The Truth of Others: The Discovery of Pluralism in Ten Tales 3031255224, 9783031255229

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Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations

Giancarlo Bosetti

The Truth of Others

The Discovery of Pluralism in Ten Tales

Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations Volume 25

Series Editors David M. Rasmussen, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA Alessandro Ferrara, Dipartimento di Storia, University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, Rome, Italy Editorial Board Members Abdullah An-Na’im, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law, Emory University, Atlanta, USA Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA Robert Audi, O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor for Political Science and Philosophy, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA Samuel Freeman, Avalon Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA Jürgen Habermas, Professor Emeritus, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt, Bayern, Germany Axel Honneth, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany and Columbia University, New York, USA Erin Kelly, Professor of Philosophy, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA Charles Larmore, W. Duncan MacMillan Family Professor in the Humanities, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA Frank Michelman, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Tong Shijun, Professor of Philosophy, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus, Institute of Advanced Study,  Princeton, NJ, USA

The purpose of Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations is to publish high quality volumes that reflect original research pursued at the juncture of philosophy and politics. Over the past 20 years new important areas of inquiry at the crossroads of philosophy and politics have undergone impressive developments or have emerged anew. Among these, new approaches to human rights, transitional justice, religion and politics and especially the challenges of a post-secular society, global justice, public reason, global constitutionalism, multiple democracies, political liberalism and deliberative democracy can be included. Philosophy and Politics Critical Explorations addresses each and any of these interrelated yet distinct fields as valuable manuscripts and proposal become available, with the aim of both being the forum where single breakthrough studies in one specific subject can be published and at the same time the areas of overlap and the intersecting themes across the various areas can be composed in the coherent image of a highly dynamic disciplinary continent. Some of the studies published are bold theoretical explorations of one specific theme, and thus primarily addressed to specialists, whereas others are suitable for a broader readership and possibly for wide adoption in graduate courses. The series includes monographs focusing on a specific topic, as well as collections of articles covering a theme or collections of articles by one author. Contributions to this series come from scholars on every continent and from a variety of scholarly orientations.

Giancarlo Bosetti

The Truth of Others The Discovery of Pluralism in Ten Tales

Giancarlo Bosetti Chair of Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations Milano, Italy

ISSN 2352-8370     ISSN 2352-8389 (electronic) Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations ISBN 978-3-031-25522-9    ISBN 978-3-031-25523-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25523-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To monists and the Tree of the Truth in custody in their larder, may they come to realize that others have it too

Preface

Sternstunden der Menschheit–“Great moments” or literally “Stellar Moments of Humanity” is the title of Stefan Zweig’s book narrating 14 “fatal” events (from Waterloo to the fall of Constantinople, from Lenin’s sealed train to Wilson’s failure). The shooting stars in Giancarlo Bosetti’s book are instead “magic moments” in the history of thought, moments at which a flash of insight occurs when observing that our own truth wavers when faced with the truth of “others”. From a status of absoluteness and certainty in given times and thanks to extraordinarily enlightened thinkers, one consciously falls into relativity, just as happens when the natives of one tribe move beyond their own borders and discover that another tribe has a different totem, a different taboo. What is law on this side of the Pyrenees is a crime on the other side (Pascal). This can be a painful discovery, but it soon reveals a benign and gratifying dimension that is also joyful, because it carries one’s mind to a higher level, making it able to acknowledge our previous naïve ignorance. It shows the mind that the shared status of human knowledge is fallible, partial and unable to obtain absolute truth. It opens the mind to dialogue. There is a treasure at the end of this intellectual chase in the journey through the flashing of the truth of the others, the god of the others, in the opening of the best brains in human history to the “learned ignorance” (from Nicholas of Cues to Kant) that tames our primitive, instinctive knowledge of everything, be it a revealed knowledge of the Holy Texts or gained by the daring of philosophical knowledge such in Parmenides and his successors. And this treasure has a name: “pluralism”, a word that speaks of the multiplicity of cultures and perspectives of the world that are manifested as equally truthful or equally almost true. With this we do not fall into perspectivism or relativism according to which anything goes but are enriched by an awareness of our limitations in the way we observe the matters of the world, something that could make us far wiser and more tolerant. Along the way, we discover the opponents of this perspective, who in turn deserve a name, that of “Monists”, who see as decadent or even worse (when they are religious authorities) as a sin or heresy all concessions to the truths of others.

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Preface

But we are not addressing all the philosophical consequences of cultural and moral pluralism on this occasion. With the exception of a brief introduction, the adventurous substance of this book lies in its journey through 10 “magic moments”. Milano, Italy  Giancarlo Bosetti

Contents

1

Introduction: The Golden Moments of Pluralism��������������������������������    1

2

ASHOKA: Ancient Rocks Teaching the Art of Discussion������������������   11

3

 ORIGEN: Redemption Is for All, Not for Us Alone������������������������������   19 3.1 Antioch, 218 A.D. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������   19

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 NICHOLAS OF CUSA: A Vision—From Verity to Variety����������������   35 4.1 Constantinople, September 1437������������������������������������������������������   35 4.2 An Aegean Island, February 1438����������������������������������������������������   36 4.3 Constantinople, 2 June 1453 ������������������������������������������������������������   41 4.4 Mediterranean Sea, Europe, Summer 1453��������������������������������������   42

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LAS CASAS: Duel of a Lifetime in Valladolid��������������������������������������   55

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MONTAIGNE, Cannibals and Us: Who are the Barbarians?������������   71

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 LESSING: Answer Coded in the Parable of the Three Rings ������������   81 Appendix����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   95 The Parable of the Three Rings (pp.36–38)������������������������������������������   95

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KALLEN: America, the Diversity to Orchestrate��������������������������������   97

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DUPUIS: The Alexandrian Spark Lights Up Again ����������������������������  105

10 MARGARET MEAD: Samoan Adventure with Much Ado����������������  117 11 Isaiah Berlin: Monists and the Concoction of the Tragic Omelet ������  131 Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   147

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About the Author

Giancarlo Bosetti is the head of Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations, the association he founded in 2004 with Nina zu Fürstenberg, and Reset, a cultural magazine, he founded in 1993 with Norberto Bobbio and a group of liberal-socialist intellectuals. He was vice-editor-in-chief of the Italian daily L’Unità. He is also columnist for the Italian daily La Repubblica. With a degree in philosophy, he has been adjunct professor at the University La Sapienza and University Roma Tre. Among his books Il legno storto, Cinque idee per ripensare la sinistra, Marsilio 1991, La lezione di questo secolo, with Karl Popper, Marsilio 1992. (The Lesson of This Century, Routledge 1997), Cattiva maestra. La rabbia di Oriana Fallaci e il suo contagio, Marsilio 2005, Spin. Trucchi e tele-imbrogli della politica, Marsilio 2007. Il fallimento dei laici furiosi. Come stanno perdendo la scommessa contro Dio, Rizzoli 2009. Latest book: La verità degli altri, La scoperta del pluralismo in dieci storie, Bollati-Boringhieri 2019.  

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Chapter 1

Introduction: The Golden Moments of Pluralism

Abstract  Sternstunden der Menschheit, literally “Stellar Moments of Humanity” was the title of Stefan Zweig’s book narrating 14 “fatal” events of the human history (revolutions, discoveries, decisive battles). The shooting stars in this book are instead “magic moments” of human thought, moments at which a flash of insight occurs when observing that our own truth wavers when faced with the truth of “others”. From a status of absoluteness and certainty in given times and thanks to extraordinarily enlightened thinkers, one consciously falls into relativity, just as happens when the natives of one tribe move beyond their own borders and discover that another tribe has a different totem, a different taboo. It shows the mind that the shared status of human knowledge is fallible, partial and unable to obtain absolute truth. There is a treasure at the end of this intellectual chase and it has a name: “pluralism”. With this we do not fall into perspectivism or relativism according to which anything goes but are enriched by an awareness of our limitations in the way we observe the matters of the world, something that could make us far wiser and more tolerant. Keywords  Ethnocentrism · Tolerance · Pluralism · Monism · Isaiah Berlin · Cultural relativism · Moral relativism · Values pluralism · Dogmatism · Nicholas of Cusa · Babel tower The truth of others, the Truth of Others, the absolute of others, the God of others. A portentous problem. Since the dawn of homo sapiens we have believed ourselves to be the unique offspring of celestial entities and continue to consider ourselves the centre of the universe. Our birth place operates like a hinge upon which everything swings; it is the Axis Mundi, ‘the tree of cosmos’ with its roots reaching the netherworld and its summit the heavens, a tree represented in some tribes as a pole for the shaman to climb with a ladder.1 ‘The tree of cosmos’ could be just a pole to put up a tent for  Mircea Eliade (tr. Philip Mairet). ‘Symbolism of the Centre’ in Images and Symbols. Princeton, 1991, p. 40 ff. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Bosetti, The Truth of Others, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 25, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25523-6_1

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shelter, with a hole not only in place of a chimney but also to communicate with higher spheres of hereafter. This simple picture becomes murkier when a tribe leaves its circumscribed area, moves towards other clearings, other woods, other valleys, and comes unexpectedly upon another tribe that celebrates rites with yet another pole, other dances and songs. Other totems and other taboos. It’s a shock that undermines certainties while eliciting comparisons and reflections. If theirs is the right pole, how about mine? Should mine not be considered just as right as theirs? If this is not the case, what is to be done? Philosophers, who much later coined expressions for similar situations, state for instance: this marks the dawn of the mental journey from ‘ingenuous monism’ to ‘critical dualism’.2 Admirable progress. It is the discovery that we are not the only offspring but members of a vast and manifold humanity, a discovery that never stops yielding other poles, other rites, other languages, and other faces. Is it a damnation or a benediction? The myth of the tower of Babel, itself yet another ‘tree of cosmos’ in its own right, remains a Biblical enigma to be solved to date. Can we say God intended to condemn those daring, courageous builders and ‘confound’ them to speak different languages for wishing to reach the heavens? Or couldn’t he have been merely bored with the monotony of their single, uniform language?3 Experienced from inside a tribe, the discovery of the truth of others can sound as an injury; it comes like a betrayal. The injury can heal, and what might have seemed initially as betrayal can turn into an advantage in time. But for this to happen, battles are fought and torrents of blood flow. Only living side by side with differences can lead to the invention of new resources, a different sort of knowledge, and new existential modes. This takes ages. An adequate word for this healing process is toleration. Philosophers, after coining dualism (meaning we are not alone, there are others), have come up with yet another expression: pluralism to mean we are many and different. The purpose of this book is to tell the stories and ideas of a chosen group of heroes of pluralism and toleration. They are heterogenous tales held together by a common thread. The in-born tendency to consider oneself the centre of the universe is called ethnocentrism, a term that took thousands of years to formulate. Only in the last century did it enter books of knowledge following the publication in 1906 of William Graham Sumner’s study Folkways.4 Sumner was a professor at Yale, a staunch

 Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, London, Routledge, 1945, Vol. 1, p. 59.  Isaiah Berlin in an interview conducted by Nathan Gardel and published as ‘The Ingathering Storm of Nationalism: The Return of the Volksgeist’ in New Perspectives Quarterly 8 no. 4 (Fall 1991), 4–10, reprinted with amendments and additions as ‘Two Concepts of Nationalism’ in the New York Review of Books (NYRB), 21 November 1991, p. 19. See also Yael Tamir, “The Enigma of Nationalism,” World Politics 47:3 (April 1995), p. 418. 4  William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1906. Boris Bizumic, claims in his essay, ‘Who Coined the Concept of Ethnocentrism? A Brief Report’, in Journal of Social and Political Psychology, vol. 2, n. 1 (2014), that the Polish sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz employed 2 3

