about a God standing besides us, in front of us, ahead, like the fire column that guided Israel in the desert”. PIERANGELO SEQUERI, Intorno a Dio, La Scuola, Brescia 2011, 11-12 [my translation].

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Even if we will read the text ‘as if it was the first time’, underlining the history of the redaction is not useless. Scholars pledge that the amazing opening of the book of Genesis, the myth of Creation and Fall, was not the first part of the Book to be written. Covering the first eleven chapters of Genesis, which have been defined a “metahistorical etiology”7, this effort to explain human experience through an event outside history, but capable to give reason to history itself, is a late achievement. Scholars also assert that it took a long period of time to settle and compose these chapters: even if a part of the text might be more ancient, the final redaction probably dates in the age

7

"Negatively it can probably be said quite simply that the account of creation in all its parts is not an 'eye-witness report' of what happened, by someone who was there, whether it be God or Adam who is thought of as the reporter. Or, to express it in more learned fashion, the account of creation does not depict the event which it reports with the actual observable features of its occurrence. Consequently it is not the report of someone who is describing and is in a position to describe a visible event of an historical kind because he was present and saw how it happened. If that were the case, then the figurative trappings and modes of expression which are present would be meaningless there. Nor would a reader expect them, if the occurrence to be reported had its own actual observable historical and therefore at all times intelligible and communicable features and provided the reporter were present at the event. Nor are the figurative modes of expression simply to explained as didactic devices designed to assist a primitive hearer's comprehension, for even to him much could have been differently said without prejudice to his understanding. To put the matter once again negatively, we can and indeed must of course affirm that what is contained in the account of creation as a proposition actually affirmed, is true, because God has revealed that content. But that statement does not imply the proposition that what is narrated there is reported by God in the manner in which it is expressed, because he was present at the event reported and is giving an eye-witness account even if it is one with some rather metaphorical features” KARL R AHNER, Homisation: The Official Teaching of The Church on Man in Relation to the Scientific Theory of Evolution, Herder K.G, Münich 1965, 34-35. The whole text can be read online: http://www.religion-online.org/showchap- (http://www ter.asp?title=3367&C=2765.

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of Babylonian captivity, one of the darkest and yet most prolific periods of ancient Israel’s history. The community being deported by a powerful nation, the temple destroyed, the monarchy exterminated, Israel lived as an exiled in a foreign country. We don’t exactly know what happened there, but of course the main issue for the Chosen People was to understand how to believe in a foreign land, having lost everything that God’s promise provided. To comprehend that age in the History of Salvation we need to recall how everything that was now lost had profoundly marked Israel awareness of God’s reliability: the Land, Jerusalem, the Temple were the History of Salvation. Even today, to describe the reason of his faith, a Jew would say: “because God brought us out of the Egypt”. Babylonian captivity means not only the loss of the land, but the loss of God’s blessing that the land was embodying. With the land Israel looses all his religious symbols, patiently built in centuries on the fundament of the exodic period: the temple, figure of the Arc; Jerusalem, figure of the Land of Promise; the king, figure of Moses who could talk face to face to God; the dynasty, figure of an Alliance for the future. In such a period of fear and uncertainty Israel had the courage to create one of the profoundest meditations about human condition, challenging the culture of Babylonian Empire, which was one of the most developed civilization on the planet, with a complex, elaborate and refined mythology, including legends about how the world was created. Of course many similarities can be found comparing Gen 111 to those myths of creation, but we must admit that the biblical message and the poetic are unique. Indeed, until then Israel’s faith concerned the presence of God in history, redemption: Israel’s profession of faith is historical, its roots deeply planted in the experience the discovery of God’s interest in the destiny of Israel. Creation was a logical consequence of this divine commitment to history. It might be interesting to understand why the theological reflexion pointed creation in this period of exile. We might never find ‘the’ reason (there might be more than one), but it is fascinating to think that Israel in Babylon had the chance to discover a ‘human invari53

The Game of Sophia: Economy, Ecology and Human Dwelling

ance’ as the result of the encounter with another culture. The people lived, in fact, a domination that was probably not as bad as Egypt; in this context they surely connected with local intellectuals, with the myths of creation of the Ancient Middle East and received as a legacy the question about the birth of mankind. The historical faith of Israel met in this way new issues and never forgot this encounter, so that the question could be shifted from “how can we live outside the Promised Land?” to “how can our faith deal with anthropological universality?”. At least, having no clear evidence, this is what we like to guess. The theological effort of the elaboration of an anthropology, accomplished through the composition of a meta-history, is an impressive operation. History is a sequence of facts or, more precisely, history is a narration that creates a sequence of events connecting them with cause-and-effect links. Any narration is fruit of a choice between the infinite chain of events, presupposing a beginning and an end. Any historical narration, in other words, elects one event as ‘the beginning’, stealing it from the infinite stream of time. Any narration of the beginning is, usually, rather than a fiction, a fantastic reelaboration of real events – it happens, for example, for many myths of city foundation. But, even when the imagination prevails, it always claims to be part of the stream of history. The beginning belongs to human history, because mankind’s main power is exactly the power to begin. There is something magic in every human beginning, the magic of a moment when everything is a promise, the magic of intuition, the magical power of youth. This magic does not belong only to human history, but also to personal life: when a man is in love you can listen to him narrating the first encounter again and again. Of course the beginning is rarely important in the very moment you are living it: you always discover it when looking back and often its magic becomes stronger as much as you narrate it again and again. This is why we must not wonder for the fact that humans often enrich their beginnings with fantastic details: we all do the same in our personal life. When I tell the story of my first date, I will 54

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probably describe sensations and certainties that were not realistically there; I will eventually invent an incredible sunset, a starry night, a distant music. All these things might not have been truly there, but they represent the truth of that event in my present perception. But there is something beyond the beginning. There is something out of the reach of human freedom: the origin. Beginning is an act of human will that can be recognized in the sequence of facts that we call history. The origin, instead, is the power to live, to make choices, to make the difference. Let me explain with an example. Our memory can find perhaps the beginning of our consciousness: our first memory might go back many years, reaching our first conscious choice or fear or feeling. Still, there is something missing, something out of the reach of our memory: it is impossible to recall nine months in our mother’s womb, for example; yet, something vital happened there. There is an origin that can’t be drawn. This ‘undrawnable’ origin gives us the perception of something standing outside history, out of the reach of our narration, outside the stream of facts that our memory can recall. We don’t see it, but we can read its effects. This is the meaning of meta-history 8. The narration of the origin is not simply imaginary and fantastic (also the narration of the beginning can be so): it is radically beyond and, at the same time, it is the possibility of history itself. In the first chapters of Genesis we meet more than one meta-historical episode (Creation, Fall, Cain and Abel, the Deluge, Babel’s tower); their nature is to be outside history and, at the same time, to explain the possibility of history. The meta-historical quality of the book of Genesis does not simply denounce it as a fiction. It reflects a perception of the boundaries of human freedom, and the need to explain some major issues of

8

We talk about meta-history and not about pre-history because we are pointing the discontinuity and not simply the impossibility to drawn informations.

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human experience. Among the others, also the original relationship between the man and the land. A biblical step is often quoted as an accusation: God blessed them, saying to them, 'Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven and all the living creatures that move on earth.’ God also said, 'Look, to you I give all the seed-bearing plants everywhere on the surface of the earth, and all the trees with seed-bearing fruit; this will be your 9 food’ .

Genesis statement about ‘being master’ and ‘subduing’ earth seems peremptory here, and it is not what we were expecting. Stating how the Garden was given to man and to his freedom, it seems to confirm that nature is completely at man’s disposal. But if we consider that these words concern the origin, we will understand the statement only if we concentrate on the complexity of the myth, that we must now walk through. Human responsibility is – as we will see – a part of God’s creating act, and not vice versa: the Bible’s greatest effort is to make us think man starting from God and not God starting from man10. The beginning of Genesis is not only a source of interpretations, but also a source of attempts of rewritings. Painters, sculptors, poets often felt the charm of these pages and went back and gave new voice to the myth. In the 17th century, John Milton’s wrote his ‘Paradise Lost11’, rewriting in free verses the history of creation and fall. The long poem – twelve books – is a literary invention, but it is also

9

Gen 1,28-29. The possibility to reconcile the idea of “subduing” nature to an ecological attitude stands in the decision to understand human freedom starting from God’s revelation and not to make a god as image of man. On this topic: PIERANGELO SEQUERI, Custode, non tiranno. Per un nuovo rapporto fra persona e creato, EMI, Bologna 2014. 11 JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost, Penguin Classics, London 2003. From here quoted as “PL”. 10

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an interesting poetic interpretation of the biblical episode. From time to time, I will suggest in footnotes to read also some passages of the poem. 2.2 “Tob” In the beginning God created heaven and earth. Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, with a divine wind sweeping over the waters. God said, 'Let there be light,' and there 12 was light .

The origin (bereshit) is an act (‘God created’), a movement of God’s freedom transforming original chaos (represented by ‘the waters’) into the wonderful result of a habitable space. We will not follow here the cycle of the seven days of creation, but what clearly appears in it is God’s will for order and beauty: every day ends with the same litany “and God saw that it was good”. This hebraic word ‫( טוֹב‬Tob), often translated as ‘good’, actually means both ‘good’ and ‘pleasant’, bringing together both an ethical and aesthetic meaning. As the greek kalokagathia (καλὸς κἀγαθός), it indicates the fullness of virtues. Applied to creation, Tob indicates the opposite of chaos, describing God’s will in creation as a will of order. Highlighting this does not mean to take a position against the theological idea of creatio ex nihilo13 , which is not in our interest. What I want to point out is that the result of God’s action is not simply a physical space, but an ordered world, or, as the Bible says, a ‘Garden’. The theological meaning of this Garden must not be underes12

Gen 1,1-3. The idea of creation from nothing has been an important theological debate that is not so important to understand here. It might be enough to remember that the First Vatican Council declared a heresy to maintain that God did not create the world starting from nothing. In any case the intention of the Council was not to express about the dynamic of creation, but about divine freedom in the decision of creation. This is why the idea of order, here, does not threaten the ex nihilo. 13

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timated. Humanity is not created in a ‘neutral’ land, but in a land filled with beauty and order. Life can never be simply neutral, life starts with a word of Good; from an anthropological point of view this might explains why man is never neutral to what happens in his life: evil will always be unfair, against justice, while good will always be experimented as the right fulfillment of a promise. When something unpleasant happens, it always appears to our experience as the interruption of the promise that life, indeed, is. The Garden is, in this sense, a symbol of the profound connection between human freedom and the land in which humans dwell. Just think your birth in an inhospitable land, imagine you were born in a land destroyed by conflicts: the exercise of your freedom would have been different, the perception of the promise of a future would be difficult – but still not impossible. Links between choices and land are much stronger than we usually think. The idea of a Garden is exactly describing order against disorder, so that the Garden is, in the biblical vision, very close to what Greeks specified as ‘cosmos’: the fulfillment of a form against chaotic existence. Creation is not, in this way, just the appearing of animate or inanimate material, but the discovery of an order that overcomes a land “void and without form”. Existence is not the mere presence of something, but its meaningful ‘beauty’. Biblical vision clearly states that the divine imprinting in Creation is not only existence, but the possibility of a good existence: a promise that grows between the boundaries of the Garden. 2.2.1 Effortless Creation Moreover, the act of creation appears to be effortless: never it is described as a fight between being and non-being, as an effort of being. The act of creation is associated with a frequency of gratuitousness and with an impressive easiness, as if creation was, for God, without any strain. The Garden was built with the simple power of a word: God spoke to give being to things. We will return on this, but we must now underline the originality of this vision, if compared to oth58

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er ancient myths, where the creation in often connected to god’s fights, celestial catastrophes, dramatic events. Closer to us, one of the main issues of western philosophy, is well summarized by the question of the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling: “why being and not nothing?”. Being and non-being seem to be opponent in a mortal fight since Parmenides first defined the features of Being. Easily this fight is confused with the mortal fight between good and evil. Opposition seems to be the easiest and simplest way to understand the world. The theory of life as conatus essendi, a struggle to live, is also deeply rooted in human experience: living, surviving is actually a fight. The Bible, instead, does not consider this struggle as present in the origin, nor to attribute to God’s act of creation the same shade. An interesting passage of the book of Proverbs – another late appearance in Scripture – has a different and surprising narration about creation. It represents God playing with his Wisdom, in a context of joy and gratuitousness. Yahweh created me, first-fruits of his fashioning, before the oldest of his works. From everlasting, I was firmly set, from the beginning, before the earth came into being. The deep was not, when I was born, nor were the springs with their abounding waters. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills, I came to birth; before he had made the earth, the countryside, and the first elements of the world. When he fixed the heavens firm, I was there, when he drew a circle on the surface of the deep, when he thickened the clouds above, when the sources of the deep began to swell, when he assigned the sea its boundaries – and the waters will not encroach on the shore – when he traced the foundations of the earth, I was beside the master craftsman, delighting him day after day, ever at play in his presence, at play everywhere on his earth, delighting to be with the children of 14 men .

14

Pr 8,22-31.

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This text is surprising: Old Testament fought hard against polytheism, one of the main issues of Prophets was the fight against local idols, whose worship in some periods risked to overcome God’s cult. Nevertheless God’s Wisdom is here presented as a person, an hypostasis, alive and playing around while God created the universe. Christian interpretation a-posteriori easily found here a trace of Trinity, but, a part from this, what is the meaning of this uncomfortable presence? I believe that this character in the Old Testament is an open opposition against the idea of the world as the result of the fight between a being principle and a non-being principle15. What stays in the origin? Not a struggle, but a game; not a fight, but an amusement, a relationship between God and his Wisdom. The origin can’t fall prey of evil, nor of a state of neutrality where Being and Nothing face each other. The origin has tones and frequencies of gratuitousness, fantasy and promise. The original encounter is not between God and nothing, but between God and his Wisdom, the original encounter from which everything exists is a dialogue full of love and friendship. This also means that there is no encounter between God and nothing, nothing is never God’s interlocutor. Existence comes from a joyful dialogue, to which mankind will be invited, by the overabundance of this dialogue. Nothing in biblical myths of creation has the tone of a struggle for being, and this is particularly important, because the origin has consequences on the history that follows. The colours of this dialogue recall the words of an important medieval theologian, John Duns Scotus: creation can only be understood as a gift. Nothing in creation is necessary, everything comes from the abundance of love of divine life:

15

About this topic see also R OBERTO MAIER , Il male in Dio. Incontro critico con l’ontologia della libertà di Luigi Pareyson, in SILVANO PETROSINO - SERGIO UBBIALI (ed.), Il male. Un dialogo tra teologia e filosofia, Glossa, Milano 2014.

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According to Scotus, God’s love is ordered, free and holy. Every single aspect of the created universe exists because of God’s absolute freedom and because of God’s unlimited love (…) This divine love tends to “spill over” or diffuse itself, and God wills that God be loved 16 by another who can love him as perfectly as God loves himself .

2.2.2 Order and man The passage from chaos to order does not only regard the universe, but, above all, man. Not by chance, at the end of the sixth day of creation, after he created man “in the image of himself”, God’s opinion is different: God saw all he had made, and indeed it was very good. Evening 17 came and morning came: the sixth day .

Not just Tob, but ‘very Tob’: this is the judgment of the Creator. The birth of man18 represents both the fulfillment of the work and an element of discontinuity: different from all other beings, he is the accomplishment of all creation and the highest point of God’s order. Genesis soon explains the consequences: the Garden is given to man, he is the keeper of creation: Yahweh God planted a garden in Eden, which is in the east, and there he put the man he had fashioned. From the soil, Yahweh God caused to grow every kind of tree, enticing to look at and good to eat, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river flowed from Eden to water the garden, and from there it divided to make four streams. The first is named the Pishon, and this winds all through the land of Havilah where there is gold. The gold of

16

ILIA DELIO, KEITH DOUGLASS WARNER, PAMELA WOOD, Care for creation. A franciscan spirituality of the earth, Franciscan Media, Cincinnati, 2007. 17 Gen 1, 31. 18 The book of Genesis has two narrations about the creation. One is follows the the seven days scheme, the other one is in chapter 2. This should not surprise, since the history of the redaction of this is complex. Both episodes express the same reality with different emphasis.

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this country is pure; bdellium and cornelian stone are found there. The second river is named the Gihon, and this winds all through the land of Cush. The third river is named the Tigris, and this flows to the east of Ashur. The fourth river is the Euphrates. Yahweh God took the man and 19 settled him in the garden of Eden to cultivate and take care of it .

The Garden, here, is represented as a secondary creation, an accurate architectural project where order rules over the stream of the four rivers and over the disposition of trees. Man is the crowning achievement of this order. This is why God commits the Garden to man, so that he could ‘cultivate’ and ‘take care’ of it. These two verbs are important. They point out to two different qualities of human freedom. ‘Cultivation’ is the space for human creativity, for his power of beginning – as we stated before – while ‘care’, pointing out the fact that something precedes human’s freedom, is about his relationship to the origin. Human freedom should always be committed in both operations: human freedom consists in these two operations. On one hand, humans have the power to produce something new: the Garden is docile and hospitable to their creativity, imagination, to the work of their hands. This is something we should never stop to be amazed of: although we often deal with human failures, mistakes, defeats, mankind is capable of great enterprises. Mankind dwells in the land changing it: this is a fact; despite it often seems to impoverish its resources, an impressive work has been made in centuries to make the land hospitable. Mankind learned to dwell in deserts and swamps, on the top of the mountains and in the middle of the oceans. This endeavor is the sign of human greatness and we might never forget it. As for the Bible, the view of human power has never only simply connected to his pride and hu-

19

Gen 2,8-15.

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bris. Cultivation is an assignment that God himself gave to mankind20 . Still, cultivation is only a part of human commitment. Man must also ‘take care’ of the land. Care is the perception that the origin can not be grabbed, that the Garden is not the result of human efforts, that human freedom always receives a legacy. A debt precedes human activity and asks for care and responsibility. In the exercise of his freedom, man must always deal with an alterity. For the Bible this otherness is God’s will, but this feature of human experience is not simply a religious matter: it belongs to the structure of human conscience. The Italian philosopher Silvano Petrosino21 remarks how Martin Heidegger, even if he is not interested in theological issues, quotes this verbs of Genesis to describe human dwelling. In his encyclical letter about the common home, also Pope Francis underlines the same words: The biblical texts are to be read in their context, with an appropriate hermeneutic, recognizing that they tell us to “till and keep” the garden of the world. “Tilling” refers to cultivating, ploughing or working, while “keeping” means caring, protecting, overseeing and preserving. This implies a relationship of mutual responsibility between human beings and nature. Each community can take from the bounty

20

Contemporary debate about ecology, in its different positions, has also presented some problematic statements about human presence in nature. You can find, for example, the idea that “man is the cancer of earth” (originally by the Romanian poet Emile Cioran). Even if this might be somehow terribly true, the assertion is illogic. We must admit that ‘Earth’, ‘man’, ‘cancer’ are words and concepts that exist only because of humanity. 21 “Here appears the great Heidegger’s issue of Sorge, care (…). Heidegger has done nothing but appropriate, comment and develop, without quoting it, a verse of the Bible (…). What I would like to underline is the theme of life as other, otherness: you can take care only of the other, of the otherness, and where you find care, you always find otherness”. SILVANO PETROSINO, Capovolgimenti. La casa non è una tana, l’economia non è il business, Jaca Book, Milano 2007, 47 [my translation].

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of the earth whatever it needs for subsistence, but it also has the duty to protect the earth and to ensure its fruitfulness for coming genera22 tions .

In a sense, the land itself is an alterity that we have to face. Nature is not simply a basin of resources, a storehouse for materials. It is a presence – a living presence – we must deal with, regarding its alterity. The encounter between man and the Garden is the heart of creation and the origin of human freedom. The beauty of the Garden is indivisible from human care and human care is indivisible from this beauty that does not belong to him, but precedes him and stands out of his reach. At the mean time, the Garden is destined to man, is given to his industrious hands and relies on his care. Without human care the Garden would be empty and useless: nobody could enjoy its fruits, nor can sit at trees’ shadow; without his capability to read this order, the creation is yet unaccomplished. Human attitude towards the Garden is suggested by the feeling of wonder, of which Genesis’ narration is filled. Wonder – as Petrosino states23 – is not just a reaction in front of something unexpected. Wonder is the fact that, in front of reality, man does not ask simply “why?” but “for whom?”. Reality directs a call to human freedom every time it strikes us with its beauty. From God’s side creation is beauty and order (Tob), from man’s side it is full of wonder. And for both the Garden’s last destination is their free, joyful, grateful relationship. 2.2.3 Nomination There is another fundamental wonder beyond the discovery of the Garden and its order. Man discovers that he can do something about order. Human freedom is not only a spectator, but participates to the

22 23

Pope Francis, Laudato si’, 67. SILVANO P ETROSINO, Lo stupore, Interlinea, Novara 2012.

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creation of order, to the creation itself. Not only because man can cultivate, but, moreover, because he is the one who can give sense and name to reality. Genesis highlights this fact with the fascinating episode of the ‘nomination’: So from the soil Yahweh God fashioned all the wild animals and all the birds of heaven. These he brought to the man to see what he would call 24 them; each one was to bear the name the man would give it .

We already highlighted how God’s creation happened through his word. The importance of language is primary in Old Testament25 (think about the prohibition of pronouncing God’s name), but it becomes even more important in the New Testament, since God’s Son is called by St. John the Logos26. We usually connect the idea of word to knowledge, frequently we think language is just an instrument to point to reality, a matter of conventional sounds and marks chosen to represent things in a speech: Language is more than that. In his texts about dwelling, Martin Heidegger maintains that man is no more capable of inhabiting because he presumes to be lord of language and denies the language’s lordship on him. The crisis of human inhabiting is connected with the crisis of human language. Going back to what we already stated, we might say that something, in the language, concerns the origin, more than the beginning. We think, we understand our world because we speak, because we use words, because we address our words to others. Nobody has ever invented the language: for any man, word is taught by the availability of other’s words and speeches. A child learns how to speak because someone spoke to him, called him, repeating his name again and again, answering to his

24

Gen 2,19. Not by chance, in Hebrew the word dabar means both word and action: God speaks and acts what he said, fulfilling his promise. 26 “In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God”. John 1,1. 25

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cries. Language – exactly like land – was already there when we started talking, it is a powerful signal of the otherness of the origin. Both the land and the language simply do not belong to anyone: men meet together as far as they dwell a land that does not belong to anyone and talk together as far as they use a language that does not belong to anyone. We might soon come back to this. There is, however, a difference between God’s word and human word. God’s word is one with his acts, God speaks and immediately things come to being. Human experience is much different: we can’t guarantee for the truth; there is a distance, sometimes a dangerous distance, between our words and our actions. There is also a distance between the reality and our speaking about reality: any language shall be aware of this. The argument about reality is not simply the reality, the world of language is not the world of things. Nevertheless, in the Garden, God guarantees the perfect connection between word and reality, since “each one was to bear the name the man would give it”. Human original participation to creation is connected with his ability to speak, like if the creation was not fulfilled until Adam speaks. The ‘true names’ given to living beings is the form of human creativity and creation perfectly responds to his calling. The narration does not only allude to human knowledge and intelligence. There something like a correspondence (‘co-respond’ means to respond together) that bonds in one great peaceful relationship God, nature and man. Man responds to God’s invite calling by name all the animals and the animals, indeed, respond to man’s calling recognizing their name. Language, in this context, is not only a rational instrument, but the place of a dialogue, the possibility of communion. Exactly as it happened in the book of Proverbs, where creation is the result of a joyful dialogue between God and his Wisdom. The Garden of the origin echoes a dialogue of communion.

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Excursus: the Girona’s Tapestry of Creation

It is worth to stop for a while and read an incredibly interesting rewriting of the Christian doctrine of creation. The Cathedral of Gerona (in Catalunya) conserves a surprising artifact from the 11th century: a big wool tapestry (3,65 x 4,70 m), representing – at least in the remaining upper part – the myth of creation. Gerona was, at the time, one of the richest catalan cities in Spain, a commercial center where Christians, Muslims and Jews lived and met together probably (at least in some periods) in a peaceful mood. The Catalan city – that turned Christian at the beginning of 11th century – was not only a commercial site, but also a cultural crossroad: the Jewish Kabbalistic school of Gerona was famous all around the world, the Muslim community was living in peace and the city soon became one of the main centers of Catalan Romanesque renaissance. It is not unlikely that the tapestry was created in a spirit of common interest and of universal effort of understanding which, as I already stated, was probably similar to that of the authors of the first chapters of Genesis. The theological sources that inspired this artistic reflection on creation were probably shared by the three religious communities of Gerona. For sure the symbolic universe was common. The complex construction of the tapestry might to be summarized by the union of the circle and the square 1. More about these symbols will be explained ahead. For the moment it might be enough to say

1

Image 1.

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that the circle and its center are symbols of the eternal source of things and their creation: a point from which everything has its principle and to which everything will return in the fulfillment of history; but the circle is also the symbol of eternity: you can perpetually move in its perimeter without an end. This is why the circle does not fit to describe human experience. The symbol of earth and human life is rather the square: four cardinal points, four directions, four rivers in the Garden. The union between the square and the circle – an ancient geometrical problem, involving the irrational number pi – is the impossible symbol of the union between eternity and time, God and man, Creator and creature. We might remember that, for the Bible, the Heavenly Jerusalem, the place where men and God will live together at the end of time, is not a circle, but a square: not the destruction, but the salvation of human history. Four are also the circles present in the tapestry: the inner one is God the Creator – rex fortis –; the second is a circle of light with a writing (dixit quoque Deus ‘fiat lux’ at facta est lux 2); the third is a figurative circle with episodes of Genesis; the following is a written light-circle (in principio creavit Deus Celum et terram mare et omnia qua in eis sunt, ed vidit Deus cuncta que fecerat et erant valdebona3). As we previously stated, creation means order; the tapestry is nothing but a celebration of this order and its justice and beauty: tob. Not by chance the tapestry itself, in its composition, follows a precise sense of proportion, since the sections are in golden proportion one with the other. The ‘Golden Section’ has been for the ancient times and for Middle Age a mathematic proportion that was thought to guarantee not only perfection in beauty, but also stability and so-

2

And God said ‘let there be light’. And there was the light. In the beginning God created heaven and earth, the sea and all the things that are in it, and God saw that all he made was good. 3

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lidity. An attentive look at the tapestry shows that many elements are related by this perfect proportion. Let us start from the inside. 1. In the center stands God the Creator. He is represented young, without beard and with a cruciform halo, that always indicates the Son. Jesus is the Revelation of God and in the Romanesque art God would be always represented as the Son: all we can say about God has been revealed by Christ. His youth (no beard) seems to be an indication of the beginning: as Saint John’s Gospel sings in its prologue, the Son is ‘the Word’ that stands ‘in the beginning’ with God 4. God is represented in the act of speaking, with his right hand risen, not only to bless, but also asking for silence. For the Bible, as we already stated, creation is connected with speaking, with the echo of an eminent word of command. In the left hand God has a book, symbol of revelation: the creation is an act of God revealing his wish of salvation. For the ancient Christian theology revelation was included in two ‘books’: the book of creation and the Scriptures (Natura and Scriptura). Fragments of his presence are hidden in creation as they are in the Bible: Christians can read the world around exactly in the same way as they study and understands the Scriptures. Moreover, from both experiences comes the lexicon of Christian faith as an answer to God’s revelation: the Scripture generates a historical experience while Nature a symbolic experience. This idea of revelation is particularly important, because it confirms that the creation is not simply a change in Being, but in God himself: any act reveals something about its Author and God is totally committed in his creation.

4

John 1,1: In the beginning it was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God.

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God himself has royal vestments, he is sitting (only kings and emperors used to speak while seated) and he has a light-blue sky behind him. His power has something to do with his revelation, with his word: this is why he is a powerful king (rex fortis). 2. The second circle is made of light (stitched in white wool), as the fourth and as the white rays that separate sectors of the third circle. Light is also a fundamental symbol in the Fourth Gospel5 , connected with word. What word is towards silence, light is towards darkness: a creative power of order coming from the center, a fecund power of creation defeating the Chaotic presence of darkness. For the book of Genesis light is not God, but it is his first creature and his first word; being the first creature, it is also the first symbol of God’s presence, the first symbol capable of being a representation of his presence. Symbolic comprehension of the world is, in this way, an act of faith and not simply an intellectual or rational operation. Things are given to man so that he can connect with God, his Revelation is like the light that shines in darkness. Darkness might not accept this advent, but still it can’t overpower it: evidences of God’s wish are spread in any corner of creation. 3. The third circle is divided in eight sections. The number eight had a unique importance in Christianity: if seven was for the Bible the number of creation, eight is, in Christian vision, the number of salvation and redemption. Any god is trusted to have created the world, only the Christian God has not just created, but also redeemed humanity through his death on the cross and his resurrection. This is why, since the beginning, Christians decided to celebrate their God on the ‘eighth day’: coming from jewish tradition, they decided that the ‘seventh day’ (Saturday) was not suitable to gather the richness of this new idea of salvation. Since the Gospels attest that Jesus resur5

John 1,4-5: “What has come into being in him was life, life that was the light of men; and light shines in darkness, and darkness could not overpower it”.

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rected in the night after Saturday, the perfect choice fell on the next day (our Sunday) that became the ‘eighth day’, symbol of Christ’s unexpected fulfillment. In Christian art, number eight has also been associated to baptism: since Saint Ambrose, eight played an important role baptismal architecture. Almost all baptisteries in Early-Christian and Romanesque art have an octagonal map. The Tapis does not have an octagon, at first glance, since the eight sectors are not equal. Nevertheless, joining with lines the main points that the sections intercept on the circumferences and vertical, an octagon and an eight-pointed star can be easily drawn: the lines that compose the star are also tangent to the inner circle of light. In the upper half6 five scenes are present, three of which have a circle in the middle, while the other two represent an angel of darkness and an angel of light. These angelic presences are not, as one might think, good and evil, but knowledge and mystery that always stand with God. The idea of ‘re-velation', in its etymology, does not suggest only a removed veil: the gesture of revelation is a veil that is placed again (re-) on reality. The act of knowledge is always connected with reality and mystery, so that God’s reality can never be completely comprehended (the etymology of ‘com-prehension’ is connected with grabbing, grasping). Both angels and both experiences (light and darkness) participate to revelation. But what revelation are we referring to, in this context of creation? Of course, we already stated that creation, being God’s act, reveals his wish of salvation. But the tapestry says more, hiding it in the representation of the first acts of creation: creation reveals God’s identity. Three circles occupy three upper sectors: remembering the circle as a symbol of God, the three circles are an allusion to the mystery of Trinity. Let us give a closer look.

6

Image 2.

