by Umberto Eco
There is a Paris that is just as real as Café de Flore—the Paris, perhaps, of Henry IV and Ravaillac, of Louis XVI’s beheading, of Felice Orsini’s assassination attempt on Napoleon III, of the entry of General Leclerc’s troops in 1944. But let’s be honest. What do we remember most, the event itself, not having been there, or its portrayal in books and movies?
We saw the liberation of Paris on the screen with Is Paris Burning?, just as we saw nineteenth-century Paris in Marcel Carné’s Les enfants du Paradis, just as the real experience of entering Place des Vosges at night gives us the thrill we’d felt only in the cinema, just as we relive the world of Edith Piaf even though we never knew her, and we know all about Rue Lepic because Yves Montand sang about it.
We can actually walk along the Seine, pausing at the stalls of the bouquinistes, but there, too, we are reliving so many romantic walks we have read about, and on seeing Notre-Dame from a distance, we cannot help thinking of Quasimodo and Esmeralda. We remember the Paris of the musketeers dueling at the monastery of the Barefoot Carmelites, the Paris of Balzac’s courtesans, the Paris of Lucien de Rubempré and Eugène de Rastignac, of Bel Ami, of Frédéric Moreau and Madame Arnoux, of Gavroche on the barricades, of Swann and Odette de Crécy.
Our “real” Paris is Montmartre, the one we can now only imagine, in the time of Picasso and Modigliani, or Maurice Chevalier, and let’s also include Gershwin’s An American in Paris and its saccharine yet memorable reinterpretation with Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron, and even that of Fantômas escaping through the sewers and, naturally, that of Inspector Maigret, whose cases we have followed through all the fogs, all the bistros, all the nights of Quai des Orfèvres.
We have to acknowledge that much of what we have understood about life and society, about love and death, we have learned from this imaginary, fictional, yet very real Paris. And so a blow has been struck against our own home, a home in which we have lived much longer than the houses we actually live in. But all these memories nevertheless give us hope, because “la Seine roule roule,” the Seine flows on.
2015
Religion and Philosophy
Seers see what they know
When I read Sister Lúcia’s letter about the third secret of Fátima, now made public for the first time, it struck me as being familiar. Then I realized: the good sister’s text, written not in 1917 when she was an illiterate child but in 1944 as a grown-up nun, is interwoven with immediately recognizable references to the book of Revelation.
Lúcia sees an angel with a flaming sword that appears as though it will set the world on fire. The book of Revelation speaks of angels that spread fire in the world, as in chapter 8, verse 8, with reference to the angel of the second trumpet. It’s true this angel doesn’t have a flaming sword, but we shall see later where this sword might have come from, although traditional iconography has a fair number of archangels with flaming swords.
Then Lúcia sees the divine light as in a mirror. Here the idea comes not from Revelation but from Saint Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians: heavenly things we now see “through a glass,” and only later will we see them face-to-face.
After which comes the bishop dressed in white. There is just one, whereas in various parts of Revelation (6:11, 7:9, and 7:14) there are several servants of the Lord in white robes, elected to martyrdom.
Then bishops and priests are seen going up a steep mountain, and we are now at Revelation 6:15, where the powerful men of the world hide in the dens and rocks of the mountains. Then the Holy Father arrives in a city “half in ruins” and encounters the souls of corpses along the way. The city, along with the corpses, is mentioned in Revelation 11:8, while it falls into ruins in 11:13 and again, in the form of Babylon, in 18:19.
We continue on. The bishop and many other followers are killed by soldiers with arrows and guns, and though Sister Lúcia brings matters up to date by introducing guns, massacres are carried out in 9:7, at the sound of the fifth trumpet, by breastplated locusts with spiked weapons.
Finally, two angels appear who sprinkle blood from a crystal watering jug (in Portuguese, a regador). Now, there are many angels in Revelation who sprinkle blood, but in 8:5 they do it with a censer, in 14:20 the blood comes out of a winepress, in 16:3 it is poured from a vial.