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conservative, and by no means a radical chic. His research explored the tendency of a certain social group to consider itself the centre of everything and rank the others according to their own measuring tape. This tendency towards the in-group (‘we’ of the centre, family, tribe, people) not only implies a sense of superiority towards any out-group (‘others’, the ever-widening external concentric circles), but urges to defend the interests of the former against the latter, and, as he wrote, ‘is technically known as ethnocentrism.’ Sumner’s time was the same as that of the birth of cultural anthropology spearheaded by Franz Boas (and later by other anthropologists in his tradition—the so-called Boasians). To the team of his followers, who called him ‘Papa Franz’, belong two distinguished former students, Margaret (Mead) and Ruth (Benedict), who gained much wider renown than Boas himself and have also a role in this book; the former, in particular, paved the way to sexual revolution (a remarkable derivative of pluralism).5 Based on his field research on Native Americans, Boas had to admit a rather embarrassing fact; that is, the value we attribute to our culture depends on our close familiarity with it, on being born into and bred by it. Consequently, we need to get used to the idea that different cultures with different values, different balancing negotiations between feelings and reason and many other aspects, are not inferior at all, although we may fail to appreciate them. Not being born into and bred in those cultures does not suggest that we cannot or should not set our imagination to work. The Boasian school of thought established the principle that no culture or race can be inferior or superior to another. As a leading Boasian stated: every comparative judgement across cultures that says a people is better than the other is playing a game with ‘loaded dice’.6 Cultural relativism, a key research method of anthropology, but it concerns wider areas of inquiry and speculation. The word relativism has the effect of a terrorist bomb attack today. Its thunder rumbles on even in societies where toleration is the norm, as in open societies, and where people have learned to live alongside it. One can object as it insinuates a comparative value judgement; open societies, we tend here to suggest, are better than closed societies. Well, indeed, after all tolerance and toleration are preferable to their contrary. I am aware of the contradiction to account for in the following pages. In the course of the stories told in this book, we shall also learn to address this issue in need of a pragmatic and reasonable solution, so that cultural relativism should not yield to the passive acceptance of, for instance, stoning an adulterer in a stadium as the Taliban do in Afghanistan or gassing a Kurdish village in Syria. A pluralist person with an open mind cannot simply shrug off saying: ‘well, it is the custom of the country, little can be done!’ The number of differing and conflicting the term earlier. Bizumic displays a more circumscribed case of a linguistic example, which need not exclude the likelihood of similar previous uses. 5  For Boas and the Boasians see Chap. 10 regarding the bibliographic references to the authors mentioned in this introduction, see the chapters dedicated to them later in this volume. 6  Melville Herskovits’s remarks on judging ethnocentrically other cultures and the reference to ‘loaded dice’, in his article ‘Some Further Comments on Cultural Relativism’, ‘American Anthropologist’, 60, April 1938, p. 270.

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cultural values is not infinite, and not everything is a cultural value. As human beings we do know how to discern these values and can only improve our compilation list. After all, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 is not an improvised work of a fool. Consequently, we need to admit that in open societies, unfortunately not in all others, a certain amount of cultural relativism—not to mistake with moral relativism—has now become an essential ingredient for the upkeep of good manners. But we must also bear in mind that neither efforts to slide back and plant the tree of cosmos in our own house nor the longing to assert our own superiority have ceased to exist. The call of the wild remains still clear and strong; it resurfaces at every mention of the loss of ‘pride’, failing of ‘self-respect’, or even ‘vileness’ of the West that has lost the ‘courage’ to roar like thunder. The expression roaring like thunder brings to mind cannonballs which, besides causing victims, strengthens the people under attack: people who cannot but hang onto their own in-group, their ‘we’, their ‘moral superiority’ proven by their ‘courage’, ‘pride’. This helps bolster extant codes of honour; ethnocentric nostalgic longings of good old times when we could, without hesitation, call them ‘heathens’ or ‘savages’. Ethnocentric passions lie in wait in every society, even in those regarded as inferior or savages, and inevitably escalate aggression. Every rally, political comment, or talk-show at one point gives vent to the desire to break loose from much loathed ‘correctness’, ditch the hegemony of an ‘excessively tolerant’, ‘excessively plaintive’ culture ridden with qualms towards cultural differences, minorities, others—towards an interminable list of no longer utterable notions: the sexual perverts, the handicapped, the blind, the deaf, the fat, the niggas, and the tramps. Monism fairly describes the flaw inflicting Homo sapiens. It is the addiction of the only child, the holder of the Truth, the only True perspective bestows sense on everything, and establishes other people’s rank; the only child who always comes first, rates other teams irrespectively of their diverse language, religion, moral, colour or ethnos. With difficulty can it be made to grow aware of the pluralism of reality and stirred out of the slumber of its rearing tribe. Together with ethnocentrism, monism forms the petrified layer its all-time opponent pluralism seeks to scratch and loosen.7

 Representatives of monism are many and each displays a different aspect—ontological, moral, metaphysical, teleological, religious. Isaiah Berlin provides a thorough list of them (for more comprehensive information see the Chaps. 10 and 11), but was primarily interested in monism concerning philosophia perennis, that is monism seeking one single true answer to the questions raised by philosophers. Among the monists who are more coherently against pluralism and cultural relativism, we can name Allan Bloom, his friend Saul Bellow (see Allan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987, by the former, and the latter’s novel Ravelstein, Viking Press, 2000, dedicated to Bloom, see Chap. 10, and Joseph Ratzinger (and his famous declaration Dominus Iesus, see Chap. 8 on Jacque Dupuis). Samuel Huntington, with his The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1996) declares war primarily against American multiculturalists. Little effort is needed to acknowledge that the self-­ evident and extremist phenomenon of radical Islam is a case of monism at gunpoint, beyond text or context. 7

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The stories I am telling here are about a set of individuals who strove to penetrate this layer and left their mark. Some won, others were defeated, but all have left a considerable treasure we still need to draw on. Some made a lofty sacrifice and nearly paid with their own lives; some cunningly bypassed the surveillance mechanism of the established order or exploited the power they held in their hands; others dedicated their entire life to the cause, while others simply intended to put to good use and thus proved their own intelligence and sharp mind. The reader will easily distinguish the extraordinariness of their cases. Each story added its share to edify, however incomplete and with unwarranted stability, the great historical building of tolerance. We will be discussing the golden, magic moments of pluralism: the Sternstunden8 of pluralism, as the German word expresses beautifully. They are the ‘stellar moments’, decisive conjectures in the history of ideas in whose course a flash of insight destroys the trenches of one’s own unquestionable truth and subverts the monist order with hardly any room except for one single truth, expected to be established one day (provided it has not been accomplished yet). Because there can be no more than one single truth, it is bound to come; the one single answer will be delivered to all our questioning. Isaiah Berlin is the principal thinker who explored and mapped out the doctrine of cultural and values pluralism setting the stage for successive discoveries like in a treasure hunt. Berlin pronounced the most accurate definition of pluralism of values and its contrary, monistic values. Berlin unearthed some of the most outstanding moments while studying Machiavelli, Montaigne, Vico, Montesquieu, Herder and others. His list is not complete and could be improved; on the other side, mine, regretfully, is still at an early stage. The last chapter of this book will help understanding the relevance of his thought for our times. Throughout his intellectual life, his engagement with the British Intelligence Services, active support for the creation of the state of Israel, his lectures on History of ideas at Oxford, and in his studies on the Russian culture, Berlin worked relentlessly. He established for our world, still bearing the scars of the recent monist adventures and absolutist ideologies, the basis for the idea that inspirational moral values and ideal principles are many and diverse, and that the most serious conflicts do not occur between good and bad principles but between the best which are not always mutually compatible. Page after page his exploration reads like an adventure with sudden turns and unexpected revelations, like a script with an indefinite ending. The treasures of pluralism are immense but always under the threat of the monist temptation. Berlin, like Voltaire, even more so Popper, had no doubt that toleration is indispensable to our human condition, our fallibility; we need to ‘mutually pardon each other our follies’ and consider it the first law of natural right.9 Popper, for whom human fallibility constituted one of the bases of his  Sternstunden der Menschheit, was the original title of Stefan Zweig’s book, Insel Verlag, Leipzig 1927. Translated as Decisive Moments in History, Ariadne Press 1999. 9  Voltaire’s quotation in Karl Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1962, 22. 8

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theory, repeated Voltaire’s above quote especially with reference to Nicholas of Cusa, the most significant philosopher in fifteenth century. Nicholas’ magic moment in our story series consists in the discovery that our knowledge of truth cannot but be thoroughly imperfect: ‘learned ignorance,’ as he called it. In addition to being a theologian, a top cleric not only because he was made a cardinal but was a friend and councillor to the Popes of his age, an outstanding philologist (the first to declare the forgery of the Donation of Constantine—the decree that transferred the secular power to Church), a mathematician and physicist (heralding the Copernican turn), Nicholas of Cusa was also a towering pluralist. He applied pluralism to the most hazardous terrain, that is of religion and theology and nearly risked being accused of heresy. He wrote that the essence of our imperfection lies in the fact that we are not granted to know God or anything to perfection, and that we have to make do with a vision of all things ‘by conjectures’. Consequently, we cannot impose our truth on others as absolute truths, because we do not even own it. No one owns it. Life in this conjectural condition makes it nonsensical to brandish the sword of truth. Vis-à-vis a sort of 9/11 that occurred six centuries ago, the fall of Constantinople to Turks, Nicholas of Cusa attempted to dialogue with Islam and all mono- and polytheistic faiths in the firm belief that all religions are the same but have different liturgies. An adventurous idea that circulated for some time at the top of the church. Leaving one’s own woods and gaining sight of the immense variety of absolute truths in existence, eternal incompleteness of our knowledge of earthly and heavenly matters, once fully grasped, is a powerful inspiration for human solidarity: we all sail on the same boat with rather low visibility. Origen of Alexandria, third century B.C., persecuted all his life like his devoutly Christian, martyred father, was a formidable biblical exegete and teacher. He did not intend his views to be read as a definite solution, rather as argumentations and debates open to interpretation. This could explain why he was not made Father of the Church, although his teaching has been employed extensively by the Church, even by Pope Benedict XVI. Origen firmly believed in revelation, and thought religious differences rose not only from «principles» but from «princes», (that’s the double sense of the Greek word of the title of his book, Perì archòn, that means both “about principles” as fundaments and “about princes” and principalities as political powers and territories). In short, one lives and believes in the religion of where one happens to be born. Origen envisaged universal redemption for everyone irrespective of their faith and/or faults and questioned the hell’s eternity, which resulted in far-reaching repercussions all the way to the age of Leibniz, Lessing, and even the theological debates today. His pluralist view, in contrast to St Augustine’s (extra ecclesiam nulla salus),10 prefigured a Church that could reject the exclusive rule of salvation, «for members only»; his was a Church of caritas in varietate, not only of

 First to use that expression was Cyprian of Carthage, but it matches well the doctrine of Augustin of Hippo. See: Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism, Oribis Book, 2001 (3), p. 84 ff. 10