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a. In the upper circle the presence of the dove – attested by the Gospel as a sign of the Holy Spirit7 – does not give rise to any doubt: this is a representation of the Spirit. In the beginning, says Genesis, “a divine wind was sweeping over the waters”8: the verse is written in the circle. Notice that the dove has a cruciform halo: the Spirit – as Catholic Credo states – proceeds from the Father and from the Son as the movement of love from one to the other. b. The left circle has no figures, only a writing: “fecit Deus firmamentum in medio aquaarum". The sphere of firmament is a point of original order in a place of chaos: indeed the water is a symbol of life, but also of chaos. Not by chance in the waters live also chaotic creatures (the monsters, the Leviathan). The circle-firmament was often represented in medieval royal rituals by the king’s crown and cape: the second circle is pointing to a King and a Kingdom, somehow it is the almighty one among the three. Everything drives us to interpretate this circle as the representation of God the Father. c. The right circle is the representation of the division of upper and lower waters. The firmament is now filled with flower-like stars, the sun (masculine) and the moon (feminine). If the creation of firmament is the first act of order that God performed, the separation of upper and lower waters gives a new level of order. Also the stars, affordable signs for any ancient traveller, are universal symbols of order. What characterizes this circle is the presence of many elements suggesting duplicity: separation of upper/inner waters, the presence of the Sun/Moon. Duplicity is also a trait of Christ: he has a divine nature and a human nature. We may also notice that the separation between waters is reached creating a red

7

Mark 1,10: And at once, as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit, like a dove, descending on him. 8 Genesis 1,2.

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space, which might be a simple allusion tu Christ’s Passion: constitution of order is not also performed by creation, but also by redemption (sin is a disorder, salvation is order). But redemption itself costed Jesus’ blood. It is clear that the upper part of the third circle is dedicated not only to the first days of creation, but mainly to God’s trinitarian identity, stating how strongly God identity is committed to the world. In the lower half9 we can see three episodes of Genesis: the creation of living beings, the nomination and the creation of the woman. We already interpreted these episodes in the book of Genesis, so we just need to add some issues. d. The central scene (sky and sea beings) is connected with the one on the right (nomination). All the birds are pointing Adam, listening to him, waiting for their name (and identity). Adam is also in the attitude of speaking (his right hand is risen) and a cosmic silence makes the place for his freedom. He was created in the image of God, responsible for the entire creation. e. This being in the image of God is underlined by a peculiarity: on Adam’s knees we can see a red swastika10 . Medieval bestiaries underline that the knees marks the difference of humans among other beings: the greatest part of the animals have a reverse knee, only men can fold the knee in this direction. The knee is therefore a distinctive human characteristic. Now, this feature is marked by a swastika, an ancient symbol of the sun as moving light. All nature gives its devotion to the first man because he is free, responsible, able to choices exactly as God. Man, as God, has a light inside himself: he is not a natural subject but a free subject that finds his identity through his choices and can enlighten with his will the

9

Image 3. Image 4.

10

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entire creation. In this sense light is the key of his resemblance to God. f. The creation of Eve from Adam’s side is beautifully represented. While Adam is in the Garden (where you can see the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge) he falls asleep and God creates from him the woman. We can notice that, exactly as the animals were pointing Adam, Eve and Adam are both looking towards God, Eve seems to intercept his blessing hand receiving benediction in her hands. 4. The last circle is the description of the whole scene of creation and is still a circle of light. Around, the four winds connect the circle to the external square: the spiritual act of creation is somehow poured from the Transcendence (circle) to human life (square). 5. If we needed another demonstration of the relationship between circle and square, we can eventually read the external square frame. It is a beautiful representation of time. In the upper frame, at the center the year (Annus) is surrounded by the four seasons. In the corners are the four rivers of Eden and all around the months, connected with their respective human work. God is not only a bump, a First Cause, as in Descartes’ idea. He is always present and acting in human history: this is why he is the lord of time. God is the origin of every human work. In the Tapis there is no mention of the original sin, from which the punishment of work started to affect human life. These scenes of work are somehow related to the origin, to the original human behavior towards Land: cultivate and take care of. In this way human work is seen as a participation to God’s act of creation. 6. At last, a pearl. Looking at the month of April, you will notice a farmer using his plow11. It is an allusion to a typical medieval game (the ‘Sator Square’) built on the words: SATOR AREPO TENET

11

Image 5.

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OPERA ROTAS12 . This sentence is an allusion to God’s creation and his ability on the ‘work of the wheels’ which is, as we know, a work of order, but also a symbol of time. The Sator Square was considered a ‘magic’ formula since it is a rare example of a palindrome sentence. If the single letters are inscribed in a square, then in the center appears a cross made by the palindrome word ‘tenet’, allusion to God’s ability to guarantee order.

Image 1 – Tapis de la Creaciò, Girona’s Cathedral

12

The discussed translation might be: the farmer Arepo has the work of the wheels.

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Image 2 – Tapis de la Creaciò, upper section

Image 3 – Tapis de la Creaciò, lower section

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Image 4 – Tapis de la Creaciò, Adams Nomination

Image 5 – Tapis de la Creaciò, April

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CHAPTER III

FALL AND REDEMPTION

1. Sin as imagination: farewell to the Garden If tones of gratuitousness characterize the first chapters of Genesis as the promise of a joyful destiny, we all know that human existence does not offer the same mood. The promise that every man recognizes in the simple fact of being alive is not fulfilled. Pain, delusions, betrayals, failures might not be the destiny of mankind, but are indeed our reality. The Bible explains this gap with the narrations of the ‘original sin’. I am talking about narrations because, despite the main narration is in chapter three of Genesis (the episode of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil), the story is re-written in the other episodes that are somehow glosses of the original treason. We will limit ourselves to the 3rd chapter of Genesis: everything is already there. Despite this might seem one of the most well-known episode of the Bible, my suggestion is, once again, to stick to the text and simply read it as if it was the first time. We might discover that – surprisingly – what everyone knows is a simplification of a much complex text and vision of the failure of human freedom. What we can state since the beginning is that the fall of humanity is connected with a drama regarding the entire creation: the harmony of the Garden will be lost as a result of a human act. The connection between man and land is strong in the fall as it was in the original promise. Let us first of all read the text.

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Now, the snake was the most subtle of all the wild animals that Yahweh God had made. It asked the woman, ‘Did God really say you 2 were not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?’ The woman answered the snake, ‘We may eat the fruit of the trees in the garden. 3 But of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden God said, “You 4 must not eat it, nor touch it, under pain of death.” ‘ Then the snake 5 said to the woman, ‘No! You will not die! God knows in fact that the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, 6 knowing good from evil.’ The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye, and that it was enticing for the wisdom that it could give. So she took some of its fruit and ate it. She also 7 gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realized that they were naked. So they sewed fig-leaves together to make themselves loin8 cloths. The man and his wife heard the sound of Yahweh God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from Yahweh God among the trees of the garden. 9 10 But Yahweh God called to the man. ‘Where are you?’ he asked. ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden,’ he replied. ‘I was afraid be11 cause I was naked, so I hid.’ ‘Who told you that you were naked?’ he asked. ‘Have you been eating from the tree I forbade you to eat?’ 12 The man replied, ‘It was the woman you put with me; she gave me 13 some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.’ Then Yahweh God said to the woman, ‘Why did you do that?’ The woman replied, ‘The snake 14 tempted me and I ate.’ Then Yahweh God said to the snake, ‘Because you have done this, Accursed be you of all animals wild and tame! On your belly you will go and on dust you will feed as long as 15 you live. I shall put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; it will bruise your head and you will 16 strike its heel.’ To the woman he said: ‘I shall give you intense pain in childbearing, you will give birth to your children in pain. Your 17 yearning will be for your husband, and he will dominate you.’ To the man he said, ‘Because you listened to the voice of your wife and ate from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat, Accursed be the soil because of you! Painfully will you get your food from it as long 18 as you live. It will yield you brambles and thistles, as you eat the 19 produce of the land. By the sweat of your face will you earn your food, until you return to the ground, as you were taken from it. For 20 dust you are and to dust you shall return.’ The man named his wife 80

CHAPTER III – Fall and Redemption 21

‘Eve’ because she was the mother of all those who live. Yahweh God made tunics of skins for the man and his wife and clothed them. 22 Then Yahweh God said, ‘Now that the man has become like one of us in knowing good from evil, he must not be allowed to reach out his hand and pick from the tree of life too, and eat and live for ever!’. 23 So Yahweh God expelled him from the garden of Eden, to till the 24 soil from which he had been taken. He banished the man, and in front of the garden of Eden he posted the great winged creatures and the fiery flashing sword, to guard the way to the tree of life.

1.1 The sin is original but is not the origin Despite the cosmic catastrophe known as the original sin, we must underline that, for the Bible, the sin is not the origin. Human freedom is not originally sinful, history does not start from sin, neither from the ban from Eden. A chance of communion between the man, his woman, God and all creation was not only possible, but actual. The Genesis describes it in a short and simple passage: Now, both of them were naked, the man and his wife, but they felt no 1 shame before each other .

This statement is not irrelevant: it points out the possibility of a transparent encounter between the citizens of the Garden, a real relationship founded on trust and confidence, an adult relationship where the man is God’s partner in creation, the woman is perfectly able to correspond to her man, being “flesh of his flesh and bone of his bones”, and where the three of them can walk together “in the Garden at the cool of the day”. This original relationship is complete and adult, nothing less than a complete and adult encounter of three persons2.

1

Gen 2,25. “The image of their glorious Maker shone, / Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure, / Severe but in true filial freedom placed; / Whence true authority in men; though both / Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed; / For contemplation 2

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Because of this, the trespassing of God’s words about the Tree can not be seen as an act of emancipation, a human attempt to use his own head and become adult. The man and the woman used their own heads even before the sin: they were not just slaves nodding to their Master or babies going after their parent. With a few strokes of paint-brush (nudity, the stroll in the Garden) Genesis gives us the idea of a possibility of an adult life together, where suspect and betrayal have no place. Of course, we don’t know if there has ever been an historical or pre-historical period where mankind matched up with this; what the narration states, nevertheless, is the human perception that this transparent relationship is the true destiny of mankind. On the other side, the catastrophic distortion of freedom caused by the original sin is not our original destiny. There is, in other words, something in humanity, something like a ‘nostalgia’, that goes back to this possibility of relationships to be the joyful encounter with the alterity. If this is true, something interesting follows: if sin is not original, then there is still a chance that a remainder of the pristine humanity persists. The nostalgia of the Garden has roots in human experience: it is the destiny we should have kept up to if we did not separate to God. This means that human perception is capable of God’s promise: through this nostalgia men can recognize the promise if it appears. Humanity is, in other words, capax Dei, capable of God, even after the sin, because something more original than sin inhabits our experience. 1.2 The Snake and the Tree A disturbing presence crawls in the Garden. The protagonist of the universal misunderstanding seems, at a first glance, to be part of cre-

he and valor formed, / For softness she and sweet attractive grace; / He for God only. She for God in him”. PL IV, 292-299.

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ation, as if God played a trick to humans through an evil being. The Bible does not say much about the snake: only that the snake was the most ‘subtle’ among all the wild creatures. The adjective does nothing more than state again the his nature: sinuous, double, tricky. The snake is an anthropological and universal symbol of ambiguity, falsehood, seduction. But seduction is not evil. However, what the Bible does not say is also meaningful. The myth does not introduce the snake as principle of evil, but only as creature among others: the possibility of evil, much more than its personification; soon the only presence of evil will be man’s betrayal. Of course, at the end of this episode the woman will blame the snake, but this accusation – as we will notice – is rather an attempt to offload her responsibility. Creation does not have any evil inside, it only has its unavoidable possibility. An objection could be easily risen: what about the ‘Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil’? We usually imagine that the Bible indicates a kind of knowledge somehow hidden to man, as if God was one of those parents who desperately try to keep bad experiences far from their children. Inevitably, in this vision, the knowledge of evil becomes a right. The knowledge of evil is an enemy, until something changes in their judgement. The fact is that in the Garden evil did not exist, nor could exist its knowledge3. Life before the sin meant the knowledge of good and in no way it meant the knowledge of evil simply because evil did not happen to be in the Garden’s reality. Everything was a gift, everything was given to the man and his woman for the joyful fulfillment of their destiny; everything was simply given: any thing and any knowledge, the relationship between man and woman, between them and God was given in an impressive abundance (Tob). Pain and loss were not present in human

3

“(…) and next to life / Our death, the Tree of Knowledge, grew fast by, / Knowledge of good bought dear by knowing ill”. PL IV, 220-222.

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experience, nor fear or need for defense. Death was not part of human life because any destiny was the right accomplishment of the original promise. The right question should be: in what circumstance the knowledge of evil can be a good affair for man? Our experience is meaningful: if evil is evil, its knowledge is in no way an increase of good; only a severe blunder can make evil desirable, a mistake that involves the paradigms of human judgement. The Bible seems to highlight this misunderstanding when Eve sees “that the tree was good for food, and a delight to the eyes, and to be desired to make one wise”4. We might suspect that precisely this misunderstanding – making desirable evil itself – is the knowledge of evil, is evil. This is precisely what God stated about the Tree: “if you eat, you will die”. After their sin the man and his woman will know evil, will experiment on their skin its burning presence. Before evil was a possibility, not a reality. What we are saying points out how good and evil are connected with freedom and choices5 , it is never simply a matter of their existence. The possibility of evil has to be guaranteed because freedom needs to have all choices opened. It is not rare that philosophers make reference to the doctrine of creation, when they intend to state human freedom. One of these authors is unforgettable: Renaissance’s genius Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494). In his famous text about human dignity6 , referring to Genesis, Pico images that Adam,

4

Gen 3,6. “So without least impulse or shadow of fate, / Or auth by me immutably foreseen, / They trespass, authors to themselves in all, / Both what they judge and what they choose; for so / I formed them free, and free they must remain / Till they enthrall themselves: I else must change / Their nature, and revoke the high decree / Unchangeable, eternal which ordained / Their freedom; they themselves ordained their fall”. PL IV, 120-128. 6 P ICO DELLA MIRANDOLA GIOVANNI, Oration of the Dignity of Man, Regnery Publishing, Washington 1956. 5

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unlike all other animals, was created by God without a specific ‘nature’ or role: he is the author of his identity, responsible of his experiences and there for of definition of himself. Man is the only creature that, following God’s wish, decides his own nature: when he decides about himself and about the world, the man is obeying to God’s wish, being the only creature identified ontologically by freedom. Man is ontologically free to choose the definition of his identity. Stating this, Pico creates a turning point in Western anthropology: human obedience to his Creator is realized exactly with his autonomy (auto-nomos). The possibility of evil, nevertheless, is not its reality – and therefore there is not knowledge of evil – until it happens. God did not create evil: the creation is only a positive gift. Nevertheless God created men: freedom means that any option is possible, even the sin7. The possibility to reject God’s project lays in the existence of the freedom, even if freedom is not evil. Once again the quality of creation is connected with the quality of freedom, the judgement about good and evil is related to human decision: also in the path of evil man is ‘in image of God’. 1.3 Suspicion We naturally interpret sin as the trespassing of a commandment. In facts our comprehension of life, our religious comprehension of life, any religious education seems to lead us in this direction. But this is

7

Read the beautiful passage of Paradise Lost when Satan curses the sun and its rays (PL IV, 37-72). Particularly: “(…) Whom hast thou then or what to accuse, / But heav’n’s free love dealt equally to all? / Be then his love accurst, since love or hate, / To me alike, it deals eternal woe”.

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not what Genesis says, if we read it as if it was the first time. On the contrary, the idea of commandment is the result of original sin8. In facts, what we usually read as a commandment was not given as a law, but as a word of care: You are free to eat of all the trees in the garden. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you are not to eat; for, the day you eat of 9 that, you are doomed to die .

There is no trace of an order in God’s words, but of a concern about human destiny, the attempt to defend the good life in the Garden. Before the sin this must have been obvious to human comprehension (there is no immediate complain to this warning), because familiarity with God was the unique horizon of Edenic life. In fact, the idea of commandment is not in God’s, but in the snake’s words: the subtle creature instills doubt in woman’s conscience: God did not want me to try something, God kept something for himself, God stole a part of my possible experience10 . From that very moment something happens in Adam’s relationship with God. Something now stands between God and the man: suspicion, doubt. Doubt itself is nothing more than the fruit of imagination: the snake does not need to bring any proof, nor any different promise. The snakes does not bring a new creation, different form God’s one. Evil is not capable of creating, it is not a principle of life: not a new world, but simply the doubt instilled in the theological relationship.

8

P IERLUIGI LIA, Lo splendore di Dio. Saggio sulla forma cristiana, Vita & Pensiero, Milano 2001. 9 Gen 2,16-17 10 This is – in contemporary experience and in contemporary debate about ecology – one of the main arguments between science and ethics. If something is possible – this is the thought of Scientism – then we must operate it. The claim of science and technology is often – hidden behind a request of independence – what Friedrich Nietzsche would have called a will to power. The objection is: if something is forbidden, then scientific freedom is threatened.

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Everything happens in the level of language, not in the level of reality. However, we already know how this level is fundamental. Since the man was partner in God’s creation through his ability to answer to his Word, the suspect is fully human and the consequent evil is once again a matter of freedom. Evil stands precisely in a misunderstanding of God’s word of care. Care becomes law, God’s concern becomes a commandment, as if God had something to hide, something to defend from his human friends. The imagination has, indeed, a support in reality. Something was actually hidden, something is actually always hidden in any relationship: its future possibilities. Any relationship is made of light and darkness (remember the Tapis de la Creaciò). A part is enlightened, clear, sure and safe: it is the affordability of the other person, the promise he is in my life, the possibility of a common life and of a common dialogue. But something, inevitably, stays in the dark: the other person is always other, he can’t be predicted, controlled, commanded; the alterity has always a part of opacity11 that we must deal with. Relation is never an ‘absolute truth’, and it is also always exposed to failure, betrayal, hate: only human choices can guarantee good and reject evil. Love has always to do with an unpredictable future, made of acts, glances, words, events. This future – impossible to grab and full of wonder – is actually the possibility of a relationship. The sin is deeply-rooted in this opacity, this is why the perversion of human understanding easily takes advantage of it: since something is actually hidden, doubt appears credible and transforms possibility in threat, wonder in danger, giving body to evil. Simple as that: if God keeps something hidden, that something has been somehow stolen from us, form our grab.

11

On this topic: ÉDOUARD GLISSANT, The Poetry of Relation, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor (MI), 2006.

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This is why the second – and decisive – dig in the snake’s speech is: “you will not die, you will be like gods”. The promise is one of those you can’t forget: to be like gods. Still: why should man and woman even desire to be like God, in the original life in the Garden? Nothing was missing, nothing was failing in that human experience. And no need to be ‘like’ God when they could be anytime ‘with’ God. God’s presence was perceived and desired as a possibility of life, as the presence of the Giver: the only reason to wish to be like God is a radical change from friendship to fear. Immediately, after the sin, God’s steps become scary, alarming, dangerous. Still, the trick of imagination succeeds, as we know: being like God becomes a dream of independence, of autonomy, but also a need for protection and defense against someone that, suddenly has become too big and too dangerous to stand. Cause and consequence of the new state of things is the fear of God. 1.4 Fear and possess After eating from the Tree, one of the purest elements of the original relationship is defeated: nudity. As soon as they hear God approaching in the Garden, the man and his wife hide, because they realize to be naked. This fear must not be ascribed to the wait for a punishment for what happened (as we easily do): they hide from God’s glance because, the Bible says, they realize for the first time their nudity. Sin, once again, is not simply a matter of disobedience, and neither a matter of the act of eating of the Tree. And the consequences are not simply a punishment to recover God’s justice. The original sin concerns first of all the quality of the original relationship; but, being this relationship the source of human identity, it also concerns the entire exercise of human freedom. The act of eating is not the sin; sinful is the change of view from confidence to suspicion. The core of sin is in this all-new glance of fear, where the problem is not the objet of our fear, but the quality of our sight. 88

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Nudity12 is a powerful symbol of trust and confidence: children’s confidence allows them to be naked without any shame, lover’s trust allows them to be nude one in front of the other without any sense of modesty. Being nude means being defenseless, disarmed. When this happens, the perception of the original possibility of love and confidence is profound: men and women were created for this confidence. Nothing was to be hidden because they did not know any threat coming from the other. After the sin for the first time fear appears in the Garden and, with fear, soon clothes will be necessary. The role of clothes, obviously, is not simply connected with practical issues: clothes defend me from other’s glance, from his temptation to reduce me to my own body. Moreover clothes let me decide how to present myself in front of the other, they are a filter to hide what I want to be hidden and show what I wish to exhibit. The simple presence in front of the other is not safe anymore. But, why should there be fear, in the Garden? The only reason is imagination. As we stated, God gave everything to men, his confidence was total. God’s words are meaningful: “where are you?”. When God approaches, he doesn’t know anything about human sin. Indeed, God himself does not know about evil. Not only he is not the creator of evil, he appears to be the victim: he approaches to the man as everyday, “in the cool of the day”, and discovers something different, realizing that the original confidence and trust are irreparably lost. God’s approach has nothing to do with fear: the sound of his steps is a threat just in man’s eyes: something radically changed only there. As we anticipated, the change regards the first of human issues: identity. The issue of identity is the issue of humanity, as we learnt 12

“(…) dishonest shame / Of Nature’s works, honor dishonorable / Sin-bred, how have ye troubled all mankind / With shows instead, mere shows of seeming pure, / And banished from man’s life his happiest life, / Simplicity and spotless innocence”. PL IV, 313-318.

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from Pico della Mirandola. Behind every quarrel and fight, behind our efforts for success or for richness often – or always – lies this issue. Who am I? What am I living for? What do others see and understand about me? Many of human activities hide an investigation about identity, many of human choices hide an effort to contend identity. Identity is a human issue: animals do not have an identity, but simply a natural behavior. On the contrary, human identity is not natural: our nature is to depend on our choices, on our personal history, our freedom. When a person gets angry during a game of his heart team, when one fights for his tastes or opinions, when he exhaust himself for his career, the real matter is not sports, ideas or money: it is him. We can say that before the original sin, before the original suspicion, identity as possibility of future and fulfillment, was – for man – the relationship with alterity. The otherness of God, first of all, but also the otherness of the woman and of the Garden itself. Man could live thanks to God’s alterity (God is the creator, man is partner in creation but nevertheless a creature), he could love thanks to woman’s alterity (she is “bone of his bones”, but still she is a “helper suitable for the man”), he could exist thanks to the world’s difference (when the man gives the names, the creation answers). Otherness, the other’s presence was the possibility of his growth and the possibility of his own freedom and the perpetual source of his identity. We might say in other words that the principium individuationis13 of humanity was relationship with otherness. Now, what the original sin changes irremediably is the principium individuationis: from the relation to my-self, from otherness to possess. The other becomes dangerous, his glance becomes mortal, since

13

As we will see, this experience has not disappeared in human horizon. Since I can see everything but myself, to understand my identity I need to look at other’s glance towards me. In this sense otherness can always be again my possibility.

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he is able to contend with me the posses of life. Life, indeed, is not anymore a gift that flows from God’s creation in a never-ending stream of Grace. Life becomes something to fight for, grabbing it with my hands. Notice that when human view changes from confidence to suspicion, nothing really changes in creation: the Garden is the Garden, the tree of life is still there, the presence of God did not fail mankind. The change lies uniquely in human freedom and in the knowledge of evil. The core of this new principium individuationis might be found in what we call the ‘law of self-preservation’. For ethology selfpreservation used to be the main law to explain animal behavior: eat lunch or be lunch. However, recent scientific theories have highlighted relationships of mutual dependence and even cooperation among different species. The modern idea of ecosystem, for example, gives a different view of natural life14. In any case the self-preservation we are talking about has nothing to do with natural instinct (animals do not fight for their identity) as human violence is never simply a variation of animal behavior. Going back to Genesis: when otherness is not a promise anymore, but nothing but a threat, when the identity is given ultimately by what the man owns (starting from his life), the logic consequence to avoid mutual destruction is the invocation of the law, as a superior arbiter in human rivalry. As we stated before, the sin is not a consequence of the law, rather the law is the consequence of sin: God’s word of care is misunderstood and becomes a law that preserves the tree from human grasp. The connection between posses as principium individuationis and the law is very strong and has two main consequences. First of all, through the idea of commandment the fault falls on God himself. God is accused of the same lack of confidence; since he does not want them to be like gods, then he is the first one who de-

14

ILIA DELIO, KEITH DOUGLASS W ARNER, PAMELA WOOD, Care for creation. A franciscan spirituality of the earth, 67-80.

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fends himself: moreover he is stealing something, he is a threat to my freedom, he is jealous for something. If something was hidden, then I must have it, otherwise my joy will never be possible. The same happens towards woman and nature itself: accusation is one of the most surprising consequence of the sin. The other does not anymore cast a shadow of joy and gratefulness, but of sinister danger. No wonder if after the sin the man accuses his wife and the woman accuses the creation. Indeed they are both accusing God and existence itself: if an evil was present in the Garden then it is God’s fault and there is not much we could do (this objection is somehow provoked by the text, so that it is also the reader’s objection). Since something was hidden, man has the right to grab life’s secret and source15 . On the other side, since possess is the new fundament of any identity, the presence of a law, the exigence of a commandment become inevitable. The model of relationships is not anymore confidence and trust: an authority is needed to protect me from the other’s hands. Law – totally useless in a world of trust – becomes the basis for the new order of sin. The core of this new order is, of course, the safeguard of my first possession: life. Self-defense is the new right to be guarded: I need to have the right to protect myself from the other’s attacks. But, of course, since my identity is not only biological life (the fact that my heart beats), but lays in what I can possess, the role of the law will be the protection of the things that I own, of my property, and ultimately the safeguard of my desires. The modern idea of composition of human freedom as the issue of defending boundaries comes from an unbearable view of humanity: homo homini lupus, used to say the ancients. The well known Thomas Hobbes’s political theory about the State as Leviathan – a monster

15

This is the meaning of the episode of Babel’s tower. Building of a tower to touch the sky is the human effort to grab God’s power. Not by chance this sin leads to the distruction of language.

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built by humans to control their natural state of violence and guarantee everyone’s survival – is a good explanation of the need for law that follows the original sin. 1.5 Relationship between humans and nature after the sin If the fear of God suggests a new order in the theological relationship, all other human relationships are perverted by the presence of sin: being sin an issue of identity, the change is all over and has many consequences also in human dwelling. First of all something happens between the man and the woman. It is of course irrelevant if the man or his wife ate first, since the sin is not the transgression of a commandment about the Tree. The fact is that the suspect, originally towards God, immediately spreads and reaches the first human relationship. It’s the woman’s fault, Adam states: “It was the woman you put with me”. The presence of otherness – any otherness, not only God’s – is a threat and God is called to take somehow responsibility of this presence that became suddenly dangerous. The next chapters of Genesis will describe profound consequences of this original suspicion: the first murder will involve two brothers and the envy against the other’s fortune. Of course, if my identity is connected with possession, the other’s presence is inevitably threatening me: what he owns will never be mine, his fortune will never be my fortune. But if this is true, then whatever he owns is somehow stolen from my possibility of fulfillment. Moreover: the simple presence of his glance is an outrage to my fulfillment. Other’s glance always appear to me as something that I will not grab: he is like me, he judges like me, he will never be simply mine because, even being “bone of my bones”, he is simply other. If I try to treat him as one of the things I possess, he always has the power to resist in his own judging glance. He would always communicate that he is

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not simply a thing: through his glance his transcendence will always appear to me16 . At the same time I realize that, at his glance, I can appear as anything else: I have a body, I am there with my physical presence just as everything else. What if he does not understand the transcendence of my glance? He might reduce me to one of his things, simply ignoring my freedom. These two human behaviors are the extreme risk of any relationship: sadistic possession of the other and masochistic self-destruction. In the new order of humanity after original sin, this dizziness follows any encounter as a possibility of violence. Once again, notice how deep is the change of perspective described by the Bible: nothing actually changed, but everything is actually different. What God states at the end of this cosmic drama is not a punishment, but the consequence of the sin. Not many scholars highlight how this perversion of relationships concerns also the fundamental relationship between man and the land. The change of vision, the passage from alterity to possess involves also nature. Creation was the result of God’s communication of love, spilling from his overabundance; since the Garden had the role of embodying the positive and gratuitous presence of God’s wisdom, destining it to human understanding, the sin as a refusal of communion appears to be a failure for the entire creation. Of course creation is innocent, God himself is innocent. Nevertheless sin shows how God and creation are harmless in front of evil. Evil as negation of communion, evil as suspicion is stronger than any beauty and good. My interest in this statement will be clear in the coming pages. If original creation (the 16

Martin Buber is the exponent of phenomenology well known for his works about human relationships. Buber states that man have two main kind of encounters: I-thou and I-it. The fundamental text is: MARTIN BUBER, I and thou, Bloomsbury Revelations, London 2013.

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Garden with its beauty and order) was not enough to persuade man about God’s love, if the original land was not capable itself to seduce human glance and to unite him to God’s communion, then we must accept that there are not incontrovertible evidences of God’s Grace that win over human possibility of denial. Despite some theological attempts, creation can not proof God’s benevolence towards man. Theodicy is destined to failure in front of suspect: evil is evident, good is inevident. Using the creation as a proof or evidence in theological debate means ignoring the power of mankind. Of course a man can be touched by the beauty of a sunset, he can be seduced by the hight of a mountaintop; but this does not oblige to recognize God’s presence nor the promise of life. Secondly, we must understand how human attitude towards the land changes after the sin. Human task was, originally, to cultivate and take care. Now man will try to simply possess nature: it becomes a source of materials that man can use for his purposes. Soon, what we called the ‘origin’, distinguishing it from the ‘beginning’, will be simply forgotten: since the origin is not part of human possibilities, it must be simply erased and denied. Men’s inquiry will be, at most, about the beginning, their chance of dominating the land will be connected to the comprehension of its protocols and the understanding of the causes and the effects. The law of cause-effect becomes the only understanding of the natural world. Mankind will ignore the precious connections between things – the same connection that Adam, as God’s partner in creation, discovered and nominated – and reduce the mystery of life to a simple mechanism. The Garden was given to man as his world: no evidence – as we stated – obliged him to serve the Garden’s cause. Docile to his wish, nature becomes what man wants. Our perception about ecological problem is that it regards the last centuries, since other ages did not have (as far as we know) big environmental changes. Nevertheless human misunderstanding of land is as ancient as sin. God’s curse towards man has something to say about this:

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To the man he said: ‘Because you listened to the voice of you wife and ate from the tree of which I forbidden you to eat, Accursed be the soil because of you! Painfully will you get your food from it as long as you live. It will yield you brambles and thistles, as you eat the produce of the land. By the sweat of your face will you earn your food, until you return to the ground, as you were taken from it. For 17 dust you are and to dust you shall return’ .

The result of sin is pain, strain and death. Pain and strain are spiritual dimensions, not physical issues. We might even believe that in the Garden the man did not know the strain of work, nevertheless we know that the man had the mission of cultivate the Garden: he used to work. But, what is the meaning of this strain? Speaking about freedom, strain is the distance between work and its result. It is not only a matter of muscles, everyone knows that strain is a matter of thought. The biggest is the distance between the strength and its result, the heavier will be the perception of an unfair struggle. Similarly, the pain of birth is not only a problem of childbirth: it is a problem of trust. A mother will suffer any separation from her child also because of the perpetual attempt to possess alterity. Richness, in the Garden, was a symbol of grace and a source of wonder; pain will be a perpetual source of complaint. Once again, this is not a matter of soil, it is a matter of human spirit. Thinking about natural resources might help us to understand this curse. There has been a time – when first the ecological issue rose – when the problem of the soil’s fertility seemed to be connected mainly with the rise of the population. In the Sixties the solution to the lack of resources was identified in birth-control. The sociological theory behind this idea is the Eighteen Century’s idea of Thomas Robert Malthus, that connects the increase of population with the level of

17

Gen 3,17-19.

