Believers and non believers

I join in – pray forgive me if a little belatedly – a point discussed in two previous post by the LD.

Since I started studying philosophy and theology about forty years ago, I felt ill at ease with the notion of "faith". I landed, coming from Italy, into an American university which was also a Methodist seminar: Drew University in Madison NJ. Which means that I found myself, Catholic, amidst Protestants, and I found them wavering between a notion of faith as something hanging on the air (a direct gift to you from the Holy Spirit, I suppose, for which you have no way to account) on one side, and blatant rationalism on the other.

I wasn't able to tell why, but I knew that it couldn't be was I had been taught since I was a child, when I heard speaking of faith.

I had to realize with my discomfort, as my studies went on, that faith talk among Catholic philosophers and theologians didn't differ so much from that which I found at Drew University.

Once a colleague in the school where I taught, un comunistone (blatant communist) I'd say in Italian, told me, well, faith is a gift, either you have it or you don't. I suppose that saying so was on his part a way to open a conversation with me, who should have agreed with him that he unfortunately hadn't received such a gift, so accepting that there was no way for me to talk about matters of faith in a reasonably acceptable way.

He tried, in other words, to bring me on his ground: of a world divided in "believers and non believers", in which believing is a kind of optional, to be excluded from the basic model conversation. But I refused to play his game, and pointedly remarked that this thing that he called "faith" I didn't have it, and neither had it, say, a Thomas Aquinas or an Augustine of Hippo.

I had to find, though, that this contraposition of believers and non believers was largely accepted even in the Church. While priests didn't show a real awareness of the confusion tied to the use of the word faith: that may be they said it meaning something, while their interlocutors would probably understand something totally different. To my making, or better trying to make them priest remark this, they usually answered with a countenance that said, we don't know what are you talking about.

In the meantime the archbishop of Milan instituted in his dioceses a "chair of the non believers", to give voice to people extraneous or estranged from the Church – as if they needed such a favor.

I was confirmed unfortunately of the insensitiveness of qualified Catholics on this regard, when I read recently the pastoral constitution of Vatican II Gaudium and spes.

There it was, the heinous expression, "believers and non believers", by which believers accepted to let non believers define them. As if faith were simply a belief that one may hold or not.

Belief is opposed to knowledge, that everyone should hold. But knowledge is thus understood as nothing more than technical competence. For example in building an atomic bomb, or manipulating genes. Independently of what we otherwise thought of nature at large, or of life. This would be a matter of belief, i.e. of opinion.

Hence the remarks that aroused the LD's protest: that abortion is against Catholic faith. Well, of course it is, but just because Catholicism is what the name says, universal, and sets no limits to the universal recognition of human life, refusing to make it depend on acceptance, personal and social – as the pro choice claim it to be when they defend the right to abort.

I was liberated from my perplexity concerning faith by the reading of s. Augustine's De vera religione, where he said that two things are necessary for man's salvation: authority and reason, the one bringing to faith, the other bringing to the intelligence of things.

This brought me back to my earliest study of law, before the aporias I found in it brought me to philosophy and theology. I remembered that, in the tradition of roman jurisprudence still pervading our treatment of legal matters, I already run into faith.

In the analysis of the elements of the contract, it was in fact included, besides the object and capable partners with valid motives, also the bona fides on their part. I remember that the book explained it as the attitude of the good father of the family – presumably knowing what that is. I take it now to mean the reliability of a man, the lack of cheating intentions that makes anyone a trustworthy person.

There I had already the true meaning of faith:
the trust that makes one believe what others say, or at least enter into conversation with them.

The simple conclusion to be drawn from such an understanding of faith, is that it makes no sense to oppose those who have it and those who don't: believers and non believers. Nobody can live without trusting others, believing what they say and holding it true. Only remains, then, the difference between believers, whom they trust and for which reason.

Let me add, to close, that exemplary reason for trust is a liberal way of being: meaning with this nothing political in the current sense of the word, but a magnanimous and generous personality, ready to give and receive from others – ready, in the most heroic case, to self-sacrifice.

I take this to be the core of what the LD called Adamsian conservatism.

HP

Not other

Perhaps my previous post was a bit sibylline. Let me add some gloss, hopefully less sibylline.

I'll start from this:

An eminent philosopher theologian of the XV century, by the name of Nicholas of Kues or Cusanus, wrote a book entitled Non Aliud, "The not other": meaning God.

Interesting, considering that we tend rather to speak of Him as "The wholly other" – actually so other, that we are tempted to consider Him inaccessible to us, to the point of falling into agnosticism.

A Jesuit friend of mine once gave me a clue to understanding Cusanus with this maxim:

I am other than God; God, is not other than me.

Whao. Then all my being is in God, is God's being!

The same exclamation came from a student of mine, lost after Nieztsche, but with enough esteem of me to ask me what I thought about it.

I tried to explain to him, against the grain of our current culture, that we are "social animals", and what this implies. I used to do it, the set theory today widely used to teach mathematics. Society, I said, isn't anything empirical. Empirical are the subsets of society, all the different definable groups to which we happen to belong; while society, well, is the most encompassing set, that we can name but not define (there is nothing in fact to which we could oppose it, so to define it): like being.