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caritas in veritate,11 and one ready to embrace the Second Vatican Council today. As for the story of his self-castration, our judgement on Origen shouldn’t be influenced by this rumor. To begin with, strenuous asceticism as he practiced it implied taking sexually inhibitory substances, like most ascetics but disapproved by Church authorities; then, the act of emasculation, even if carried out with a knife—as Abelard was to endure in twelfth century—does not necessarily impede a fruitful intellectual life. But most importantly, this defamatory accusation was probably the invention of a jealous bishop who attempted to annul Origen’s priestly ordination. Origen continues to be the most important and sought-after biblical exegete to counter a strictly literary interpretation of Matthew 19:12 ‘and there be eunuchs, who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.’ Montaigne’s thought on human affairs emphasises the varied nature of truth and values: ‘What am I to make of a virtue that I saw in credit yesterday, that will be discredited tomorrow, and that becomes a crime on the other side of the river? What of a truth that is bounded by these mountains and is falsehood to the world that lives beyond?’12 No other figure could equal his rueful mockery of those, brandishing the sword of the absolute, chopped off heretics’ heads or burned them at stake. As regards a witch or sorcerer, he noted: ‘…should in Conscience sooner have prescribed them Hellebore than Hemlock. After all, ‘tis setting a man’s Conjectures at a very high price upon them, to cause a Man to be roasted alive.’13 Montaigne had read Nicholas of Cusa and was familiar with his ‘conjectures’. Our absolute truths, he teaches, are merely accidental. ‘We are Christians by the same title that we are Perigordians or Germans.’14 ‘Wherefore Xenophanes used to say wittily that if the animals make gods for themselves, as it is likely they do, they certainly make them like themselves, and glorify themselves as we do.’15 Montaigne is among the founding fathers of cultural pluralism and cultural relativism in anthropology; his most significant writings on this subject concern cannibals of the New World, one of the most radical manifestos on the truth and God of others. Staunch monists view his Essays as the watershed in the history of the decline of the West. Despite their intellectual kinship, Montaigne is unlikely to have been familiar with A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de Las Casas, the privileged son of an encomendero in the New World, a leading figure among the conquistadores in West Indies. Las Casas regarded the ruthless destruction of Indians as a dark page in the history of Spain; the brutality perpetrated during the conquest wiped out an entire civilisation instead of protecting it (notwithstanding  I’m contrasting here the concept of ‘charity in variety’ with that of ‘charity in truth’: Caritas in Veritate was the title of the encyclical letter of Pope Benedict XVI, June 2009. Charity in Truth, Libreria editrice vaticana, 2009. Also here: https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate.html. 12  Michel de Montaigne. The Complete Works, trans. Donald M.  Frame (London: Everyman. 2003), p. 531. 13  Ibid. p. 962. 14  Ibid. p. 394. 15  Ibid. pp. 482–483. 11

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the latter’s practice of human sacrifices and cannibalism). Throughout his life he sought to convince the King of Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor, to prohibit the slavery of Indios. His advocacy for the rights of indigenous people set him against his fellow traders. He was accused of treachery that led to the famous confrontation before the Junta of Valladolid with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. The pluralist ‘bug’ gets at Leibniz through Origen whose teaching of universal salvation, which restores all humankind to a conclusive unity, is read as the rejection of the eternity of the infernal punishment. The esoteric Leibniz was not only attracted by this theory but secretly asked a heretic to write a treatise on it. He himself had promised to write a preface but could not dare publish it. Lessing, appointed the Director of the library of Wolfenbüttel half a century after Leibniz, found Leibniz’s introduction and the treatise and printed both. This served as a perfect pretext for dogmatic protestants who wanted Lessing removed from his position with the accusation of heresy. He did not shun entering an openly threatening debate, but his most cutting response came encoded in his play Nathan the Wise, one of the most vibrating, energetic moments of pluralism in the history of ideas. With the parable of three rings, as in Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century narrative, Lessing makes a radical return and states: all three religions are equal because they are all equally true and equally false as positive religions. The concept of ‘cultural pluralism’, however, has a distinct inventor, a real father: the American pragmatist Horace Kallen, a former pupil of William James. Kallen articulated his idea while teaching at Harvard when the concept of citizenship in the United States was being debated. It is to be noted that to date the United States is among the most successful examples of a pluralist culture, today under the onslaught of monists who tend to view multiculturalism as a poison to discharge from the American society’s organism (Allan Bloom, Samuel Huntington, and the like). Kallen enters the melting pot debate, itself a monocultural metaphor for a container where ethno-cultural differences dissolve to yield an altogether new alloy of homogenous American citizens and becomes an advocate of different identities that merge with one another harmoniously, like musical instruments of an orchestra playing a melody. This is a significant recognition of the rights of so-called hyphenated Americans, a characteristic to identify a unified people, where each single component—such as Italo-Americans, Jewish-Americans—can claim the former part of their identity as much as the latter. This means the process of identity formation remains open-ended and never perfectly completed. We shall encounter Nicholas of Cusa and Origen once again in a more recent account concerning a Belgian Jesuit, who became the centre of an extremely severe confrontation within the Church of Rome. Having lived in eastern Asia for years and equipped with first-hand knowledge of Asian pluralist traditions, Jacques Dupuis, a theologian, returns to Rome, resumes teaching at the Gregorian university and starts writing a history of Christian theology in a pluralist key. Despite all the caution and care to avert any likely accusation, he is investigated on suspicion of heresy, and forced to retract his thesis. Old and embittered, he is made to live his last years relieved of all his teaching duties. One of the saddest pages in the history of the contemporary Church is the papal notification, the verdict, that bears cardinal

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Ratzinger’s signature, the Prefect of Faith; so does the epistle Dominus Iesus, issued by the Vatican in 2000 and primarily directed against Father Dupuis. It was this verdict that forestalled the pluralistic perspective of the Second Vatican Council, originally intended to encourage dialogue between faiths, and acknowledge that «seeds of truth» are present and active in other different religions. Father Dupuis’s historic and theological teachings help us retrieve and explore the pluralist heritage in a perspective closer to our contemporary conflicts. At the end, we come to the chronologically first of the chosen heroes of pluralism: Emperor Ashoka, the ruler of the Mauryan Empire (300 BCE), whose edicts, carved on rocks, pillars and strewn across an immense territory from the Middle East to Bangladesh, were brought to light between 1700 and 1800. Their excavation story alone is an amazing, passionate account. The edicts range from Sanskrit, Prakrit, to other local languages and dialects, including Greek. Most importantly, they deliver a highly outspoken, powerful and unexpectedly pluralist message. After long years of war and having converted to Buddhist faith, Ashoka decrees that no religion shall try to establish its own tenets to the exclusion of others and that every faith with its proposals and values deserves equal consideration. His teaching of self-control, moderation, and dialogue with different ethnic and religious others was certainly echoed much later during the Mughal Empire in sixteenth century, when Akbar himself taught and practiced dialogue and integration between Hindus and Muslims, and in twentieth century, when Gandhi personally displayed one of the highest moments of cultural pluralism in India. The story of the reconstruction of his assassination, the assassin’s motivations, how he decided to kill Gandhi, and especially his written statement testify a contrario the greatness of the founding father of modern India. Today Gandhi’s teaching seems to be perilously abandoned. It goes without saying that my choice of stellar moments of pluralism is personal, arbitrary, incomplete and conditioned by the little I know, and the lot I do not know. I wish I were more familiar with more non-Western cultures to be able to include them here. Among the Muslim scholars in twentieth century with a vision open to dialogue and the truth of others, there are two worth mentioning. First, (Mahmoud) Mohammed Taha, a Sudanese theologian of ‘Two Qurans’, who was executed for his ideas, and whose pluralist teaching continues to live among his students. Taha distinguished between the sacred writings of Medina and Mecca, interpreted the holy book of Islam historically. This meant a swerve from the strictly literary Wahabi dogma, which stems from fundamentalist traditions. Second, the Egyptian scholar, Nasr Abu-Zayd, deceased in 2010, also established the grounds for a humanistic and historical analysis of the holy book of Islam. His rejection of the orthodox reading meant forced exile. We could only look forward to more books on more stellar moments. A liberal and culturally pluralist outlook must also contend with the impasse that keeps challenging it, an impasse that regards the following question: does the pluralist perspective claim a privileged status for itself with respect to other non-liberal or non-pluralist ones? Or, if it withholds from any perspective the right to judge others, does it not condemn itself to silence? As the American poet Robert Frost put it: ‘A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in quarrel.’ That’s a fun

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paradox, but there are a number of ways to come to grips with it. Isaiah Berlin, for instance, who confronted the question throughout his life, was satisfied with a diagram proposed to him shortly before his death; he noted it gave a fair account of his idea of pluralism of values and cultural pluralism. This diagram consists of two circles, one smaller contains the ‘basic human values’ common to different human cultures, each with their own different interpretations, the bigger contains psychopathic behaviours which remain outside the ‘human horizon’. In a manner not unlike John Rawls’s doctrine (Political Liberalism), varying doctrines, religions, ideologies have an overlapping area; they intersect with common values, each having broader borders of ‘comprehensive’ doctrines that do not belong to the nucleus, the humanistic core, common to all doctrines. In his other works, Berlin observed that a list of what is to be excluded from the human horizon can be compiled reasonably easily. This signifies that unless cultural pluralism is viewed so radically as to be incompatible with any judgement of universal import regarding human dignity, human rights, denial of genocide, it does not and cannot necessarily precipitate to the level of moral relativism, nor can it be downgraded to the principle that says anything goes.16 On the contrary, pluralism enriches us with its broad perspective on the world, making us more aware of our limitations, partiality, and parochialism, while also favouring us with a predisposition to make more prudent, wiser, and more tolerant judgements.

 The question of compatibility of universal values and judgments, and the perspective of cultural pluralism has given rise to a vast literature. See the chapter on Berlin for the works concerning his views. Other references can be found in the relevant chapters where the same question arises. I only wish to single out Seyla Benhabib, who in her opposition to a radical version of the view of incommensurability of cultures, defines cultures as controversial and internally separate entities and underlines their narrative aspect; cultures are not simply tags or brands, and are not isolated from one another in time. Their boundaries are porous, always subject to temporal transformations; they produce hybrids, and initiate new evolutions. ‘We should view human cultures as constant creations, recreations, and negotiations of imaginary boundaries between “we” and “the other(s)”.’ A pluralist and conflictual view of cultures is therefore reconcilable with the capacity to make universally normative judgements, for instance on a genocide like in other cases. (S. Benhabib. The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002, p. 8). 16

Chapter 2

ASHOKA: Ancient Rocks Teaching the Art of Discussion

Abstract  The edicts of the Maurya emperor (third century BC) are spread all over an immense region ranging from the Middle East to what is now Bangladesh, and engraved on pillars in various languages, such as Sanskrit, Prakrit, others as well as Greek, and convey a powerful pluralist message. Having converted to Buddhism after never-ending wars, he decreed that no religion should defend its own reasons with excessive vehemence and that each one contained principles and valuable suggestions that should be taken into account. Keywords  Ashoka · Edicts · Tolerance · Moderation · Discussion · Deliberation · Religious pluralism · Maurya empire · Buddhism · Hinduism

The government honours both ascetics and the householders of all religions…there should be promotion in the essentials of all religions…The government desires that all should be well-learned in the good doctrines of other religions.1

The above statements dating more than 2300  years may still be heard in current religion syllabus discussions at schools and has far-reaching overtones. It is an invitation to study all faiths, not only the faith of minorities in a community alongside that of the majority but also those of other (all) peoples and nations; it further stresses that it should be done in-depth and aim to discern what is worthy for us and others (‘the good doctrines’). The principle of teaching ‘other’ religious confessions in state schools continues serving as a minefield, or even forbidden not just in Muslim countries, China, India and elsewhere but also in Europe. The debate on how to reform confessional religious instruction and the possible option of offering  12th Major Rock Edict, available as all the Rock Edicts here: Inscriptions of Asoka. New Edition by E.  Hultzsch : Eugen Hultzsch : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming: Internet Archive, Public Domain, p. 43. There is a variety of interpretations in the literal translation in many respects, but not in the core values and prescriptions present in the Edicts: the respect and knowledge requested toward other religions, the moderation in defending each one’s point of view, the reject of violence. I’m following the translation of the Italian researcher Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli who published Gli editti di Asoka, Milano Adelphi, 2003. The quoted Edict XII at pp. 64–65. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Bosetti, The Truth of Others, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 25, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25523-6_2