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misery18 . Very soon ecologists denied this proportion. Earth is capable to feed all her guests: the contemporary problem of resources is much more about distribution than production. It is just another way to say that pain and strain are not natural problem, but lay in the relationship between man and the land he dwells in. Creation is still the right place for a History of Salvation: the conversion of human view is the only obstacle since creation is still waiting for him to cultivate and take care of earth. 1.6 The Universal Flood We already stated that the episode of original sin is followed by three related tales about its consequences: Abel’s murder, the Universal Flood, the tower of Babel. Each is in a way a gloss of the original sin’s narration. The tale of the Flood – which has many parallels in other myths of the Ancient Middle East – is the longest and most articulate of the three, and is somehow close to our subject. God’s decision about the flood seems to be due to an irreversible attempt to natural order: When people began being numerous on earth, and daughters had been born to them, the sons of God, looking at the women, saw how beautiful they were and married as many of them as they chose. Yahweh said, 'My spirit cannot be indefinitely responsible for human beings, who are only flesh; let the time allowed each be a hundred and twenty years.' The Nephilim were on earth in those days (and even afterwards) when the sons of God resorted to the women, and had children by them. These were the heroes of days gone by, men of 19 renown .

18

Indeed, the first time someone pointed an ecological issue, this was connected with demography. MICHELE ARAMINI, La terra ferita. Etica e ambiente, Monti Editore, Saronno 2010. 19 Gen 6,1-4.

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We will not give any interpretation about this mysterious passage20, but something is sure: Genesis keeps memory of an important upset of nature or – may be – of the fear for it. This fear is proportional to its mythical consequence: the destruction of earth through the flood. It is compelling the fact that this upset is connected with generation, which evokes immediately for modern reader issues of genetical modifications. Of course, our ancestors knew nothing about genetics, but they still felt that some natural laws must not be trespassed and that its violation is irreparable. The link between the act of generation and the possibility of an irredeemable perversion of nature is ancient as human conscience. This fact is a trace of three human perceptions. First of all the fact that choices are sometimes irreparable. There is not always a way out from human acts: there are consequences that sometimes can not be avoided. A contemporary hubris often convinces us that the consequences of our acts are reversible. The great alibi from our responsibilities is that everything can always be fixed21. Post-modern culture has a refined habit to always built a second-chance, a way of escape from definitive choices. On the contrary, choosing a possibility always means to reject others, in this sense choice is always a form of poverty. Now, this poverty seems intolerable for us and our idea of a rich, fulfilled and powerful man coincides with a man that is clever enough to undo what he has chosen. The new frontier of medicine is an evocative symbol22 of this modern claim: stem cells. A stem cell is

20

Some bizarre interpretations: the sons of God as fallen angels of the survivors of Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis, or aliens from the space… 21 On this topic: I VAN ILLICH, Tools for Conviviality, Marion Boyars, London 2001; SERGE LATOUCHE , Farewell to Growth, Polity ed., Cambridge (UK) 2010. 22 Of course, I am not talking of medical issues. What really matters here is the powerful presence of this idea which is like a myth for the ‘man in the street’, who is not an expert in research, but still dreams about a totipotent particle that might

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a cell that has not chosen yet what to be. Its power and effectiveness stands in the fact that it has not an identity. ‘Totipotent’ (we might translate it as almighty) is what has still all the choices available. Now, leaving aside the medical importance of stem cells, this fact is remarkable: the role of money in the capitalistic system is very similar to this power; the capital itself is not a good, but the infinite possibility of good and consequently the infinite power. Life – biological life, life of a body – in nature does not regress: biological life means that things happen and leave profound signs. The effort of humanity in these decades pretends to reverse this movement, while the ancients knew that we must face the fact that a way out is not always given. Beside this, it was quite clear to our ancestors that irreversible facts often deal with the power of generation, of birth. We all know that the most resistant taboo in human culture have something to do with sex and with death. Death is comprehensibly the great fear for man. But what about sex and gneration? Sexuality has something to do with origin, which is, as we already stated, out of human reach: this is why it must be somehow denied. Human taboo about sexuality seems to be connected with the perception that generation is not a normal act among others, a possibility among others. Of course, the fall any taboo is not to be blamed, but the separation between generation and sexuality has profound and unpredictable consequences. One of them is the possibility of modern genetics to connect human life to a productive process. The last perception deals with what happens after the flood. Of course, the biblical narration is about a cataclysm, about the complete destruction of earth decided by God. But it is not mainly about that. It is, most of all, about God’s effort to save a part of creation – but, as

solve many wealth problems. The language is philosophically explicit: salvation has to do with the possibility of being anything.

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representative, to save all of it. It is, in fact, a new creation and God’s definitive blessing (definitive, as definitive was nature’s perversion): “Never again will I curse the earth because of human beings, because their heart contrives evil from their infancy. Never again will I strike down every living thing as I have done”23 . Life does not end, the world is now new, and no more the waters will cover the land. The flood, event of death, becomes a symbol of rebirth, of the power of a new beginning. Now, in this effort of salvation we must recognize that a man, Noah, played an impressive role: God saved him and gave him instructions to save all animals. Noah’s work – scoffed by other evil earth inhabitants – made the difference. The animals, two for each species to preserve the possibility of generation, were totally committed to a man, to his freedom, to his friendship and trust towards God. There is life coming out from human freedom, there is salvation for earth coming out from human effort and – most of all – from his encounter with God. The flood is not the end of human history, but a caesura, an interruption, a new beginning.

2. History of Salvation 2.1 Attempts of a Garden The access to the Garden is definitively forbidden with the the original sin: God “banished the man, and in front of the garden of Eden he posted the great winged creatures and the fiery flashing sword, to guard the way to the tree of life”24. The Bible could not be more explicit. Still this is not the end but the beginning of human history 25. As you remember, these chapters in Genesis are ‘meta-historical’: their

23

Gen 8,21. Gen 3,24. 25 PL X,1045-1059. 24

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purpose is to found history, to give history a direction and a meaning. Since the original sin, the Bible unrelentingly describes God’s attempts to heal human’s freedom, his efforts to bring man back to his original destiny, re-building the confidence that was destroyed by suspicion. An episode, right before the ban from Eden, shows us God’s wish to participate to the new age of human history: “God made tunics of skins for the man and his wife and clothed them”26. We could say that the whole Bible is the narration of God’s attempt to reactivate the original relationship with mankind. But how can this happen? Of course we can’t travel through the whole Bible, but we can try to point out some key issues in Biblical History of Salvation. 2.1.1 A land flowing with milk and honey An an episode, above all, represents the historical source of Israel’s faith: the liberation of the People from the land of Egypt. This original encounter with God and with his Name represents for the People the time of falling in love, as the prophet Hosea states: “I am going to seduce her and lead her into the desert and speak to her heart. (…) There se will respond as when se was young, as on the day when she cam up from Egypt”27 . The passage is particularly interesting: many centuries after the Exodus a prophet named Hosea looks back to the time of the desert – the forty years Israel passed in the desert leaded by God himself – and calls it a time of youth, just as the time of falling in love is for lovers. There are historical moments that reproduce the origin. In many occasions, Israel will feel a sincere nostalgia and look back to that period. Now, the Exodus is not only leaded by the promise of freedom from Egypt; this promise is – I would say – embodied by another

26 27

Gen 3,21. Hos 2,16-17.

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promise: a land will be given, a land “flowing with milk and honey”. The image – that will be confirmed forty years after by the explorers crossing the Jordan river – clearly points out an experience of fullness and fertility that can not avoid to recall the Garden of Eden. The liberation from Egyptian captivity is a theological issue, it is an attempt to restore the Edenic life. Two great themes are here present: freedom and land. 1. About freedom, the Bible is very clear: the issue of freedom is not simply the issue of liberation from the Pharaoh’s tyranny, but a path of education for the people’s conscience. The long path in the desert (forty years is of course a symbolic number, but it expresses very well the idea of an itinerary) is an education for Israel because the people “is like a baby” and needs to learn “how to walk” 28. It takes one night for God to let Israel out from Egypt, but it takes forty years to let the experience of slavery out from Israel’s heart. In the desert Israel will experiment trust and doubt, the courage of the road and the temptation of complaint, the hope for a land where to live free and the lure of the land of Egypt where food was certain 29. Freedom is difficult: bitter herbs in the Passover Supper are a symbol of this strain. But this strain has a destiny, God’s effort to set Israel free is the promise of a possible return to communion and joy. Not by chance one of the great verb of the Bible is schub (‫)שׁוּב‬, that means ‘to return’. God’s invite to human freedom is often expressed as the courage to return, not simply to go ahead. Return to the time of youth when God and his people crossed the desert together, return to communion, return to the Garden: this is the promise that spills from the Old Testament. The

28

Hos 11,3: “I myself taught Ephraim to walk, I myself took them by the arm” Num 11,5: “Think of the fish we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic! But now we are withering away; there is nothing wherever we look except this manna!” 29

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perception of a loss – the loss of the Garden, the loss of a homeland – is the first step for any human conversion. 2. The Promised Land is, in this way, also the lost land that will be given back when freedom will be up to the task of dwelling in it. One more time, land and and freedom are connected: freedom to respond freely to God’s election and land as the promise of a stabile relationship are the two parts of a unique alliance between God and his People. But there is something more: the land given by God will not be Israel’s property: the land does not belong to the people, but to God. The book of Leviticus shows us how deep is this awareness. Israel had a law: any sale and any purchase could last only fifty years, since the fiftieth year was the Jubilee and the land had to go back to the original owners: You will declare this fiftieth year to be sacred and proclaim the liberation of all the country's inhabitants. You will keep this as a jubilee: each of you will return to his ancestral property, each to his own clan. This fiftieth year will be a jubilee year for you; in it you will not sow, you will not harvest the grain that has come up on its own or in it gather grapes from your untrimmed vine. The jubilee will be a holy thing for you; during it you will eat whatever the fields produce. In this year of jubilee, each of you will return to his ancestral property. If you buy land from, or sell land to, your fellow-countryman, neither of you may exploit the other. In buying from your fellow-countryman, you will take account of the number of years since the jubilee; the sale-price he fixes for you will depend on the number of productive years still to run. The greater the number of years, the higher the price you will ask for it; the fewer the number of years, the greater the reduction; for what he is selling you is a certain number of harvests30 .

30

Lev 25,10-17.

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The land does not belong to Israel, in fact the land does not belong to anyone: this is the peculiarity of the law of the Jubilee. It is an attempt to found a society not on property, but on non-property, so that what can guarantee the people’s existence is not possess, but the declaration of its impossibility. The land itself becomes the chance (but we might even say the “sacrament”) of the possible common life or, to use a modern expression, of the Common Good. The Common Good is not simply something that belongs to everyone (like the “public property”), it is rather what does not belong to anyone. Exactly like it happens for the language, the Promised Land has no owners: its promise belongs to everyone, but its possess is God’s prerogative. In this sense the Common Good is not something, it is the possibility of communion itself, the good which is the fact of communion. Reading carefully the text of the Leviticus, we might say something more: what is actually sold and bought is not the land, but the harvest. In 1690, John Locke, the English philosopher and empiricist, writes something impressively similar to what we are talking about: God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest conveniencies of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational, and labour was to be his title to it. […] The measure of property nature has well set by the extent of men’s labour and the conveniencies of life: no man's labour could subdue, or appropriate all; nor could his enjoyment consume more than a small part; so that it was impossible for any man, this way, to intrench upon the right of another, or acquire to himself a property, to the prejudice of his neighbour, who would still have room for as good, and as large a

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possession (after the other had taken out his) as before it was appro31 priated .

Locke is not against private property, in fact he is considered the ‘Father or Liberalism’. Still, what he states marks a limit to the idea of property. There is no reason to own a land that exceeds your needs: “the measure of property” is labour, not possess. Now, the modern liberalism would not accept even the protocols of one of his fathers: our idea of property is closer to a myth of absolute possess than to its practical meaning. It works as an abstract idea of absolute right, having lost any connection with the real life. In real life, as Locke states, it is quite obvious that there is no need to possess more land than one can cultivate or use. This shift from reality to ideality – which is one of the main features of Capitalism 32 – is made possible by the power of abstraction of money. Locke writes: And thus came in the use of money, some lasting thing that men might keep without spoiling, and that by mutual consent men would 33 take in exchange for the truly useful, but perishable supports of life .

Money, which is originally only a unity of measurement of value, becomes in Capitalism the purpose of the entire economic system: revolving all choices around the idea of money, the capitalistic system overcomes reality. The contemporary economical system (with all its crisis and countermeasures) is an abstraction that overtook what it originally intended to represent, so that the land, through its monetary value, can be accumulated in a few’s hands.

31

JOHN L OCKE, On property, in DAVID WOOTTON (ed.), Modern Political Thought. Readings from Machiavelli to Nietzsche, Hackett Publishing Company, IndianapolisCambridge, 1996, 325. 32 On this topic: MICHEL HENRY, From Communism to Capitalism. Theory of a Catastrophe, Bloomsbury Academic, London 2014. 33 JOHN LOCKE, On property, 326.

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The fact that money is an abstraction is also its appeal: always available to become something else (being invested elsewhere), it is the perfect symbol of a indefinite desire, that does not need to embody and rest in any good. Through money, human desire can indefinitely postpone its realization; the accumulation of money is a perfect example of modern idea of power as infinite possibility of choice, where the choice itself can stay temporary, reversible, remediable. 2.1.2 What if the Garden was still available? The experience of the Exodus states something else. There are experiences, in human history, capable of reproducing the same confidence of the Garden; there are experiences of trust that make possible to human freedom to overcome suspicion towards God and towards life; there are experiences – historical experiences, events – that highlight the good promise that lies in creation. If the Garden is lost, nevertheless it did not fade34: the history of salvation makes it present to humanity. When it does, humans also experiment the regenerating power of the land, a land where milk and honey flow gratuitous, a land where everything is as it should be. Now, we stated before that the prophet Hosea compares the experience of Exodus with the human youth and with the time of falling in love. The metaphor works in both ways: there are experiences in personal history (both personal and universal experiences) that reproduce the same promise of the Exodus. Some episodes awake the personal perception of the power of good against evil, reinforcing the promising side of life. Of course there is nothing absolute in this perception, there is not a self-evidence of good: it is much more a matter 34

A very peculiar study about history of art, shows how the Garden of Eden used to be considered a physical place, impossible to reach but present in ancient maps. ALESSANDRO SCAFI, Maps of Paradise, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2013.

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of education of one’s attitude towards life. Personal history is somehow similar to the history of Salvation. There is a period of promise, where everything is given for free: food, care, love, affection. Every child benefits from a period of gratuitousness, when his mother feeds him and people around him have care of his health and needs. We do not have any memory from these first years of our life (in this sense, as we said, first childhood is a personal meta-history) but they obviously give a direction to our perception of life as a promise of good. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus says that “you, evil as you are, know how to give your children what is good”: it is an example of the original gratuity that makes man, despite evil, similar to God himself. Of course, to grow up means to be dealing with experiences of disillusion and failure: somehow we discover how hard is life, how often we must deal with strain and pain. Life appears cursed and the original blessing far behind. A sense of nostalgia dwells in us: through this sense we judge pain unfair and joy fair, we discover that we can not be neutral in front of life. But not only this discovery is made possible by the original experience of good: the loss of enchantment in life is not ineluctable, other experiences, after childhood, can confirm its affordability and raise the bet. Falling in love, the wonder of nature, some intense friendships, the experiences of good and joy are capable to awaken our perception of promise, suggesting the possibility to return to the original life of communion with nature, with others, with God. The chance of education, in this sense, is enormous; having denied the existence of an absolute and self-evident truth, the construction of human conscience is a call for our responsibility. Nothing but our attention can guarantee the experiences on which a trust towards life has its nourishment. The land we are dwelling in does not belong to us: an ancient Masai proverb says that the land it is not the legacy of our fathers, but the loan of our children.

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2.1.3 Land and toledot: responsibility in time If life after original sin means a new perception of land – a new land itself, since the access to the Garden is forbidden – it also means a new dimension of time. The Bible does not express about the flowing of time in the Garden, we only know that the rhythm of day and night counted God’s action. We also know that the man and the woman had the responsibility of work, before the fall. Still the absence of death means that the flow of time was a non-problematic dimension of life. Of course this perception changes in our present experience: time is the great enemy of our life, its flow makes us old and approaches us to death. Death will be the great theme of Christian Revelation, but something is present even in the Old Testament. In front of death the People of Israel knew that the land is not simply the place I dwell in, but the place where my children and the children of my children are destined to live. Inhabiting a land does not regard simply my experience, but also the generations that will come. The biblical symbol of this new awareness about time are the so called ‘toledot'. ‘Toledot' is the hebrew word for generations and indicates the way through which God’s blessing passes from a generation to another. Episodes of Genesis show how this passage is not simply connected to a bloodline, but to the unpredictable encounter between human freedom and God’s blessing. The character of Jakob, who steals his brother’s blessing violating primogeniture and does it again, at his death, crossing his hands and blessing with the right hand Ephraim, the younger35 , is the symbol of a precise perception: nothing is obvious in the history of salvation, nothing is automatic; everything happens thanks to choices, every blessing must be chosen. Nevertheless, the impression we get from the importance of these biblical tales is a profound sense of responsibility towards those who

35

The funny episode is told in Genesis 48.

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will come. God’s promise is never aimed only to his interlocutor, but to the generations that will come from him. Not by chance the first of God’s friends, Abraham, stands in front of a double promise: land and People. He is asked to leave behind his homeland to become “a great nation”36 . Now, Abraham himself will have only one child to bless – Isaac – and will not live enough to see the nation settled. But he believes in God’s Promise and gathers enough signs of its growth. The visionary ability to recognize these signs creates hope and responsibility for the new generations. Moses himself – after so many adventures in the desert – will not enter in the Promised Land 37, but still he can see the Promise fulfilled in the promise that the new generation of Israel will have the land. Something is clear for God’s friends: the land will survive them and will be a home for their children, a possibility of life for the generations that will come. We might say that in the Scriptures, the encounter of different generations is a privileged place of God’s revelation. In the foundation of Israel’s history with God – the night of Pesah – God himself connects his promise and revelation with generational relationships: there will be a time when the People, finally free from Egyptian captivity, will narrate to their children the great benefits of God: And when your son asks you in days to come, "What does this mean?" you will tell him, "By the strength of his hand Yahweh 38 brought us out of Egypt, out of the place of slave-labour” .

The fulfillment of the Promise goes beyond the limits of a single generation, it involves a project of salvation that encompasses the whole human history; moreover its truth becomes evident not simply when it happens, but when it is narrated, entrusted to someone else.

36

Gen 12,2. The moving episode of the death of Moses is in Ex 34. 38 Ex 13,14. About faith, narration and generation: JEAN-P IERRE SONNET, Generare è narrare, Vita e Pensiero, Milano 2015. 37

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This perception is not only biblical: it characterizes also other periods of human civilization. Take, for example, the great gothic cathedrals: the construction site could last decades and often those who worked at the project knew that they might die before its conclusion. In our modern society nothing like that seems to be possible anymore39. The modern lack of this awareness is one of the greatest issues also in ecology. The changes that our exploitation imposes to the Planet will affect the coming generations. The lack of resources, a notsustainable use of nature will be payed by those who will come after us. Still, this does not seem to concern enough. Our shortness of breath is strengthened by an idealistic hope in progress: tomorrow we will find the solutions; it is an overturning of the biblical point of view and a legacy of troubles for our children. Illusion of perpetual fixability of problems nurtures this hope. Once again, it is not simply the seriousness of the problems we are pointing out: it is a matter of our education to responsibility. Human perception about responsibility endured through ages and was reached in a time when exploitation of land could not damage our planet as badly as today. Modern age needs should somehow to learn back this lesson. 2.2 Losing the land: exile and pilgrimage As we stated, one of the most significant moments in late Israel’s history was the loss of the land after the Babylonian deportation. The Prophetic word – with its eighteen books – is a considerable section of Old Testament. Their preaching often involves the threat of the loss of the land and advise God’s People about how the idea of possess is the greatest enemy of the possibility of dwelling in it. The land

39

Excluding, of course, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the only case of the erection of a building that crossed many generations and is now close to its conclusion.

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was given as a symbol of God’s alliance: if the People breaks this alliance the obvious consequence is the loss of the land. Some passages show how it is not simply a matter of punishment: it regards the human attitude towards land. Inhabiting means recognizing land as a gift, it means the perception of a debt, it means gratitude. In Milton’s Paradise Lost there is a superb passage about gratitude. Satan, in a moment of regret, says: Forgetful what from him I still received, And understood not that a grateful mind By owing owes not, but still pays, at once 40 Indebted and discharged; (…)

Milton highlights that gratitude is the possibility to keep in memory a debt and, exactly doing so, to feel free form the debt itself. The debt towards life – towards God – can be e reason of freedom not only when it is solved, but when it is recognized as irremediable. A debt that we can not solve is a reason of freedom only when it generates a link of gratitude: we are somehow discharged when we feel indebted by the possibility to be grateful. There is a great wisdom in this comprehension of life. Think about human relationships. We all incur debts in our life. We owe life, education, feeding to someone. We owe what we are to the experiences we made, to our environment, in good and in evil. Living means incurring debts. The modern claim is to deny these debts: some can be solved, others can be simply neglected. The idea of not-related autonomy of gown-up men has something to do with this denial. Modern ideal of subject is self-dependence, selfsufficiency, self-made. Something else easily derives from the denial of debts: the pretension of our credit. As much as we forget about our debts we ask back our credit. We don’t owe ourselves to others, but others owe themselves to us, so that the age of autonomy is also

40

PL IV, 53-57.

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the age of the greatest pretension of our rights. Public debate is often blocked by the violent defense of personal rights, which is nothing but the result of the defense of personal identity as a matter of possess. Contemporary European history is a perfect example of all this with its fear of immigration, its use of courthouses, its blind protests and the underestimation of democracy. Now, the Prophets in the Bible often pointed out this phenomenon of denial of debt, ungratefulness and pretension of personal rights. In Hosea – again – the People is compared to a woman that betrays her husband and forgets about his gifts: Yes, their mother has played the whore, she who conceived them has disgraced herself saying, ‘I shall chase after my lovers; they will as41 sure me my keep, my wool, my flax, my oil and my drinks’ .

The woman refers to God’s gift – not by chance we have a list of fruits of the land – as hers: the lovers – local idols, in Hoseas metaphor – must simply guarantee what is already a possession of the People. The answer of God is consequent: She never realized before that I was the one that was giving her the grain the new wine and the oil (…) This is why I shall take back my grain when it is due and my new wine, when the season for it 42 comes .

The fruit of the land is connected to the recognition of its provenience, the gratitude and the perception of a debt. A prophetic image – among so many others – is particularly precious for us. Since the sense of possession and the lack of gratitude come together, God’s People should dwell in the land without possessing it: Israel should inhabit his land as a deportee. This idea is expressed one of the tasks of the prophet in the book of Ezekiel:

41 42

Hos 2,7. Hos 2,10-11.

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‘Son of man, you are living among a tribe of rebels who have eyes and never see, they have ears and never hear, because they are a tribe of rebels. So, son of man, pack an exile's bundle and set off for exile by daylight while they watch. You will leave your home and go somewhere else while they watch. Then perhaps they will see that they are a tribe of rebels. You will pack your baggage like an exile's bundle, by daylight, while they watch, and leave like an exile in the evening, while they watch. While they watch, make a hole in the wall, and go out through it. While they watch, you will shoulder your pack and go out into the dark; you will cover your face so that you cannot see the ground, since I have made you an omen for the House of Israel.’ I did as I had been told. I packed my baggage like an exile's bundle, by daylight; and in the evening I made a hole through the wall with my hands; then I went out into the dark and shouldered my pack while they watched. Next morning the word of Yahweh was addressed to me as follows, 'Son of man, did not the House of Israel, did not that tribe of rebels, ask you, "What are you doing?” Say, "The Lord Yahweh says this: This prophecy concerns Jerusalem and the whole House of Israel who live there." Say, "I am an omen for you; as I have done, so will be done to them; they will be deported into exile. Their prince will shoulder his pack in the dark and go out through the wall; a hole will be made to let him out; he will cover his face, so that he cannot see 43 the country .

The prophecy is the explicit condemnation of the “tribe of rebels”: the prophet lives in a people that declares its faith but has forgotten to deal with God: therefore it is a blind and deaf people. The prophet must then raise in the middle of them and “become a symbol” of the exile, so that everybody’s eyes can be fixed on him. In his liturgical movement the people is able to understand its destiny: the loss of the land, the exile in Babylon, the deportation. Since they have lost their theological fundament, the prophet is already exiled, because the land is already lost: it is just a matter of time and everybody will un-

43

Ez 12,2-12.

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derstand what this means. Unless, of course, looking at the prophet, they convert and change their life. Now, speaking about the land as something that does not belong to anybody, Ezekiel’s symbol is particularly interesting. It shows a way to dwell in the land without possessing it. If Israel wants to keep in mind that the land does not belong to him, but to God, there are some experiences of the space – such as exile and its ‘domesticated’ form, the pilgrimage – that might help him to remember his debt and gratitude. Indeed in human culture some experiences among others have always assumed a prophetic role: the attitude to become a symbol of how life should be. Two of them are particularly important in Western culture: pilgrimage and monastic reclusion44 are experiences of exile that deny the necessity to possess the land. While Israel will have to live centuries without the land, in the diaspora following the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, the biblical concern about possession of the land will pass to Christianity as a spiritual issue and has an incarnation in Medieval Pilgrimage (the famous roads to Santiago de Compostela, Rome and Jerusalem) and in monastic experience of reclusion. We will deal with these experiences further on.

3. Conclusions I would like to summarize here briefly the profit of this section about the Bible. a. There is a connection between land an human freedom. This connection can be described as responsibility. It means that the world does not exist without human thought. Of course, things might exist as materials, but they do not have any sense and any destiny out of the human choice. The world exists because man dwells in

44

On this subject: JEAN-YVES LACOSTE , Experience and the Absolute, Fordham University Press, New York 2004.

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it. Only the presence of mankind, indeed, can guarantee a vision of nature, can give name to natural environment, to its dynamics of birth, feeding, life and death. Natural circle does not exist elsewhere than in human comprehension and understanding; Tob is the nature, only because mankind contemplates its beauty and order. Natural order, – the movement of the planets, the succession of seasons, the perfections of constellations – exists as far as a man is staring at things. Human freedom is the only place where nature receives its sense and can give its messages. The fact that the Garden was given to the man to “cultivate and to take care” of it is not only a symbol of human will to power, but is also the only place for the fulfillment of nature. Humanity is not the cancer of earth: our possibility of destruction – that we must not underestimate – exists only as the negation of our possibility of communion. As we previously stated – quoting Giovanni Pico della Mirandola – freedom is the first human trait. In this way anything natural is in humanity submitted to his choice, and any homology between man and nature becomes secondary to his decisions. Moreover: creating human freedom, God submitted creation to a principle that trespasses the simple presence of things: the fulfillment of creation (man) denies any law of necessity, but can also deny the dependence from God’s projects, when man decides to be on his own. The obedience to the creator is not fulfilled by any necessity or by any chain of cause-effect, but by the free decision of man about himself. Through human freedom is revealed and realized (or tragically defeated) the world’s truth. b. Creation’s beauty – Tob – is a powerful symbol of gratuitousness of life. Nature does not appear to humanity simply as a chaotic warehouse of material, it appears as a place of order. Humanity reads and discovers this order in natural events and recognizes a promise. Looking at nature, at the creative power of birth and rebirth in the cycle of seasons, at the impressive fecundity of nature, men understand life as a promise of good. Despite many dangers, 115

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natural abundance can feed the human people, the planet is a good place to live in. This original imprinting of generosity is impressed in human freedom so deeply that we are never neutral in front of our life. We keep waiting for the fulfillment of a promise that, since our birth, can be read in natural cycles. Moreover, we discover that this order that can be read in nature is hospitable for our action. We discover that there is something we can do, about order. Beyond its knowledge and contemplation, there is something we can do. Our participation to creation is first of all a matter of relationships with God, with others, with nature itself: in these relationships, human freedom can have the same gratuitousness of God. c. The role of human freedom in creation is so wide that humanity can also spoil these relationships. Refusing God’s trust and familiarity, humanity chose a different identity: trusting only ourselves and our possess. This catastrophic overturning of order was a choice among the infinite possible choices. But it had theological, anthropological and cosmic consequences. The first one is the suspect towards alterity. Otherness becomes a threat to my possible fulfillment. Because of this, man experiments also a perversion of language. The word of care is misunderstood and becomes commandment; the law becomes necessary to protect life and goods from the others; our vision of land is nothing more than a place of pain and strain, as if we had to force the land to be fruitful. The distance between work and result, in a system of suspicion, becomes intolerable and life is the unbearable endurance of human efforts to cover this distance. d. A nostalgia of the Garden still marks our lives. We know that this life of fight and endurance, this suspect towards life and others was not our destiny. Some historical and personal experiences are – in this sense – particularly capable to confirm the promise to life, to give us a vision of the Paradise lost. In the history of Salvation the main episode, considered the time when Israel fell in love with 116

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his God, is the Exodus. In personal history, childhood and experiences of joy and gratuitousness can educate freedom. Of course, there is no necessity in any human act, but the possibility of these experiences is on our responsibility. e. Relationship is the key of the whole doctrine of creation. Relationship between man and God and between man and woman. But encounter is not simply a matter of meeting. The problem about otherness is human recognition. To recognize the other as other, means to create him as an interlocutor. It is not just a matter of talking about him, but talking to him. Since anything in humanity is submitted to freedom, to human decision, the decision to recognize the other is previous to any relationship. If I don’t recognize the other, I will not elect him as an interlocutor, I will not share any relationship with him, I will not consider him worthy of my attention. In human history – also recently – we had many episodes when humans have not been recognized as humans. Nazi’s destruction of Jewish People, the exceptional violence of some recent wars, the episodes of ethnic-cleansing, hide an issue of recognition: violence is perpetrated simply because others are not recognized as persons, as interlocutors. This means that relationship has something to do also with a sentimental education 45, meaning the art of electing someone as an interlocutor. If this is true we might state something more: nature can be chosen as a parter and not simply an object. A sentimental education allows man to meet nature, the exercise of attention and empathy towards nature allows man to consider the world non just as a warehouse of useful material, but as a subject that somehow communicates with human freedom.

45

J. M UMFORD, Ethics at the Beginning of Life, 133-134.

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f. An attitude of possess towards the land is the constant temptation of humanity. On the contrary, the land is, for the Old Testament, something that does not belong to anybody. In the history of Salvation the land is lost precisely when the People of Israel act this possess. The loss of the land, of the temple, of the fundamental symbols of the relationship between God and his People is the result of a lack of memory. As soon as the People forgets how land was God’s gift, the land itself is already wasted and will soon be taken away. In this sense Israel is invited to be a pilgrim in the land he dwells in. A sense of gratuitousness, a perception of debt must be cultivated and preserved to cultivate and preserve the land itself.

