Italian Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, delivers a speech during a conference at the Sorbonne University in Paris March 25. (CNS photo/Jacky Naegelen, Reuters)
While secularists in various positions of
influence all over the world have been stepping up their attempts to prevent
the spread of the Gospel by depicting religious faith as something inherently
divisive and therefore dangerous to discuss in public, Pope Benedict XVI has
quietly been laying the groundwork for a global cultural counter-offensive.
To turn the tables on those who would silence
all public mention of the Christian faith, as well as remove Christian symbols
from all public places, in December of 2009 the Holy Father called for an
itinerant “Courtyard of the Gentiles,” a place where all “might somehow latch
onto God, without knowing him and before gaining access to his mystery, at
whose service the inner life of the Church stands.”
In saying that this forum should be open to all,
Benedict clearly did not mean only “all” religious people. He said: “Today, in addition to interreligious dialogue, there should
be a dialogue with those to whom religion is something foreign, to whom God is
unknown and who nevertheless do not want to be left merely godless, but rather
to draw near to him, albeit as the Unknown. I think that today the
Church should once more open a sort of Courtyard of the Gentiles.”
Historically, the Courtyard of the Gentiles was
at the Temple in Jerusalem, whose imposing outer walls opened onto an atrium,
or courtyard—a vast area separated by a railing from the sacred place reserved
to the Chosen People, dedicated to worship and sacrifice. This area was
filled with vendors and money-changers, those whom Jesus drove out (Mark 11:17)
when, according to the Holy Father, he “cleansed the Court of the Gentiles of
extraneous business, so that it could be the place available to the Gentiles
who wanted to pray to the one God, even if they could not take part in the
mystery, for service of which the inner part of the temple [the “Holy of
Holies”] was reserved.”
Over the centuries the term “Gentiles” has taken
on different meanings. When St. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin, he identified
the Gentiles with the “peoples” referred to in the Torah. They were the people
of grace who, through Paul, had accessed the new Gospel that did not demand circumcision,
as opposed to the Jews, who remained the people of the Law. Later, when Thomas
Aquinas penned his Summa contra Gentiles, a treatise on the truths that are accessible to reason, it is
thought that he may have used the term as an instrument of discussion with the
Muslims, the “Gentiles” of the 13th century.
In Jesus’ time the word referred to the
uncircumcised: goym in Aramaic, ethni in Greek, gentiles
in Latin (the plural of gens). These Gentiles spoke the languages born
of Babel and, according to rabbinical texts, included seventy distinct nations,
which were represented by the seven candles of the Menorah.
But when Jesus, quoting Isaiah 56:7, said “my temple will be called a house of
prayer for all peoples,” Pope
Benedict explains that he meant “the people who know God, so to speak, only
from afar; who are dissatisfied with their gods, rites, myths; who long for the
Pure and the Great, even if God remains for them the ‘unknown God’ (cf. Acts
17:23). They needed to be able to pray to the unknown God, and so be in
relation with the true God, although in the midst of shadows of various kinds.”
On this basis, for the purposes of today’s new “Courtyard
of the Gentiles,” the Holy Father has identified the Gentiles as the atheists
who, “when we talk about a new evangelization, may become afraid. They do not
want to see themselves as an object of mission, nor do they want to surrender
their freedom of thought or of will. But the issue of God nonetheless remains
present for them as well, even though they cannot believe in the tangible
nature of his attention to us.”
It is to these determined but not inimical
non-believers that the Church, under the guidance of Pope Benedict, is opening
its outer Courtyard, in an effort to help them in their search for God and
avoid setting the matter aside, judging it inessential to their existence. This
task, as has often been the case when the Church has sought new ways to reach
out to non-believers, involves an inherent risk of lending credence rather than
gaining it, and of propagating relativism and drifting towards syncretism, even
while avoiding them as documental conclusions.
Religion deserves
full citizenship in universities
Whether the Courtyard of the Gentiles manages to
stay on task will depend in large part on the man who has taken up the
challenge of spearheading the project—Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the president
of the Pontifical Council for Culture.
Well-known to the Italian public as a regular
columnist for both the Italian bishops’ daily Avvenire and for the
Sunday supplement in the financial paper Il Sole 24 Ore, as well as for
the Sunday program he has conducted for more than 20 years on Italy’s Channel
Five (the Berlusconi family’s main broadcasting station), Cardinal Ravasi is on
the media’s roster of the papabili
(those thought to be possible candidates for the papacy).