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to those students who refuse compulsory, mainstream religious or at any rate confessional instruction here also begins to consider teaching of non-religious ethics or history of religions, which has so far not made progress (except in Germany). Onerous commitment is required everywhere to enact the generous nature of the above quote. Where does the quote come from? From a rock inscription dating three centuries before Christ and can be found on other rocks and pillars strewn thousands of miles from one another. The inscription did not appear as a fruit of isolated intuition, rather, it belongs to a vast cycle of edicts that substantiate and explain the scope of action of a sovereign who ruled the Mauryan Empire, stretching from current Afghanistan to Bangladesh and the entire Indian subcontinent. I have only substituted the original subject ‘King Piyadasi and Devanampiya’, meaning ‘the king who looks with kindness upon everything and is the beloved of the Gods’, the honorific title Emperor Ashoka defined himself with in the inscriptions, with the word ‘government.’ For the greater glory of his dynasty and Indian history, Ashoka covered that vast area of the world with rock and pillar inscriptions that taught not only concepts, modes, decrees and ideas on how to conduct discussions, but also how to respect animals, described the operation of ‘public services’ (as we would say) of the imperial administration, such as where to provide roads with shady rest areas and water supplies at regular intervals, how to protect animals and forests, and in some inscriptions suggested not mandatory but personal views particularly about the regretfully bloody and lengthy years spent to conquer and unify his empire. That highly complex territory with all its diverse languages, traditions, religious stratifications, differing progress levels—from the ‘untouchable’ wild forest inhabitants (of which even today certain tribes survive in contemporary India) to affluent city dwellers—certainly bore some resemblance with our current globalised world. In Ashoka’s edicts, whose pluralist intrepidity and political brilliance are being rediscovered, the religious question is preponderant over any other problem not only because of the relevance of the public ceremonies of the opening of temples, or the urgency to pacify theological or monastic querelles, but also because every moment of the daily life was affected by possible conflicts among so many different confessions of the empire: Vedic Brahmanism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Greek polytheism. Preponderant it was because such was the biggest hurdle, as it continues to be in current India, on the path of any government aiming to rule such a vast and varied a territory. The question returns in other languages and alphabets: in Sanskrit, in the Magadi and Prakriti variations, Aramaic and then in Greek, because the history, politics, and the boundaries of the Mauryan Empire developed close ties with the heirs of Alexander the Great’s empire. ‘All religions have the right to reside where they wish’,2 ‘contact with other religions is good and one should listen and respect the doctrines professed by others’.3

 For the Edict VII, see Inscriptions, p. 34; in G. Pugliese Carratelli, Gli Editti di Asoka, p. 54.  Edict XII, Inscriptions, p. 43, in G.P. Carratelli, p. 65.

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Another important gift Ashoka left us with is that of a precious granite block written both in Greek and Aramaic, where he provides the key to how to translate certain demanding concepts. Beginning with dharma, the Sanskrit word with a broad significance ranging from ‘duty’, ‘law’ to ‘religion’, ‘natural order’ to even ‘justice’, and a word the scribes, on the order imparted by the translators of the imperial court, rendered in Greek as eusébeia, a word often and widely used in religious and philosophical contexts, which we tend to translate as ‘piety’. This occurs in the edict of the law of Piety of Shahbazgarhi (north of modern Pakistan, where Greek communities resided), that relates ‘in the eighth year of his rule’ of Ashoka—presumably in the middle of the third century BC—the conquest of Kalinga, today the state of Orissa in the Bay of Bengal.4 The lengthy and accurate account is as follows: ‘One hundred and fifty thousand were deported, one hundred thousand killed and many more died.’5 After this a strong inclination towards Piety, a love for Piety and instruction in Piety express the King’s remorse ‘because the conquest of an unconquered state is slaughter, death and mankind’s evil’, and ‘this pains the King, Beloved-of-the-Gods. But Beloved-­ of-­the-Gods is pained even more by this—that Brahmans, ascetics, householders of different religions and atheists who live in those countries, and who are respectful to superiors, to mother and father, and who behave properly and have strong loyalty towards friends, acquaintances, relatives, servants and employees—that they are injured, killed or separated from their loved ones.’6 The Mauryan emperor wanted everybody to know of the news of his remorse and his power: even the forest people who did not fight in the war and people of the neighbouring Seleucid Empire divided among the heirs of Alexander’s conquests from Central Asia to Persia, from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean. The King, Beloved-of-the-Gods, now considers conquest by Piety the real victory and insistently describes ‘it has been won here, on the borders, 600 yojanas away, where the king Antiochos rules, beyond there where the four kings named Ptolemy, Antigonus, Magas and Alexander rule, likewise in the south among the Cholas, Pandyas, and as far as Tamraparni.’7 (Ashoka refers to the five Greek rulers he held diplomatic relations with: Antiochos II Theos of Syria, Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt, Antigonus II Gonatas of Macedonia, Magas of Cyrene (Lybia), Alexander II of Epirus, and to the rulers at the southern tip of India and current Sri Lanka.) And farther ‘where the Yonas, the Kambojas, the Nabhakas, the Nabhapamkits, the Bhojas, the Pitinikas, the Andhras and the Palidas’ (other nations and territories in the Himalayan north and the east), everywhere ‘the conquest of Piety has been won.’ And this edict has been written ‘so that my sons and my great-grandsons may not consider making new conquests, or that if military conquests are made, that they be done with forbearance and light punishment.’8

 The Shahbazgarhi Rock Edict there, Inscriptions p. 50 ff.; in G.P.C. p. 117 ff.  Edict XIII, Inscriptions, p. 43 ff. 6  Edict XII and XIII, Ibid. 7  Edict II, Inscriptions p. 2; in G.P. Carratelli, p. 41. 8  Edict V, Ibid. p. 8 ff.; in G.P. Carratelli, p. 48. 4 5

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The same edict appeared with slight variations in different parts of the empire in different languages. As in the case of another rock the edicts were written ‘in brief, in medium length, and in extended forms.’ Ashoka had ‘some subjects’ described in detail; they were spoken of again and again ‘because of their sweetness, and so that the people may act in accordance with them.’ If some texts were written incomplete, he added ‘this was because of the imperfection of the rock surface, or due to the scarce clarity of the manuscript (apparently handed out by the scribes at the chancellery in the capital Pataliputra), or due to the fault of the scribe.’9 In this passage the text register becomes epistolary as if the king were seeking a conversation, as if beyond his political, diplomatic, dissuasive, instructing and at times law-making, at others purely narrative role, he wished to voice the desire to communicate, talk with his subjects, making thus manifest his more personal feelings and preoccupations: particularly the torment that led him to convert from Brahmanism or Hinduism to Buddhism at the end of the bloody war campaign. This is not an altogether clear point because Chandragupta (in Greek historiography Sandrocotto, said to have encountered Alexander the Great), the founder of the Mauryan dynasty, and Bindusara, Ashoka’s father, were of unclean origin in terms of their caste rank and royal bloodline, for they belonged to a lower-middle caste and were born into families with lower-class spouses. This would mean an awkward position in Hindu orthodoxy. Ashoka himself was at a disadvantage because of his birth while his brothers belonged to a superior rank and his rise to power came through military conquests, which brought him distinction but also made him eliminate them, as is often the case in many other dynasties; the revenge of the ‘bastard.’10 The renowned Indian historian Romila Thapar has not been able to establish the exact date and reasons for Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism. But it is broadly agreed it should have occurred after the Kalinga war and must relate with ceasing of massacres, barring the hitherto mysterious two-year interval between the first stage of bland devotion and ‘without zeal’, as Ashoka confesses on rocks and columns all across his empire. Why initially a tepid embrace of Buddhism? And why a stronger conviction only years later? Besides, Buddhism spread out undoubtedly most extensively in the Indian subcontinent during his reign and gave cause to validate the legend that Gautama Buddha himself must have foretold Ashoka’s birth. Among the many legends about Ashoka, it is also said that his mother was Greek, married to Bindusara to thank for the good neighbourly relations between the Mauryan and the Seleucid Empires. At all events, however, in his reign he became the patron and guide of Buddhism and employed all his power to eliminate factionalism. The essence of Ashoka’s pluralist vision derives its strength from the fact that it comes from within a profession of faith, that of Buddhism; it is not born out of a  Edict XIV, Ibid. p. 14 ff.; in G.P. Carratelli, p. 70.  The essential information on the Maurya Empire is taken from Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India. From the Origins to AD 1300, London: Penguin Books, 2002, 346–408. More about Ashoka’s life, his edicts, the context of religious conflicts, the dynasty and Ashoka’s family relations with the Seleucids (Antiochus I was probably his uncle) in the same author’s Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas. Oxford: OUP, 1997 (3. Edition). 9

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relation of indifference vis-à-vis confessional belonging, but from an inclusive conception of different creeds, as Ashoka advocates for all equally. The most significant of all his edicts, edict XII, states: The King honours both ascetics and the householders of all religions, and he honours them with gifts and honours of various kinds…for growth in the essentials of all religions. Growth in essentials can be done in different ways, but all of them have as their root restraint in speech, that is, not praising one’s own religion, or condemning the religion of others without good cause. And if there is cause for criticism, it should be done in a mild way. But it is better to honour other religions for this reason. By so doing, one’s own religion benefits, and so do other religions, while doing otherwise harms one’s own religion and the religion of others.11

Ashoka does not dread to be repetitive; we may as well imagine him dictating the scribes in his palace in Pataliputra (today, Patna, in the East Indian state of Bihar): ‘Whoever praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion and condemns others with the thought to glorify his own, only harms his own religion. Therefore contact (between religions) is good. One should listen and respect the doctrines professed by others.’12 This was followed by the statement at the beginning of this chapter, and the successive instructions, not entirely intelligible for us but certainly concerning inspectors’ and state officials’ duties how to treat differences regarding religious rituals, women’s position, and questions concerning animals and food. The latter continues to be a major source of conflict in India today, while administrative operations were formerly expected to draw inspiration from the concept of major respect and restraint of all ‘excess’. The emphasis on a moderate vindication of one’s own religion and readiness to accept the benefits of different convictions has far-reaching consequences, which we shall posit today under the emblem of ‘culture of dialogue’ or ‘pluralism’. But Ashoka does not go so far; he does not look into the question of ‘the truth’ of other creeds, mainly because his is the age with a polytheist horizon but accomplishes an even more arduous task by extending the principle of moderation and attention to others’ reasoning to the non-religious public domain. In his edict XXXIV of Kandahar (today Afghanistan) written in Greek, he asks for ‘piety and restraint in all disputes. Who restrains his speech has the highest self-control. There should be no extolment of one’s own sect or disparagement of others…Those who do so extol themselves and conquer others.’13 Self-restraint and attention to the good sense in the reasoning of others, besides the good sense in their religious beliefs, become rules in Ashoka’s edicts that anticipate certain basic principles of a deliberative discussion in public institutions. This opening towards the potential truth of others

 Edict XII, Inscriptions, p. 43, in G.P.C, p. 65.  Edict XII, Ibid. 13  This Edict, known as XXXIV, is a different version of XII and XII, has been edited by D. Schlumberger, Une nouvelle inscription grecque d’Açoka, in «Comptes rendus de l’Académie des inscriptions et Belles Lettres», 1964. Source quoted by G.  Pugliese Carratelli, see above, pp. 121–122. 11 12