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CHAPTER IV

THE DISCOVERY OF ORDER

1. Discovery of order and foundation of the world Human wonder is not only about the fact that things are, but about their beauty. If in many religions the myths of creation are attempts to explain the fight between order and chaos, Genesis’ first chapters are full of wonder: the movement of the sun, of the stars, the fact that water is kept away from the land, the growth of plants and animals, the cycle of life, the creation of the first man, the gift of the first woman… The discovery of order is one of the most impressive acts of human genius: it is an action, a creation itself. We might say that natural order is the fruit of human knowledge and understanding: it exists because of mankind’s exercise of attention and vision, it is the fruit of human visionary intelligence. In the 20th century, Martin Heidegger wrote a masterpiece of philosophy with the title Building Dwelling Thinking, in which he points out how decisive is the experience of building in human existence. The German word for ‘building’ (bauen) has lost his original meaning, but it was actually related to the verb ‘being’. This means that the manner in which we dwell is the manner in which we exist, the manner we are. Building, in other words, is not a mare problem of providing shelter or housing: it has something to do with the protection and care of the soil, because it enables the world to be what it is. When a man dwells, Heidegger states, in the simple action of building he gathers four fundamental elements: sky, earth, mortals and di-

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vinities. This is what the philosopher calls the “fourfold”, das Geviert1. He describes it more or less like it follows. Mankind dwells in earth saving it; the danger from which the earth has to be saved is the human lordship: the earth has to be left free (freilassen) so that its essence can develop and grow. Mankind dwells greeting the sky as sky. For Heidegger the sky is a symbol of time. It is about leaving “to the sun and the moon their course, to the stars (…) their path, to the seasons their blessings and their inclemency and not to do of the night the day, neither of the day an everlasting effort” 2. Somehow the operation is similar to the one suggested for the earth: this time it is not about leaving free, but about an acceptance, the acceptance of the sky’s inaccessibility. Dwelling under the sky means to recognize an original order that has to be received and to which human efforts must be entrusted. Men dwell waiting for divinities as divinities: they wait for them through their hope and in the perception of a radical distance, since divinities is what can not, actually, be desired and waited. Divinities are not God, but something more similar to the presence of sacred, of mystery, so that the warning about divinities seems to be a warning against idolatry. Waiting for the divinities means not to create our own gods and maintaining intact and open the await of what can not be waited: transcendence. Heidegger’s fourfold is the unity of earth, sky, mortals and divinities. The Geviert is possible when dwelling takes place. Human beings provide access to the fourfold by being a part of it and by their dwelling, sustaining the fourfold and its unity. When man dwells, he protects earth and spare it, he accepts sky as sky – with its blessings and atrocities –, he hosts other men and he deals with his condition

1

M ARTIN HEIDEGGER, Building Dwelling Thinking, from Basic writings, Harper Collins, New York 1993, 343-364. 2 M ARTIN HEIDEGGER, Building Dwelling Thinking, 352.

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of creature. We might say that the world does not exist as world unless the man decides to dwell: it is only a pile of material, without order and sense, without any purpose and function. But when the man builds, the world itself takes place. Heidegger explains this operation describing a Greek temple: Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This resting of the work draws out of the rock the darkness of its unstructured yet unforced support. Standing there, the building holds its place against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm visible in its violence. The gleam and luster of the stone, though apparently there only by the grace of the sun, in fact first brings forth the light of day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of night. The temple's firm towering makes visible the invisible space of the air. The steadfastness of the work stands out against the surge of the tide and, in its own repose, brings out the raging of the surf. Tree, grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter their distinctive shapes and thus come to appearance as what they are. Early on, the Greeks called this coming forth and rising up in itself and in all things Φύσις. At the same time Φύσις lights up that on which man bases his dwelling. We call this the earth. What this word means here is far removed from the idea of a mass of matter and from the merely astronomical idea of a planet. Earth is that in which the arising of everything that arises is brought back – as, indeed, the very thing that it is – and sheltered. In the things that arise the earth presences as the protecting one. Standing there, the temple work opens up a world while, at the same time, setting this world back onto the earth which itself first comes forth as 3 homeland, heimatliche Grund .

Building is the human act of care for the connections, but we must not forget that the fundamental relationships that described in the Geviert are installed in human experience by the building itself. Earth and sky, mortals and divinities are in a relationship in the moment

3

M ARTIN HEIDEGGER, The Origin of the Work of Art in Off the Beaten Track, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, 21.

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and in the place where he dwells. With these fundamental dimensions of human life, the order itself rises from the human works as an association of things, numbers, words, representations: human creation, in this sense, is the answer to God’s original order. Without the act of dwelling, without building, this net of relationships would simply not exist: the building is the knot where all these connections meet and from where they take place. Going back to Genesis: the Garden is not only the place that God created, but also the beauty that human wonder discovered. Since the very first day the Garden is suitable for human life, perfectly responding to his search for order, to his act of nomination. In front of unpredictability of life and death, in front of the chaos of emotions, mankind finds an ordered orientation in life and he does that discovering the orientation of the land. Mircea Eliade, one of the greatest historians of religion, explains how the first experience of aware dwelling, in primitive humanity, is connected to nothing but the creation of a totem, a line of orientation inside a land of chaos: So it is clear to what a degree the discovery – that is, the revelation – of a sacred space possesses existential value for religious man; for nothing can begin, nothing can be done, without a previous orientation, and any orientation implies acquiring a fixed point. It is for this reason that religious man has always sought to fix his abode at the “center of the world”. If the world is to be lived in, it must be founded-and no world can come to birth in the chaos of the homogeneity and relativity of profane space. The discovery or projection of a fixed 4 point – the center – is equivalent to the creation of the world .

Building is a sacred act: the presence of the totem in the middle of the village is an act of religion. Something is created but something is received: order is received from gods in the very moment of the hu4

M IRCEA ELIADE, The Sacred and the Profane. On the Nature of Religion, Harper Book, New York 1961, 21-22.

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man decision of building; religion itself has something to do with this human act of foundation of the world, as much as building has something to do with transcendence. This order is nevertheless possible only because a relationship between man and the land is possible: the promise of life – and its transcendence – emerges at the precise happening of the encounter between nature and human freedom. Order does exist in nature only because a man is builds and, on the other hand, order is discovered by man only outside himself. It is not simply the result of imagination, neither the result of a rational abstraction or metaphysical reasoning. Order comes from human wonder in front of the cycle of the sun and of the stars, it comes from the hardness of earth and the fecundity of water, it comes from the stability of the sky; and it has something to do, as Heidegger states, with his life and death. It has something to do with the mystery of being. Wonder reveals that the man himself belongs to that order, so that there is a perfect correspondence and proportion between what he has inside and what lays outside. Every time man finds a proportion he feels something that involves him in its beauty, seducing his gaze and provoking his knowledge. He discovers in himself an attitude to correspond to the ordinated world he belongs to. But there is something more: he also discovers that there is something that he can do against chaos. Human freedom is not only capable of finding order, but also of its preservation. His fantasy and freedom can create an order that was never seen before, a new presence of order to which the world itself will answer. Further on, this presence is so powerful that it can also also support the presence of disorder. The erection of a Greek temple, for example, is the answer to the genius loci: the spirit of the place itself, to which architecture is in perpetual dialogue, as we just heard from Heidegger. Now, the genius loci, the presence of transcendence in the place where the temple ascends to the sky, might not only be a spirit of order, but also a spirit of disorder: the power of a volcano, the rage of tempest and waves, the dangers of a forest. With these powers 123

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that man can’t control, the building is in constant contest. Building a temple always meant a religious act of respect and spiritual comprehension of the presence of divinity in that peculiar place, even when this presence is chaotic and fearful. Building is not only a continuity of the natural order, but also the possibility to face disorder or even to create it, an act of newness. Our modern idea of environmental impact is just a faint memory of how humans used to be aware of their encounter with the soil. The Bible underlines the same dynamics, considering this freedom as imago Dei, and suggesting human role in creation through the episode of nomination. In the Gospel of John, the Son, God himself, is the Word of the beginning, since “through him all the things came into being”5. And “the Word became flesh and he lived among us”6. The verb translated as ‘lived among us’ is in fact a verb of dwelling: the greek verb alludes to the construction of a tent (Σκηνή), so that the process of incarnation is interpreted as a divine act of building and dwelling. This is why for Christianity the construction of sacred architecture has often been not only an answer to the cosmic divine architecture and its harmony, but also the celebration of God’s presence. The meeting between cosmic and human order, was somehow officiated by the perception of this divine presence. Another place for the ‘invention’ of order is the use of numbers. Despite our modern scientific understanding of numbers, their role has not always been a simple matter of counting things and making operations. Pythagoras – the ancient Greek philosopher of numbers – had a religious use of numbers that was not at all simply counting: the special mysterious relationship between cosmic order, human life and numbers is the ancestor of modern mathematics.

5 6

John 1,3. John 1,14.

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The science of numbers always claimed to understand and correspond to the cosmic order, so that the use of numbers was, first of all, a relationship with the whole: the experience of single fragments of reality linked together by numbers has been for ages the possibility to create connections between the immanence of the present and the universality of transcendence. Despite we are usually not aware of this, also Christian liturgy, architecture, art, and even the Sacred Scriptures are profoundly signed by this science of numbers. There is always the echo of Trinity in number three, the resonance of universality in number four (elements, Gospels, cardinal points). Seven is the number of natural fullness, eight is the number of the Grace’s fulfillment (Sunday, resurrection, baptism…). These numbers are always hidden in art, music, architecture, making each of these acts a liturgy and a celebration of the whole. Numbers, nevertheless, are just the tip of the iceberg of the human invention of order as our ability in creating connections between things, events, movements and, at the same time, positioning man inside this net of relationships. The the method of human encounter with nature is the creation of connections, the method of knowledge, the possibility of comprehension lays in this bonds. Connections are the answer that nature gives to the human question for order and at the same time they are the human answer to its discovery: they are the origin of an uninterrupted dialogue between humans and their world. All this is possible only if nature can recognized and protected as otherness. The contemporary passion for pets has nothing to do with this relationship. Any relationship needs alterity: finding human expressions in nature is not a good way to start a relationship since it is nothing but our image reflected on the tender snout of a cat. But, we all know that, man often loves himself through the others. The answer of nature in this relationship, the unexpected answer of natural otherness, is the docility of nature to the invention of a symbolic system. Symbolism – as we will soon explain – is the attitude to invent a net of links between nature and man. A symbolic 125

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system is not only the result of human imagination on some particular natural element, it is always the result of man encountering the whole of nature. Take, as an example, the symbolism of water. In any culture water is life, birth, purification, fecundity. But in any culture the symbolism of water does not rise alone: water will always be a part of the whole, it can be understood only together with all other elements (earth, sky, fire, light…). Symbolism is the whole of nature encountering the whole of human freedom.

2. Order and language 2.1 Full of merit, yet poetically man dwells Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while 7 in fact language remains the master of man .

With this fundamental statement starts one of Heidegger’s most evocative writings: Poetically Man Dwells. Interpreting a verse form a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin, the philosopher connects openly dwelling and language. In Hölderlin’s poem, indeed, the man is defined “full of merit” but “yet, states the poet, he dwells poetically”. These two statements correspond to cultivation (‘full of merit’, points ‘active’ part of freedom) and care (‘poetically’ underlines that something is received): they are the same attitude that Heidegger pointed out about dwelling, now projected on the poetic act. Poetry – thought as the truth of language itself – is the ability to “take the measure” of being: This measure-taking not only takes the measure of the earth, ‘Ge’ and accordingly it is no mere geometry. Just as little does it ever take the measure of heaven, ‘Ouranos’ for itself. Measure-taking is no science. Measure-taking gauges the between, which brings the two, heaven

7

M ARTIN HEIDEGGER, Poetically Dwells Man in Poetry, Language, Thought, Harperperennial, New York, 1971, 213.

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and earth, to one another. This measure-taking has its own metron 8 and thus its own metric .

Measure-taking between earth and sky, which is committed to the language, means that the language always points a disproportion: this measure is nothing but the unavailability of life to human grasp. Language is the place where man deals with this disproportion and with this unavailability: Perhaps we have to pronounce the sentence, “Poetry is a measuring” with a different stress. “Poetry is a measuring.” In poetry there takes 9 place what all measuring is in the ground of its being .

This underlines something important for our work: to dwell poetically means to accept that something stays in front of us as unavailable to our grasp. The language is the place of this unavailability. In what sense does the language point out the unavailability of the world to our grasp? If words were just means to understand reality, we had to admit that the idea of ‘comprehension’ seems to hide the opposite claim: the latin etymology of the word (comprehensio) points an intention of holding, seizing. We need to understand in a better way how human freedom is involved in the operation of language: deep in this dynamics we will have the chance to discover that language itself is a way of dwelling. We might say that the connection between a sign and its meaning, the link between signifier and signified comes to light in two main ways: allegory and symbolism. The creation of an allegory is the result of a rational decision that connects an element to a single meaning. Take a national flag with the choice of its colours: shapes and colours often have an historical meaning, and the choice for one or another has to be connected with a positive act of election. The Italian flag, for example, recalls the

8 9

Ivi, 219. Ivi, 219.

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French flag and the French Revolution, since Italians fighting for the Unity of Italy aimed to share the same values that some decades before gathered the revolutionaries. During the Napoleon’s campaign in Italy, the French tricolour reached Italy and, during the Wars of Italian Independence, green substituted blue, since green was the uniform of Milan’s civil guard; red and white were also the colours of the city of Milan, that became a symbol of liberation. The choice of colours, in this case, is a celebration of winners, has a political meaning which is strengthened by the fact that it is was decided by them. For this kind of operation, human positive choice is of primary importance. This is what we might call an allegory. Of course everyday we deal with many similar operations, where the signifier has nothing to do with the signified. From street signs to political symbols, from commercials to factory logos… choice is – and has to remain – the protagonist of this human operation. Symbols are different. They are not simply chosen: as we already noticed, there is a truth that is found in reality. A kiss is not simply a human act that someone decided somehow to connect with love and affection. The kiss ‘is’ the presence of love: lovers kiss not because they need to express love, but because love would simply not be possible without a kiss. The example simply points how the symbolic power of the thing is somehow inside the thing itself. Nobody really explains the connection between a kiss and affection and we could not choose to express love in a different way, for example with a slap on the lover’s face. Even if we can find in human language some conventional signs, the greatest part of it is simply received by something that we may define as a dialogue with the world. The symbolic presence of light and darkness, of the sun and the moon, of water and wind is somehow calling for humans, and language is human answer. In this sense language comes from the outside as something transcending our simple decision. An important Orthodox theologian, Pavel Florenskij, considers the birth of language as the greatest fruit of God’s Spirit:

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Words are not ‘mine’ nor ‘yours’. They are not even ‘our’ common words. They are the words of Who has in itself, as in a living Intellect, the fullness of any word – they are the words of the Word, they belong to Him (…) Even if we did not agree about symbology, we can speak in a symbolic way and we understand each other. Does this mean something? (…) Symbols are not something conventional, created to please or as a tantrum. Symbols are built by the spirit following some laws end with an interior necessity; this happens particularly when we let some parts of the spirit work. The symbolizer and the symbolized do not link together by chance. (…) We can’t invent symbols: they come 10 themselves when you are filled with other content .

The association between signifier and signified which is involved in any symbolism comes from elsewhere: the human relationship with the mystery of life in its sensitive complexity is the real source of language. 2.2 Relationships as origin But how does a symbol arise? And what exactly is the language? Our idea of language – and about any act of thinking – is a representation of reality. Words are, in this sense, means to reproduce reality when it is not available, fruit of an agreement made by men. This is how we usually think, pretending an absolute point of view, as if we could watch this process from the outside. But, in human experience, it is not that simple. Let us use an example. The baby has a movement of joy when he sees his mother’s breast: he moves his hands, he smiles, knowing that soon his hunger will be satisfied. Our understanding of this infantile operation would be something like that: ‘I am hungry, I experienced

10

ANDREJ BELYJ - PAVEL F LORENSKIJ, L’arte, il simbolo e Dio. Lettere sullo spirito russo, Medusa, Milano 2004, 53-54 [my translation].

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that food comes from my mother’s breast, I am happy when she feeds me and, if she is far, I can cry for help’. Reality teaches us, instead, that in the child’s head the idea of hunger, the idea of mother, the idea of milk and even the idea of himself do not really exist. The child can – fortunately – do these operations far before he can think the idea of mother, food, hunger and identity… otherwise he would just starve to death. Let us try to reverse our interpretation: what we really have is the event (a child sipping to his mother’s breast) first of all is an encounter11. The experience is mysteriously written in the child’s memory, so that comes a moment when the child is ready to ‘read’ it, and draw from there the idea of ‘I’. The experience of enjoyment within life is the real source, in the baby’s mind, of both the mother’s and the son’s identity: these identities do not exist outside the experience and its repetition. The baby’s cautiousness is not the subject of his hunger, but the result of what happens there: joy, smiles, hands clapping to his mother’s appearance ‘are’ the child. If you try to think this way, you might understand that identity is not something happening inside everyone’s head, but the edge of our experience. ‘I’ is not the origin: original is the link between a child and his mother’s breast, a link created at his first sip of milk, a link made of joy and satisfaction which is then confirmed again and again, until he learns to speak ‘Mom’. Intentionality is created by our experience, towards which we can’t and we will never be neutral. And every subject is the result of a net of links: the child will soon learn not only to cry for food, but also to smile to the other’s attention, to call for his father, to be amazed at the sight of the world… Identity is the result of this net of experiences, which is actually a net of marks that draws

11

I owe this reflection about language to the works of Carlo Sini, particularly to CARLO SINI , Col dovuto rimbalzo, in GIANFRANCO DALMASSO (ed.), Di-segno. La giustizia nel discorso, Jaca-Book, Milano 1984, 13-50.

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the identity of the infant as much as the identity of the mother and any other person. In other words, ‘me’ comes from ‘mine’: the identity is the result of an experience of enjoyment. Let us now devote our attention to how this net arises. The first relationship with nature is its enjoyment. We enjoy our world: we eat, we drink, we try to survive, our hand seizes reality to taste its fruit. We must admit that our first relationship with our world is the attempt to use it, to enjoy from it. A false morality would state that man is not done to exploit the world, that man is its keeper (this is what we also stated, interpreting the doctrine of Creation?). In a sense this is true: it is true for the formed conscience. But on the other hand, we also know that in the Garden the man could eat the fruit of any tree (but one) and savor it. Enjoying the world, enjoying life is not a sin, it is not the act of a superficial creature: the blame for human enjoyment, as if it brought man to destruction, is a moralistic deviation. The French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, in Totality and Infinite calls this primitive human experience ‘jouissance’. Understanding human conscience means accepting that enjoyment is the primitive relationship towards things. Living is enjoying life. Deciding about life has sense only because life is, originally, happiness. Suffering is a lack of happiness and it is not correct to say that happiness is the absence of suffering. Happiness is not an absence of needs – of which we denounce the tyranny and an imposed feature – but the satisfaction of all needs. (…) Happiness is accomplishment: it happens in a satisfied soul and not in a soul that 12 has eradicated every need, a castrated soul

From the experience of fulfillment and of joy arises the first human attitude: “love for life”13. In this love the man somehow discov12

EMMANUEL LÉVINAS , Totalité et infini. Essai sur l’extériorité , LGF, Paris 1990, 118-119 [my translation]. 13 CARLO SINI , Col dovuto rimbalzo, 154-156.

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ers himself. But, deeper, from the experience of enjoyment rises what we call our world. Every human being builds his own world over the experience of enjoyment: we dwell because we enjoy life. Our world is organized by our enjoyment, the right placement for all the elements of our world is the possibility to enjoy them, grab them, use them, find them. Nevertheless, our enjoyment is possible only because the world appears for us enjoyable. We do not grasp reality, we can enjoy it only because it comes close to our hand. Possess is – in any case – a result of our relationship with the world. Imagine you are falling in an abyss and you see some stones coming out from the walls that can be your salvation: your hand will grasp them only because they came towards you14 . Your hand simply responds to the world corresponding to it. Even our desire of possess, in fact, could not exist else than as a response to the world’s beauty15. This link between reality and language explains very well where the power of symbols is. The symbolism of water, for example, arises from the experience of freshness, of quenching our thirst, of washing our body; and – probably – also from a possible distant remembrance of our life in mother’s womb. Water is not simply the material presence of plenty of H2O molecules; water is the name that we give to this original experience of life, gathering together many sensations we experienced (freshness, clean, refresh).

14

Ivi, 21. John Milton, in his Paradise Lost, often illustrates Satan’s point of view; now, Satan himself seems to be seduced by the beauty of God’s creation, even when he accomplishes his desire of destruction. Particularly touching is his approach to the woman in book IV. 15

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2.3 Language, voice and names But there is something more: how can this personal experience become universal? How do we move from the personal experience of water (with all its richness) to the universal idea of water? What makes this possible? Our answer would be, of course: words. Language is not only our chance to give a name to the things: it also suggest that that we can share the same interpretation of the world (since, of course, we share a language). But it is still not clear how this happens. We figure something like a conventional agreement about names: man gather around a river, one of them points to it and loudly says ‘water’ and from that very moment the word water comes to light. Of course it does not work like that, because to fulfill this operation language itself is needed. Let’s give a closer look. Words are connected with voices and voice is connected with sound. Now, of all five senses, hearing is connected with an event. While touch, taste, sight, and smell are leaded by our decision to investigate, hearing simply happens in spite of our decision. We decide to taste something, to touch it or to smell it; we might not decide our sight, but we can always and immediately close our eyes or look somewhere else. This does not happen for hearing: sounds always come from the outside to surprise us and, once they happened, they simply disappear. We are exposed to sounds, to their advent. Sounds are, in this sense, events themselves: when a word is pronounced it immediately disappears its echo, so that listening has the form of an event. Let’s go back to the infant. When a child cries for hunger – or for any other reason – he knows nothing about him crying: there is no ‘me’ in the infant, neither a precise decision of crying. What really happens is that in the very moment he cries, he can hear a voice and he can eventually discover himself crying. In this way the sound reveals me to myself at the moment that it reveals myself: even without any intention for that, the voice is the first place where the subject can discover himself. At the same time the infant discovers that the 133

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voice is producing an effect: it can call the mother’s attention, producing something that is not at all private, but involves everyone who can hear that. Once again, this is different from other senses which lead to a personal experience: any voice happens as a universal event. Once e sound (a word) is spoken, it remains spoken in front of a public that we are not able to control or to decide. The voice creates a universal mark, overcoming any other sense of privacy: it happens something for everyone and in a irreparable way. Something similar happens with the sense of sight: when we look in someone else’s eyes he feels immediately an invitation to glance back, and he accepts or refuses this invite. But voice has a public profile that makes us much more committed in the event of speaking: we can’t refute a sound. In this sense in the voice dwells the birth of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, the voice is the first sense of the experience of what we have called ‘human invariance’, since we have the precise perception of it as a universal event. Voice is also the place where any thought about universality comes from: any metaphysics has its origin here, in this primitive and universal experience of the voice. There is one last feature connected with voice and language. Language indicates an absence. Carlo Sini states in one of his works about language: The fundamental fact is that the thing of the word is absent also when, hypothetically, it is present. The presence of a horse would not make less absent the object of the word ‘horse’. Moreover, we could not have any ‘thing’ in presence, any ‘horse’, if a space of word and nomination was not already open. Things show up in words and not before them. (…) The outside that resounds from outside is indeed ‘for everyone’, neither mine, neither yours (in fact ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ derive from this, as the poles of the pan-acoustic explosion of the bouncing answer). This is why Husserl could discover, in the intimate of himself, in the deepest egoity, the presence of the ‘generalized other’ (as Mead used to say), the presence of ‘us’. In the deepest soul I am as everyone (…), more precisely I am ‘everyone’. This was Socrate’s greatest discovery, 134

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at the origin of philosophy: there is, and resounds, deep down, a voice that speaks and says ‘good itself’, universal good: for every16 one .

The voice points out an absence because it points out a universal experience, something that resounds in everyone’s deepest soul as a call. In this way universality is possible when we renounce to the simple presence of things and we reach what that presence can not produce: its name. The name is what remains of any thing after we experienced it, the name is the permanence of the thing in our experience when we renounce to possess it. The name is the ‘soul’ of the thing, in this sense. We already stated that the experience of speaking has something to do with the enjoyment of life and with the possibility of a universal enjoyment. If every man experiences the enjoyment of the world, at the same time we all know something else: we know about a possible loss. We know that the enjoyment can always be lost, that the our grab of the world can fail, that our aim can be frustrated. Love for life meets uncertainty – as Lévinas says – as the possibility of nothing. It appears as a concern about tomorrow (lendemain), as an uncertainty about the future. The use of things places the man in a position of dependence from the world itself. And we know that the world does not depend on us, that things may turn to nothing. In one word: we know about death. This uncertainty, this dependence from uncertain things, “opens a dimension where transcendence can be expected and greeted”17 since somehow man expects to be saved from it. The knowledge of death accompanies any intersubjectivity, since we all know about this possibility, and we know about of our own death only because we experience the other’s death. But we also know that something might be

16 17

C. SINI , Col dovuto rimbalzo, 37 [my translation]. EMMANUEL L ÉVINAS, Totalité et infini, 160 [my translation].

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saved form death: we know that there is something ‘more’, beyond the mere presence of the things. We call this ‘more’ the ‘soul’. But, in a different sense, we already know that we might call it the ‘name’. We have a name and we give a name, once again, when we stay in front of the possibility of an absence, when we believe in what is more then the mere presence. The name, our name, is what overcomes the mere presence, the name keeps and guards things from death. In this sense language is always symbolic: any name does not simply recall the present thing, its mere presence, but all the richness of its meanings that were gathered by the thing in the experience of its presence and that – nevertheless – survive to its absence. This richness is what can endure in front of physical absence, in front of the concern for tomorrow, in front of death. The name, coming from the world of sounds, is not simply a convention, but the space where we renounce to the mere physical presence, the space of our perception of the excess of reality. Language is a challenge to death, it is what remains, it indicates the soul of reality: as it happens with the soul, you could never precisely locate it, even in the presence of the thing. The name, our name, is our being beyond our presence, our possibility to be remembered, our chance not to disappear in front of death, as far as someone can pronunce our name. Language is the place where we overcome uncertainty of life and we devote our rationality to its possibile survival. This is how symbols, language and life are connected. Our possibility of speech has something to do with our perception of a promise, a hope and a quest for fulfillment. The perception of order, in other words, is inherent with the perception of this promise: order is not the mere presence, order is the possibility to understand our

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world overcoming the mere presence18 . Thought itself, philosophy, metaphysics, exists as far as this renounce is still possible, as far as we decide to create a distance between us and the mere presence of things, believing in the promise of reality. Rationality is not simply an effort of correspondence to reality, but – deeper – dedication to the denial of possess19 .

18

This feature of language seems to be not scientific, as science mainly devotes its attention to materiality. Nevertheless also in science there is a claim: to find a general rule, a universal law that overtakes the single passing experiment. 19 In the next chapters we will meet Bernard of Clairvaux. One of the main themes of this outstanding medieval theologian is the connection between love and rationality.

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Excursus: The History of the True Cross

Trying to guess where this path is leading us, we now approach one of the numerous symbols of Christianity to show an example of the life of a symbol. To do this, we will read a cycle of frescos painted by Piero della Francesca in Arezzo, known as “The Invention of the True Cross”. The choice falls on Renaissance paintings because, even if the Medieval Art is considered far more symbolic, in this period the symbolic dynamics is rich and complex, and it intersects a new idea of history. The Cross had – since its ‘invention1’ – a main significance in the Christian imaginary, however its use does not begin immediately after Christ’s death. The powerful meaning of a death instrument, the impression of a defeat, the hard reality of many prisoners still crucified during the Roman Empire was probably so burning that in the first examples of Christian art we don’t find crosses. In Paleochristian art other other symbols are much more frequent: the Staurogram ( ) or the Chi Rho ( ), coming from the union of Greek letters (R and T, R and X) and the Ichthys ( ), an acrostic of “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior”. Some of them are obviously related to the cross, so that we can’t say that it was not present at all in Early Christianity, nevertheless the assumption of the cross as universal symbol of Christianity was not obvious at all.

1

This is, indeed, the name of the Christian fest of the Invention of the Cross, which remembers the recovery of Jesus’s cross by Helen, the mother of the first Christian Roman emperor.

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Even less obvious was the representation of the Savior’s death. The most ancient crucifix where Christians could contemplate the tragedy of Jesus’ death is probably from the 11th century (the Crucifix of Ariberto di Intimiano, nowadays in the Diocesan Museum of Milan). Before that, Jesus was pictured alive, with royal clothes, open eyes, in his triumph. And we must wait until the 13th century to see crucifixions in all the churches. For many centuries the cross was used mainly in its symbolic power, not as a representation of Jesus’ death. Christianity owes the universal use of the cross as a symbol to the emperor Constantin the Great and – as the tradition states – to his mother Helena. Constantin the Great introduced it with a strong political meaning: probably his first intention was to replace the roman eagle with a symbol that could be as powerful as the first one used to be. Not by chance the legend of the cross appearing to the emperor is connected with a militar victory (in hoc signo vinces). The relationship between Christianity and this roman emperor, ratified in the Edict of Milan (313 a.C.) had enormous political consequences and changed the face of the church forever. Nevertheless Constantin the Great could only guess the power of this symbol and the consequences of his choice: the ‘logo’ of the cross was capable to express many cosmic meanings and this made it the most powerful symbol in Western history.

1. Center, circle, cross It is likely that the shape of Jesus’ gibbet was not the perfect geometric symbol of two lines crossing in a center. Historians state that different kind of crosses were used: the crux simplex was probably a vertical stake where the condemned was tortured and killed; the crux commissa had the shape of a ’T’, the crux immissa was more similar to our idea of cross. The most ancient image of a roman cross (2nd century AD) has a ’T’ shape and this shape was recurrent also in Eary

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Christian art. Nevertheless what everyone has in his mind is Constantin’s crux immissa. The reason must be found in the preexistence of the cosmic symbol of the cross that, with the center, the circle, the square, is one of the first human attempts to write the idea of order and their dwelling2. 1. The center is a powerful symbol of order connected with the beginning. The ancient people, in the darkness of their nights, could stair at the sky and see its rotation: in the middle a shining star, the North star, was the natural expression of a static center. Since the ancients considered the sky made of water, another natural phenomenon could be connected to this vision of a center: the movement of waves in water when an object breaks the surface. As the circular waves expanding from a center, the universe finds in the North his undivided point: every created thing comes from and will go back to it. The center is the origin and the eschatological end of any evolution. The number of the center is one and there is a similarity between the geometrical and arithmetical symbol of the center: the both represent the cosmic symbolism of the origin, the center which is the Pure Being, the Absolute. Space and time come from this center, from this one. Moreover – and more simply – without a center any movement in creation would be only chaos and privation: any human experience of dwelling, as we already stated, starts with the invention of the center. The cross, at the meeting of vertical and horizontal lines, hides the power of the center. In Christian art some crosses have a circle right in the middle and in the Middle Age Christ’s halo had had the marks of the cross, leaving to his face the place of the center. 2. Around the North Star all the firmament moves in circle. Circles are the extension of the center, somehow participating of its per2

On this topic: JULIEN RIES, The Origins of Religions, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids 1994.