A brilliant speaker, commentator, and literary
expert possessing an extraordinary memory, capable of holding forth on a wide
range of subjects, and often sprinkling his talks with references to a broad spectrum
of scholars and artists, Ravasi was a student at the Biblical Institute in Rome
of the most prominent exponent of Italian ecclesiastical progressivism, Carlo
Maria Martini, who would later become archbishop of Milan. Of the many
positions Cardinal Ravasi has held, the one he is remembered for most widely is
that of prefect of the Ambrosian Library and Art Gallery in Milan. His
appointment to head the Pontifical Council for Culture in 2007 came despite the
misgivings of a fair number of bishops, both within Rome and outside, who
feared he was ambiguous on doctrinal subjects and too far removed from pastoral
concerns. When the concept of a modern-day Courtyard of the Gentiles was
introduced by the Pope, Cardinal Ravasi, with his vast scholarly knowledge—and whose
group of friends and acquaintances, by his own tally, consists of atheists by a
margin of up to 50 percent—was undoubtedly in the right place at the right
time.
Within two months of the Pope’s suggestion,
Cardinal Ravasi had unveiled his plan to set up a Court of the Gentiles
Foundation, to focus on relations with atheists and agnostics. A year later, on
February 12, 2011, the first session of the itinerant “Courtyard” was held, at
the cardinal’s chosen site of Bologna, a city that considers itself at the
crossroads of Catholic and secularist cultures, and a place to which the
cardinal himself has often been invited to speak in the past.
On the one hand, home to the oldest of the
ancient European universities—all
of which were, of course, founded by Catholic clerics—and on the other hand, the most
important city of the papal states before these were replaced by the Italian monarchy,
Bologna was to become, at the end of World War II and throughout the Cold War
era, the Communist showcase of the Western world, run by a Communist mayor and maintaining
close ties to the Soviet Union. This evolving double identity added a symbolic
meaning to the choice of Bologna and of its university as the appropriate place
to hold the “preamble” session of the Courtyard, prior to the initiative’s official
unveiling in Paris, which took place in March.
The city’s unique history also lent additional
solemnity to the words of the president of the University of Bologna, Ivano
Dionigi, a professor of Latin literature. In his opening remarks he insisted
that “attention to the area of religion” receive “full citizenship” within the
university walls. These words can be interpreted as vindication of the argument
that opening wide the doors of the outer courtyard to the “Gentiles” ultimately
will bring greater attention to God.
Comparison: The
Pope’s invitation to La Sapienza
To gain a sense of just how contentious such an
openness to Catholicism can be in Italian academe, one need only look back at
the controversy three years ago over the invitation extended by the president
of La Sapienza University to Pope Benedict to deliver the academic year’s
opening address. Although a papal appearance was not uncommon at Rome’s most
ancient university—which was founded by a pope (Boniface VIII in 1303) and
belonged to the Church until the mid-18th century—the protest, ignited by a
letter from a handful of teachers (67
professors out of 4,500), spread quickly among the students, who carried it to
the streets.
The indignant
“no” to the Pope stands in stark contrast with the welcome La Sapienza extended
two years earlier to a former member of the Red Brigades terrorist group, who
had taken part in the abduction and murder of former Italian Premier Aldo Moro
and his five bodyguards in 1978. The event was only called off when the
university’s new president got wind of it.
Why,
then, the “no” to the Pope? Because of Galileo. As a cardinal,
in 1990, Joseph Ratzinger had given a lecture at La Sapienza in which he had
quoted the agnostic German philosopher Paul Feyerabend as saying: “In Galileo’s
time the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself. The
trial against Galileo was reasonable and just.” Those words, which had not
caused a stir at the time of the lecture, were ferreted out 18 years later and
quoted out of context to portray the Pope as a narrow-minded bigot who needed
to be kept from influencing young minds. (The subject of the 1990 lecture was
science and modern-day skepticism and relativism. Cardinal Ratzinger spoke of
the case of Galileo, who went from being heralded as a victim of the 17th-century
Church’s narrow-mindedness to actually being criticized in the 20th century for
not having supplied convincing proof of the Copernican system—precisely the
grounds on which the Church had challenged him. Cardinal Ratzinger had
mentioned all of this to illustrate the point that science needed to maintain
confidence in itself. Ultimately his address was a defense of Galilean
rationality.) The willful distortion of Pope Benedict’s position on Galileo
shows that what the handful of professors and students feared was not any
backwardness on his part but rather his desire to open a dialogue between faith
and reason, re-establishing a relationship between the Judeo-Christian and
Hellenistic traditions, and tearing down the barriers between science and
religious belief.