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presents the edicts as a form of political thought ushering in advance the defence of toleration, heterodoxy, discordance with dominant views, and pluralism.14 Amartya Sen has considered this as a fundamental feature in his investigation of rationalist, deliberative, and argumentative roots in the history of India—roots which paved the way to the culture of discussion, codified dialogue among different religions, state neutrality with respect to different faiths, were established as tenets nearly 2000 years later during the Moghul Empire of Akbar, and thrived in the twentieth century in the thoughts and deeds of Tagore, Ambedkar and Gandhi, the founding fathers of the modern Indian democracy.15 Ashoka’s rocks display such an outspoken message of toleration and eagerness to dialogue with people of different faiths that to encounter its equivalent in Western tradition, to witness the separation of state sovereignty from the sovereign’s religion, and concede, for instance, freedom of religion to Protestants living under Catholic rule, or vice versa, we had to wait until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The pluralist enlightenment of this emperor of Antiquity, however, did not secure an enduring national cohesion in the Indian subcontinent over time, but it did provide a significant lead for creativity and political intelligence, not entirely studied to date, whose extraordinary challenge does not fail to astonish with respect to the vast variety of differences India has always represented. With the introduction of Christianity and particularly Islam, the social composition becomes increasingly more instable. As noted, the culture of dialogue and discussion thrives once again under Akbar the Great’s rule: sometimes at odds with his own religion, the Emperor of Islam, as he called himself (the entire Moghul dynasty was Muslim), sponsored and supported philosophical and theological discussions, dialogue between adherents of different faiths, religious liberty, and State neutrality. He personally abstained from eating beef and prohibited cattle slaughter out of respect for Hinduism and

 In ‘The Roots of Indian Pluralism. A Reading of Asokan Edicts’ (in Philosophy and Social Criticism, 41: 4–5, 2015. Sage Publication, pp. 367–381), Rajeev Bhargava also focuses on self-­ restraint in public debate, governing of the tongue both during critical argumentation with respect to different faiths and defence of one’s own belief, viewing these norms of utmost relevance to make sense of religious contentions during Ashoka’s rule. 15  In his Argumentative Indian. Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (London: Penguin Books, 2006), Amartya Sen illustrates how the enquiry about the historical roots of democracy, rather than being limited to the Western traditional narrative, must take into account the importance of public reasoning, open discussions and sceptical mind which, by questioning orthodoxy, enables an interactive value construct. In this respect, democracy as ‘government by discussion’ can also stem from ‘India’s argumentative tradition’ which began to occur as early as the initial years of Buddhism and its principal councils. Amartya Sen mentions in particular the third—the largest and the best known of these councils—held under the patronage of Emperor Ashoka, who was strongly committed, as his rock edicts display, to ensure that public discussion could take place without animosity or violence of pasandas (followers of different schools of preachers and monks with contrasting views). Ashoka dictated the rules for public discussion, thereby anticipating in the third century BC an ancient version of ‘Robert’s Rules of Order’, the standard for facilitating parliamentary discussion and debate codified only in the nineteenth century. 14

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tried to create a creed akin to Sufism unifying different but compatible aspects of diverse religions. Thus, he secured a period of peace and cultural growth.16 With Gandhi, about whom Einstein notably remarked ‘generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth,’ a gigantic political figure rose to political stage, and who, besides being the major hero of non-violent struggle for his country’s independence from British colonialism, set an unparalleled example of Ashoka’s tenet of pluralism in a modern key: ‘Hinduism is not an exclusive religion. In it there is room for the worship of all prophets in the world. It includes all that I know to be best in Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. For me, the different religions are beautiful flowers from the same garden, or they are branches of the same majestic tree.’17 His commitment to dialogue included a vision of individual liberty and far-reaching ideas which could not have been born 2000 years before, but their pluralist extent was a typical theme of Indian heritage: refusal to impose on others an identity based on purity and exclusive unity of a single tradition. Every single person, continued Gandhi, had the right to interpret and amend their own tradition of thought beyond the notion of belonging and by subjecting ‘every formula of any religion to the test of rationality and universal principles of justice.’ Every religion, culture and tradition own a core consisting of humanity and justice, and therefore should ‘all be subject to a consistent experiment to find out their capacity to enter into dialogue with other religions.’ Gandhi believed that the culture developed in India with the ‘seeds sown by our ancestors’ would never be trampled again and that it was a mistake to think India could never be a one nation state because its people adhered to different religions. ‘Muslims who think only a Muslim India can exist,’ as he responded to a fundamentalist ‘live in a dream country.’ His idea of Indian independence was a success, but the project of unification was not, because the birth of new India coincided with the partition and birth of Pakistan, based on the theory of two nation states. And it meant defeat due to tragic migrations in pursuit of ethnical cleansing and all the ensuing consequences. The two-­ nation theory based on a religious divide posited by Ali Jinna took off with the support of radical Hindus. Among these nationalist Hindus, Nathura Gotse, assassinated Gandhi because Gandhi had sought and pursued peace and dialogue with the Muslims in his country and in Pakistan, and had believed everyone, not only

 For Akbar Amartya Sen’s above quoted book: the tradition of restraint in regard to speech, self-­ control while defending one’s own reasoning, moderation, tolerance and respect for other’s ideas, as well as State impartiality towards different religions (the essence of secularism) were once again core values in the mid sixteenth century during the reign of the Moghul emperor Akbar the Great. The same tradition emerges again thanks to the liberal spirit of important figures in modern India, such as Gandhi, Tagore or even in the religious spirit of non-aggressive Hinduism championed by Vivekananda. In short, the intolerant and exclusivist versions of Hinduism and Islam contradict and betray the strong roots of Indian argumentative culture and reasoned public discussions, whose progenitor is to be found in the enlightened figure of Ashoka. 17  Jahanbegloo’s The Gandhian Moment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2013. 16

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Hindus, could live in a one-nation state.18 Today, in the Republic of India nearly 200 million Muslims live alongside a billion Hindus and millions of people of other religions, which include Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains and Jews. Ashoka’s ancient rocks propagating tolerance have witnessed repeatedly the failure of their design in the course of human history, which is also the case of today’s India. Nevertheless, their wisdom continues to provide hope and inspiration for future ages.

 As for Gandhi’s assassination, the death verdict pronounced against his assassin Nathuram Godse and the culprit’s own declaration in its integral form, see the final pages of his biography by Yogesh Chadha. Rediscovering Gandhi. London: Arrow, 1998. 18

Chapter 3

ORIGEN: Redemption Is for All, Not for Us Alone

Abstract  The theologian and Bishop of Alexandria, third century AD, is considered a great exegete of the Holy Books even by his most tenacious opponents (still powerful today). Having studied in the stormy times of the Roman Empire, when persecution alternated with stages of the consolidation of Christianity, and thanks also to a pluralist atmosphere (Jews, pagans, Christians, Neo-Platonists and eastern philosophers lived side by side in Alexandria) he developed the astonishing doctrine of universal salvation for everyone, including extreme and provoking cases such as the biblical pharaoh who raged against Moses and Satan himself, within the framework of his ideas on the rehabilitation and general restitution of everyone in God’s unity: that is the apocatastasis. This is a famous word that has received anathemas over the centuries from various councils and still today (at least until the times of Pope Ratzinger) is suspected of heresy. This chapter also narrates Origen’s fame and success at the Imperial Court of Julia Avita Mamaea, mother of the future emperor Alexander Severus and recreates the conversation between her and Origen, faithfully following his writings. Keywords  Salvation · Redemption · Apocatastasis · Neo-Platonism · Plotinus · Alexandria · Roman empire · Syncretism · Iulia Mamaea · Severan empire · Augustine

3.1 Antioch, 218 A.D. After the salutations, Julia Avita Mamaea turned to the pressing point: ‘Apocatàstasis? My enlightened philosopher and preacher, what an obscure Greek work to describe your Christian paradise? Is it a magic formula to open the gates of heaven? Is this redemption for everyone? Or is it a code for your secret reunions? I do not understand how these sounds can lead to eternal happiness, as Jesus and Paul promised. The physicians of Hippocrates’s language refer to apocatàstasis as ‘rehabilitation’, ‘healing’ or ‘recovery’, as when we regain our faculties, use of our legs or broken

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Bosetti, The Truth of Others, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 25, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25523-6_3

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arms after treatments. Is this what it means? How come what is valid for our bodies be also valid for our souls?’ Origen had to take a deep breath on hearing these words spoken by a woman of power, a regent of the Roman Empire, now questioning him on the crucial thesis of his theology in a court room at Antioch, one of the biggest Roman cities in his age (now Antakya in Turkish Kurdistan, near the Syrian border). And he was ready to deliver a response quickly, as he had imagined he would pronounce a series of precise and thought-out arguments. The controversy on this point was not novel to him. But before listening to Origen’s reply, we need to explain what caused such emotional upheaval despite his sharp wit and wide learning. Although he had left Egypt and his native town Alexandria to meet different people, travelling extensively from Rome to Palestine, from Petra to Caesarea, Origen at 33 was now for the first time before a member of the world-ruling family: Julia Avita Mamaea, aunt to Elagabalus, the emperor on throne in Rome. Origen of Alexandria, the young and renowned Christian scholar of Greek language, hence not Latin, was Leonides’ son, a martyr of Septimius Severus’s persecution, who had been tortured and killed just 15 years earlier. At the moment of that meeting Origen had not yet recovered from a sense of astonishment, the recurring memory of deep and never-ending pain that also filled him with pride as a passionate Christian. The woman standing before him was Septimius’ niece. When the Praetorian Guards had summoned him few days ago, he had recalled the terror of his father’s own arrest: as a young boy he would have wholeheartedly gone into his cell to be by his side at the martyrdom (thwarted by force by his mother’s cunning as she had hidden his clothes). The target of that night’s round up in Alexandria was not Origen or his mother of humbler social status but his father, a Roman citizen of higher rank who had converted to Christianity. Leonides had been decapitated publicly.1 Its grief and humiliation were to leave an indelible mark on Origen and become the major impetus to his faith and his mission as a preacher. But now, when the Praetorian Guards arrived, Origen noticed they were being kind and did not intend to persecute him. The empire was still under the rule of the same Severan dynasty, but the current tide for his religious fellows was no longer as tempestuous as before. The religious policy at the summit of the Empire was voluble, chaotic—Elagabalus was himself fond of sun worship alongside the tradition of Roman cults, Mithraism, other numerous local cults—and potentially unstable and perilous (the persecutions would resume 30 years later). The order imparted to the

 For the story of Origen’s father Leonides, who was beheaded for his Christian beliefs in Alexandria and his high social status, see Aline Rousselle, ‘The Persecution of Christians at Alexandria in the 3rd Century’, in Revue Historique de Droit Français et Étranger, 2, 1974, pp. 222–251, quoted by McGurkin, The Westminster Handbook of Origen (John Knox Westminster Press, 2005) Kindle, in chapter ‘The Life of Origen – Childhood and Youth in Alexandria’. The latter source provides also information about his mother’s lower social class and the fact she may have been a Jewess; this means Origen, a child of a mixed marriage, may not have been entitled to citizenship under the Roman law. 1