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fection. Having no side, the circle is still a symbol of unity, but it is also something more, being the outside of the center. The circle with the central point in the middle is a symbol of the distinction between the created perfection of the cosmos and the absolute perfection of the Origin. When we sign one or more points in the circle, we are immediately dealing with a circular movement, just as the stars rotate around the North; this movement, differently from any other (linear, sinuous or chaotic movement) has a perfect path. In a different way, the circular movement is a possible representations time: the infinite loop of days and nights, months and seasons. This is not only a positive element: our first experience of time is aging, and somehow we can feel that our life might not take us anywhere, as if we were cursed to live with no sense in the infinite return of time. The spiral and the swastika are other extensions of this idea of circular movement. Once again we must state that all these meanings are not in the circle (or in any other symbol): the symbolism has no value until it is object of a real personal existence. Without human life, nature has no voice and no meaning. 3. Symbols do not work alone, as we already stated. There is always a link between different symbols. The understanding of this link can’t be reached by mere rationality; symbols are a living comprehension of world, they have the power of the experience: experience of infinite obtained from the totality of subject’s freedom; experience of order obtained from a life often subject to incomprehensible changes and chaotic events. The ancient man looks at the sky to contemplate order, captured by the power of the North Star. But he still lives in land, he dwells in the soil; to face his life he must lower his glance to the earth. This makes him discover that this movement of descent happens everyday as the most astonishing of any natural phenomenon: the movement of the sun from zenith to sunset and from sunrise to 142

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zenith. In this movement the sun draws over the chaotic land two points (sunrise and sunset) that gain two more points from the duality of human body (left-right): orienting his body to the sunset or to the sunrise, and perceiving his duality, the man creates the four cardinal points of his existence, literary tracing a cross on the land. The sun does not appear alone: nature can feel also the presence of the moon, for example, affecting the cycle of natural fertility and make the lines more and more complex. And the fascinating shining of the stars. Many centuries before Christ, in a very primitive landscape, an ancient people built an enormous temple with the only purpose to celebrate the death and new birth of the light in the winter solstice. The mystery of Stonehenge and the challenge of its erection must be searched in this relationship between the rhythm of human life and the movement of the sun, the moon and the stars. The geometrical symbol of the cross is connected with the square: as quaternary symbols they both regard the land. But the cross is more original than the square. The cross is number four, but also number five since it has a center. For ages the cross has been the meeting between the land and the origin (4 + 1), the perfect symbol of passages between different layers of reality. It is also a symbol of mediation, since, when inscribed in the circle, it generates the square. Even after Christianity took possess of it, the cross maintained its cosmological meanings, bringing them in the heart of Christian faith. Romanic architecture chose the latin cross plant, and the structure is the meeting between a square volume and a sphere (the basilica and the apse). Pointed vertically to the zenith, the cross represents both a union of sky and land (vertical) and of horizontal relationships. In this way it has a role of mediation as Jesus himself is the mediator between man and God, but also between men. This might appear very theoretical, but it is not. Modern man has lost this kind of experience of reality and our comprehension of this world of symbols can be done only through study and archeo143

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logical research; for ancient people the symbolic operation was their perception of reality, their seek for order and their way to create links. And it was an operation of ‘sympathy’ for the world: the discovery of an order outside always corresponds to the discovery of an inside order so that the world is actually answering to human order as much as soul answers to cosmic perfection. This sympathy suggests that we might never separate the invention of symbols from the anthropological experience in which they are originated and its context. A clear starry sky, the freshness of air, the curious first glances of a child are fundamental experiences that mark our encounter with nature. If we want to reproduce this exercise of understanding in our modern world – and not simply explain symbols as a dictionary might do – we must demand to ourselves a deep and attentive experience of the world, involving senses as much as fantasy and rationality. Symbols are not signs, they are tangible presences in the world, in its totality. This is why symbols were believed to have also magical powers and were always exposed to human greatest attempt: grabbing the secrets of life.

2. History of the True Cross in Arezzo The symbol becomes even more complex when not only original human experiences, but also human history makes enters among the meanings. Of course, history creates complex symbols, it introduces characters, events, and the original symbols enrich: the collection of natural and cosmic resonance made by the cross obtains new meanings since the addition of historical episodes. Even if history often appears to be chaotic and fortuitous, some episodes in human history become paradigmatic and can be used as elements of order. Of course events are not yet history. History is a choice of some happenings that are removed from indifference and become part of a narration. But what makes those events different from others, so different that they will become symbolic? Of course, first of all, their 144

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importance, their ability to generate consequences, their weight in what will happen. If my son comes to life today, I will consider this a part of my personal history while I might decide not to remember how many coffees I have been drinking or what color is my shirt. But this is not enough: events are important because they are told, otherwise they would be lost. History can become a symbol only thanks to an important narration, only through the art of storytelling, which is not simply a chronicle, but the the ability to connect single events to the whole: the whole of my personal experience and the whole of human culture. When this happens, a historical event becomes part of the mystery of existence, it does not concern a single person, but the entire world of men and it can become a symbolic presence, since it affects everyone’s existence. Of course, differently from natural symbols (whose presence is strong in any generation), an historical event can be forgotten, can become irrelevant. But for the living generation it is evident enough not to be explained and it works as any other symbol. In our example, the cross does not only assume original human elements, but becomes an knot capable to connect different episodes in the History of Salvation. In the Leggenda Aurea by Jacobus de Voragine3 (an hagiographic writing of the 13th century) the legend of the ‘Invention of the Cross’ is the attempt to join different biblical and historical episodes and, building these links, to highlight the topicality of the History of Salvation in the present. Connecting in a single narration biblical and historical events of Early Christianity means that God’s historical revelation is not ended with the establishment of the biblical canon. The History of Salvation continues in the life of Early Christianity and still continues nowadays, in our troubled ages. The Medievals called the Christ’s presence in history the medium ad-

3

J ACOBUS DE VORAGINE, The Golden Legend. Readings on the Saints, Princeton University Pres, Princeton 1993.

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ventum, meaning his presence to history between the Ascension and the fulfillment of time. The same awareness of the Legenda Aurea can be found, strengthened, in the frescoes by Piero della Francesca (1415-1292) in Arezzo, that explicitly evoke the poem: the painter suggests his interpretation of the legendary finding of the timber relic of the Cross by Constantin’s mother, enriching it with a new understanding of reality that was not possible for the medieval poet. Piero is not only one of the outstanding painters of the Early Renaissance: he also represents a philosophical and theological vertex of that period. Renaissance is often considered as a time when art and culture found their emancipation from Christianity; if this simplification might somehow fit the Late Renaissance and its Mannerism, things are very different in the ‘dawn4’ of Renaissance, when theology itself opened – and somehow never fulfilled – a period of reflection about human experience, a humanism. The paintings in the apse of the Basilica of San Francesco (14521466) are the largest cycle of Piero’s frescoes and a mature work, where the painter shows his ability in perspective, colors, movement and space organization5. The ‘text’ of Piero’s work is a network that connects past events, his personal experience and our work of comprehension; as in any artwork, the past, the present of narration and the present of understanding are sewed together in a unique work of interpretation. This is how will read his work, keeping on the background the evolution of this Christian symbol of the cross in the Early Renaissance. We will not follow each scene: I prefer to underline the following points. 4

An unfinished dawn: the title of an important work by Henri De Lubac about Pico della Mirandola points how the Renaissance does not fulfill the promise of its beginnings: HENRI DE L UBAC, Pico della Mirandola. L’alba incompiuta del Rinascimento, Jaca Book, Milano 1994. 5 Images 6-7-8.

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1. It is important to remember that the symbol of the cross earned a new life with the Franciscan experience. Francis of Assisi had a veneration for Christ’s Passion and received the stigmata on the mountain of La Verna in the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, the 14th of September 1224. The five wounds of Christ were impressed in Francis’ body as a sign of his resemblance to his beloved Master. The importance of Francis’ experience in the 13th century’s Church was impressive: in a few years Franciscans became one of the most influent orders in Christianity; their relationships with the new born Italian civil life became a cornerstone of Late Middle Age and Early Renaissance. The symbol of the cross, with the ‘new’ shape that Francis loved, the Franciscan ’T’ (probably more similar, as we said, to Jesus’ real gibbet) gained new spiritual meanings, adding also Francis’ experience of poverty. Piero’s customer was, not by chance, a Franciscan convent, even if the buyer was a rich Aretine family, the Bacci’s. In the Franciscan Santa Croce Basilica, in Florence, in the main chapel has frescoes with almost the same scenes by Agnolo Gaddi (1380). Still, what Piero creates is something completely new. 2. As we stated, the main feature of the Legend of the Cross (written in the Legenda Aurea using previous materials) is to gather different biblical and historical episode, around the presence of the cross. In chronological order: the tree of Knowledge (from which the wood of the cross comes), the death of Adam (a seed from the tree is planted where the first man is buried), Christ’s Passion, the battle of Milvian Bridge (Constantin against Massenzio) with the dream of Constantin (In hoc signo vinces), the discovery and the proof of the True Cross in Jerusalem by Saint Helene, the loss of the True Cross in the battle between Heraclius and Khosrau (Eastern Roman Empire against Sassanid Empire). Piero – probably in full agreement with his customers – makes different choices, neglecting some scenes and introducing two episodes that were not usually painted in similar cycles of frescoes: the encounter be147

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tween King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and the Annunciation. He also chooses not to follow a chronological order: in his painting the scenes are juxtaposed and connected in a different way. Piero chooses to follow the power of poetry: artistic order is the true protagonist of this complex composition of different historical layers. This fact is particularly important: a simple approach to history would describe it as a chain of consequences; the modern idea of progress (which is our common sense of history) would describe and explain facts with the logic of cause-effect. In this vision, of course, the flow of time is essential, since the first way to establish a cause is its location in time. A battle might be the consequence of an aggression, a defeat the consequence of wrong choices and so on. The denial of the time sequence denies that the mysterious heart of history is the cause-effect consequence. The legend of the cross – but, above all, Piero’s interpretation – follows this denial: Salvation is an unexpected event that denies the irreparable consequences of sin, and the cross itself is an instrument of torture transformed in redemption. The painter’s choice underlines how profoundly revolutionary is the logic of redemption: it forces history’s sense in a different place, far from the cause-effect; it claims that history is not simply a sequence of events, but a whole where the red thread of Christ’s Passion is the true protagonist. This thread – whatever it takes – is way more important than any time sequence. But there is more. This choice is also aesthetic: following the gothic spirit of the apse Piero della Francesca paints crowded scenes in the lower frescoes; gradually – ascending to the vault – the act is played in a wider and more airy space. At the top, in the lunette, the last scenes are ‘en plain air’, as if a spiritual freedom was conquered in this ascension. The chronological sequence of events is not interesting: Piero points out the possible redemption of human conscience from the lower experiences (war, slaughtering, fight) to the highest. The lunette on the right represents Adam’s death: our 148

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First Parents had a nobility that we lost and that can be newly gained. This nobility is the sense of history. 3. In the scene of Adam’s death6 we can see a complex construction of the space. Two different groups of people are on the stage: Adam’s family before his death (on the right), and the small crowd participating to his burial (in the center-left part). Right in the middle, a majestic tree opens his branches against a clear sky, with one of the typical Piero’s landscapes. Two character seem to be unexplainable. They are standing in the extreme left of the lunette. A young and athletic man wearing a lion’s skin and a beautiful girl with her eyes wide open – probably, together with the Madonna del Parto, one of the most beautiful faces that Piero has ever painted. Her hairstyle has typical classic appearance and something in her gaze is magnetic. The young man seems to be talking to her, or maybe his month is open in an expression of wonder. The dress explains his identity: Hercules used to wear a the skin of the Lion of Nemea that he killed in one of his Labours. His mate is probably Alcestis: in the Greek tradition the hero brings back the dead woman after his journey in Hades. The Tragedy of Alcestis is a story about love and death. Alcestis died because she decided to give her life in place of her husband’s, Admetus. Since the God Apollo had a debt of hospitality, he decided that, Admetus would have avoided death if he found someone to die for him. When the moment arrives, no one steps forward: only Alcestis, for her husband’s sake, is ready to die. In front of this example of nuptial affection the gods decide to let her go back to life. This moving tragedy – one of the few with a happy ending – can be considered the greatest Greek ‘prophecy’ of Christ’s life, passion and resurrection. Death, in front of the sacrifice for love, looses her power.

6

Image 9.

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Piero and his customers made a surprising choice: the ancient Greek wisdom is a part of human history of salvation, so that the tracks of Jesus’ Passion – the tracks of the cross – are also hiding in the Greek pagan culture, and potentially hide anywhere, in every human gesture of love. The renaissance of ancient culture – that gives name to the European Renaissance – is not against Christianity: there, faith can gain new passion and, of course, new symbols. 4. The Dream of Constantin is probably the most famous scene of the cycle. In the night before the Milvian Bridge battle, the emperor dreams of an angel promising that he will be victorious thanks to the sign of the cross (In hoc signo vinces). Piero paints a nocturnal, a masterpiece study of light. Preceding the expressive use of light of authors that will come many decades after him 7, Piero uses darkness and light in their powerful opposition to paint a revelation. The light coming from the cross, the use of shadows and the sharp cut between light and darkness evoke the symbolic importance of light and darkness for Christianity. But never before this relationship was painted in such a realistic and expressive way: in the Dream of Constantin light is a physic presence, it really ‘is’ there, casting shadows, dazzling characters, penetrating in the tend. But there is something more. In this impressive fresco a second element is protagonist: the tent. The symbolic presence of the tent is not new in Piero’s art: the fresco of the ‘Madonna del Parto’, in Monterchi, is an outstanding celebration of incarnation, where the beauty of the Virgin, the position of her body and the tent where she stays are an incredible representation of the Fourth Gospel’s Prologue. In this poetry that opens his Gospel, John uses a profound symbolism where light and darkness are the main elements. The incarnation is described as the construction of a tent. As we

7

The contrast between light and darkness will be one of the main dramatic instruments in Caravaggio and in many other painters in 16th century.

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already said, the word usually translated as he lived among us8 is actually the Greek ἐσκήνωσεν, which means to settle the tent. The tent becomes, in this way, an important symbol of Christ’s incarnation and of the Virgin’s womb: God’s dwelling. 5. Many scholars have notice the resemblance between Constantin (particularly in the battle at Milvian Bridge9 ) and the emperor John 8th Paleologus10 who was in Florence in 1439 for the Florence Council. This council was an attempt of reunion between the Catholic and the Ortodox church: the city was invaded by the emperor’s court and by the eastern people; their visit would have been remembered for many years11 and the cycle of the True Cross is filled with quotations of this event (particularly with eastern clothes). As any attempt of reunion, it meant cultural exchange and internationalization of Italian culture, it meant encounter with otherness, wonder and discovery of a different understanding of Christian faith and, of course, a different way of living. Now,

8

John 1,14: The Word became flesh, he lived among us, and we saw his glory, the glory that he has from the Father as only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth. 9 Image 11. 10 We have a portrait of the Eastern emperor on a medal by Pisanello, nowadays in the Louvre Museum. 11 Many marks still remain today from this encounter. Curiously – for example – in the name of foods. The Italian vin santo, erroneously considered a ‘saint wine’, is actually a trace of this encounters. The Greek court didn’t know the white wine, which was used in Italy: the world xanthos, which means blonde in Greek, was used to point out the new discovery. The same happened for the italian arista (a particular cut of pork’s meat), whose name comes from the legendary exclamation: Aristòs! (the best).

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choosing this portrait – probably suggested by his customers12 – Piero inserts this present in this symbolic reconstruction of history. God’s history continues uninterrupted: as usual in ancient times, characters in the frescoes – not only Eastern kings, but everyone in the painting – are dressed in contemporary clothes, as if the ancient episodes were happening in the present13 . Piero’s personal involvement with the events of Salvation through the art of portrait is shown in other works: in the Madonna del Parto in Monterchi, many art critics suggest that the face of the Madonna could be a portrait of Piero’s mother. Many traces in the cycle of the True Cross signal the same claim; in the scene of the Recognition of the True cross, for example, in the landscape is visible a city with ramparts surrounded by hills: it is Arezzo. Everyone can recognize it by the view of the Basilica. Notice – at last – how the cross stands in the perfect geometrical center of this section of the fresco. It is a symbol of unity and universality, a universal recapitulation of history and humanity. 6. It may be interesting to notice how Piero’s characters are particularly unexpressive. Bernard Berenson, an American art historian, wrote an important essay about Piero’s style, defining it a noneloquent art. Art, he states, reaches its acme when it does not surrender to the temptation of expressionism and presents the mere existence as its weight. Indeed, Piero’s human figures are statuary, often looking forward, never totally committed in their actions: 12

The Bicci’s family was in close relationships with Cardinal Bessanione, one of the main characters of the Florence Council and one of the main supporters of the West-East reunion. 13 Just imagine that a painter represented nowadays these scenes with the same technique: soldiers in mimetic uniforms with automatic weapons, powerful persons dressed in elegant suit… the annoying impression that we might feel is the proof of how far we are from this perception of contemporaneity of the History of Salvation.

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Couldn’t exactly be Piero’s in-eloquence, the phlegm of his figures, undisturbed by any emotion; couldn’t his deliberate abstention from any rhetorical amplification that, in an age of exaggerated passions as today, seduces the spectator and incites him to gratitude and adora14 tion?

Piero’s main effort is to present and transmit to the spectator the mere existence, the essential character of being. He is not trying to represent, but simply to present reality, convinced that reality itself is hospitable for human feelings and perceptions, but shall never substitute them. Real art has never represent, but presented. Art is based on reality, but it lives independently from it, without looking at the trampoline from which it jumps in the ocean of Being. Real art is Being; and, as 15 the Old Testament’s Jehovah, it shall answer: ‘I shall be what I am’ .

For our work this behavior is particularly interesting: the Thing that comes to thought is always the miracle of existence: feelings (wonder, pain, joy, seduction) are answers to the original question of reality, they are not the main object of the art’s interest, they are not supposed to be the only protagonist. Art, as language, is not the representation of existence, but the possibility of existence to point to something more. Existence, in other words, is not only a matter of being there, it is not the mere presence, existence is the infinite echo that questions humanity.

14

BERNARD B ERENSON, Piero della Francesca, or the Ineloquent in Art, Chapman and Hall, London 1954, 14-15. 15 Ivi, 43.

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Image 6 – Piero della Francesca, The Invention of the Cross, Saint Francis Church in Arezzo. Left side.

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Image 7 – Piero della Francesca, The Invention of the Cross, Saint Francis Church in Arezzo. Center.

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Image 8 – Piero della Francesca, The Invention of the Cross, Saint Francis Church in Arezzo. Right side.

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Image 9 – Piero della Francesca, The Invention of the Cross, Saint Francis Church in Arezzo. Adam’s death.

Image 10 – Piero della Francesca, The Invention of the Cross, Saint Francis Church in Arezzo. Constantine the Great in the battle at Milvian Bridge.

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ORDER AS RESPONSIBILITY

1. Introduction In the first chapter I criticized the modern idea of absolute truth that has in Descarte’s Cogito the principle of an unrelated subjectivity; meanwhile I underlined that in the phenomenological approach to subjectivity hides a chance to think differently. In the second chapter I described the doctrine of creation and the biblical idea of the Original Sin. We understood that Christian Revelation is not only a revelation of God’s identity: it involves an anthropology, a vision of man, an idea of what is freedom. It is possible for the man to dwell in the land without possessing it: human role towards the soil is to take care and to cultivate it. In the third chapter I tried to introduce dwelling as the human search for order. In this operation humanity does not only comprehend reality: we renounce to possess, we overcome the mere presence and we address to a transcendence that is guarded by the language. Rationality, dialogue, knowledge is not our way to dominate of the world, but to cultivate and take care of it; it might be our effort to renounce to possess. Despite modern pretension, rationality itself is not neutral in front of life and nature: “poetically dwells the man on this earth”. To dwell poetically means to direct our attention to reality without grasping its mere presence. In the following chapters I would like to give a closer look to the theological idea of the relationship between man and the land. We will meet two episode of Christian theology that suggest two great 159

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issues: the education of our responsibility for order and the idea of God’s presence in nature. We will first meet Bernard of Clairvaux, who was not only a theologian, but also an architect, a musician, a rhetorician: his main challenge is a path of education of senses for the monks of his order. In a second moment, the encounter with Sergej Bulgakov, a theologian from the Orthodox church, will suggest us that the material and the spiritual world can’t be thought as divided. Bernard and Bulgakov have something in common: they are very far (in time or space) from the present Christianity. This is not by chance: modern theological interest about the land is nowadays lacking the language to be said and thought.

2. Bernard of Clairvaux 2.1 The whole of human experience It is impossible to give even an abstract of the complex and outstanding theology of Bernard of Clairvaux in the next few pages. I will only focus on some of main issues, particularly on his doctrine of ‘spiritual senses’. I will neither describe his outstanding importance in the 12th century’s Europe political scenario: the impressive growth of the Cistercian Order after his entrance and after his foundation of Clairvaux is eloquent enough. In his life (1090-1153) he earned an incredible fame, assuming a principal role in many different historical episodes: from the Second Crusade to the 12th century’s schism, from the Rule of the Knights Templar to the different Councils of his age, from the discussion with Peter Abelard to the invention of a new style in architecture. What in our time would be defined eclecticism, was in Bernard’s experience an attempt to devote himself to the entire complexity of the human experience. His main effort, the Cistercian Reform, regarded the whole of the monastic experience: songs, liturgy, architecture, painting, sculpture, theology and monastic rule. This interest for the whole is the first feature that I would like to point out. Our contemporary conception of knowledge is affected, as 160

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we all know, by an irreversible fragmentation. If we consider universities as the heart of research, we immediately understand what this fragmentation is about: the system of departments, the competition among disciplines, often mean that different knowledges, different disciplines barely talk to each other. Specialization is nowadays a synonymous of precision – and this is often comprehensively unavoidable. Of course, the amount of knowledges is so great that any scientist can at least be expert of his field and must renounce to the idea of possessing the whole of knowledge. Nevertheless, in recent years, the research seems to gain interest in interdisciplinary connections, since a common idea of knowledge comes to life in the possibility of mutual listening and understanding. Knowledge was very different in the Middle Age: any scientist, as we already stated, was also a theologian; but even for that time Bernard’s work is surprising. It is not just a matter of geniality: it is an attempt to reach any dimension of human existence (particularly in the monastic life) and to make it the possible place of an education of faith. Nothing had to be ignored, because man is a whole: affects, thoughts, actions, relationships. Bernard is not an eclectic medieval genius, he is a man, committed to the profound unity of human experience. Any age, of course, has its own characteristics. In our age we are not just dealing with the fragmentation of knowledge: we are generally facing the fragmentation of humanity. The man of postmodernity experiences the existence of different versions of himself: we act differently – and sometimes we simply have to – when we are working, when we stay with our family, when we are with friends. The unity of our experience is a main issue of modern time: we are one, no one and a hundred-thousands, as Luigi Pirandello accuses. The fragmentation becomes even deeper since we discovered the possibility of a virtual identity and since we are dealing with it. The incoherence of our different selves does not seem to be a problem anymore. The new generations pass from an experience to the other as computers shift from one to another desktop: the issue of our 161

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unique identity seems to not to be pertinent anymore. Identity is various, interchangeable. Bernard’s work is 360 degrees, not because of a hubris, but because of the claim of unity of human identity. For a monk, the relationship with God, the love of God must involve every single spot of humanity. In an interesting passage of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus himself seems to confirm this integrity of human identity: If your right eye should be your downfall, tear it out and throw it away; for it will do you less harm to lose one part of yourself than to 1 have your whole body thrown into hell .

While human salvation of man has something to do with the integrity of his life, for damnation a single part seems to be enough; salvation regards the possibility of a compact identity, damnation (dia-ballo) is its fragmentation. Not by chance Bernard’s work is totally devoted to the life of the monastery and any monastic life is the attempt to create an environment for the growth of the whole of human experience. The monastic rule touches every aspect of life: celebration, thought, culture, the rhythm of work and prayer, of sleep and wakefulness, property, relationships, calendar… The architecture of the monastery is an important symbol of this attempt: around the cloister, which is somehow the heart of the monastic life, stand the church, the refectory, the dormitory, the ‘Scriptorium’, the library and further, the monastery’s fields. Now – as we stated considering human dwelling in the third chapter – the unity of human experience has something to do with the recovery of an orientation that can transform chaos in cosmos, disorder in order. No one as Bernard has believed that this orientation con only be the love of God, principle of any order.

1

Mathew 5,29

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2.2 God’s ordo and its seduction Until now, we have talked about order as the fruit of the relationship between man and nature, the result of the encounter between the world and human rationality. This order comes to light when the man dwells in the land and when – with a similar operation – the man speaks. Language and building are the knot where human conscience and universal order come to light. We must now add something more: we must understand the nature of this order, since – so far – we took it for granted. Of course order has something to do with the relationship between things (sky and earth, mortals and divinities), but we still need to characterize this relationship. Moreover, despite order is created by human freedom, at the same time it precedes our decision: something is in our hands and something is already there. I am not speaking about natural events (the cycle of the stars, of the sun, or of the moon): these are gathered by human dwelling; what I am talking about is the idea of order itself, the possibility of this gathering, the fact that something in our experience calls our decision and our freedom. This call, somehow, foreruns our ability: once again, the beginning is committed to our freedom, but the origin is out of our reach. Bernard2 has a clear idea of the origin: the origin is God. God is the source of any order; and God himself is not simply a unity, but a relationship of love between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. If God is the origin of any ‘ordo’, its principle is love, ‘Agàpe’. Love is the connection in the Trinity, love is the power of God himself and love is also the principle of creation and of any activity of God’s freedom towards what he created. In this way charity has two different appearances: one inside the Trinity (where love is the nature of

2

About the idea of order in Bernard’s theology: PIERLUIGI LIA, L’estetica teologica di Bernardo di Chiaravalle, Edizioni del Galluzzo, Firenze 2007, 107-129.

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God) and one outside (where it becomes God’s gift and a quality of his action). The order of creation that stands under our eyes is the result of God’s action of charity and it is only the visible part of his majestic creation: our knowledge only regards a part of this order as the infinite possibility of our rationality meets the infinite reality of this order. Rational investigation of this order is potentially boundless, since unlimited is God’s wish and unlimited is human response. Order, in this way, is not simply a feature of creation: order is the hypothetic line that, crossing creation, joins together man and God, the divine wish of salvation and the human affection towards the Creator. This hypothetic line – which makes dwelling ‘linear’ and not chaotic – is not drawn once for all: the line is nothing but the representation of a love relationship. Now, God’s order was not fulfilled by creation: since its principle is charity, order is his dedication to the relationship with man, his commitment in the bond with humanity. This is why the order of creation is entrusted to human hands, as we already understood. Man is responsible for creation because God involves his freedom and asks for his answer, so that he can lead the world to its fulfillment, responding freely to the Creator’s love. The original order is always exposed to human freedom and given in man’s hands, so that the true goal of creation, love, can be actually possible. Freedom, as we all know, also means the possibility of betrayal, so that God’s order is always exposed to the risk of chaos; but freedom can in any moment respond to God through an orientation of life and desires on the ordered line of love. The relationship between mankind and the Creator might also be described (as in any relationship) as a process of seduction: the beauty of creation touches his senses and deeply invites him to have care of that order, sharing the same love that brought all the things into being. Since man is free, order is seductive: it is the constant suggestion of a lovely form through the world’s beautiful appearance. As we stated, enjoyment is the original experience of the world and 164

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beauty is a promise, but it is something more: the experience of enjoyment enlighten that beauty is not simply outside me, but also inside me. When you discover beauty at the same time you discover yourself seduced by it, you discover yourself smiling at the world, you discover your enjoyment and your participation to this beauty and order. Somehow in the experience of beauty your freedom is already answering even before you realize it. As it happens when you are listening to a great music: the vibrations don’t only involve the instruments, but all the world around and also your body: your tympanum, your chest, your entire person. Man finds himself in front of beauty, discovers himself full of wonder. In this sense – and in this sense only – there is a seduction in God’s exhibition of order, so that human freedom discovers itself already participating to the same charity. It is very important for us to underline this idea of Bernard, because it clearly states that faith has something to do with senses. Faith is not a theoretical consent to the existence of God, but an experience that involves human senses and human perception of the promise of life. Because he understands this, Bernard will devote his life to the creation of an order capable to reach all human senses (music, architecture, painting…), capable of reproducing the same education and seduction of senses. Wa already know that also the original sin has a process of seduction, represented by the sinuosity of the snake. This seduction has its power in imagination, not in creation: it is a disorder, not a different beauty: it is a seduction of destruction3 and not of creation. God’s challenge after the experience of the sin can’t be anything but a constant attempt to call the man back to order and not disorder, to support creation and not destruction, to love and not to stay alone. Bernard’s idea of monastic experience is an effort to bring back to the

3

On this topic: SILVANO P ETROSINO - SERGIO UBBIALI , L’eros della distruzione, Il Melangolo, Bologna 2014.

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origin human’s principium individuationis: otherness and not possess, order and not disorder. Let us remain some more on the experience of seduction. The vision of beauty enlightens not only something outside man (the natural order), but also inside him. The perception of beauty is already the answer from our senses to the presence of order, as if something inside entered in resonance with the beauty outside. From the experience of wonder – as we already said before – arises the question about myself: “who is this for?”. In this sense, on one hand wonder enlightens man’s ability to correspond to beauty, his answer; in the other hand it enlightens his difference, his disorder, his condition of chaos and his need for conversion4. The conscience discovers beauty and order and at the same time discovers to live in a ‘regio dissimilitudinis’, in a situation of disorder: it becomes aware of the condition of sin, of the presence of evil. In beauty we experience the fact that we are often obliged to live without this order and, eventually, without love. The ‘regio dissimilitudinis’, the reign of sin (once again) is not a different creation: it is not an alternative to God’s wish, it is chaos, a world where no beauty can satisfy human glance and where life is not really possible. Evil is not simply a possible choice among others: evil nullifies any possibility of choice and, at last, it is not the exercise of freedom, but its denial. Differently from the seduction of sin, God’s seduction appears as the possibility of redemption, as the possibility to preserve and confirm human freedom, the possibility to live again.

4

The idea of conversion is connected with vision: it means to turn yourself towards something different, to look to a different object. When something seduces you, it gains your attention and what interested you before simply disappears.

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2.2 Ordo Caritatis If this structure of seduction (both of order and disorder) is what human freedom is exposed to, we can easily understand Bernard’s interest for the style of the monastic experience. Through the style of life he chose, the monk tries to reach an order to his life: desires, passions, acts, relationships. Bernard’s strain towards monastic life is – not by chance – first of all a fight against distraction, against anything that, in the monastery, can enchant the monk pulling him away from his linear orientation to God. Simplicity in architecture, and moreover in the organization of the monastic life, is the result of Bernard’s efforts. Simplicity has nothing to do with poverty: it will take more or less one century to hear Saint Francis’ preaching about ‘Sorella Povertà’. Simplicity (in architecture, in music, in the rule itself) is the attempt to educate human attention. Bernard’s appeal for simplification is not a matter of poverty or humility, but of unity of the monk’s experience around God and his love. The man himself, in other words, can find an order in the linear experience of loving God, which is never disgust for creatures, since God’s love is experienced through them. Bernard distinguishes two forms of love: ‘caritas in affectu' – the possibility to love God himself and to point to him our feelings – and ‘caritas in actu' – our love towards the world, the others, up to our enemies. The connection between these forms of agape is entrust to human freedom. The ‘ordo caritatis’ means a re-union of life around its principle, and this conversion is what the monastic life is done for. A man capable of this, loves all the things in God; without possessing the land he desires the sky, he can use things discerning their eternity through the use of his wisdom. The latin word for wisdom, sapientia, alludes to the sense of taste, since the verb sàpere means both knowledge and taste. The possibility to choose between eternal things and things that pass is in this sense esthetic, it is a matter of senses, of perception and not simply of morality. The road for sanctity appears – in this way – as a conversion of the whole human experience to the ‘taste of God’.