Why a watering jug? It occurred to me that Fátima is not far from the Asturias region where those splendid Mozarabic miniatures were created in the Middle Ages. And in them angels appear pouring jets of blood from cups that are difficult to identify, as though watering the world. That Lúcia may have been remembering the iconographical tradition is suggested by the angel with the flaming sword mentioned earlier, since the trumpets held by the angels in those miniatures sometimes look like scarlet blades.
It is interesting that if we go beyond the brief newspaper reports and read the full theological commentary by Cardinal Ratzinger, we can see that this man, while he stresses that a private vision is not a matter of faith, and that an allegory is not a prophecy to be taken literally, specifically notes similarities with the book of Revelation.
Furthermore, he states that a person sees things in a vision “insofar as he is able, in the modes of representation and consciousness available to him,” so that “he can arrive at the image only within the bounds of his capacities and possibilities.” By which, in rather more secular terms, though Ratzinger heads the section “The Anthropological Structure of Private Revelations,” he means that, if Jungian archetypes don’t exist, every seer sees what his culture has taught him to see.
2000
European roots
This summer the newspapers have been livened up by the debate as to whether it is acceptable for the European Constitution to make reference to Europe’s Christian origins. Those in favor argue the obvious fact that Europe was born under a Christian culture before the fall of the Roman Empire, from at least the time of Emperor Constantine’s edict in 313. Just as the Eastern world cannot be conceived without Buddhism, Europe cannot be conceived without recognizing the role played by the Catholic Church, by the devoutly Christian kings, by scholastic theology, and by the actions and example of its great saints.
Those who argue against such a reference invoke the secular principles on which modern democracies are based. Those in favor suggest that secularism is a recent development in Europe, a legacy of the French Revolution, nothing to do with the origins that are rooted in the monastic or Franciscan tradition. Those against it think above all about the Europe of tomorrow, which is destined to become a multiethnic continent, and where an explicit reference to Christian roots could halt the process of integration for newcomers and reduce other traditions and beliefs, some of considerable size, to the status of minority cultures and cults that are merely tolerated.
It is therefore not just a war of religion; it relates to a political project, an anthropological vision, and the decision about whether the physiognomy of Europe should be drawn on the strength of its population’s past or on the strength of its people’s future.
Let us look at the past. Has Europe developed solely on the basis of Christian culture? I’m not thinking about the benefits European culture has reaped over the centuries, starting with Indian mathematics, Arabic medicine, or contacts farther east that predate Marco Polo and go back as far as Alexander the Great. Every culture absorbs elements from cultures near and far, but then develops its own character. It’s not enough to say that we have to be grateful to the Indians or the Arabs for the number zero if it was Europe that first came up with the idea that nature is written in mathematical notation. The fact is that we’re forgetting Greco-Roman culture.
Europe absorbed Greco-Roman culture in terms of its law, its philosophical thought, and even its popular beliefs. Christianity incorporated pagan rituals and myths, often casually, and forms of polytheism can still be found in popular religion. It wasn’t only the Renaissance world that was populated with Venuses and Apollos and went on to explore the classical world, its ruins, and its manuscripts
. Medieval Christianity built its theology on the thought of Aristotle, rediscovered through the Arabs, and if it ignored much of Plato it didn’t ignore Neo-Platonism, which greatly influenced the fathers of the Church. Nor could Augustine, the greatest of Christian thinkers, be imagined without the impact of Platonic thought. The very notion of empire, over which there has been a thousand-year conflict between European states, and between states and Church, is of Roman origin. Christian Europe chose the Latin of Rome as the language of its sacred rituals, its religious thought, its law, and its university disputations.
There again, a Christian tradition is inconceivable without Jewish monotheism. The text on which European culture is based, the first text that the first printer thought to print, the text whose translation by Luther practically established the German language, the principal text of the Protestant world, is the Bible. Christian Europe was born and grew up singing the psalms, quoting the prophets, meditating on Job and on Abraham. Jewish monotheism was indeed the bridge that allowed dialogue between Christian monotheism and Islamic monotheism.