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imperial guards could not but be positive in this case. Origen was asked to appear in court, as a free person, a learned Greek, for his knowledge, philosophy, and for the simple reason of being the best renowned and respected Christian of his age. The guards were asked to accompany him with courtesy from his present address in Palestine to the court temporarily established at Antioch, because there Julia Mamaea wished to make his acquaintance. Origen had already been informed about the regent by Ambrose, his Alexandrian friend who had wide connections (not the patron saint of Milan born 150 years later). Since emperor’s aunt and Julia Mamaea’s mother, Julia Maesa, exercised enormous influence, the two Julias wished to guide the young emperor on the throne, respectively their nephew and son. Origen then began his discourse: ‘Domina and Mater Augusta, Julia Avita Mamaea, the most excellent lady,’ and after a brief pause upon her gesture to take seat before her, continued ‘I am most honoured to expound to you the principles which have given me reason to formulate this idea.’ Julia: ‘And I am listening to you with much attention because I know your qualities, of your excellent Christian scholarship you have proven from an early age; I am listening to you for my own sake, for the benefit I can draw from it for my son, how it can contribute to establish peace in the Empire and govern the faiths of its people. Above all I hope this interview, which I wish to thank for, should dissipate the shadow of any secret plot against the State and the law—as you well know—over Christian communities.’ This fleeting remark on his personal experience, and perhaps indirectly on his father, startled Origen. This meant she must know of his father, but wished to converse precisely with him although he was the son of the unjust victim of the noted suspicions. Origen: ‘I will begin therefore with the Greek word that means ‘restoration’, reconstruction of the original integrity of mankind, of the world and of God, broken by sin, vice, guilt and human failure. And I intend to do it with clear, open reasoning, the reasoning of faith that does not wish to conceal anything of itself; on the contrary, a reasoning that also aspires to render manifest its own doubts, as is my habit in my sermons and writings. If in the past Christians had to hide away in underground ravines and gorges, they did not do it to seek darkness but to seek shelter from injustice and maltreatment. And God does not wish them to have to do so again. The current times seem propitious to dissipate prejudices, the existence of so many different faiths and philosophies, new and old, in the cities of the Empire enhances the circumstances to live in peace, to tolerate one another and even collaborate with one another.’ Julia Mamaea let pass the remark on maltreatment: ‘Your faith is spreading across the Empire along with other faiths, it is gaining ground among the poor, the Roman citizens, and also among the learned and people of higher status. Your preaching based on strong philosophical arguments is

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encountering increased support and attraction for those who, like me, care for the emperor’s family and his heirs. The sacred books, from the stories of Moses to those of Jesus and his apostles, are not only repeated in prayers and told as popular fables by priests but are now the topic of philosophical discussions in Greek schools of important scholars, Jewish schools, among the Gnostics and the Oriental learned people. And you have earned a more distinct reputation in Alexandria than anyone else, more than Philo, more than Clement and even Ammonius.’ This proved Julia’s keen knowledge of the cultural life of one of the most dynamic Mediterranean cities as she mentioned some of the most significant figures of Jewish culture (Philo), Origen’s tutor (Clement), and the founder (Ammonius) of the Platonic school, which was soon to deliver the exceptional figure of Plotinus. Origen: ‘I wish to thank you for your high regard and appreciation. Time will show if and to what extent it may be worthy of. The term you ask me to start with means ‘restoration’ of all things at the end of all times, and it is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles. It is ‘the reintegration’ of everything in union with God, in a certain way a return to the original state, to heavenly Jerusalem, which we can discuss at length. But what matters most in my interpretation is that this reintegration is universal and embraces the entire humanity without exclusion.’ Julia: ‘You have said this is your ‘interpretation’, which suggests that it is not an absolute principle of faith?’ Origen: ‘I formulate speculations by applying reason to the reading of holy scriptures and will leave my writings on this topic with you. Both in the Old and the New Testament there are obscure, or apparently irrational and impossible passages. Who can believe, as the Genesis suggests, God planted Paradise facing east, as though he were a farmer, or that he actually created the tree of life, or that one does good or evil for eating a fruit? But in the Gospels, too how can one believe that the devil took Jesus to a high mountain to show him all the kingdoms of the world and that the human eye can see, from atop, the entire kingdoms of Persia and India? And all those absurd pedant instructions, such as the Sabbath for Jews in the Old Testament or as in the Gospels the command Jesus allegedly gives to Luke ‘to greet no one on the road’ (10.4). Is it not all too clear that only idiots would interpret the words of Jesus in Matthew (19.12) as an invitation to choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven? To confront so much awkwardness one needs to enquire the spiritual or allegorical meaning through careful reading which should elevate us from the literary version upheld by simpliciores. My own interpretation of apocatàstasis is therefore the result of an analysis of the irrationality of the literary significance of holy scriptures. The JewishChristian sect of ‘Ebionites’ alone, which in my view means no more than ‘poor of wit’, can follow the teaching of Jesus thinking it is destined to the children of Israel, in flesh, to the exclusion of all others, which they conclude from the letter of the Redeemer’s words according to Matthew: ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.’ The term Israel in this context has a spiritual

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significance, all the minds and men who see God, the heavenly city which does not exist within a geographical perimeter: hence all mankind’. Origen’s open mind impressed Julia deeply. She also saw that what she had heard about him corresponded to reality, yet she was still cautious and worried for several reasons. Julia: ‘I know from your writings and from what I have read by Paul that sacrificing Jesus represents in your religion the path to redemption and to the potentially eternal award for all mankind. But, however extended it may be out of the bounds of Judea ‘in flesh’, as you put it, the award is reserved only to those who adhere to your religion, who enter your church, and excludes not only sinners, which is understandable, but also those who do not wish to or cannot be Christians as they refuse Christ’s message or because they do not know him. It follows that the ‘restoration’ of all to the original integrity and eternal happiness in communion with God is not for all humankind. If the Empire acts benignly to different faiths and predications, and if we respect Roman and Greek traditions with their respective deities, Orpheus, Ceres, Diane, the forefathers, emperors of the past, Alexander the Great, Abraham the patriarch of Jews, and spiritual figures like Apollonius of Tyana, so dear to my grandmother Julia Domna that she asked Philostratus to write his biography, if these faiths can live with one another in mutual respect that impedes the invasive proselytism of one towards the other, I fear, by contrast, your universal mission of Christianity is belligerent and incompatible with other flourishing beliefs. I fear your religion in the long run intends to prevail, and that it can become a permanent source of subversion unless it manages to prevail by subjecting others.’ Origen: ‘We Christians believe in one God only, like the Jews, but he is so big and grand that he can embrace everyone and all and not only one people. But this does not mean that redemption is to the exclusion of those who share our faith. After many cycles of time—and here I turn to Greek philosophy—all souls that have gone through different cycles of life will end up ultimately at apocatàstasis, everyone will be punished for their sins and then the grace of God through Christ will call all the creatures to one single end, after having beaten and subjected also the opponents, not as in this world where men beat their opponents like stools under their feet, to redemption instead.’ Julia: ‘So, what I hear is also true that you believe malign and dark forces as well, the devil of all faiths will at the end reach salvation through ‘restoration’ in integrum, in union with God?’ Origen: ‘I understand that the debate concerning my thoughts has reached you too, and I do not know whether to worry about it or rejoice in it. It is true, certainly, that the reasoning which urges me to consider that the supreme grace which is God, that is its utmost being, contrasts both with the presence of a malign power at the end of times and the eternity of infernal punishment. How could God co-exist forever with eternal fire that burns the damned. My thought, whose coherence I do defend vehemently but which I do not wish to impose as a dogma, is that first some, followed by others, others even at the very last instances and by means of even harsher and more painful punishments to

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be endured at length for many centuries, all will at the end be restored through severe corrections, and be reintegrated first among the angels and then gain access to higher levels. Everyone will benefit from ‘restoration’ because all rational souls will have the faculty to decide by virtue of their free will, and will do so by means of a long, yet not infinite, cycle of apprehension. You may be ridden with many philosophical questions at this point, Domina Julia, which we can look into, but as regards the potential conflict Christianity harbours because of its universal ambition, I would say that based on my reasoning and the idea of apocatàstasis, Christian faith has no need to coerce the followers of different religions, because after having experienced the most diverse customs and devotions which have existed through all varieties in human history, all rational souls will be able to benefit from the restoration to integrity of everything. But I also realise that my theses are often met with prejudice and regarded as heresies by my own brethren. These accusations come from representatives of orthodoxy, which is by the way still being defined. I, for my part, expound my ideas with much caution and care, and examine and discuss them at length rather than formulating a secure and forever definite solution. I proceed tentatively and know two different ways are open to the future history of the church of Christ: one is the one as shown in my On Principles, the other is the one owned by unquestionable absolutists. My theology can lose or win. It may certainly appear subversive to many orthodox Christians, even more so than how it may appear to your present order of different faiths.’ Julia was much impressed by the humanity expressed in Origen’s latter argumentation. Julia: ‘If you are not sure about your own convictions concerning God’s wish for all rational natures, if you treat them as hypotheses that can be written off not on the strength of reason but by contrary prejudices, or even by dogmatic Christians, how can you continue to preach with the mastery of argumentation, which you are never short of?’ Origen: ‘I do it by appealing to what I call ‘a rule of piety’; I am aware of being bold, but I do not wish to leave my faith in Christ’s reign, knowing full well that elocution most inspired by Holy Spirit must be then expressed through the elocution available to us, that of human fragility, as much as the treasure of divine thoughts confided in holy scripture is also contained in fragility, I insist, ‘the fragile shell’2 of a literary meaning of scarce value. In addition, I am doing it because after all our souls come to life on earth, among  My work is based on Origene, I princìpi, edited by Mario Simonetti, UTET, Torino, 1968; that’s the Italian version (with the Latin text in front) of Origen’s De Principiis, itself a translation from Greek by Rufinus, see below. Quotes have been referred to the classic Ch. and Ch. V. De La Rue, Origenis opera omnia. Paris 1738–1759, reprinted in I.B. Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Graeca, voll. XI–XIV. De principiis in vol. XI, is divided in libers and paragraphs. The quote of “the fragile shell of the literal sense of little value” in I princìpi, Simonetti ed. p. 537. (De principiis, in I.B. Migne Liber IV-14). 2