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All this is meaningful for our strain to understand the relationship between man and the land. The experience of order – and eventually its theological meaning, but also the desired respect for nature – is not simply a matter of good will. There is something like an education that can involve our senses, our attention and our decision towards the world around us. We already stated that hearing is an event of which we can hardly back out: sounds reach us without asking our permission, they just happen around us and strike our attention; this makes hearing the sense of universality and of intersubjectivity. On the other hand, sight is always connected to our personal decision: where, when and what we see is the result of a choice. Sight is deeply intentional. It is not just a matter of where you are looking at: even more intentional is the fact that one single thing, inside our field of view, captures out attention. In facts, we do not simply ‘see things’, since our sight has always the need to focus on something. Everyone can experience how often an educated sight recognizes things that others can’t. Try to collect mushrooms in the woods with your expert uncle and you will immediately understand the difference: despite the beginner’s luck, if it is your first time you will never reach his overflowing basket. Mushrooms are there, they have always been there, but they simply disappear at your unexperienced sight. Why does this happen? It is not at all a matter of diopters. The expert searcher has a perfect coincidence between his sight and his will: he perfectly knows what he wants to find, his eyes and his intention go together. On the contrary, when we don’t know what we are looking for (because of the weakness of our intention), our sight will focus on casual spots, and soon it might simply give up and hope in some stroke of luck. Somehow we might say that human vision is so strictly connected with his intentionality that ‘we see what we wish to see’. Not by chance any language has two different verbs

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for sight: to see and to watch, the first one meaning the presence of things in our field of view and the second our ability to focus on one particular point5. Now, if we extend this dynamics in the relationship between man and the land, we can understand how much an education is needed: listening to nature should be a primary interest for anyone dealing with it. Our perception of natural phenomenons and their meanings should be a priority for human education, since often uneducated persons simply don’t see the problems. Think about how often – for example – architects plan there buildings without ever living in the place where they will be erected, without experimenting the natural or human environment, without simply caring about the genius loci. Mistakes come out because they simply could not see them. In our examples it is clear that exercise and education must accompany step by step our intention and our sight so that they learn to go together, ordered to a single aim. In this sense order becomes not only an external issue, but an anthropological issue: we need to find exactly the right aim, which means the right disposition of our intention, or, in other words, the unity of our will. Now, monastic life used to be a way to provide this education as an experience of conversion of will. To accomplish this in the Cistercian Order, Bernard devotes all his attention to the creation of a new style architecture, in music, in monastic life, so that all senses could operate together under the leadership of a unified freedom. 2.3 Regio dissimilitudinis In a Christian point of view this education which unifies senses and will is not simply a matter of exercise. It has to face a deep wound in human freedom: sin. The order of human freedom has to contrast a

5

About the anthropological meaning of sight: SILVANO PETROSINO, Piccola metafisica della luce, Jaca Book, Milano 2004.

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radical disorder represented by the loss of our relational identity and the birth of possess as ‘principium individuationis', as we stated in chapter three. This condition of sin is what Bernard calls – following a precedent tradition – the ‘regio dissimilitudinis’: we might translate it ‘region of unlikeness’. The idea of sin as a region of unlikeness is a doctrine of Saint Augustine. Man was created at image and likeness of God, as the Bible states. Man is an image of God because he is free; nevertheless with the sin man lost his likeness to God, having chosen evil. We already studied how the consequences of this deformity are deeply rooted in our life: sin is not just a matter of the exercise of freedom, sought after, now by vices and now by virtues. Sin is the loss of an original beauty, sin affects our perception of reality and confines us in a land of exile, far from the Garden of intimacy with God. This is the ‘regio dissimilitudinis’ also in Bernard’s idea. Sin deformed human perception of reality and the region of unlikeness is not a physical place, but a state of conscience. Nevertheless this state of conscience involves our perception of life so deeply that we actually live in a ‘regio’ where things are not how they were destined to be. Our perception is so deeply deformed that, of course, we would not even be aware of it, if it was not for our encounter with God’s order. We would simply live in a world of unlikeness to God. But, since God’s love does not stop the effort to seduce and convert us, when we first encounter his order – in any of the different ways God reaches us – we understand our deformity. We understand at the same time that this deformity does not involve the world itself, but precisely our conscience: the world is not a place of evil, things are not bad in themselves, the deformity concerns our distance from God, our sin, the ‘regio’ is inside, not outside. Conversion is an education to the exercise of love against possess, of ‘caritas’ against ‘cupiditas’. Now, since, as you remember, ‘caritas’ is the source of God’s order, conversion is the recovery of human likeness, which has as a consequence the reconstruction of the world as ‘regio similitudinis’. The features of the ‘regio dissimilitudinis’ against which the conscience 170

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will have to fight his battle and against which the monastic life will have to engage a severe struggle are described, in Bernard’s writings, are described more or less as follows. 1. Bending. If the ordered relationship between man and God is a line that connects their glances, the first consequence of sin as deformity is a bending. The man marked by his sin is bent over himself, he does not search anymore God’s glance, but only his posses that he must defend from the threat of others. He covers his nudity. He answers to his search for infinite simply devoting to the possess of things, and so at the end, to himself. When a bent man can’t anymore see the possibility of relationships and encounter, everything and everyone else is only a material that must be brought inside his possess, grasped at his service. The original ‘rectitudo' which once let the man stay straight in front of God is deformed to a bending, where ‘myself’ is the only god possible and the truth of God is deformed in the same way, so that religion itself might easily become the celebration of this deformed self. A paradoxical fulfillment of the snake’s promise to “become like God”. 2. Curiosity. Bernard’s idea of order finds an important enemy in what he considers a vice: ‘curiositas'. This word, nowadays almost a synonymous of interest, is described as a defeat of conscience, caused by the roaming of human attention from one experience to another, from one object to another. Curiosity is the distraction from your proper identity, the lack of care for your proper dignity, the lack of knowledge of yourself. Literarily, a lack of orientation. The experience of the world’s beauty, as we said, should lead to a unification of senses and rationality; the original sin can distract man from this orientation and make him pass from an experience to the other, from a choice to the other, forgetful of his responsibility. All this, originally thought for medieval monks, is not as far as we might think from our modern lives. We often live our experiences in a superficial way because we are always waiting for the next one: not satisfied from what we are dealing with, we dream to be liberated 171

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from the present by a new possibility. The phenomenon has a contemporary symbol in the art of ‘zapping’ through the media: a new amusement, a new show, a new short video is ready. The new medias are so dependent from this habit that videoclips became shorter and shorter, not longer than a bunch of seconds. Websites are so dependent from this modern curiosity that they automatically play the next video, related with the previous, sometimes with very odd connections. The result on our sight, on our knowledge is that we don’t have time to assimilate what we have seen: our comprehension becomes wider and wider, but at the same time more and more superficial. Knowledge – probably much more than Gilbert Deleuxe and Félix Guattari6 actually wished – passed from a tree-scheme to the rhizome-scheme: multiple, non-hierarchical interpretations. It is not anymore simply a matter of epistemology, but of common behavior. In front of this phenomenon – sharpened in our days, but as old as men – Bernard works to build a path of conversion of rationality and

6

GILBERT DELEUZE - FÉLIX GUATTARI, A Thousand Plateaus, Continuum, New York and London, 2004, p. 8: “As a model for culture, the rhizome resists the organizational structure of the root-tree system which charts causality along chronological lines and looks for the original source of 'things' and looks towards the pinnacle or conclusion of those 'things.' A rhizome, on the other hand, is characterized by 'ceaselessly established connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.' Rather than narrativize history and culture, the rhizome presents history and culture as a map or wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis, for a 'rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, inter-being, intermezzo.' The planar movement of the rhizome resists chronology and organization, instead favoring a nomadic system of growth and propagation. (…) In this model, culture spreads like the surface of a body of water, spreading towards available spaces or trickling downwards towards new spaces through fissures and gaps, eroding what is in its way. The surface can be interrupted and moved, but these disturbances leave no trace, as the water is charged with pressure and potential to always seek its equilibrium, and thereby establish smooth space.”

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senses: particularly in the monk’s life, experience must not become experiment and the greatest temptation is to act by attempts and not by commitments. We might notice something more, by the way. Bernard’s work owns much to Augustine’s theology, as many scholars notice. Now, Augustine – many centuries before Bernard – new very well that the only thing that can unify human forces is love. Eros has the power to create a unity in human attitudes: desire, rationality, body, senses and feelings are all committed to the object of love. Particularly in the erotic experience nothing is left out, distraction is overtaken, the whole of man is seduced and present to the other. This is why Eros becomes an important image of this conversion to unification. In Bernard’s idea knowledge, profoundly connected to love, also gains an erotic imaginary. One of the main adversaries of Bernard’s monastic theology is the scholastic theology of Peter Abelard, with whom the abbot had many reasons and episodes of conflict, despite they were probably both the most brilliant minds of the 12th century. Bernard blamed Abelard’s theology to claim that knowledge is possible also without the love of God. We can easily understand what he meant: without a path of unification of will and rationality, no true knowledge is possible; and without God’s love this path is unaccessible. 2.4 Cistercian architecture and linearity of love We might at this point understand why Bernard’s efforts regard architecture, music, poetry, food, garments: it is the construction of a world where the experience of God’s order and love can reach and re-order human freedom. Experience, as we know, is a matter of senses, this is why his reform concerns all the most important parts of the monastic life, featuring to be first of all a ‘practical’ and ‘pedagogic’ reform. I will try to describe the main ideas of the edification of this new monastic style in architecture. Bernard’s whole which is not, as we stated, simply eclecticism, but – deeper – a unique vision 173

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of the complexity of human life. The number and the beauty of European Cistercian sites, which are often nowadays destinations of tourism, makes his style easy to recognize also for common people who never got the chance to study his personality. 1. First of all the Cistercian monastery is build in open antagonism with the moor, the wasteland. The order of the monastic citadel is the result of a struggle to force order in a chaotic world. The monastic chronicles often tell how the foundation takes place in “locus horroris et vastae solitudinis”7 . Of course, in the ancient times, the remediation of the soil was necessary before any construction, nevertheless the contrast also symbolizes the distance between the monastic life and the ‘regio dissimilitudinis’. In an Old Testament’s psalm the God’s People arrival is described as the possibility to win chaos and sadness: ”as they pass through the Valley of Baka, they make it a place of springs”8 ; the valley of sadness becomes filled with life again. Not by chance many of the names of the Cistercian monasteries make this blessing resound: claire-vaux, aiguebelle, fonte-viva… The monastery’s structure is an impotent symbol of the coming of order. A symbol, as I said is not simply an idea: the monks arrive did change desert places in places of spring, did bring back life where life seemed to be impossible, did actually change the life of people living in the neighborhood. The example of the Pianura Padana (with Chiaravalle Milanese and Chiaravalle della Colomba) has been well studied 9 2. In the wasteland, the monastery appeared as a square citadel, a complex of different buildings that can be always read as a net of square modules repeated both in the plan and in the facades. The 7

M IGNE, Latin Patrology, 185, 1009A-B Psalm 84 9 P IERO OTTONELLO, L’esordio cistercense in Italia. Il mito del deserto, fra poteri feudali e nuove istituzioni comunali (1120-1250), ECIG, Genova 1999. 8

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choice a the modular scheme of squares is one of the main features of Bernard’s architecture: it is not simply a practical solution (as if the square was somehow an easier scheme), it is, at the same time, a spiritual issue. The most evident innovation is the transformation of the apse in a parallelepiped-form instead of the universal known semi-spherical plant. We must, still, remember that the Abbatial Church – that usually attracts everybody’s attention – was not the center of the monastery. Of course the church is often the greatest hall, but Bernard’s vision involves the entire life of a man. In this whole, prayer has an important role, but it never stands alone. The center of any Cistercian monastery is the cloister, a spacial representation of the monastic rule as center and principle of order of the life of a monk. Around this square center – and around the rule – all the monastic activities have the same dignity, since every human experience can draw its dignity from the central spring of God’s love. Both in a symbolic point of view and in a structural point of view, the cloister is the original element that generates al the abbatial space: a square place, in a perpetual tension between the zenithal opening and the closed space, between a place of passage (since walking is the principal way of dwelling in it) and the stability of the monastic life. A perfect representation of the monastic life: a rule that has to be nevertheless opened to the transcendence of God’s love. This square is the module that, repeated, connected to others (both closed and opened), generates any environment, marking profoundly its symbolic power. 3. In this space – resulting from the multiplication of the square – the nude stone has a relevant role. Differently from the other churches of the Middle Age, the figurative paintings were banned from Cistercian churches and monastic buildings. Building material is the protagonist of the space, with its suggestive distribution of forces and its hospitality for light. The result is astonishing: the static distribution of weights becomes somehow visible with the introduc175

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tion of lines that highlight it in the vaults, in the ceilings, through the columns and the pillars. Architecture becomes dynamic, as if it intended to celebrate the dynamics of love itself. Love, eternal beatitude as the goal of any soul, is not thought as a static condition, but as an infinite dialogue of the human and divine desires. Cistercian architecture is like a music: it has lines (melodies) and modules (harmonic unities), it has rhythm and harmony in the alternation of full and empty. 4. Light is the main instrument that makes this harmony possible. The external openings, the windows, invite light to animate the architecture and to play something like a music. In the apse, free from mosaics or paintings, the great windows are a celebration of this mystic presence: natural light becomes not only a representation, but a physical experience of transcendence. At sunrise, while the monks greet God as a Sun “rising from on heaven”10 , the light enters from the great windows. As we already stated sight is the sense involved in the discovery of order, because of the close connection between senses and intention. Sight is again the protagonist of the recognition of this beauty and harmony between shapes and volumes that characterizes the Cistercian architecture, giving to everyone a perception of beauty. Light also evidences the role of time. The monastic day and the rule itself is marked by the movement of the light: movement that can be noticed in the shadows of the cloister’s columns, in the path of solar rays in the Abbatial church as much as it can be experimented everyday in the rhythm of the monk’s activities. 5. The disposition of the buildings around the cloister is an eloquent sign of this rhythm that the movement of light and shadows itself creates. At one side of the cloister lays the abbatial church. Every10

It is the Zacharias’ Canticle, used every morning for the Laudes in the Christian prayer: Luke 1,67-80.

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thing is functional to concentration and attention: the simple and essential architectonic lines gradually drive the monk’s glance to the apse and its miracle of light; even today a sense of serene attention and concentration can strike the tourist visiting a Cistercian church, in a sense of personal recollection11 . Even if the dimensions of the churches are sometimes relevant, we always have the impression of a friendly space, never too big, never disproportionate. Despite the presence of the pointed arch, the Cistercian architecture has nothing to do with Gothic art: we do not have any elevation, any desire of hight. The internal volumes are always proportioned to human presence, closed in themselves. Some architectonic elements are introduced to give this idea of a space where man can concentrate. Directly from the church a stairway leads to the dormitory, so that prayers are the last words before the time of sleep. Singing the antiphon to the Virgin Mary, the monks used to climb the great stairway. Sleeping becomes – as every other part of the monk’s life – a liturgical act: the great silence of the night is a symbolic representation of death to which man is called everyday, invited to a sense of trust: in the Compline the community sings the Simeon’s Canticle: Lord, now you let your servant go in peace; Your word has been fulfilled. My eyes have seen the salvation

11

The idea of personal concentration, many centuries after Bernard and with no evident relationship with his reform, is an important feature in Lévinas’ idea of dwelling: “Recollection, in the current sense of the term, designates a suspension of the immediate reactions the world solicits in view of a greater attention to oneself, one's possibilities, and the situation. It is already a movement of attention freed from immediate enjoyment, for no longer deriving its freedom from the agreeableness of the elements”. EMMANUEL LÉVINAS, Totality and Infinite. An Essay on Exteriority, Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh 1969, 154.

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You have prepared in the sight of every people, 12 A light to reveal you to the nations and the glory of your people, Israel .

Again from the cloister, usually on the other side of the church, stays the refectory: the hight and the solemnity of this hall is usually impressive. Eating together is not simply a practical activity, since there are not human actions not related to the order of love. The Eucharist celebrated in the church calls the common supper: the communion as a sacrament does not stand without the conviviality of common eating, where friendships and common care gather around a table as the nourishment of spiritual life. Often – immediately in front of the refectory – stays the great fountain. Once again this presence is not simply functional (even if, at this point, we might not need to distinguish between practical and symbolic functions). The refreshing presence of water, the everyday rituality (washing, drinking…) in the middle of the cloister, are a celebration of the unpredictable presence of Grace in this world completely leaded by the rule. Water’s song, always various and changing, is a great symbol of how the rule itself – regular and square – becomes hospitable for a different frequency, a different voice, opened to transcendence. On the another side of the cloister is the Chapter house, where the community gathers to discuss about the common life and to read regularly a chapter of the rule. Unpredictability and regularity stand again together: the monastic life is not a way to reduce freedom – as the modern man often imagine – but to lead it to unity. In the life of a monastic community many problems had to be solved, both coming from internal life and external relationships. The identity of the monk had to be found in the continuous attempt to connect the rule to new events, problems and opportunities.

12

Luke 2,29-32.

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1. God’s modern absence in the material world The presence of transcendence in nature, in Christian vision, has nothing to do with a pantheism: God does not confuse with his creation. Still, God is not simply the creator, the first cause of the existence of things: we can’t be satisfied simply ascribing to him the power of settling the world. Descartes’ God, first cause of creation, is just a little bump at the beginning of a process: “Descartes’ God is useless”. Christian God is present in history and in creation. The end of Christian preponderance in Western Culture, the Cartesian thought, the great development of positive sciences, pushed theology to what seemed to be an inevitable decision: leave materiality to the positive sciences, to keep its authority on the souls. Theology left the matter to science, promising not to interfere with its work; at the same time, science left spiritual truth to theology and philosophy, pretending not to take part to the discussion about truth, sense of life, God’s presence. This division of different fields – which does not correspond to a real division of life, of course, since man is united – seemed to work quite well for many decades. In fact, the discussion between science and faith was somehow only a matter of borders, since the fields of materiality and spirituality were perfectly divided. But this fragile peace has a great price. 1. First of all faith became more and more an opinion: not having to face the hardness of materiality, the common thought considers faith as a personal interpretation of life: religion is not something 179

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we can actually talk about, religion is a private choice that does not need to show any good reason since it is never asked to; it is the modern fulfillment of the Peace of Augusta: ‘cuius regio et eius religio'. We share this point of view in the modern time in the important (and still somehow ambiguous) idea of religious freedom. Of course religious freedom is one of the most important human rights, properly stated also in the Second Vatican Council: guaranteeing this right, we show to have a great idea of freedom and, of course, also a great trust towards the possibilities of an dialogue. The fact that every religion has the right to be professed is meaningful for different theologies, since it gives them the commitment to think about the possibility of an encounter between different points of view about God. What religious freedom should not mean – on the contrary – is the irrelevance of beliefs in the public debate. Still, often this is precisely what happens in our age. After a period of fight against any kind of religion, after the rhetoric of “religion opium of the masses”, nowadays the criticism towards faith seems to be weaker. But not in a promising way. Some years ago Time Magazine dedicated a “Mind and Body Special Issue” about “How faith can heal”1 . The interesting idea about the possibility of faith to interfere with human body was expounded without any attention to the content of faith; this reduces faith to an irrational attitude of hope and trust, without any interest in the object of this trust and its possible truth. Faith is reduced to an emotion, a feeling, with its rituality and its gestures: the universality of this emotion is found not in its truth, but in the physical results of serenity (or at least, this is pretended). Today it might also be politically correct to have a faith: many appreciate the good actions that can be encouraged by a religious educations and many, of course, criticize immoral behaviors in the life of the Church. The

1

Time Magazine, How Faith can Heal, 23h February 1996.

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scandal of pedophilia in the Church pushed the debate far from doctrinal issues and the result of this scandal showed how the Church itself gains and looses consent depending from reasons which are very far from its doctrinal interest. This, of course, is somehow perfectly right. Still the consequence produced by this climate is a lack of interest in the possibilities of a rational dialogue about truth, about the connection between the act of faith and reality. Faith and religion are private choices, their public side is not interesting anymore and, at the end of this process, religious freedom can be confused with its public irrelevance. Everyone is left alone in front of the possibility of God’s existence. 2. The second consequence of the division between spiritual (and in this way religious) issues and material ones is the presumed objectivity of science. Science claims to be neutral, objective: it is never a matter of choices, but only of observation. A good scientist, in other words, is completely far from ideologies: his role is to observe reality as it is, describing it and finding the best scientific model to understand it. Science becomes the only possible source of an absolute truth. This pretension of objectivity is so widespread that the ‘man in the street’ knows that a scientific truth can’t be discussed: ethical problems are not pertinent to scientific work. Science provides objective instruments of comprehension and any moral choice should come after, regarding only the use of these inventions. Now, of course a good scientist should be honest in his work and any falsification of datas must be refused and condemned. Nevertheless, any researcher knows that in any subjects there are different schools, different points of view, fighting each other everyday in academic milieu. We already remembered in the Introduction the recent discussion about Global Warming: in the past years the issue came to everybody’s attention; about the dangers of the rise of temperature on earth the positions are extremely different and they are 181

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all scientific positions, based on studies. Moreover, from different position the main claim is to be neutral, objective, as the main accuse against the other frontline is to be not-scientific and ideologic. How can the ‘man in the street’, who does not have the luck to study the climate, choose one side or another? 3. I would like to point out another consequence, probably the most dramatic. If religion and faith become a private matter, obviously human life appears to be divided in two: one part is material, public, rational, official; the other part is spiritual, personal, private, somehow hidden. One of the main goal of any religion was the possibility to unify the different sides of human life and to be the Leitmotiv capable to harmonize different voices, different aspects of reality. If religion becomes simply a part of man, what can take its place as a reasonable center? Science refuses transcendence, religion refuses matter: the sense of senses becomes simply unreachable. Of course we know that science can tell a truth about something: let’s take a tree. The truth of this tree might be its chemical composition, its weight, its length. Science might of course state that the existence of that tree is important for the environment, because it can transform CO2 in oxygen. But what happens if that tree was, for example, a sacred tree for the people living there? Or if it was planted as a symbol of the Righteous in the Yad Vashem, the holocaust memorial in Jerusalem? What is the truth of those trees, at the end? What right has the scientific truth to overtake all the others aspects? We might say the same thing for many elements in human life. Any fire is the result of a physical reaction, but it is also the place where great narrations started (the Greek word ‘femi', which means to talk, is connected with the word fire); it might be the pleasant place where I read at night or, in a dark forest, my only defense against wildlife. What is, then, its truth? In the example of the tree and of the fire we understand that we must not simply choose one truth, because the tree or the fire can be all those 182

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things. Truth is not the result of dividing reality, but of gathering meanings. Now, if theology chose not to bother about material, we can’t say the same thing about human life: we still live in a body, we dwell in materiality and we don’t stop to give meanings to the things around us. Matter is never separated from ideas as man can never be separated from his body. This union comes somehow before any religion, before any experience of transcendence; moreover this union makes possible any transcendence, since the perception of the excess of reality comes from reality itself and not from imagination: spirituality is an excess of materiality. This void of communication between the material world and the spiritual issues is sometime occupied, in contemporaneity, by the a kind of pantheism where nature takes the place of sacred. The ‘New Age’ philosophy owes some of its success to the lack of attention towards the spiritual meaning of the human experience of dwelling in nature. Now, to state spiritual presence in the material world does not mean an attempt of pantheism. The experience of beauty and its seduction can be, on the contrary, the starting point for a reorientation of human freedom to God. In this chapter we will try to complete our study of Christian approach to nature with an important episode of Christian Orthodox philosophy.

2. God’s Sophia in Eastern Orthodox theology 2.1 God’s Sophia in the world and in humanity Theology in the Orthodox church had a different approach to the issue of creation and nature; this is interesting for our work, since in this particular subject, Western theology shows its weakness. The untold agreement with science – theology will not deal with the material world – provoked an interruption of the thought and an attentive listening to a different theology can suggest a return to the theme.

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The main work about creation that reached many Western theologian in our age is The Meaning of the Creating Act, by Nikolai Berdjaev2. The publishing of this seminar about the power of creation and human participation to the enterprise, touched modern philosophers for the intense defense of human freedom against a collectivized and mechanized society. Thanks to his works the great Orthodox theology became closer to the Western tradition and many scholars discovered the possibilities of this new proximity. Another outstanding Orthodox theologian, Sergej Bulgakov – not to be confused with the almost contemporary novelist Mikhail Bulgakov – wrote some interesting essays about the God’s presence in nature3. An important Orthodox tradition entrusts the presence of God in the living world to the figure of Sophia, recalling the biblical Wisdom; we already met this figure in chapter two, reading the book of Proverbs. Now, if the Catholic interpretation of God’s Wisdom is weak (even if not absent), the Orthodox church developed a fine theology about Sophia as the soul of creation. Through this figure Bulgakov’s works show a profound belief in the possibility of theology and science to work together: if God is present in the world, then science can find his footsteps, traces of his passages. Also thanks to this challenging theological doctrine, many Russian theologians, in the 20th century, were investigating also in mathematics, physics, economics,

2

NICOLAI BERDJAEV, The Meaning of the Creating Act, Victor Gollancz LTD, London 1955. 3 S ERGEJ BULGAKOV , Bride of the Lamb, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publish, Grand Rapids 2002; –, Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology, Lindisfarne Press, Hudson 1993; –, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, Lindisfarne Books, Hudson 1997; – , Philosophy of Economy. The World as Household, Yale University Press, New Haven 2000.

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pursuing a new unity of knowledge: very few modern Western theologians ever attempt this challenge 4. We might explain the Sophia as the vision, the plan that God has in the moment he creates. Every creator starts with a vision, one single glance that somehow contains every following choice, the plan of his action. At the same time, any vision (the order, the sense of creation), to be set in existence, exposes itself to the risk of chaos: Creaturality is the loss of ‘totality’ – which belongs to the divine Sophia – through an immersion in multiplicity, temporality and relativity of the particular existence. Through this – as if the clear the clear and self-evident manifestation of sophianity in the world was lost – 5 the principle of chaos gains force .

Creating, in other words, God exposes his sophia (and, actually, himself) to the multiplicity of the world (evident in the growth in the vegetable kingdom and in the generating energy of animals) that grows chaotically. Nevertheless, despite the multiplicity, still the world is a whole that preserves life from chaos: the unity of the world is not simply the sum of the different existences and it must be guaranteed by the eternal presence of Sophia in the drama of being. It subsists over the fundament of this image as an unifying force, a real center, a project for the world, its idea and its generating energy. This unifying force, this cosm-organic force is nothing but the creatural Sophia itself, image of the divine being, the force of ‘totality’. In 6 this sense it is the soul of the world and its entelechia , its final cause, 7 that is actuated and made in it: it is the life of the world .

4

In the modern Catholic church one of the bravest efforts is the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, suspected of heterodoxy and banned by the Holy Office in 1962. 5 S ERGEJ BULGAKOV, La sposa dell’agnello, 125 [my translation]. 6 The Aristotle’s idea of entelechia points something for which the fulfillment is not a state of rest, but the energy itself: the chaotic growth in the world is not evil,

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This soul, this life of the world is not only the totality of its contents, but also the relationships between things. The Old Testament had a powerful symbol of this unity in the blood, since “For the life of every creature is its blood, and I have told the Israelites: You will not consume the blood of any creature, for the life of every creature is its blood, and anyone who consumes it will be outlawed”8 . The symbolism of sacrifice – including Jesus’ interpretation – has in blood an important root, often neglected in our reading of the Scriptures. Blood is not only present in animals, but somehow hidden in every created being, since it is the endless power of being and not only theology, but also science has a main commitment in the research and understanding of the principle of life. At the same time the created Sophia is not an hypostasis, not a person. Being created as a unity, it comes from God, but it is not its image and likeness: nature does not have freedom, even if inside nature there are infinite possibilities, even if inside nature there is a principle of life, a power of being, a Sophia. This is why creation is not completed until God creates man. Differently from any other creature, man has a personal spirit: “Yahweh God shaped man from the soil of the ground and blew the breath of life into his nostrils, and man became a living being”9. This spirit comes directly from God, it is not a fruit of creation, but an emanation of his soul: this makes humanity different to any other created being, despite it is part of the creation and of its Sophia. God reflected himself in the creation of the whole of the world, but he gave himself in human soul. In the creation of the world, God makes a being, a mirror of his beauty; in the creation of man God makes a being-with, a companion, a partner of

since it is the energy necessary for the world’s existence. Nevertheless this growth is not fulfilled in itself: the sense of this generative power is the unity in God’s will. 7 SERGEJ B ULGAKOV, La sposa dell’Agnello, p. 126 [my translation]. 8 Leviticus 17,14. 9 Genesis 2,7.

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the Trinitarian relationship. This is why the relationship between God, his creation and human freedom is committed to human care: this is the main object of his care. Now, when the man is not able to fulfill this task and to receive this role, we have two main forms of failure. On one side we have the ‘philosophy of ego’, when man claims to be like God, to be the only God in its independence: the will of power becomes his only aim and he considers himself the lord and the creator of the world. On the other side we have nihilism, when man considers his personal identity as an illusion, a simple neural process, a part of nature, lacking meaning; human freedom does not take anymore seriously its aim and humanity, together with land, falls into chaos. These different failures are an interesting symbol of the contemporary attitude towards nature: on one side we have the temptation of total exploitation, on the other we have the temptation to abdicate any responsibility as if an hypothetic return to natural state was somehow possible. Both attitudes are the same misunderstanding of Sophia. On the contrary, assuming his role, man can discover and follow God’s Sophia, understand his Wisdom and fulfill the natural order through his personal responsibility. This fulfillment needs a human dialogue with God, where the difference between God’s word and human word becomes imperceptible. Moreover, in the creation of man (when God gives his breath) God includes the possibility of human answer, says Bulgakov. The human answer comes mysteriously in the act of being, provoked by God’s breath. This means that humanity is originally oriented to God and only for the original sin we have lost this possibility to correspond to him. Humanity, despite the sin, is capable of recognizing and corresponding to God’s love; this is why in human existence is hidden a nostalgia of God and loving God is always a fulfillment of human life. Nature, even if it is not an hypostasis, is not simply a dead and inanimate material; nature is somehow crying for its fulfillment, as the apostle Paul says: “It was not for its own purposes that creation had frustration imposed on it, but for the purposes of him who imposed 187

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it with the intention that the whole creation itself might be freed from its slavery to corruption and brought into the same glorious freedom as the children of God”10 . The ability of nature to address to man as an interlocutor is a symbol of this hope: the animals, for example, can create relationships with man, answer to his wish and somehow communicate with him. The animal world has its recapitulation only in man, in the “plenitude of his spiritual freedom and creativity”11 . Humanity brings the imprinting of God’s revelation – of the gift of his personal Sophia – in the division between male and female. We can say that the male existence is an image of the Son and the female existence is an image of the Holy Spirit, the two divine persons that, with the Father, act God’s Sophia: It is possible to state that – translated in the language of creation or applied to humanity – the Second and the Third hypostasis (of the Trinity) correspond, is analogue, is parallel (but in no way identical) to the masculine and feminine principle present in it. To this corresponds then the fundamental event: the Son of God became man in the masculine nature and the hypostatic descent of the Holy Spirit 12 was fulfilled in the feminine nature of the Holy Mother of God .