With
these antecedents, the explicit legitimization of religion in academe delivered
at the Courtyard of the Gentiles by the president of the University of Bologna,
sitting side-by-side with a Catholic cardinal, can be considered an auspicious
beginning for future Courtyard stopovers.
Dialogue for dialogue’s sake
Nevertheless,
there are also reasons for concern about the model that was unveiled at
Bologna.
First, the event was not a roundtable discussion
or a debate, but a set of individual lectures, interspersed with readings from
St. Augustine, Pascal, and Nietzsche. The event lined up four professors from
the University of Bologna, presumably chosen to represent atheists and
believers. They spoke about atheism, law, philosophy, religion, and ecology,
mostly in tones of unmitigated pessimism. These four academics made up a
qualified, but hardly a diverse, panel. Ranging in age from 67 to 75, all four
(Vincenzo Balzani, Augusto Barbera, Sergio Givone, and Massimo Cacciari) are of
left-liberal inclination. Two, Barbera and Cacciari, have held political office
as members of the formerly-Communist (now renamed Democratic) Party, and one,
Balzani, is currently a candidate representing a party even further to the left.
The University of Bologna’s President Dionigi, for many years a Communist
representative in local affairs, added to the monolithic nature of the group.
And the two philosophers, Givone and Cacciari, are both linked to the
Heideggerian school of thought.
In the end, the lack of diversity among the
speakers underlined the other key area of concern about the Courtyard project: the
prospect of an outcome favorable to relativism. When speakers talk past each
other and address the audience without relating to each other’s arguments, with
no defining comments or criticism to collect the loose ends, the resulting
impression may be one of neutrality and objectivity. But there is also a risk of
giving an inconclusive and unstable impression of relativity, which would turn
the purpose for the Courtyard of the Gentiles on its head and belie the intention,
voiced by Cardinal Ravasi himself, that the dialogue take place between clearly
defined positions.
Either way, one would expect that in the
Courtyard of the Gentiles, the teaching of “the Temple,” while not imposed upon
the participants, should at least be articulated clearly. It appears, on the
contrary, that the omission of any teaching from the “Holy of Holies” was not
an oversight, but exactly the way things were planned. Dionigi said as much,
when he stated at the outset, “I think that dialogue, and dialogue alone, will
save us.”
Was dialogue for dialogue’s sake the intention
of the Pope in calling for this updated Court of the Gentiles? Hardly. It was,
rather, dialogue for the atheists’ sake. While warning against making
conversion of the atheists the objective, the Holy Father made it plain that
the purpose should be to help atheists keep their search for God alive: “We
must take pains that man not set aside the matter of God, this being an
essential matter for his existence. Take pains that he accept this issue and
the longing it conceals.”
Defining terms
Of course, one might object that it would be
asking too much of the president of a public university to take sides—indeed,
to do anything more than list the terms of a debate on such highly charged
subjects. Yet on a few counts in his brief introduction Dionigi did do
more. With the cardinal’s approval, and an unassuming tone, he did some
important defining of terms.
First, he said, “I think that to talk about man
is equivalent to talking about God, and talking about God is equivalent to
talking about man.” Dionigi’s meaning seemed to be that man’s destiny is in
God’s hands, and Cardinal Ravasi, sitting right next to him, gave him full
approval. But considering how easily such a turn of phrase can be translated
into a tenet of New Age gnosticism, it should be pointed out that
confusing human nature with divine nature is philosophically absurd and
theologically unacceptable. In the Catholic Church the issue was settled at the
Council of Chalcedon in 451, and one would be hard-pressed to find any Christian
group—whether Protestant, Orthodox, or non-denominational—that would state
anything to the contrary. Furthermore, saying that to talk about man is to talk
about God can be interpreted as being but a step away from saying, with the
Theosophists, that man is God or can become God; or with pantheists,
that everything is God; or with Karl Marx, that man is his own God, and that it
was man who created God, and not the other way around.
It would also be interesting to hear why the president
of the University of Bologna stated flatly that the West would do well to keep
in mind that “Occidental” means “sundown” (i.e., decline). He did not offer to
explain that potentially provocative point. There was no time for questions
after his introductory address, so his meaning remained unclear.