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different peoples, under different sovereigns and circumstances, born of these or those genitors, that what they shall, what we shall have at our disposal will always be a great variety of states of imperfection. Truth, as well as the kingdom of heaven with all its mysteries, is like a treasure buried in a field that exists but we do not know where to find it.3 Perfect knowledge is impenetrable for us. However hard and deep we may keep on studying, we shall never attain the object of our research entirely, be it the nature of God or the ultimate meaning of our being on this earth. A state of things that must instil prudence in us and never let us close mentally the door of redemption to others.’ Origen of Alexandria and Julia Mamaea went on conversing that day and the following. Then the former returned abruptly to his studies.4  I princìpi, p.530 (Migne, Liber IV-11).  Origen’s meeting with Julia Avita Mamaea is generally considered a fact, so is its venue the imperial court at Antiochia, whose ruins today are part of the collection of the Archaeological Museum of Antakya. The meeting was first mentioned in Historia Ecclesiastica (Ecclesiastical History) by Eusebius of Caesaria (trans. Kirsopp Lake. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1926). Julia was known for her passion to converse with the most outstanding philosopher of her age. See Francesca Ghedini, Giulia Domna, Una siriaca sul trono dei Cesari, (Rome: Carocci, 2020), pp. 158–159— Giulia Mamea was her niece—; E.A. Hemelrijk, Matrona docta: Educated women in the Roman élite from Cornelia to Julia Domna (London/New York: Routledge, 1999), 126; B. Levick, Julia Domna, Syrian Empress, (London/New York: Routledge, 2007), 115–122; J. Burns, Great Women of Imperial Rome. Mothers and Wives of the Caesars (London/New York: Routledge, 2007), 219–220. To render the content of their conversation I relied nearly literally on the most significant excerpts in Origen’s major work I princìpi, quoted above. This work no longer exists in its Greek original but in Tyrannius Rufinus’ Latin translation that was carried out nearly two centuries later, when Christianity had already been adopted as the religion of the Empire and when Church and State authorities had begun to repress Origenist heresies. Although several passages in Greek selected for the anthology Philocalia, edited by Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil of Caesarea in the fourth century, provides access to the original text and helps to assess how far Rufinus might have subdued Origen’s most troublesome statements, any affirmation needs to be evaluated by relying on the vast production by Origen scholars in the last decades. In this context, I refer to Mario Simonetti, the editor of I princìpi, (Torino: Utet, 2002). (On First Principles, trans. G.W. Butterworth. Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press, 2013). Simonetti’s work as editor is of immense value with its vast information, meticulous introduction and notes. He underlines, among many useful remarks, the ambivalent significance of its Greek title, Perì Archòn, (p. 27), which suggests both principles and princes or rulers, the relevant difference that emerges in the original Greek thesis, amply delved into in the text itself, of religion being acquired in relation to one’s place of birth; he comments on the Trinity (p. 54) where Origen tends toward ‘subordination’, as the Son is the first emanation of the Father while the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son; three levels of interpretation (p. 89) that allocates the literal, moral and spiritual significance for incipientes or simpliciores, progredientes, perfecti respectively, depending on the service rendered to the body, the soul and the spirit (p. 89); Origen’s social relations (p. 95), especially with his wealthy friend Ambrose; his meeting with Julia Avita Mamaea (p. 95). I have construed from Origen’s text several statements he made on the end of the world (p. 199 ff., Migne Liber I-1), apocatastasis and the reintegration of all souls (pp. 205–207, Migne, Liber I-3), the continuity of the Old and New Testament (p. 263 ff., Migne, Liber II-1), the translator Rufinus’s warning at the beginning of the Third Book (p. 361, Migne, Liber III-Praefatio), obscure and even impossible or irrational passages in the scriptures which anticipate the notion of ‘learned ignorance’ and negative theology (p. 513 ff., Migne, Liber IV-1-2-3), the insuperable limits of human knowledge, the kingdom of heavens being similar to a 3 4

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Although reported as a narrative, rather than a witness account, we can rely on the veracity of this meeting which Eusebius of Caesarea in his Ecclesiastical History recounts, however not of firsthand. The actual conversation must have been very much similar, almost to the letter, to what I have reported above after examining Origen’s extant writings and translations; as noted Julia Mamaea had sought this meeting in her need of a strategy for the imperial court, and also to provide her son with adequate education in a world where Christianity was beginning to take hold. It might have been out of sheer intellectual curiosity too, a skill that often accompanies wise and successful sovereigns. We cannot know how far the intelligent, astute regent of the Severan family, who was to shape the Empire’s fate by conducting the 14-year-old Marcus Antonius to the throne, could be aware of having experienced an exceptionally significant moment in the history of Christian theology and general philosophy, when the then young preacher of Alexandria illustrated his idea of truth attainable only by trial and error, never entirely graspable due to the unalterable state of human imperfection— a condition which enclosed also holy scriptures in the state of a ‘fragile shell’ because of their literary, by force human, form, which the entire Trinity—God the creator, Christ the saviour or the Holy Spirit the prompter—, as if taking turns, had to pass through. As she was a highly intelligent and insightful person, she must have benefited and taken great pleasure from this conversation. It is unlikely that she could have imagined the philosophical breadth of that rough critique of perfectionism and ‘negative theology’ coming to view with Plotinus in Alexandria and which would have laid 1200 years later with Nicholas of Cusa the premises of modern transcendental philosophy (Kant, yet another six centuries later): knowledge through approximation and conjectures, inaccessibility not only of God, but of ‘the thing in itself.’ To conclude, Julia could not foresee that the principle of apocatàstasis and of the noneternity of infernal punishment would trigger a theological battle, now grown into a two-millennium long and still on-going debate in the twenty-first century of the Roman Church.5 But she must have grasped the urge to keep ambitions of a single hidden treasure of divine thought enclosed in a ‘fragile shell’, that of the letter and human language (p. 537, Migne, Liber IV-14) which can never attain complete knowledge of the beginning and end of all things. ‘However, one may advance through intense study, helped and illuminated with divine grace, one can never succeed in attaining the object of this study perfectly…’ (pp. 537–538, Migne, Liber IV-14-15). 5  Concerning the fate of apocatastasis (and the anathema showered on it as heresy), see Vito Mancuso “The Soul and its Destiny: Readings and Dialogues on Science, Philosophy, and Religion”, in Existence, Historical Fabulation, Destiny. Analecta Husserliana. The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research. Vol. 99. Dordrecht: Springer and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope “That All Men May Be Saved”? (With Short Discourse on Hell), trans. Dr. David Kipp and Rev. Lothar Krauth. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014. The hypothetical nature and temporary thesis of apocatastasis by Jacques Dupuis, is in Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997) p. 87. The Belgian Jesuit father’s circumspection of Origen expressed as early as in his doctoral thesis can be explained as his endeavour to broaden the limits of the Catholic doctrine suitable to the views of the Church. I will discuss his courageous attempt in Chap. 8.

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truth within confines, and to contain the peril of potential disorders, violent upheavals against minorities or singled out individual targets, phenomena we have learned in the course of time to call pogrom or lynching. Julia Mamaea, perhaps also in an instrumental perspective and for the same intuition that had induced her to invite Origen, could not have missed the new elements embedded in his viewpoint of fusion and fluidity in a religious sense that, for some years still, might have earned the epithet of pluralism, syncretism and toleration ante litteram. In fact, when her son Marcus Bassianus Alexianus rose to the throne as Severus Alexander 4  years later, he had among the Lares the image of Christ together with that of other emperors: Abraham, Orpheus, Apollonius of Tyana and Alexander the Great. Among the projects of Severus Alexander there was said to be the construction of a Christian church, but he called it off probably out of fear of precipitating attention to the new religion and thereby upsetting the regime of consensus and traditions the government of Rome relied on. Besides the above conversation Origen held with Julia Aviva Mamaea, we also need to point out that he had to make a living at an early age as grammar instructor, but already at the age of 18 he had been invited to the Catechetical school by the bishop Demetrius. It was a precarious period, for the peaceful breaks when Christians lived side by side with pagans and Jews (who had a remarkable community in Alexandria) were still interrupted by lengthy persecutions. A moment that lasted long enough to enable the Church to solidify its rise from low to high levels, reinforce its power structure, increase its goods and number of its followers. This was followed by persecutions under Diocletian and Valerian in the second half of the century. Things would change ultimately and forever with the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and Constantine’s conversion in 312, after defeating Maxentius. This interweaving of faiths, conflicts and cohabitation was destined to produce in a highly creative, challenging mind a novel and original thought capable of marking a turning point in the Christian interpretation of Scripture, and to provoke millennial-­ long turmoil for the upholders of the dogma, or at least what it was to become after hundreds of years of councils, anathema, damnation and burnings. After yet a renewed Roman clampdown against Christians, Origen himself was forced to move to Palestine for shelter. At Caesarea Palestinae he continued to teach and preach, gaining even further success and more numerous followers to the anger and envy of the bishop of his hometown, Demetrius, especially when he was ordained a presbyter without the latter’s authorisation. This conflict is the most likely root of the speculation that Origen was one of those Christians who castrated themselves for their religious zeal, by applying Matthew’s Gospel to the letter.6 It was not an uncommon practice at the time and would have been justified as a means  John Anthony McGuckin, editor of The Westminster Handbook of Origen, (John Knox Westminster Press, 2005), states a convincing remark. In the chapter ‘The Life of Origen – Origen’s Development as Philosopher and Didascalos’, paragraphs 5–6, (Kindle version); he insists on the slandering nature of Origen’s ‘castration’, an accusation made by numerous foes of his age and throughout centuries, in particular the envious bishop of Alexandria Demetrius, who found himself eclipsed by the young Origen’s success as a preacher and overridden in his authority as the latter 6

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of eliminating any suspicion of abuse at meetings of male teachers with young girls, as it no doubt occurred to Origen too. He must have chosen celibacy and advocated chastity, but as we have heard from his preaching, he also considered that method of interpreting Christ’s words an idiocy, even if no document proves the fact that he did not carry out the said practice. However, the breakthrough nature of Origen’s works from apocatàstasis onwards is documented as it was repeatedly anathematised in various councils, opposed by zealots, and led to infamous campaigns against him, such as the above speculation or the rumor offering incense to pagan gods.7 was ordained a bishop in Palestine, without his knowledge. Besides tarnishing his name, such an accusation aimed to invalidate his ordination, making him incompatible for office. On this very issue, Origen himself commented the famous passage from Matthew 19:12: ‘For there are some eunuchs, who were born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, who were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.’ In his critical exegesis, Origen ridicules the literal reading of a hypothesis that sees castration as a way to conquer the kingdom of heaven (in Origen, Commento al Vangelo di Matteo I, Libri X–XII. Introduction and notes edited by Maria Ignazia Danieli, translation by Rosario Scognamiglio. In Collana di testi patristici (Roma: Città Nuova Editrice), 197–212. This is not a minor comment. After a lengthy analysis, the author takes up all the three conditions Jesus proposes to focus on the third one, the zealous ones who believe to earn divine grace and salvation through castration. And he refuses it vehemently as only simplices could make such an erroneous interpretation. Origen opposes explicitly both ‘the letter that kills’, the spiritual meaning of the holy text, and a bodily mutilation that abolishes manhood which must needs be protected, for it is God’s gift even when one practices abstinence and chastity. Adamantius writes a long commentary on this matter, because in his age castration was quite a widespread practice among many sects. McGuckin, therefore, insists there are good reasons for holding Origen’s own text more valid than Eusebius’s interpretation in Historia Ecclesiastica and Demetrius’s defamatory accusations. Here follows the passage of his clear commentary on the non-literal significance of ‘choosing to live like eunuchs’: ‘But what is worthy of acceptance is if someone takes up the word which is living and ‘effective and sharper than any two-edged sword’ (Heb 4:12), even the ‘sword of the Spirit’ (as the Apostle names is [Eph 6:17], castrating the passionate part of the soul, without touching the body, indeed he may do this because he understood the kingdom of the heavens, and that to castrate the passionate part of his soul with reason contributes greatly towards inheriting the kingdom of the heavens. It is to such people, and those who suppose that the passage is to be taken in a somatic fashion, that the passage is fitting, There are eunuchs such as have made themselves eunuchs on account of the kingdom of the heavens (Matt 19:12).’ (Origen, Commentary on Matthew. An English Translation (revised 2019) by Justin Gohl, p. 11. www.academia.edu). Peter Brown does not bring a convincing thesis when he sides with Eusebius on this point, stating it as a common practice of the age, hence ‘possible’ on the sole grounds it would be ‘not unthinkable’ if Origen had not done it (The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. NY: Columbia UP, 2008), 161–169. 7  News about Origen’s life in Joseph W.  Trigg, Origen, Routledge 1998. Studies on Origen are extremely varied, deep and wide-ranging. The international review “Adamantius” (that’s the title he earned due to his sharp and clear thought like a razor) edited by The Italian Study Group on Origen and Alexandrian Translation (GIROTA) since 1995, is a yearly publication focussing on Origen, and can be accessed online (http://cisadu2.let.uniroma1.it/girota/). Despite the difficult task of finding the sources dating from the dawn of Christianity and the loss of a great part of his vast scholarly output—which amounted to thousands of works—some of Origen’s ideas have spanned the entire history of ideas up to our age. And this occurs as a result of a number of reasons among which the following needs highlighting: his ideas have exercised an extraordinary force to