Man is also an hypostasis (person) through his individuality. Not only his essence is masculine or feminine: every man has a personality, a well-defined theme that supports his singularity. The creation of a single person is also the creation of his theme, distinct from others. This theme both distinguishes him from others and makes his connections to others possible, so that every man has to perceive and choose his personal identity to communicate with ohters. In other words, there is something that can be done, in creation, only by my personal choice, there is something that only I – and no one else – can 10

Romans 8,20-21. SERGEJ B ULGAKOV, La sposa dell’Agnello, p. 158 [my translation]. 12 SERGEJ B ULGAKOV, La sposa dell’Agnello, pp. 140-141 [my translation]. 11

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do. This identity, that I am the only one who can chose, is connected with the time I live, in this sense it is a sort of destiny, a destiny that has nothing to do with the unavoidability of the future, but with my present or, in other words, with “my presence to my present”. 2.2 Christ’s presence on earth: the Holy Grail In another work, Bulgakov announces a different form of God’s presence in human history: the presence of his sacrifice. The essay has a fascinating title: ‘The Saint Graal13’. Bulgakov focuses his attention on a mysterious episode of the Fourth Gospel: John is the only Evangelist describing the scene. A few minutes after his death the soldiers came to Jesus to check the corpse, and one of them “pierced his side with a lance; and immediately there came out blood and water”14 . Now, both blood and water have important meanings. Blood, as we already stated, is the symbol of life, since, flowing in any body, it connects the body to the soul. Blood is a kind of “body of the spirit”, since it is the way the spirit flows inside us. Water, on the others side, is the symbol of primordial life, it is the cosmic matter, from which the world was made (since the Spirit, before creation, was flying over the waters). The union between blood and water represents the union between the psychic principle and the material principle. Christ’s blood is, in this way, the union between his soul (blood) and his flesh (Water): Jesus’ whole is present. The flow of blood and water that from Christ’s body spilled on earth gains in Bulgakov’s interpretation an important meaning. Usually interpreters have read this passage in a eucharistical sense: water and blood would then be the signs of the sacraments of the church. However, since we have no informations of this blood and water going back to his body, Bulgakov rejects this reading. The separation between Jesus’ body and Jesus’

13 14

SERGEJ B ULGAKOV, Il santo Graal. L’eucarestia, Lipa Srl, Roma 2005. John 19,34.

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blood-and-water is definitive, so that it is somehow present in the soil, where it was poured. An image of this presence can be found in the legend of the Holy Grail: for an ancient Christian tradition, Joseph of Arimathea used the cup of the last supper to preserve Jesus’ blood; after many adventures, the cup was hidden and is now preserved in some mysterious place. The ‘quest’ for the Grail is one of the great legends of the Arthurian literary tradition, although almost completely lost its theological roots; nevertheless it is a trace of the fact that an uninterrupted tradition kept separated the poured blood from the eucharistic sacrifice. Unlike all others interpreters, Bulgakov identifies Saint John’s blood and water with the tradition of the Grail: in the Last Supper the apostles ate and drank not his earthly body and blood, but his sacramental body and blood, so that the sacrifice could be present in the church. On the contrary, blood and water falling from his side are poured on the ground and they dwell and sanctify the soil eternally. Since blood and water spilled from his body in the soil, all the world has become the Holy Grail, creation is the cup where Jesus’ blood and Jesus’ presence is preserved and hidden. The Grail is not given for the disciples’ communion, it is not consumed15, its aim is to stay in the world and dwell in it as a mysterious sanctity, mixed with the power of life as a principle of transfiguration of the world. While the eucharistic species are created in any Mass, this presence of Jesus’ blood in the soil happened once and irreversibly. This idea of the irreversibility of Jesus’ permanence on earth is the center and the real interest of this doctrine. The Eucharist is already the possibility of a material link between Jesus and those who love him; the sacramental presence of his blood on earth, even if mysteri-

15

In the Mass the communion has to be completely consumed, not a single crumb must be left in the eucharistic vessels.

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ous, points out that this relationship is not simply sublimated in a spiritual or intellectual bond. Jesus’ bond with his apostles – them who he called friends – was not at all intellectual, it was dramatically physic: it dealt with senses, beauty, seduction, true and strong friendships. The modern access to the experience of the church must also be physic, of course: it is a matter of bonds and charity, agape and friendship; Jesus’ presence in the Eucharistic Species has a taste. But, besides this approach – Bulgakov says – there is still another possibility of material encounter in the mystery of God’s presence in the the soil we are dwelling in, that is, in a sense, entirely sacred. Jesus’ Ascension is not a farewell to the world and his presence at God’s right is totally compatible with this material presence in the land. Now, this presence is not a sacrament, since it is not possible to recognize it, it is not possible to point it and grab it. This presence is a mystery, the divine mystery of the world, its relic, its glory that must always be searched – exactly as in the legend of the Holy Grail, which is a tale of quest. Literature and theology here meet and work together, in Bulgakov’s thought. There is a transcendence that has to be researched even if you will never be sure about its presence; there is a lifelong quest, a wisdom gained living that can’t be ever grasped and, nevertheless has to be pursued. The ability to question about God’s presence, in the legend of Perceval, is the key for the comprehension of the Grail. Even if the Grail can never be grabbed – in the legend it belongs to the Fisher King – the hero must endure the search because the search itself is the secret of the Grail. Moreover, this presence has a power of regeneration, of healing: in the Arthurian legend, the Fisher King is ill and weak and only the Grail can sustain his life as a food of immortality. This presence is also a form of compassion of God towards humanity: Christ has assumed on himself the burden of human sin and the nuisance of human pain not only globally, in the Gethsemane’s agony, but also in all their totality, in the life of humanity. God’s love for the world, his divine condescendence towards it did not end in one singular episode of acceptance of pain and sin of the world, but reveals 191

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itself in the time process. Incarnation made the God-man share the 16 whole human life, his compassionate love embraces any human life .

Nothing in the life of Jesus is simply past, nothing is simply left behind, this presence guarantees his contemporaneity to our daily struggle. This opens a new possibility of a Christian naturalism, not so distant from the idea of an ‘integral ecology’ in the Pope’s encyclical. Human history relevant for God himself, who is deeply committed to our destiny, were the challenge of Sophia might be fulfilled.

16

SERGEJ B ULGAKOV, Il santo Graal, p. 40 [my translation].

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1. Food and Convivium In the past chapters I showed two possible ways for theology to think human dwelling. The first one is a path of education of senses, so that our perception of the material world can find in its order a trace of spirituality. The external order operates a seduction towards human freedom re-orienting it to the love of God. The second is an idea of God’s proximity to creation: Sophia is the life of the world given to human responsibility so that God’s order can overcome the chaotic power of life through human actions. Christ is mysteriously present today in human history and the world itself is the Holy Grail of his presence, entrusted to man’s quest. I would like now to end our reflection with a mention of the experience of human eating, which is particularly interesting for its powerful symbolism. Eating is the living example that life can’t be completely human until it is also symbolic. The cornerstone of the symbolism of food is, no doubt, the idea of ‘convivium’. Humans do not feed, they have dinner: the gesture of sharing is the human interpretation of feeding. In this sense the convivium is an insoluble knot of material needs and spirituality, relationships and self-development, gratuitousness and sustenance. At the same time – from another point of view – the convivial experience is often a place of injustice and disparity. The eradication of the world’s hunger is nowadays far from being fulfilled, even if many efforts have been done; and we must confess that, if it was really in our interest, we might do much more to change the situation. 193

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The loss of a great part of the food production in many rich countries and the lack of nutrition of the poor countries are two realities that, seen together, immediately question us about justice. In 2014 Pope Francis, addressing a speech to the FAO members, said: the “paradox of plenty”, in which there is food for everyone, but not everyone can eat, while waste, excessive consumption and the use of food for other purposes is visible before our very eyes. […] This is the first challenge to be overcome.

Since these issues ask for political choices and involve a precise will, the failure puts in a bad light both the attitude and the possibilities of international politics. Despite the problem of hunger is obviously enormous, the failure points two possibilities: that the will of chance is actually too weak or that the political instruments are inadequate. Being the convivium a knot of practical and spiritual issues, we will also face these issues of justice; moreover, we will try to understand how justice is involved in the experience of human eating, not simply as an appendix, but in its very heart.

2. Phenomenology of a Convivium Despite its obvious physiological function, eating is not a simple natural act: men do not feed, men have lunch and supper, share food and words. The banquet, the family table, the ritual meal are powerful symbolical actions (and effective places) that made possible for human culture to gather spiritual values as civil relationships, affections, religious service. In Christianity, furthermore, the common meal became the synthetic act of communion – with brothers, in God – since Jesus himself instituted the sacrament of his presence in the Last Supper. All these themes, as usual, were already there: Jesus simply found them around human tables. Speaking about food in the modern Western countries might sound odd. The daily bread is guaranteed by our economic wealth and the time where food was ‘the’ problem of life seems to be far be194

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hind us. Still, it is useful to remember that in different ages (and in different countries even today) people used to spend all their day to find something to eat. The modern man eats so that he can live; in different situation men live so that they can eat. Actually, we shall not forget that there was a time, far behind us, when men had to fight not to be eaten. I believe that we still have evident marks of this state of things even in our modern culture. Many of those marks are readable in the religious experience. The religious sacrifice was a sort of lunch prepared for the gods; an attempt to feed the gods so that they did not eat us. Many ancient religions repeat this cliche: the best part of our world has to be sacrificed, so that the divinities can leave us free and safe. There has been a period of human sacrifices, in the history of many religions: the scapegoat was the most beautiful virgin of the village, offered in sacrifice to the disturbing presence of the gods. A very ancient hebraic word, ‘Kabod’, meaning ‘glory’ might be translated as ‘to give weight’, to ‘feed’ the gods. Glorification has something to do with nutrition. Divinities are ambiguous, we need to dull their senses with our sacrifices. Something similar happens to Odysseus: stuck in Polyphemus’ cave with his companions, he prepares a dinner, he pours the best wine, so that the monster can fall asleep and the desperate escape can take place. We might smile to this attitude, considering it primitive. But I am quite sure that any age has its idols and its sacrifices. In the postmodern age the tremendous divinity that has to be fed is the ego. Passions, emotions, experiences, food, technology… everything seems to be nowadays offered to this unpredictable divinity. We feed our ego also because we fear ourselves. We fill up our stomach, hoping that the question about our true self can be eternally postponed. The result of this is a gigantic ego, more and more demanding but also more and more slow and dull. Something completely different happens in Christian religion. Jesus somehow overturns our perspective: God is not the one that has to be fed, God is the one who gives his flesh and his blood for our nutrition. God does not only offers to man a beautiful victim: he of195

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fers himself, his body, his blood, so that he can remain in us. Sacrifice is not anymore the method to feed the other so that he leaves us alone. It is the space of communion between God and his friends. To be God does not mean to demand the other’s sacrifice, but to give your life to others. Indeed, many episodes in the Gospels happen during suppers, and Jesus himself was accused by his enemies to be a glutton. Jesus used and raised the intensity of the symbolic power of meals: reconciliation, communion, sacrifice, love, justice were common issues sitting around Christ’s table together with his friends and guests. The Last Supper, where he gave his disciples an explanation of his imminent death was not an extraordinary event, but the normal form of their meeting, the habitual style of their common life. Usually Jesus’ meal is an intimate place, where his disciples and a few guests are gathered. In some of his miracles and teachings Jesus recalls the symbolism of convivium with singular strength. Many parables are set in a banquet and at least two signs are connected with eating. The first one is the nuptial banquet of Cana, the second is the Multiplication of Bread and Fish. These miracles, moreover, underline that Jesus is not only using an allegory, but he is performing, creating the possibility of common share. Jesus does not simply speak about food: he feeds humanity, he takes care of their nutrition and of their life. And he does this giving his own body. In the episode of the Multiplication of Bread and Fish, Jesus gives a food that must be understood – his accusation towards his disciples will be that they did not understand a sign, but they simply filled their stomaches – and at the same time he speaks a word that is capable to feed – the crowd stayed listening to him for days, forgetting the need for food. In a particular episode of John’s Gospel1 Jesus himself, after his resurrec-

1

John 21.

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tion, cooks some fish for his disciples on a fire of embers that they did not work for. The symbolism of Convivium in the Gospel is so complex and important that a deep study would be too much for our possibilities. I will therefore limit my interest to some modern re-interpretation of this symbolism, in recent filmography. ‘Food movies’ are surprisingly frequent in the history of contemporary cinema2; at the same time, in Western culture it is almost impossible to talk seriously about human feeding without recalling a complex religious symbolism. It is also impossible to make a movie about food without considering its Christian meaning. Jean Paul Sartre, in a conference about phenomenology, once stated that “everyone of us makes the absolute by eating”3. The philosopher wanted to point out that even the most innocent and apparently insignificant action is completely human and, being human, when we deal with truth, good, and beauty, we are dealing with God. But where and under which conditions does eating start to be human? The answer seems to be impossible, since the peculiarity of human eating is the continuity between physical and spiritual values. We can anyway say that no other human act shows such a strong bond between material and spiritual world: the link can’t be loosen as in other human experiences4 . At the same time in no other human act

2

I was inspired by the recent work by FAUSTO COLOMBO , ADRIANO D’ALOIA, Gastronomia mediale. Riti e retoriche del cibo nel cinema, nella televisione e nella Rete in FRANCESCO BOTTURI , ROBERTO ZOBOLI (ed.), Attraverso il convivio. Cibo e alimentazione tra bisogni e culture, Vita e Pensiero, Milano 2014, 88-100. 3 Conference, 1946. 4 Also sexuality, of course, could have a strong power in this sense. Nevertheless the separation between the physical function of sexual act (reproduction) and its spiritual echoes is nowadays very deep. Practically, in our time man and women do not make love with the purpose of reproduction, while we always eat because of a physical need.

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the link between the possibility of life and the judgement about life is so strong: when we eat we immediately express our taste, so that we might say that we can’t encounter food without judging it. Eating is always an immediate experience of taste and of judgement: good or bad, pleasant and unpleasant. Even the contemporary commercial side of eating, even food marketing can’t be divided by these spiritual values. Consider any modern advertisement directed to the consumer to sell him an alimentary good: you will find esthetic and ethic issues, taste and costume, culture and conviviality. Without the use of this rhetoric you would not sell anything. Despite this seems to be a paradox, the economic side needs to refer to food symbolism, probably one of the few that resist (and increase) in our age. Resistant and growing, as anyone can understand if he spends some time to consider the recent passion for slow food, wine knowledge, ethnic curiosity, etc. Or the recent controversy between Vegans, Vegetarians and common eaters. Food is interesting (and sells) as far as it is connected to a symbolism and a rituality. And where there is a rituality of course there is a priestly class; think about the last years’ television formats and food talent shows and how they created a new figure of celebrity, inventing a new class of chef-stars. Our choice will be to describe some important episodes of the contemporary reprise of the symbolism of convivium: doing this we will also underline the important vibrations that this symbolism owes to Christian culture. 2.1 Justice and Convivium: La Grande Abbuffata Even if around any human table seats the issue of justice, this does not mean that any banquet is actually fair. The guest can be invited with the aim of its elimination: in any tradition, the slaughter of the

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guest during the meal is the greatest possible act of treason5. In 1973 an Italo-French production issued a movie where a banquet is transformed in a great sadomasochistic experience, fatally leading the participants to death. In ‘La Grande Abbuffata6 ’, four rich bourgeoises meet with the intent to commit suicide by the excess of food, simply eating to death. Bore, loss of interest towards life, a pain of living, the misery of their relationships is the great engine of this tragedy, sought voluntarily. Many years before Pope Francis’ words about the ‘paradox of plenty’ the movie was already pointing out an impressive feature of post-modernity: while a part of the world dies because of the lack of food, some representatives of our Capitalistic society die because of its excess. The four characters share a loss of passion and interest for life and decide for a path of excess: this suicide is not intended as the extreme attempt to avoid despair and pain, but as a celebration of non-sense and disgust. We are not in front of a simple transgression, and, even if we are also in front of the protest against social conventions, the Abbuffata is primarily an authentic celebration of human vice. The taste of human experiences seems not enough to feel alive, so it needs to be brought not only to its excess, but to its destruction. Contrary to what we might think, the decision to expel any human value from this meal – in a word: the renounce to humanity – does not lead to an animal experience: even if in many scenes the characters seem to be transformed in beasts, the denial of values is always a human decision. Their transformation is something more like a diabolic involution: at the end they will be nothing but demons and the feast will be a Sabbath. What I am pointing out is particularly im5

In very recent times, fans of ‘The Game of Thrones’ (outstanding TV series) easily recall to mind the “Red Wedding”. 6 La Grande Abbuffata was directed in 1973 by Marco Ferreri and had an impressive cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Ugo Tognazzi, Philippe Noiret. The characters had the same name of the actors.

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portant for our thought: when human eating denies justice, it does not regress to a simple feeding, but to a Sabbath, because man can’t regress to animality. Men are not neutral, like animals, they become the incarnation of evil itself. This capsizing of eating is a human act: as men – differently from animals – are able to decide fasting, they are also able to decide to eat over their need: stuffing ourselves is still the result of a free choice, even if paradoxic, that an animal would not be able to do. Not by chance what is involved in this overturning of convivium is not only food, but the complex of values that compose the experience of a human meal: all main taboos are still there. Sex, Sacred, life and death are involved in the Abbuffata because they are all present somehow in the symbolism of eating. In many scenes sex is connected with feeding: Marcello is a sex-addicted pilot from Alitalia and he invites three whores in the party, Ugo will die while his friend gives him food and a woman masturbates him. Also religion is always present: Ugo prepares an enormous leaver pate with the shape of Saint Peter’s dome; Philippe wears a long night-robe recalling priest’s vestments. The presence of death is also astonishing: the corpses of the dead are stored in the fridge-cell instead of food, so that somehow the priests of this ritual become the victims, they are part of the sacrifice. This transformation makes also reference to the main food taboo: cannibalism; somehow the four friends eat each others. At the end of the movie, since the fridge-room is full, the animals that were already ordered from the butcher are left outside in the garden. At a certain point the house is submerged by excrements, another human taboo connected to death and fear. The first victim is Marcello: after the accident of the excrements he tries to escape, but he is stuck in a snow storm and dies for freezing. Marcello, despite his beauty and his success with women, is impotent: the reason of his suicide seems to be connected with his incapacity to get and give satisfaction. When Marcello dies, his friend Michel cries bestially and, in despair, he kisses his mouth: this mouth to mouth kiss is connected to sex, religion (Judas’ betrayal) and even 200

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cannibalism. The three others die one by one, in an increase of decadence of terrible depravation: watching the movie might actually give a sense of disgust and of physical rejection. The strength of some scenes remembers Pasolini’s ‘I Cento Giorni di Sodoma’. Marcello’s death, on the other side, seems to be quoted in the high symbolic masterpiece ‘Shining7 ’, when Jack, after his bestial involution, dies in the garden. These are just examples, but, as we can understand, even if overturned, the symbolic power of the banquet is at work. Notice something else. The Abbuffata is a meal of injustice: not by chance it is a private, closed meal. The privateness of the feast is an important symbol of the impossible connection to the rest of the world and its universality. But this attest something important: the issue of justice, in human eating, is always connected to the issue of hospitality; a inhospitable meal is always a place of injustice. If any banquet means somehow a gratuitous opening to others – men had always organized banquets to meet and we often use to prepare ‘something more’ for unexpected guests – in this diabolic feast everything must stay hidden. Only a young and shapely teacher will participate to the banquet, but not as a guest. Her role will be that of an accomplice: despite she does physically survive the party, she will assist the criminal intention, becoming somehow slave of their voluptuousness. Differently from the waiter – who is in the dark about his master’s projects – the young teacher takes her part and, as any other, she is part of the lunch. Of course, a powerful political criticism against the Capitalistic society is the main aim of the movie, but we might go beyond this. In a paradoxic way we understand why in many cultures the justice of the banquet is connected with its opening to others. An important example is in the monastic hospitality: even if the monastic citadel is a closed community, even if the monks are separated from the rest of

7

S TANLEY KUBRIK, Shining, USA-UK 1980.

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the world, in the monastic rule the dinner must always be opened to any poor wanderer or pilgrim passing by. Hospitality saves human feeding from its self-destructive injustice. 2.2 Banquet, identity and gift: The Big Night A second movie – definitely more pleasant – introduces us to a second category of convivium. Common meal is a place of identity for humans: in almost any culture sharing food also means sharing a common culture, language, tradition. The latin word cumpanium, that generates the english ‘company’ owes its etymology from the word panis, ‘bread’: cum-panis means that person that shares his food with me. This is particularly interesting since eating is originally the answer to a personal and individual need: the fact that I am hungry does not actually involve others. We might say more: the food is never really shared, since I always eat my part while you eat yours: the food goes inside me and no one can take it back, it disappears inside me and is not anymore available to others. Actually, to survive I need my food and I need to protect it from the other’s possible appetite. Nevertheless men eat together and have the impression that something is actually shared. The untold law of every common meal is that sharing is possible: men share even the less sharable thing – food. The possibility of a common identity is set by the food that we eat together, sharing with others what can’t be eventually shared. What is really shared is the judgement about taste. We share opinions about food, we share the common concern about taste. In a sense, common meal is the place where we build universality. This operation is original: when a mother wants her child to eat, she usually eats the same food in front of him, so that her affordability opens the chance to educate the child’s taste. Taste is also a matter of education: as every adult knows, a young man would be satisfied in eating chicken and fries at any lunch; only through education we teach our children to eat complex food or even good wine. Surprisingly, the

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education to the taste of wine often plays a role against the excess of alcoholism. As every human people and every nation has a common language, there is also a common taste connected with a land, a culture, a territory. This link between food and identity is evident in our contemporaneity: to experiment ethnic food seems to be particularly a la mode in these years, bringing together supply and demand. Many immigrants find great opportunities in Western world’s curiosity for new tastes. In the movie The Big Night8 two Italian brothers open an Italian restaurant in the USA: Primo is the Chef and Secondo the manager. From the beginning the main issue of the movie is identity: immigration, culture, taste. The dishes that Primo prepares seldom find the comprehension of his clients: the typical American middle-class man has a narrow view, he does not dare to trespass the boundaries of his taste and – of course – is convinced to know everything about how Italian food should be. For these misunderstandings the two brothers’ enterprise is close to failure. The solution seems to arrive when a competitor, Pasquale, proposes them to invite to their restaurant an important jazz singer, so that they can gain fame and fortune. The dinner is arranged using all the spare money, but the celebrity – as in a reconstruction of Waiting for Godot – never arrives. The brothers discover to be cheated by the competitor whom they trusted. Since the movie is about a restaurant, the drama of identity is subordinated to the law of commerce: the intersection between supply and demand. As we previously stated any banquet is connected to an issue of justice as far as it is open to the others. Now, business requires a peculiar type of opening: the client is not actually a guest, but claims to be a lord. And the situation is even more complex since the two brothers (and their cooking) are actually guests themselves

8

Stanley Tucci - Campbell Schott, The Big Night, USA 1996.

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of a foreign country. The guest (the American middle-class) becomes host and can decide about the economical life or death of the two immigrants. The issue of identity – connected with hospitality – would be now: how can identity be hospitable without being lost? How can Primo give to his clients his work, without being eaten by them and disappear in the great stomach of the USA? As you can see the two movies are related: in ‘La Grande Abbuffata’ the physical suicide was committed by food to state an identity that was somehow lost, in ‘The Big Night’ we have a business suicide caused again by food, but at the end of the movie, the two brothers seem to keep their identity and to survive – if not economically – at least morally: accepting the failure of their enterprise, they will eventually preserve their identity and soul. Almost at the end of the movie after the plan’s failure, in a scene of despair, the two brothers have a fight. The dialogues are profound. Primo – the chef – says: “If I sacrifice my work it dies”. The sacrifice of an identity is death, somehow worst than death: “I would prefer to die” rather than sacrifice my work. Indeed some minutes before, accusing the New World, Primo said: “This place is eating us”. A tension is created between sacrifice and identity: somehow any banquet is a sacrifice (the Big Night’s banquet will be the disaster of the restaurant, since Secondo spends their last moneys). Something must be sacrificed to avoid the sacrifice of identity, to avoid the cook to become the victim (exactly as it happened in ‘La Grande Abbuffata’). Even if the movie is funny and happy-ending, the issue of identity will not be solved: we don’t really know how things eventually evolve. Probably the two brothers will have to go back to Italy, which would mean the failure of their American dream. In this case the market would be the complete impossibility of communication, a place where identity has to be immolated, without any chance. In an interesting dialogue Pasquale, the competitor that made a lot of money by adapting Italian cooking to the American taste, says to Secondo: “I am a business man, I am anything I want to be at any time I 204

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want to”. Business – or at least bad business – eats identities, creating persons that proudly loose their soul; money (exactly as we previously stated) is the possibility to be “anything” at “anytime”: still the price is a complete loss of humanity. True hospitality works differently, and the movie shows it. The two brothers invite for the big night all their neighbors and friends: the absence of the jazz star does not actually ruin the dinner, where friendship, taste, wine and fun are really shared. There is place enough for friends, wives, lovers and enemies and the good food overcomes any possible misunderstanding. Despite the absence, the dinner works, the identity is safe. The quotations of Jesus’ Last Supper are evident: in the middle of the dinner the traitor (Pascale) kisses Primo, just as it happened in Judas’ betrayal. In fact, also in the Last Supper – when Jesus explains to his friends both his sacrifice and his identity – the traitor is present: Jesus confirms in front of him his identity in the very moment that he gives his life. By doing that Jesus is actually stronger and more free than Judas. But the similarities between the Big Night and the Gospel are many. The relationship between sacrifice and identity is – in both – connected with the power of gift. Jesus in his death gives his life as a gift: he is, in the moment of his death, God’s gift to humanity. The Gospels state that Jesus knows about his imminent crucifixion, this does not much state his omniscience, rather it highlights that he is free in the moment of his death, that no one obliged him. He could have called a legion of angels, but he did not: the gift of his life is an incredibly powerful assertion of his identity. No one can steel or force him to be different, even killing him. In this way, through the gift, Jesus weakness is stronger than any violence, because his identity is not available to his enemies’ grab. Primo has a same intention: he is generous with his friends, he invites them for dinner, but he can’t sacrifice his work (his identity) to the customers: he prefers to die. On the contrary Pascale, the businessman, is strong and powerful, but he is none: he actually became what others wanted him to be, with the illusion of being “anything he wants to”. 205

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It is no surprising that the movie also has a resurrection. The happy-ending is not simply the victory of the two brothers: it is again a meal9. The sun rises, the morning comes and Primo and Secondo are again in the kitchen having breakfast together. There are no words, but this time Secondo is cooking. The younger brother seems to have learned a lesson: success is not worth of the sacrifice of identity (“you are nothing”, he had the courage to say to Pascale). Overcoming the fight with his brother, he prepares food. He learnt gift: a small but true gift. The act of eating is a fundamental place for the statement of human identity because it is the place to learn the risk of hospitality and the habit of gift. On one side hospitality is the exposition of personal identity to universal appreciation: the other is invited to share the most personal of all human dimensions, so that what is interior can become common; any supper can be this, just as far as it has a guest. On the other side, gift is the human attitude to deny the rule of profit: our decision is not simply a matter of advantage, there is something more. Or, deeper, there is an advantage that can be reached only with gift: gift opens a new reality, a new dimension of beauty and comprehension of life. In every human supper the gift is present in many ways, first of all in the complexity of cooking: of course cooking has something to do also with food security, but cooking mainly deals with gift. A long preparation – an entire day for ‘The Big Night’ – is necessary for the feast; rituality – in the preparation of dishes, in the dance of the waiters, in the gesture of eating – is the trace of this disproportion that makes any supper a place of gift. The movie, after all, is the declaration that the rule of profit can not be the truth of human meals: there is something more that money can’t buy. There is something more.

9

Notice that, when Jesus appears to his disciples after his resurrection, he often eats with them.

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The American clients of Primo and Secondo do not only have different tastes: they are uneducated. It is evident since the first scene, when a woman asks Secondo to eat spaghetti with meat balls as a side order of a tasteful Risotto. The contrast is not only between two different styles, but between knowledge and ignorance. Once again we are told that senses can and must be trained and educated. At the evening’s dinner everyone is available to be taught. Ann, to whom Primo is in love, is invited in the kitchen to see him cooking and Primo explains her Italian taste and culture. Food and taste are the exclusive protagonists of a scene of seduction. When Ann tries his food, Primo says: “Eating good food makes us close to God”, because “The bread of angels is the knowledge of God”. The sentence is indeed very important, because it links spiritual values with the education of tastes. We will discuss about this considering the last movie: the ‘Babette’s Feast’. At last, in ‘The Big Night’ there is a character, almost unseen, that I would like to point out: Cristiano, the young boy that helps Primo and Secondo in the restaurant. Despite he barely speaks, his presence is important: the movie starts with Cristiano looking at the beach – the same beach of the fight between the two brothers – and he is the only person present in the morning breakfast, when Primo and Secondo reconcile. Strange enough, Cristiano is not Italian, but Spanish: he is an immigrant as the two brothers, but he comes from a different country, he is an additional identity. Being present in all the important moments, he represents a spectator in the comedy, but also, somehow, a judge. He is not from the family, he is not Italian and he is not American either: others are guests in the dinner, but he is the only one – excluding Ann – to be guest in the kitchen. This strange presence has an important role: he is the ‘third’ in the relationship between Primo and Secondo, and, as a third, he is the only one who can really measure the justice of their relationship and the justice of their work for others. Any relationship is not just until it is exposed to the sight of a third; any relationship must be open to this judgement, since any relationship might be a complicity against the rest of 207

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the world. It is meaningful that in ‘La Grande Abbuffata’ the servant does not know the project of his masters and he is soon substituted by the young teacher, that becomes accomplice. Cristiano is there, spectator of all the circumstances, judge of the brotherhood. He leaves the scene only when, in the last breakfast, Primo and Secondo hug again: his presence is not needed anymore, justice is fulfilled. 2.3 Family meal: Kramer vs. Kramer I would like to quote briefly another movie – this time it is not a food movie – where the symbolism of food plays an important part. It is the famous ‘Kramer vs. Kramer10’, probably one of the first movies to describe the situation of a modern family facing divorce11. Of course the common meal is an important symbol of any family life and the loss of this rituality is one of the severe damages of modern time. The story is not moralistic, anyway; despite it describes very well the troubles of two people divorcing and the consequences on their son, it is far from a superficial judgement. We might say, on the contrary, that the movie is the story of an evolution: from the first catastrophic discovery of the end of a marriage, to the last scene when Joanna decides to leave to Ted their child. Ted Kramer will learn to take care of his son, he will loose his important job and he will discover how hard can be to grow a son on his own. They might not be anymore a united family, but they both become capable to be a mother and a father. To underline the growth of the main characters, the movie starts and ends with two different breakfasts: in the first one, Ted is alone with his son for the first time; in the last one, Ted is convinced to have lost him in the juridic fight against his wife.