My student got the point, and exclaimed: you mean then that we are in God?!

Well, yes.

Not just us, but everything. Of which we have knowledge because in society we transcend anything definable, hence corporeal.

A corollary concerning science:

There are sciences of bodily things, but what makes them sciences is our capability to look at things defined in the light of the indefinable – shed on us, I repeat, because we enter the world in society.

Here you have the science I asked for (without which there is no science): the science capable of accounting for the knowledge professed by, and in favor of, the practitioners of all other subordinate sciences, so called; as well as, moreover, for the knowledge professed by all peoples who equally bear witness of what knowing means.

Because of the kind of evidence you could call it cultural anthropology.

Because it concerns noantri (literally "us other"), they would say here in Rome, meaning who we are in comparison we all the rest of us, so as to be able to give each his due, you could call it political science, or, more classically, episteme politike.

Because it involves the Non Aliud, call it simply theology.

HP

Nostalgia and hope

I have a nice CD with old recordings of Christmas songs by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, that my wife and I are willingly listening to these days.

What do I want to say with this.

There is a funny mixture of feelings those old recordings arouse in me that make me want to say it. A love for Christmas, when it's time "to glory the new born king" (as the verse of a song says); and a love for America, where I became a man; and, who knows, perhaps a love for old times. When Hollywood made the movies I grew up loving, like the talkies in black and white of the Thirties and Forties.

A teacher of mine, Will Herberg, wrote a book entitled Protestant Catholic and Jew, describing the making of America as a land of immigration. By way of this, America has been able to turn herself mythical: allowing a storytelling drawing its ethos from the biblical story of Exodus, capable of a universal message I learned to appreciate even before my stay in the USA.

That's why those old recordings fill me with a vague sense of nostalgia and hope: that America may keep that mythical sense of herself alive, against the temptation to imitate Europe, where it has been lost.

HP

Quel esprit? Homage to Piccari

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) thought necessary to distinguish between the esprit de finèsse and the esprit de geométrie. In my young age and even later, being alien to the finèsse required by geométrie, I held to such a distinction.

I mean, I thought that one thing was to be able to appreciate the beauty of art and literature, of which I was capable, and another to perform the operations required by mathematics and by the physical sciences that use it as their primary language, out of my range.

When almost fifty years old, I met an undescribable man, his name was Franco Piccari (1929-2008), mathematician, engeneer, philosopher and theologian, and on the top of it musician, who showed and taught me how wrong Pascal was.

You want the moral of the story? Well, I have already given it to you.

Learning good rhetoric (not to become empty suits)

It was hard for me as a young man to come to learn the importance of rhetoric: I mean, the art of talking, be it in simple conversations, or to a public audience. That's why I appreciated Obama's talk in Cairo.

There is a strong streak in our culture that praises sincerity at any cost, and views any holding back in what we say as hypocricy.

So we have group therapies - or their caricature in tv shows, I don't know - that recommend venting one's feeling as a liberating experience. And maybe it is so: if I have a grudge against somebody, it may be good to be able to bring it out and say it. The problem arises when for whatever reason I care for that somebody. Say my wife did something that caused me a discomfort (I don't mean necessarily a betrayal, but anything that can make me feel estranged from her, like her preferring "I" to "we" when discussing common matters), should I be sincere and assault her with my bad feelings? Nowadays she will probably go away. I would have liberated myself, and lost my wife. Should I keep it all bottled up inside, and get a bad liver (as we say in Italy)? Leaving aside that probably even in this way I'll loose her, no. It's a question of how I say things.

It's a question of rhetoric.

There is more that I had to learn in my unlearning of the no-hypocrisy culture: not to assume that my interlocutors are in agreement with me, by too soon showing where I stand on touchy issues - or, if you prefer, who I am. It is easy in such a case for them to manipulate what I let them know - somehow to turn it against me.

I remember an episode from the time of my staying in the United States. I was talking with a fellow student in the docrotal program I was attending in the seventies, when at a certain point of a discussion on some topic, I prefaced, to make my argument, "I am a Catholic"; well, I could not go on, because he immediately retorted: "If it makes you happy."

I could have no more case to make. And that was a relatively nice way to cut me out. There can be much nastier ones. But it was an occasion for learning that we need to know whom we are talking with, in order to know what to say to find commong grounds of discussion.

It's a question of rhetoric.

Rhetoric is oratorial etiquette. The habit by which we present ourselves. Even when we expose ourselves naked, we have to know that we'll not stay so for long, and after undressing we'll dress again. Should I say more? That of sincerity in rhetoric is a genuine question: by what can we know that habits do actually show and don't hide?

Obama is not my president - or in a way he is., bBecause personally I can say that I became a man in the United States of America, and still feel therefore, after decades I have been away, an hyphonated American. But also because here in Europe we always takes sides, pro or against American adminstrations: as if we were part of the United States of Europe+America. As a concerned Italian-American I say then that the trouble with Obama is that he is an accomplished rhetorician, even too much so. So that one notices it.

And doesn't quite know, as an American friend of mine suggested, whether he isn't after all an "empty suit".