But it doesn’t end there. Indeed, Greek culture, at least from the time of Pythagoras, would have been inconceivable without the influence of Egyptian culture, and one of the most significant phenomena of European culture, namely the Renaissance, was inspired by the teachings of the Egyptians and the Chaldeans, while the European image, from the first attempts to decipher the obelisks up until Champollion, from the Empire style to the modern and very Western imaginings of the New Age, were inspired by Nefertiti, the mysteries of the pyramids, the pharaoh’s curse, and the golden scarab.
So I don’t think it out of place in a constitution to make reference to the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian roots of our continent. Likewise, just as Rome opened its own pantheon to gods of every race and put men with black skin on the imperial throne—and we shouldn’t forget that Saint Augustine was born in Africa—Europe should declare itself ready, by virtue of these very roots, to include every other cultural and ethnic contribution, since openness is one of its most distinguished cultural features.
2003
The lotus and the cross
I’ve followed with a great deal of interest the discussion begun by Cardinal Ratzinger over allowing Catholic clergy to use Eastern corporeal techniques as an aid to meditation and religious discipline. Certainly, leaving aside the breathing techniques practiced by Hesychasts in early Christian times, the prayers of modern-day devotees take account of the role bodily rhythms and postures play in setting the mind to meditation. The techniques of Eastern meditation tend, however, to use the body to bring about a sort of annulment of sensibility and of will, in which the body, and with it the pain and miseries of our material nature, are forgotten. In this respect they come close to that search for suppression of anxiety and pain that characterized classical and pagan ataraxia.
On this point one can agree with Cardinal Ratzinger. Christianity is based on the idea of a son of God who, as son of man, points the way to redemption from evil through the cross. For Christianity, pain cannot be forgotten; indeed, it is a fundamental instrument of spiritual growth.
I don’t wish to be misunderstood: what I am referring to here has nothing to do with a recent controversy that has erupted at a high level over whether or not Christians should be reducing pain in the world. From reading just a few pages of the Gospels it is clear that Christians have a duty to alleviate the pain of others. But they must know how to deal with their own pain. Christians must make sacrifices so others do not suffer, and must do what is possible to reduce the pain that afflicts the world. So they must also reduce their own pain, if this can be done without harming others. Medicine is therefore welcome if it alleviates our sufferings; suicide and masochism are sinful. But since some degree of pain, through original sin or through the imperfections of this sublunary world, is impossible to eliminate, Christians must draw the maximum moral and ascetic benefit from the pain that awaits them.
Ideally no one should suffer, to the extent that it depends on you. But since even with the best of intentions you cannot eliminate the evil in the world, you have to know how to accept and make good use of that portion of pain that life will bring. I am thinking of the magnificent recent book Filosofia della libertà (Philosophy of Freedom) by Luigi Pareyson. After several pages of high metaphysical tension on the terrible question of whether evil paradoxically lurks in the same sphere as the divine, Pareyson celebrates pain, freely accepted and not ignored, as the means of overcoming evil.
It’s not essential to be a practicing Christian to accept this point of view: it permeates Western thought, and the finest writings of poets and philosophers who are nonbelievers, above all Giacomo Leopardi, originate from this ethos. Many Eastern doctrines are wholly extraneous to such an ethos. I would not agree with Cardinal Ratzinger if, based on such assumptions, he wanted to prevent laypeople or non-Christians from practicing whatever forms of religious discipline they choose. Likewise, I wouldn’t wish to comment on the assurances of the Catholic clergy who remind the cardinal that sitting in the lotus position doesn’t mean forgetting the mystery of the cross. These are internal Church matters. But the debate involves us all to the extent that, as Benedetto Croce said, we cannot not call ourselves Christians.
Recently a philosopher declared on a TV chat show that to resolve the crisis in the Western world we have to rediscover Islamic spirituality, using the unfortunate metaphor “sword of Islam,” once used by Mussolini. I don’t rule out the possibility that some might find the solution to their problems in the totemic rituals of Native American tribes. But, being what we are, our philosophy included, we have been brought up in a Judeo-Christian culture. It may be helpful for repentant terrorists to shed their skin, but philosophers decide their own conversion by looking inside the skin in which they are born.