10

Robert Benton, Kramer vs. Kramer, USA 1979. The movie was produced in 1979; in Italy divorce was introduced in 1970. Kramer vs. Kramer was in our country particularly popular, because it told a story that Italian society needed to understand. 11

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The first breakfast is, predictably, a disaster. The sleepiness of Ted and Billy are a symbol of a low awareness of how profound will be the change of their lives. In this situation Ted seems confident, but everything goes wrong: he discovers not to be able even to prepare a French toast. Cooking becomes here a symbol of the role of educator: pretending does not work, to be up to his role he will need to learn many lessons. You can’t be an educator if you did not educate yourself, which means to convert yourself. No cooking, suggests the movie, can be done without the proper preparation; no nutrition is possible without conversion. It is not, of course, just a cooking issue: Ted needs to learn to take care of his son, understanding in this way also his wife’s efforts. The greatest and most painful part of the movie is, no doubt, the divorce trial, where the two Kramer fight for the custody of Billy. Despite his conversion, despite his attempt to be a good father, despite the sacrifice of his job and his new awareness, the judge is against Ted so that, at the end of the movie, he prepares what seems to be the last breakfast. In the meanwhile Joanna arrives. This breakfast is very different from the first one. Ted learned not to lie to his child just as much as he learned to feed him. He is not anymore preparing breakfast alone: now Billy helps him and, together, they seem to be, finally, able to face their new life. Any table is a place of care: the preparation of the food – no matter how simple – is always an act of care. Cooking is one of the oddest human activities: men do not really need to cook. The same food could be ingested also without any preparation, as animals do; cooking produces an obvious decrease of the amount of food, and the time spent for the preparation is usually much longer than the time spent eating. Somehow cooking shares with other spiritual activities an imbalance between the effort and the result. Sometimes the disproportion is similar to art; hours of work for something that is consumed in a few minutes: any musical concert can costs many days of practice and last a while. In the movie Kramer vs. Kramer, where the main problem is about time – the time that Ted needs to spend with his son, the time that he 209

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takes away from work – the breakfast is a symbol of the wastefulness of care. Education needs this wastefulness, it needs gratuity, our main affections need a waste of time, energy, fantasy and love: this is why the table can be a symbol of a family life. The movie gets to the point: love is a matter of waste and any family shall be open to the gift’s reasons, because only this makes education possible. This is how Ted will actually keep Billy: he learnt to spare his time and his career for his education and eventually also Joanna understands this. Learning to cook for his son is the great symbol of his conversion and guarantees of the possibility of this new family to survive. At the end also Joanna makes a choice of gratuitousness: despite she wins the trial to have her son in custody, she decides to leave Billy with Ted in the very moment she is not obliged anymore to do it. Somehow renouncing to consider her son as a right, she makes the life of the family possible again. This is particularly interesting for the definition of a family in contemporary time: what exactly is a family? Christian defense of the familiar institution is of course a fundamental task; nevertheless family is often pointed as a value. And the modern idea of values is ambiguous: values are often quoted as empty boxes and it is not clear what is actually inside. Everybody knows that the family must be protected, but what exactly is a family? And what happens to the family when a marriage is broken? The symbol of the common meal is meaningful: even in troubles, even facing a divorce, a family is still possible when the parents are available waste time, love, energy for the someone else. Adults can be parents when they discover that their energies are enough not only for themselves, but to give birth to a new life: the stability of any family has profound roots in this attitude and should be probably evaluated on this. 2.4 The mystical banquet: Babette’s Feast The last movie is a Danish production: despite its complexity and its theological interest, it became famous all over the world and it was 210

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recognized as a masterpiece, winning an Oscar prize in 1988. The ‘Babette’s Feast12 ’ – from a Karen Blixen’s tale13 – is the story of a Christian community living in very strict moral conditions in a village in Northern Denmark during the late 18th century. The members of the community try to live the Gospel in its purity and their existence is sober, constantly guided by the sermons of their charismatic protestant pastor. The pastor has two daughters: Martina and Philippa. All the characters are painted in light colors: the good and the ‘bad’ ones; the narrator decides not to judge, but only to describe the drama of their lives. The style of this narration is refined and delicate, just like some paintings from the Flemish Renaissance, enlightened by a soft northern light; Blixen’s dialogues and modern cinematography reproduce this style delightfully. The first part of the movie takes place when the pastor is still alive and his daughters are young and beautiful; in this period the village has two visits: a young soldier who falls in love with Martina and a French singer, Achille Papin, that proposes to Philippa. Both the women freely decide to decline the proposals and to stay in the village to accompany the community after the pastor’s death. After some years, when the two sisters are in the beginning of their aging, a young lady, Babette, arrives from Paris looking for protection: during the Paris Commune her husband and son were killed and Babette had to flee far away to survive. The sisters accept to keep her as a governess and there she stays for free, accepting the community’s style and gaining everybody’s affection. One day, after a dozen of years, Babette wins a big amount of money from a lottery and the two sisters sadly believe that she will soon leave them and go back to her previous life. In the occasion Babette asks for the permission to prepare a ‘French Dinner’ for the community in the 100th anniver-

12 13

Daniel Axel, Babettes gæstebund, Denmark 1987. Karen Blixen, Babette’s Feast, Penguin Modern Classics, London 2011.

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sary of the pastor’s birth as a thanksgiving to their hospitality. Despite they have always followed a strict and poor way of living, the sisters accept and Babette starts working to prepare an incredibly rich banquet. Scared by the situation, preoccupied for the sin of gluttony the sisters decide, with the rest of the community, that this will be only a concession to Babette and that they will all try to forget the sense of taste and not to talk about food, so that they can avoid any temptation. At the feast the general Lorens Lowenhielm – the young soldier, now grown up – is also invited and the dinner is served for twelve people. The incredible beauty of the table, the flavor of food and wine, the care of the preparation links the community in a unique way, resolving all the quarrels that, after years of common life, were emerging from the past. Babette’s banquet is an interpretation of Christian Eucharist, as it is usually interpreted14 : twelve are invited, there is an immense gift (10.000 Francs) that is actually all Babette’s richness, there is a process of salvation that produces a reconciliation and a new life in the community. I think it would be more precise to compare the ‘Babette’s Feast’ to one of the apparitions of the the Risen in the Gospel of Luke: the episode of the two disciples of Emmaus. I have no proof that both the Karen Blixen or the director of the movie had in mind this particular part of the Gospel, nevertheless – making this episode also reference to the Eucharist – the comparison is not improper. We will keep the Gospel it in the background, so I suggest an attentive reading. Now that very same day, two of them were on their way to a village called Emmaus, seven miles from Jerusalem, and they were talking together about all that had happened. And it happened that as they 14

Wendy M. Wright, Babette's Feast: A Religious Film (http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/BabetteWW.htm): “The pastor's memorial banquet becomes a recapitulation of the Last Supper and, by extension, of the Christian liturgy and the eschatological banquet”

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were talking together and discussing it, Jesus himself came up and walked by their side; but their eyes were prevented from recognizing him. He said to them, 'What are all these things that you are discussing as you walk along?' They stopped, their faces downcast. Then one of them, called Cleopas, answered him, 'You must be the only person staying in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have been happening there these last few days.’ He asked, 'What things?' They answered, 'All about Jesus of Nazareth, who showed himself a prophet powerful in action and speech before God and the whole people; and how our chief priests and our leaders handed him over to be sentenced to death, and had him crucified. Our own hope had been that he would be the one to set Israel free. And this is not all: two whole days have now gone by since it all happened; and some women from our group have astounded us: they went to the tomb in the early morning, and when they could not find the body, they came back to tell us they had seen a vision of angels who declared he was alive. Some of our friends went to the tomb and found everything exactly as the women had reported, but of him they saw nothing.' Then he said to them, 'You foolish men! So slow to believe all that the prophets have said! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer before entering into his glory?’ Then, starting with Moses and going through all the prophets, he explained to them the passages throughout the scriptures that were about himself. When they drew near to the village to which they were going, he made as if to go on; but they pressed him to stay with them saying, 'It is nearly evening, and the day is almost over.' So he went in to stay with them. Now while he was with them at table, he took the bread and said the blessing; then he broke it and handed it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized him; but he had vanished from their sight. Then they said to each other, 'Did not our hearts burn within us as he talked to us on the road and explained the scriptures to us?’ They set out that instant and returned to Jerusalem. There they found the Eleven assembled together with their companions, who said to them, 'The Lord has indeed risen and has appeared

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to Simon.’ Then they told their story of what had happened on the 15 road and how they had recognized him at the breaking of bread .

2.4.1 It’s nearly evening, the day is almost over All the guests in the Pastor’s house are somehow pilgrims, exactly like the two disciples of Luke’s Gospel. Passing by the village, they bring with themselves a delusion towards life and a question about their identity. The young officer lived as dissolute and guesses the possibility of a pure experience of life, while Achille Papin is facing the emptiness of his success. Their love towards Martina and Philippa is a possibility of salvation for both and we understand that they are both seduced not only by their beauty, but by their faith and their life style. Nevertheless, to understand this, the two guests will need a lifetime, they will need to fulfill their pilgrimage: in the beginning, when they leave the village, they are simply disappointed for their love not exchanged. Indeed, the path of salvation is not the one they were expecting: they will not marry the two women, they will go back to their lives with a heavy heart, but eventually they will also understand what needed to be understood. The same experience happens to the two disciples of Emmaus: “Our own hope had been that he would be the one to set Israel free”, they say. In front of his death, his absence and his apparent failure, the disciples are disgruntled, “their faces downcast”. They do not identify Jesus, alive, resurrected, walking with them: their eyes are “prevented from recognizing him”. The recognition – their salvation, the proof that his death is not the last word – will need much more: they will need to understand deeply their experience and meet again Jesus’ gift, while he is breaking the bread. It is precisely what happens to the general: he will understand the sense of his salvation during the last banquet.

15

Luke 24,13-35

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Pilgrim in the community is also Babette: she comes in the night, in need of help – with a letter o presentation from Achille Papin – and she is invited to stay in the community. Indeed she, this third pilgrim – exactly like Jesus in the path from Jerusalem to Emmaus –, will eventually be a blessing for the community. The two sisters save her, they let her stay with a gesture of hospitality. In the episode of the two disciples of Emmaus Jesus himself is invited to stay with a similar gesture of care: “It’s nearly evening, the day is almost over”. Hospitality, as we already stated, is one of the main dimensions of any human meal: hospitality is a place left to an unexpected guest. The disciples’ hospitality – a simple gesture of human kindness – will be rewarded by Jesus’ revelation. Of course this does not mean that human kindness can produce Christ’s epiphany, but still it is the condition for its fulfillment: reception of otherness is always a little human miracle that becomes a space open to Grace. The letter to the Hebrews, alluding to Abraham in Mamre, says: “Continue to love each other like brothers, and remember always to welcome strangers, for by doing this, some people have entertained angels without knowing it”16. Hospitality is not just a matter of politeness, but the fundamental opening to alterity. Now, as it often happens, the miracle of hospitality in both episodes is that the guest and the host are overturned, so that the guest becomes host and the host guest. Jesus breaks the bread for his hosts and Babette, the guest, will prepare the French Dinner, she hosting her guests and becoming for them a reason of salvation. 2.4.2 Fasting and eating: man is what he does not eat The first part of the movie is somehow a celebration of fasting. Some beautiful scenes describe the noble and poor meals of the community, the choice of a sober way of living. But the greatest fasting is the

16

Hebrews 13,1.

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sisters’ sacrifice: they are both somehow bound with their guests, but they renounce to a possible change of life for the sake of the village and for loyalty towards their previous choice. Martina and Philippa are fully satisfied of their simple life and, despite they feel the seduction of the two men and of new possibilities, they choose their condition. Their life is somehow monastic and recalls our thoughts about human conversion to order. Particularly in the relationship between Philippa and Achille Papin, there is an exquisite scene when Philippa and Papin sing together the aria ‘Là ci darem la mano’, from Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’. Everybody seems to be aware of the meaning of the song and of the power of its seduction: Philippa’s voice is beautiful, Achille’s gestures are very explicit. But no one needs to recommend anything to the young girl: she freely decides to end the song lessons, the nascent relationship with Papin and a promising career. Fasting is not simply a renounce, fasting is a choice: this is very clear in the movie. Any choice excludes other possibilities. “There are things that are impossible in life”: this is the drama of choices, as the young Lowenheilm states. He will also make a choice: he will concentrate on his career and forget about romance. Lowenhielm will marry an aristocratic woman, keeping Martina in his mind for a lifetime as the unforgettable and yet impossible love of his life, a joy that life has made impossible to reach, but that is still able to enlighten his life. The same experience is in Papin’s perception: when he discovers that Philippa refuses his music lessons, he “looses hope”. Nevertheless some years after their meeting, in the letter of presentation for Babette, he will state that Philippa has made the right choice: forgotten by his fans, alone in Paris, he imagines the lady surrounded by the affordable affects of the community. She could have been a star in Paris’ Opera, but the part she has chosen is the best one. Still ‘this is not the end’, he says: in Paradise Philippa will sing and she will be the artist that God meant her to be. Papin understands that Philippa’s fasting is the true feeding, her poverty is the true richness. In a paradoxic way his life of richness and fame is the real fasting. And, at 216

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the end of life, Paradise will be a place where God makes impossible possible. Fasting is not an act of heroic abnegation, fasting is the decision to be faithful to ourselves: it is not an act of censure of senses, but – once again – an attempt to educate them. If they want to inherit a future, humans need to postpone the fulfillment of their needs; the enjoyment of life is not immediate, but connected with a renounce 17. This choice is not a denial of joy: it is the profound and mysterious path of human true enjoyment. In this sense, if Fauerbach could state that “man is what he eats” (der Mesch ist was er ißt), we might as well say that “man is what he does not eat”. Any human choice is also the rejection of other possibilities and loving a state of life (a style, an identity) also means the hard and difficult renounce to others. Abstinence – in this way – is not a religious value in itself, abstinence is the possibility of taste, the possibility to persevere the good taste of the life you chose, which is often very different from what you could expect. But the movie also remembers that fasting has no meaning outside this taste: if it looses the good sense of joy, fasting becomes the reason of complaint towards life. This is precisely what happens in the community where, aging, the brothers regret past choices, evoke mistakes and betrayals, sins and regrets. The memory of their spiritual father’s care and tenderness towards them seems to be slowly fading and their choice, together with its fasting, becomes more and more heavy. Simply: life is slowly loosing its taste. Not by chance, worried by Babette’s feast, the community takes the decision to “suspend the

17

The biblical tale of Esau and the bowl of red pottage is the famous episode of the book of Genesis about how an immediate satisfaction of a need can become an obstacle to the fulfillment of the future. Esau, hungry, gives to his brother his birthright in exchange for a stew of red pottage. In this way his future is lost because of his inability to control his hunger.

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sense of taste”: they will not judge the food, they will eat without tasting to preserve their righteousness. But, as we know, taste can’t be suspended: the nature of taste is a judgement that can’t be interrupted. Senses are strong and their seduction is unavoidable. As the dinner proceeds, everyone is won over by Babette’s delicious food. If in the beginning they seem to succeed in their intention (since “food is not important, just as in the marriage of Cana”). But at a certain point – when the ‘Cailles au Sarcophage18 ’ are served – they discover that their fasting had sense only if it was a means to appreciate the real taste of life, their renounce had a value only as a way to savor the totality of God’s gifts. One of the ladies says: “Man shall not merely refrain from, but also reject any thought of food and drink. Only then can he eat and drink in the proper spirit”. She is right: there is a time for renounce, of course, but there is also a time to eat and drink in proper spirit. Christian fasting gains its sense in the possibility to teach how to properly eat and drink, it is not a denial, but a statement of the true taste of life. The courage of renounce is vital for the fulfillment of our freedom, but at the same time, human choice finds its fulfillment only when it meets God’s mercy, which is “endless and makes possible the impossible”, as the Colonel states in the end. The rectitude of life can be enough to guarantee good choices, but it is not enough to fulfill human salvation, which also involves senses. Salvation is a result of God’s mercy that reaches us from the outside with the power of surprising our intentions. During the dinner the thankful memory of the pastor’s care rises again, and this is made possible by the unexpected taste of food and wine.

18

The meaning of this dish is highly symbolic. The Cailles (quails) are one of the foods given by God in the Exodus and the Sarcophage (sarcophagus) an allusion to Christ’s death.

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The Gospels tells that Jesus’ disciples were not used to fasting: the Pharisees accused him about this. Jesus answers that “they will fast when the groom will be taken away”, meaning his death. The loss of their master, the death of their friend will be for his disciples the real fasting of their life. But, once again, this loss is a choice and as a choice it must be understood. Somehow the disciples are left alone after his death: Jesus is aware of the risk of this solitude but, despite this, he freely decided the gift of his life. The experience of God’s victory, nevertheless, is the experience of their master given back to their friendship, coming from the death with his beloved body. With him the disciples experience a new possibility of relationship so that what was chosen is granted (Jesus’ gift of his life) and what was rejected is also granted (Jesus’ relationship with his disciples). But, once again, the possibility to enjoy his eternal presence is consequent with the ability to accept and understand his death. On the other hand, a fasting without this perception of mercy and salvation becomes ideological and somehow useless. It remains just the terrible weight of delusion oppressing life and the bitter taste of defeat, very well known by the Colonel and, somehow, also by the community. The two disciples of Emmaus are in the beginning full of the same regret: “our hope was…”. Jesus does not console them, he does not deny the necessity of sadness. Sadness and regret are a part of life and Jesus does not appear with his Resurrection until they deeply understand the affordability of his death. But, still, hope is never satisfied by fasting, by good intention, by the effort of will. Hope can only be satisfied by God’s mercy that promise to give back what was lost19 . The disciple is not asked for heroism, the disciple 19

This is also Christ’s answer to Peters question: “Peter took this up. 'Look,' he said to him, 'we have left everything and followed you.’ Jesus said, 'In truth I tell you, there is no one who has left house, brothers, sisters, mother, father, children or land for my sake and for the sake of the gospel who will not receive a hundred times as much, houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and land – and persecu-

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does not have the assignment to defend the Gospel with his abstinence: the disciple is and will always be object of God’s care and concern. After a long life of fasting and sharing, the community needs to learn how much God granted to them. In other words, fasting is possible only in an eschatological perspective, it has no sense if it does not point the eschatological fulfillment of any human intention. 2.4.3 Grace and Mercy will kiss The destiny of our existence is a place where “mercy and justice will kiss”: a time of universal reconciliation where God “grants what we have chosen”, but at the same time he “grants what we rejected”, as the Colonel says. The conciliation of opposites is God’s possibility. Grace and mercy, justice and peace can meet only in him. Life comes from death, and still the Risen is the same person that gave his life in sacrifice, for human salvation. This is why the banquet costs to Babette all her possessions. The young lady does not esitate to donate the entire amount of money she won to prepare the French Dinner. Once again, we are in front of a gift and, once again, the gift is not only precious for its totality, but for the fact that it is unexpected. The community and the two sisters soon realize how different this dinner will be from all they experienced until then: material and spiritual enjoyment are finally conciliated. Babette’s gift is obscure and unintelligible for the two sisters, it is somehow a scandal. Martina dreams of a Sabbath and suspects a spiritual ruin for the community so that, as we stated, they decide not to comment the food. What happens while eating is a universal and complete reconciliation, a moment of eschatology. The first place of reconciliation is the community: we will see them – after dinner –

tions too – now in this present time and, in the world to come, eternal life” (Mark 10:28–30)

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dancing and singing around a well. The old quarrels and discussions disappear progressively, they recognize each other as brothers. In the day devoted to the memory of the Pastor their remembrance is slowly purified and they recall happy moments with him, they discover his tenderness towards them and not a single word is told about his rigidity and severeness. He really has the role of a father and his faith becomes for everybody a mean of salvation and benediction. Another reconciliation is between Martina and the Colonel. He once left her stating that in life some things are impossible. After the dinner he remembers that nothing was actually lost, since he will stay spiritually with Martina for the rest of their lives. Martina has clearly strong feelings towards the Colonel, but she also seems to understand that she didn’t really lose him, but she always kept him for herself and for the whole life. The colonel will leave knowing that “nothing is impossible” and he seems to be the first one to give voice to a reconciliation which is not primarily with others, but with himself and his choices. Philippa also has the possibility of reconciliation with her choices that – it was quite clear – she had suffered. When the dinner is over and Babette reveals her gift, Philippa addresses to her the exact sentences that Papin wrote some years before for Philippa: “in Paradise you will be the artist that God always meant you to be”. At the end of the evening Philippa repeats to Babette the same promise. Babette herself is the mean of this reconciliation with Philippa’s past, since she was send there from Achille Papin. Both the two sisters, in this way, are reconciled with their past, through to the seduction of food. The destiny of our existence is a place where “mercy and justice will kiss”: a time of universal reconciliation where God grants what we have chosen, but at the same time he grants what we rejected. Only a well educated taste, which stood in front of fasting and at the same time did not lose the perception of flavor fits the promise.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following bibliography does not only include the text quoted in footnotes: there can be found texts that inspired this work and suggestions for further study. I tried to focus on English bibliography so that, when possible, I quoted the English translations available. Despite this, many texts fundamental for my research are in Italian; I made a selection of the Authors to whom I owe more. In some cases no English translation is available. I apologize for this inconvenient.

Introduction ARAMINI MICHELE, La terra ferita. Etica e ambiente, Monti Editore, Saronno 2010. HEIDEGGER M ARTIN, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, Verlag Güntehr Neske, Stuttgart 1954. PASCAL BLAISE, Thoughts, Letters and Minor Works, Cosimo Classics, New York 2007. POPE FRANCIS, Laudato si’. On Care for our Common Home, LEV, Roma 2015. RAHNEMA M AJID, Quand la Misere Chasse la Pauvrete, Actes Sud, Paris 2003. SEQUERI PIERANGELO, Custode, non tiranno. Per un nuovo rapporto fra persona e creato, EMI, Bologna 2014. WRIGHT NANCY G. - KILL DONALD, Ecological Healing. A Christian Vision, Orbis Books, New York 1993. XALXO PREM, Complementarity of Human Life and Other Life Forms in Nature, Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, Roma 2007.

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Approach BARTH K ARL, The Epistle to the Romans, Oxford University Press, London 1968. BONHOEFFER DIETRICH , Letters and Papers from Prison, Fortress Press, Minneapolis 2010. GUREVICH A RON, The Origins of European Individualism, WileyBlackwell, Oxford (UK) & Cambridge (USA) 1995. IBSEN HENRIK, Peer Gynt, Nick Hern Books, London 1990. JANICAUD DOMINIQUE , Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française, Eclat Editions, Paris 1992. LIA PIERLUIGI, Finalmente come Dio? Considerazioni inattuali sullo statuto morale della soggettività, Vita e Pensiero, Milano 2012. LESSING GOTTHOLD E PHREIM, On the proof of spirit and power, in Philosophical and theological writings, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2005. MARLEAU-P ONTY MAURICE , Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, London 1962. MANN GOLO, Wallenstein. His Life Narrated, Reinhart & Winston, New York, 1976. MASTERSON PATRICK , Approaching God. Between Phenomenology and Theology, Bloomsbury Academic, London 2013. MORRIS COLIN, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050-1200, University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1972. MUMFORD JAMES , Ethics at the Beginning of Life. A phenomenological critique, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2013. NIETZSCHE FRIEDRICH, Thus spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, Penguin Classics, London 1978. NORBERG-SCHULTZ CHRISTIAN, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, Rizzoli, New York 1991. OTLONE DI SANT’EMMERANA, La tentazione di un monaco. Liber de temptatione cuiusdam monachi, Mimesis, Milano 2007. RATZINGER JOSEPH, Homily for the Mass “Pro eligendo Romano Pontifice”, LEV, Roma 2005.

224

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The Doctrine of Creation BORGONOVO GIANANTONIO, Lettura esegetica di Genesi 1-11: tradizione, redazione, narrazione, in S. LANZA (ed.), Atti del Convegno: "In principio...". Origine e inizio dell'Universo, Vita e Pensiero, Milano 2011. DE U NAMUNO M IGUEL, In viaggio con don Chisciotte, Medusa, Milano 2013. DELIO ILIA - WARNER KEITH DOUGLASS - W OOD PAMELA, Care for creation. A franciscan spirituality of the earth, Franciscan Media, Cincinnati, 2007. GARCIA I R ENAU MARIA A SSUMPTA, El tapís de la creació, símbol del sagrat, Le Llare del Llibre, Barcelona 1992. MAIER R OBERTO, Il male in Dio. Incontro critico con l’ontologia della libertà di Luigi Pareyson, in SILVANO PETROSINO - SERGIO UBBIALI (ed.), Il male. Un dialogo tra teologia e filosofia, Glossa, Milano 2014. MILTON JOHN, Paradise Lost, Penguin Classics, London 2003. DE PALOL P EDRO, El tapís de la creació de la catedral de Girona, Edicions Proa, Girona 1986. PETROSINO SILVANO - UBBIALI SERGIO, L’eros della distruzione, Il Melangolo, Bologna 2014. PETROSINO SILVANO, Capovolgimenti. La casa non è una tana, l’economia non è il business, Jaca Book, Milano 2007. –, Lo stupore, Interlinea, Novara 2012. PICO DELLA M IRANDOLA GIOVANNI, Oration of the Dignity of Man, Regnery Publishing, Washington 1956. RAHNER K ARL, Homisation: The Official Teaching of The Church on Man in Relation to the Scientific Theory of Evolution, Herder K.G, Münich 1965. SEQUERI PIERANGELO, Intorno a Dio, La Scuola, Brescia 2011. WYERS FRANCES, Miguel de Unamuno: the Contrary Self, Támesis Books, London, 1976.

Fall and Redemption BUBER M ARTIN, I and thou, Bloomsbury Revelations, London 2013.

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GLISSANT ÉDOUARD, The Poetry of Relation, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2006. HENRY MICHEL, From Communism to Capitalism. Theory of a Catastrophe, Bloomsbury Academic, London 2014. ILLICH I VAN, Tools for Conviviality, Marion Boyars, London 2001. LATOUCHE SERGE, Farewell to Growth, Polity ed., Cambridge (UK) 2010. LIA PIERLUIGI, Lo splendore di Dio. Saggio sulla forma cristiana, Vita & Pensiero, Milano 2001. LACOSTE JEAN-YVES, Experience and the Absolute, Fordham University Press, New York 2004. RIES JULIEN, The Origins of Religions, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids 1994. SEQUERI PIERANGELO, Il timore di Dio, Vita & Pensiero, Milano 1993. SCAFI ALESSANDRO, Maps of Paradise, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2013. SONNET JEAN-P IERRE, Generare è narrare, Vita e Pensiero, Milano 2015. WOOTTON DAVID (ed.), Modern Political Thought. Readings from Machiavelli to Nietzsche, Hackett Publishing Company, IndianapolisCambridge, 1996.

The Discovery of Order BELYJ ANDREJ - FLORENSKIJ PAVEL, L’arte, il simbolo e Dio. Lettere sullo spirito russo, Medusa, Milano 2004. BERENSON BERNARD, Piero della Francesca, or the Ineloquent in Art, Chapman and Hall, London 1954. BERTELLI PIERO - M AETZKE A NNA MARIA - A RONBERG LAVIN MARILYN, Piero della Francesca: the legend of the true Cross in the Church of San Francesco, Arezzo, Skira, Milano 2001. DE LUBAC HENRI, Pico della Mirandola. L’alba incompiuta del Rinascimento, Jaca Book, Milano 1994. ELIADE MIRCEA, The Sacred and the Profane. On the Nature of Religion, Harper Book, New York 1961. NANCY J-L., Résistance de la poésie, William Blake & Co., Bordeaux 2004. 226

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HEIDEGGER M ARTIN, Building Dwelling Thinking, in Basic writings, Harper Collins, New York 1993. –, The Origin of the Work of Art, in Off the Beaten Track, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. –, Poetically Dwells Man in Poetry, Language, Thought, Harperperennial, New York, 1971 RICOEUR PAUL , Le symbole donne à penser, in «Esprit» 7-8 (1959). –, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, Routledge Classics, London 2003. RIES JULIEN, The Origins of Religions, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids 1994. SINI CARLO , Col dovuto rimbalzo, in DALMASSO GIANFRANCO (ed.), Disegno. La giustizia nel discorso, Jaca-Book, Milano 1984. –, La scrittura e il debito, Jaca Book, Milano 2002. DE V ORAGINE JACOBUS, The Golden Legend. Readings on the Saints, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1993.

Order as Responsibility DELEUZE GILBERT - GUATTARI FÉLIX, A Thousand Plateaus, Continuum, New York and London, 2004. GILSON ETIENNE, The Mystical Theology of St. Bernard, Cistercian Publications, Michigan 1990. KINDER T ERRYL NANCY , Cistercian Europe: Architecture of Contemplation, Cistercian Publications, Michigan 2002. LÉVINAS E MMANUEL, Totality and Infinite. An Essay on Exteriority, Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh 1969. LIA PIERLUIGI, L’estetica teologica di Bernardo di Chiaravalle, Edizioni del Galluzzo, Firenze 2007. OTTONELLO P IERO, L’esordio cistercense in Italia. Il mito del deserto, fra poteri feudali e nuove istituzioni comunali (1120-1250), ECIG, Genova 1999. ETROSINO P SILVANO, Piccola metafisica della luce, Jaca Book, Milano 2004.

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Sophiology BERDJAEV NICOLAI, The Meaning of the Creating Act, Victor Gollancz LTD, London 1955. BULGAKOV SERGEJ , Bride of the Lamb, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publish, Grand Rapids 2002. –, Philosophy of Economy. The World as Household, Yale University Press, New Haven 2000. –, Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology, Lindisfarne Press, Hudson 1993. –, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, Lindisfarne Books, Hudson 1997. CODA PIERO, Sergej Bulgakov, Morcelliana, Brescia 2003. MAIER ROBERTO, L’escatologico tra occidens e oriens. Taubes a confronto con la sofiologia di Sergej Bulgakov, in S. UBBIALI (ed.), Jacob Taubes. La fenomenologia dialettica, Glossa, Milano 2016. SERGEEV MIKHAIL , Sophiology in Russian orthodoxy: Solovʹev, Bulgakov, Losskii and Berdiaev, Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston 2006.

“Convivium” (bibliography and filmography) FERRERI M ARCO, La Grande Abbuffata, Italy 1973. KUBRIK STANLEY, Shining, USA-UK 1980. TUCCI STANLEY - SCHOTT CAMPBELL, The Big Night, USA 1996. AXEL DANIEL, Babettes gæstebund, Denmark 1987. BENTON ROBERT, Kramer vs. Kramer, USA 1979. BLIXEN KAREN, Babette’s Feast, Penguin Modern Classics, London 2011. BOTTURI FRANCESCO - ZOBOLI ROBERTO (ed.), Through the convivium. Food and nutrition between needs and cultures, Vita e Pensiero, Milano, 2014. PAGAZZI GIOVANNI CESARE , La cucina del Risorto. Gesù cuoco per l’umanità affamata, EMI, Bologna 2014. WRIGHT W ENDY M., Babette's Feast: A Religious Film, http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/BabetteWW.htm.

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