The “right kind” of atheists
Finally, as Ivano Dionigi left the podium to
Cardinal Ravasi, he pronounced the Courtyard off-limits to “devout atheists.”
That oxymoronic phrase is used in Italy as a term of contempt, with a precise
political connotation: it refers to those atheists and agnostics who are on the
conservative end of the spectrum, the bloc also known as the “theo-cons.”
Concerned that not enough is being done to preserve Western civilization from
being demolished by domestic and foreign enemies, the theo-cons, despite their
own indifference to religion, are happy to cooperate with the Church in
countering threats coming from left-liberals and multiculturalists on issues
that involve natural law, bioethics, the family, and education. So what
President Dionigi was doing was effectively slamming the door of dialogue on
atheistic or agnostic conservatives, while opening it wide to progressives and
liberals—which is, again, a reasonably apt description of all the participants
in the Bologna forum.
Taking the floor after Dionigi’s introduction,
Cardinal Ravasi, quite at home in Bologna—where, he said, he has always found
large audiences of people willing and able to digest hours of discourse on
complicated topics—endorsed everything Dionigi had said, thanking him for
saving him the trouble of saying it himself. Then he came straight to the
point: avoiding the politically charged term “devout atheist,” he explained
that his courtyard would keep out “those who aren’t atheistic enough.” He proceeded to make the reference
to politics more explicit (and more confusing) by explaining the category:
We are excluding
indifference, banal secularism, devotional religiosity, stereotypes, clichés,
superficiality: an area that extends itself like a shroud not so much over
religion as over politics; all this we are going to exclude. Those who are
going to speak here will rule out the banal, the superficial.
From these words it would seem that only those
who were atheistic to a high degree could hope to qualify as being profound,
caring, lively, and original. Then the cardinal wrapped it all up by pointing
out that these exclusions were only “for now” and, while insisting that they
were “a bit tormenting” to him, added that they weren’t a matter of principle “but
perhaps a bit necessary.”
Interestingly, the morning’s final speech ended
with a jab at the “wrong” type of atheists. Philosopher Massimo Cacciari,
ex-mayor of Venice and a very popular figure with Bolognese progressive
circles, distinguished between acceptable and unacceptable atheists by slamming
the idea that the Church can “do business” and reach an agreement on religio
civilis with “atheist nihilists who think that nothingness should be left
alone.” Gaining momentum with his characteristic vigor and forceful tone of
voice, Cacciari worked the crowd into enthusiastic applause with his final
words, bemoaning the theo-con alliance with the Church: “This way they both
[believers and devout or weak atheists] perceive as their enemies the real
atheists, the ones who say, ‘Let’s talk things over.’ This is no longer a risk,
but a reality which we have already plummeted into completely!”
After the thunderous applause that followed this
remark, President Dionigi wrapped things up and sent everybody home with one
sentence: “These are going to be the crossroads themes that the Courtyard of
the Gentiles will confront in its itinerary.”
With that, the participants in the Bologna
session departed, to await the formal launching of the Courtyard initiative—the
first official session, after this prologue—in Paris in March.
Taking cues from Rome or from Milan?
The framework and content of the academic
discussion at the Bologna event reminds one of “The Chair of Non-Believers” set
up in Milan, Cardinal Ravasi’s hometown, by Cardinal Carlo Martini, Cardinal
Ravasi’s former mentor. This was a forum which put believers and non-believers
on the same level, and which ultimately allowed the task of diocesan “evangelization”
to be unduly influenced by declared atheists like Umberto Eco (one of many
atheist friends that Cardinal Ravasi mentioned come to see him now that he is
headquartered in Rome at the Pontifical Council for Culture).
But wasn’t the foundational idea of the
Courtyard of the Gentiles something different? Didn’t Pope Benedict propose
something more than just philosophical and academic panels in august
surroundings when he said the new Gentiles would like to pray and adore the
Unknown God? Wasn’t he asking that faith and reason, and not just speculation about
atheism, be presented to the Gentiles?
The Holy Father thinks Jesus Christ is the
answer to man’s profound expectations, and therefore should be discussed in
terms of reason starting with a hypothesis of faith. By mentioning the
consecrated premises of the “Courtyard of the Gentiles”—just outside the Inner
Room and the Temple’s Holy of Holies—what he had in mind was a place where
non-believers may approach God “at least as a stranger.” But the itinerant model
Courtyard unveiled in Bologna did not have God as its focal point. The forum
did not even extend its reach to all of mankind—or, for that matter, to all
atheists.