2005
Relativism?
Perhaps it’s not so much the fault of media crassness as of those obsessed with how the media will report them, but certain debates even between people not lacking in common sense now take place with the clash of cudgels, with a lack of finesse, using words as subtly as boulders. A typical example in Italy is the debate between so-called theocons, who accuse secular thinkers of “relativism,” and representatives of secular thought, who accuse their opponents of “fundamentalism.”
What does “relativism” mean in philosophy? That our representations of the world’s complexity are not exhaustive, but are always views from differing perspectives, each of which contain a grain of truth? There have been, and still are, Christian philosophers who support this view. That these representations are not to be judged in terms of truth, but in terms of historical or cultural needs? Richard Rorty supports this in his version of “pragmatism.” The proposition that whatever we know is relative to the way in which the subject knows it? This comes from Kant. That every proposition is true only within a given paradigm? This is called “holism.” That ethical values are relative to cultures? This was discovered in the 1600s. That there are no facts but only interpretations? This is what Nietzsche said. What about the concept that if there’s no God, then all is permissible? That is Dostoyevskian nihilism. What about the theory of relativity? Come on, let’s be serious.
But it ought to be clear that if someone is a relativist in the Kantian sense, he cannot be one in the Dostoyevskian sense. Kant believed in God and duty. Nietzschean relativism has little to do with cultural anthropology, since the former doesn’t believe in facts and the latter doesn’t doubt them. “Holism,” as interpreted by Quine, is firmly anchored in sane empiricism, which places much reliance on the stimuli we receive from the environment, and so forth.
In short, it seems that the term “relativism” can refer to forms of modern thought often in mutual conflict. Sometimes thinkers firmly anchored in a profound realism are regarded as relativists, and “relativism” is used with the polemical ardor with which nineteenth-century Jesuits spoke of “Kantian poison.”
&n
bsp; But if all of the above is relativism, then there are only two philosophies that completely withstand this accusation, and they are radical Neo-Thomism and the theory of consciousness in Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. A strange alliance.
2005
Chance and Intelligent Design
Last week in La Repubblica, Eugenio Scalfari wrote about a story that seemed dead and buried, or rather, a story limited to the American Bible Belt, isolated from the world, clinging to its fierce fundamentalism. The arguments over Darwinism have resurfaced, and have even affected plans for the reform of our school system, by which I mean the Italian Catholic school system.
I emphasize the word “Catholic” because Christian fundamentalism comes from Protestant circles and is characterized by a determination to interpret the scriptures literally. But for the scriptures to be interpreted literally, they must be freely interpreted by the believer, and this is typical of Protestantism. There should be no Catholic fundamentalism, since for Catholics the interpretation of the scriptures is mediated by the Church.
Back in the time of the Church fathers, and earlier with Philo of Alexandria, there was a softer hermeneutic approach, such as that of Saint Augustine, who was ready to admit that the Bible often spoke using metaphors and allegories, and it was therefore quite possible that the seven days of the creation were seven thousand years. And the Church accepted this hermeneutic position.
Once it is conceded that the seven days of the creation are a poetical account that can be interpreted beyond the letter, Genesis suggests that Darwin is right: first there is the Big Bang with the explosion of light, then the planets take form, and on Earth there are great geological upheavals as the lands are separated from the seas. Plants, fruits, and seeds appear, and the waters begin to teem with living creatures as life starts to emerge from the water. Birds rise up in flight, and only later do mammals appear. The genealogical position of reptiles is unclear, but we can’t expect too much of Genesis. Only at the culmination of this process, and, I suppose, after the great anthropomorphous monkeys, does man appear. Man, who, lest we forget, is not created from nothing, but from mud—in other words, from previous material. More evolutionist than this, though without excluding the presence of a Creator, is hardly possible.