God: The Naked Being?
Cardinal Ravasi’s keynote address, given just
before the four academics addressed their topics, was supposed to describe how
this modern-day Courtyard was to work. After explaining that the weak, banal
atheists were to be excluded, His Eminence gave an introduction to the ideas of
the pugnacious atheist Emile Cioran, the son of an Orthodox priest from Romania
who lived in Paris most of his life. This year marks the centennial of his
birth.
The titles of Cioran’s books, explained the
cardinal, convey such total pessimism that you realize what they are about even
before you start reading them. “I have read most of them, and if Cioran had
been alive he would have been one of the atheists I would have liked to involve
[in the Courtyard of the Gentiles],” Cardinal Ravasi said. His stated reasons for
wishing to engage Cioran were as follows:
1) Cioran’s attitude toward God, which he
described thus: “I always hovered around God like a secret informer. Incapable
of evoking him, I always spied on him.”
2) Cioran’s “ferocious” criticism of believers
and above all of Christians, which the cardinal described as “extremely
well-grounded even today.” Cioran’s accusations included the charge that “[Christians]
have worn Christianity down to the bone,” so that it is no longer a source of
scandal; “It has stopped fomenting vices and virtues.” Quoting T.S. Eliot,
Cioran said: “If we let go of Christianity we will not be able to understand
Voltaire and Nietzsche and, above all, we will have no face.” Cardinal Ravasi
commented: “This is why we have no dialogue with Islam, which does have a face
of its own.” (It is difficult to discern to whom this comment is more unfair:
to Pope Benedict, who managed to set up an inter-religious dialogue after the
controversy over his speech at Regensburg, or to the Egyptian Coptic
Christians, whose defense by the Pope last January prompted the Muslim
authorities at Al-Azhar University to shut down all dialogue with the Vatican.)
3) Cioran’s love for music. “When you listen to
Bach you see God being born, you know he must exist!” the writer said.
4) Cioran’s giving to God a new name—a name
which to Christians sounds blasphemous—“Rien,” French for “nothing.” Cioran wrote:
Nothing is the name of
God. We always have someone above us. Beyond God himself there is rien, Nothing. The visual field of the heart
is the world. But not just the world: the world plus God plus Nothingness, i.e.
everything. Nothing is the name of God.
But this is Nothing with a capital “N,” observed
Cardinal Ravasi. “It is embarrassing to us, but we can set Cioran side by side
with the experience of mystics such as Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, and
John of the Cross. It is the darkness out of which one looks to the sun.” At
this, even a critical observer must admit that Cardinal Ravasi’s method of
jolting listeners into paying closer attention does work. As a believer’s
alternative to Cioran, the cardinal proposed another “new name” for God: Naked Being. The term is taken from a poem dedicated to atheists by Father
David Maria Turoldo, which the cardinal offered as
a description of the Courtyard for the Gentiles’ itinerary, inviting participants
to progress beyond “the forest of the faiths,” the multiplicity of religions,
to reach a point called by this name.
“Naked Being,”
explained the cardinal, is the opposite of Cioran’s “Nothing.” It is “the
extreme golden knot which is inside of us and which is in the being that
surrounds us, which is inside of actuality, which is humanity’s continuous
anxiety and search for security and stability.”
Brother
atheist, nobly pensive,
seeking a
God that I know not how to give you,
let us
cross the desert together.
From one
desert to the next let us go beyond
the forest
of the faiths,
free and
naked
towards the
Naked Being.
And there,
where the word dies,
let our
journey end.
The emptiness described by this poem strikes a
chord. But is it possible to refer to God, the all-perfect Being, as a “Naked
Being”? The poem says that “the word” dies. Perhaps the word with a small “w”
dies. But Christ is the Word with a capital “W,” and he is, we are taught, the
same yesterday, today, and forever.
Will an intellectual journey, headed by
philosophers and academics who are not subjected to criticism, ultimately bring
people closer to Christ? What will be the gauge of success for this itinerant
Courtyard? Will the obvious temptation to proclaim success simply because
high-profile personages have come together and captured a few headlines be
avoided? Will there be an insistence on some sign of progress toward a meeting
of minds on the matter of the Unknown God?
Time will tell. Meanwhile, the Bologna model
seems already to have been improved on, with the Paris panel including people
whose words and works are consistent with Catholic teachings. Who knows—there
may even be an optimist included somewhere in the future plans.