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At all events Origen was called back to Alexandria, where he continued to work, and travelled to Athens, Rome, Arabia and once more to Palestine. With a considerable income through his writings and protection of families of higher status and of his friends, particularly of Ambrose, for a long period he could count on several scribes to meet his fecund output and compose his works by dictation. In this context of different cults co-existing within close proximity, Origen’s thought unfolds in a colloquial fashion often open to doubt, leaving at times the reader before hazardous options. Although principles of truth of one may contradict those of the other, borders between one religion and another are subtle, more than we can imagine today. The Didaskaleion in Alexandria, once headed by Clement and now by Origen, was the crossroads of dialogue between Jews, cult members of Egyptian philosophy, Chaldean and Indian astrologers, and learned people who expressed varied opinions about Greeks and their deities. All promised, so writes Origen himself in De principiis, according to the Latin title (Perì Archon in Greek, which contains also the meaning of De Pricipatibus), the knowledge of the Sublime. For Origen these differences are not simply the result of different choices made by individuals, as one could opt for a faith based on mere preference. No, these varying beliefs and knowledge are a consequence of ‘powers’, a concept that denotes different degrees of being, in a hierarchic order of a Neoplatonic vision. There are friendly and adverse powers, angelic and diabolic creatures that go through varying degrees of rise and fall in the cyclical course of cosmos, towards good or towards evil. ‘Powers’ are also rulers as the Bible also indicates: Hebrew wisdom and Neoplatonic order of being thus converge in Origen at this point to indicate that rulers, that is to say States, and powers each have their wisdom and teach different doctrines, as is the case among Greeks, Persians and others, with the consequence that people born in those nations guided by those rulers adopt the faith of that place. Origen thus offers the idea that can be called the customary religion today, the religion one adopts on the basis of one’s place of birth and for which one does not entirely account for. (Montaigne was to put it more crudely and without theological inhibitions as ‘we are Christians by the same title that we are Perigordians or Germans.’)8 Whether government powers or rulers should be for or against our good or be inspired more or less by the devil cannot be decided by a ruler’s subjects. In fact, when God’s Son manifested himself, ‘the kings of the earth united against him and crucified him.’ But it cannot be stated that they did so to comply with evil nor for wishing to cause harm. Origen says they could have done it out of error or ignorance, for they held a precise idea of supreme good to teach to others. Therefore,

defeat the life-saving perimeter of the truth as an exclusive property of one faith. The central notion of his philosophy is the redemption of all humankind, independently of its accidental differences, the reconciliation of ‘all in all’ at the end of all times: apocatàstasis. This vision is linked strictly with the negation of eternal hell and the affirmation of eternity of creation. Eternal damnation is incompatible with any sensible idea of God (‘He cannot want and co-exist with an eternal Auschwitz, as Mario Canciani translated it in simple words, Vita da prete. Milan: Mondadori, 1991, 117). 8  See Chap. 6.

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what counts for heretics goes for rulers, or ‘angels of nations’ too, who have in their following their peoples. In this world of Alexandria and of the Roman Empire during the third century, particularly in the Middle East at the time, so many different creeds, heresies, angels of nations and political guides of lands and communities were so tightly interwoven that an exclusivist assumption—good and redemption belong to ‘my’ confession alone, as papal documents of twentieth century still suggest—must have seemed inconceivable, especially to a mind formed with the Neoplatonic culture. It is based on the conviction that the life of each individual on this earth is only a part of a series of cycles it has already or will accomplish in future, will be reborn into a different destiny, have a different faith, and belong to a different hierarchic level of being: rulers, angels, devils, more or less fallen men. Origen’s exceptional personality was formed in Alexandria not far from where the founder of Neoplatonism Ammonius Saccas had opened his school, and where Plotinus would teach shortly.9 The two philosophers are likely to have met, for Origen attended the same school too. Ammonius, of unknown descent but perhaps Indian, is said to have been raised by a Christian family. At 25, Origen had already absorbed the principles of Platonism: the intelligible superior and the sensible inferior levels of the universe, the eternal return of being after the hyperuranium circuit, the final incorporeity of rational creatures, metempsychosis or metensomatosis, the existence of souls before being united with bodies and the creation of the material world as a result of their sins. We also need to bear in mind the strong Hebrew presence in the Alexandrian culture at the dawn of Christian age, authoritatively represented by Philo and his Bible exegesis school whose influence Origen was susceptible to, for he had also studied Hebrew in addition to his native Greek. Fitted out with this expertise Origen is the most distinguished interpreter of the Old and New Testament, wherein he reads and underlines the continuous validity of divine revelation. Without him this union could certainly not have been so strong in the Christian tradition. And, as usual, dialogue with Judaism is the first test of the openness of a Christian mind to plurality of religions. At the beginning of the third century, the Church doctrine is still being constructed and its certain fundamental principles are not entirely established, such as the Trinity, the nature of Christ, grace and free will, relations between the Old and the New Testament. And Alexandria is and was to remain at the crossroads of various interpretations which, a century later, will occupy central attention at the Council of Nicaea in 325 (that will settle the issue regarding the Libyan priest and Alexandria-leaning Arius’ heresy). Origen’s exegetic writings on holy scriptures will be essential to the formation of Christian theology and provide several reference points to the interpretative method of Scriptures, distinguishing three levels: the literary sense that is to correspond with corporeal, carnal, elementary context of humanity, meant for simpliciores or incipientes (the beginners); the moral sense for progredientes; and the spiritual  Giovanni Reale, Storia della filosofia antica, Vol IV, Le scuole dell’età imperiale, Milano 1992 (10), pp. 461–470. G. Reale, A History of Ancient Philosophy IV: The Schools of the Imperial Age, SUNY Press, (1990) pp. 297–303. 9

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sense for perfecti. The first is preparatory with its edifying usefulness, like a veil that needs to be lifted to discover the hidden truth. The second includes practical norms that serve the individual and social life. The third, the truly essential level for Origen, leads to the deepest significance of the Scripture. Origen sowed powerful seeds in Church history; yet these, 14 centuries later, did not prevent Cardinal Bellarmino, beatified Doctor of the Church, from accusing Galileo for contradicting the Old Testament passage, where Joshua states ‘let the sun stand still over Gibeon, and the moon over the valet of Aijalon.’10 By contrast, Origen was neither beatified nor made a Doctor of the Church as ‘Church Father’, a title his teacher Clement was found worthy of instead. Origen was given only the title of ‘ecclesiastical writer’, itself a respectful but inferior merit, for his works were not considered immune to doctrinal errors. Origen’s illuminating scholarship, whose legacy has been acknowledged in most parts, is charged with irrepressible impulses moving in ‘troublesome’ directions. From the beginning it was thus: his idea of the Trinity, for instance, is rather ‘subordinating’, inclined to subject the Son’s status to that of the Father with the Holy Spirit under the Son, which corresponds with Neoplatonist hierarchy of chain of being. Yet it was naturally more far-reaching than this. The scandal stone is thrust with his most original thesis: the universal redemption he formulates, as noted, with the Greek world αποχαταστασις, apocatàstasis. This word has spanned centuries, held its sway over other fathers of Christian theology, from Gregory of Nyssa to our present age, and has encountered at times consent and more often dissent. Even today the Church makes use of Origen as one of the most looted Bible interpreters, particularly when dealing with difficult Pauline texts. But his works had a twofold effect: on the one hand they have been repeatedly quoted and honoured by orthodoxy, as during the pontificate of Benedict XVI. In 2007, he rewarded Origen as a true master who effected an ‘irreversible turn’ in the history of theology based on ‘allegorism’ (a discourse that blatantly ignored all what could be suspected of heresy).11 But on the other hand, Origen also laid an explosive and universalist potential in Church history, to the antipodes of the dogmatic formula ‘EENS’, extra ecclesiam nulla salus. Origen supported the evangelical mission of the Church during the years of martyrdom; he himself was imprisoned and tortured in old age, and died soon afterwards at 69, most likely as a result of the ordeal. In his sermons held at an age of bitter conflicts, he called the brethren to unite, for the Church was the Ark of Salvation like Noah’s Ark, and denounced the Jews for not adhering to Christ’s message and those Christians who had abandoned the Church for fear of reprisals. The evangelical and missionary passage in his teaching is not to be debated, but and there is a ‘big but’ that gets in the way of seeing him as an upholder of an  Joshua, 10:12.  Benedict XVI, Origen of Alexandria: life and work at a General Audience, St Peter’s Square, 25 April 2007. https://www.vatican.va/content/bened,ict-xvi/en/audiences/2007/documents/hf_benxvi_aud_20070425.html. 10 11

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exclusively Christian salvation: in his Bible exegesis Origen enlarges the Church concept, noting that all humankind, perhaps the entirety of creatures, is body of Christ and we are joined to him, each one of us for his own part, including the damned, even the daemon. To cause a spate of accusations of heresy against Origen, his followers and diabolic legends was this satanic feature, as told in the satirical film by Buñuel Simon of the Desert, where a saint who becomes possessed of Satan cries for apocatàstasis as a word of horror that opens the gates of hell. Despite his overt caution, Origen did not back off from this significant point. It is his Latin translator, Tyrannius Rufinus, who 200 years later does so at certain passages and in whose circumlocutions, when translating from the Greek to the extant version (with the exception of few passages the Greek original is lost), one can read the changed dogmatic atmosphere. As proof of the scale of ongoing wars during the sixth century is the theme of ‘Pharaoh’s heart hardening’, a long-debated passage in Biblical exegesis. Indeed, why does Yhwh say to Moses: ‘But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt. But Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt, and bring forth mine armies, and my people the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt by great judgments’?12 Why does the Lord announce he will cause the ruler to behave badly? If he is omnipotent and helps Israel by manifesting himself and causing new plagues in Egypt, why does he need to ‘harden him’? Discussions do not cease on this point. Origen, after looking into a number of hypotheses, offers his own: The Lord ‘hardens’ human beings in sin so that he postpones the judgment on the sinner, giving him the possibility to accumulate sin upon sin, error upon error. The postponement is, in Origen’s view, the result of divine benevolence and has a therapeutic virtue: similar to an expert physician in healing souls, God knows the appropriate moment when to apply his therapy. This moment can last longer than one’s existence on earth, for the soul is immortal from creation, and God, to heal and recover it, lends it time longer than the bodily existence.13 It follows in Origen’s commentary that the hardening of the heart and Pharaoh’s death in sin make up the design to redeem his soul. The significance of this thesis becomes even more shocking since some interpretations14 read Pharaoh as an allegory of the devil. Before such a bold position—the salvation of a hardened sinner— the Latin translator Rufinus attempts to make it appear as ‘the aim to convert other people’ and struggles with the similitude concerning the operation of a physician who, for the sake of a deeper recovery, induces an inflammation in a superficially  Exodus 4–21.  Origen’s, I princìpi, pp. 205–206, Migne, Liber I – 3. 14  The reasons for God’s hardening human beings, such as the Pharaoh, which discloses Origen’s idea of extending salvation even to the devil, with corrective punishment lasting longer than historic, bodily existence, are taken from Giuseppe Caruso’s ‘L’interpretazione origeniana di Rm9’, Alpha Omega, XII, issue 1. Pontificia Università Regina Apostolorum, 2009, pp. 93–105, and from Nicola Pace’s Richerche sulla traduzione di Rufino del ‘De principiis’ di Origene. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1990. p. 92 ff. 12 13

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healed wound. Even in the case of worse souls, such as the inhabitants of the Galilean cities, Chorazin and Bethsaida, who refused to convert to Christianity although Jesus had performed several miracles for their benefit,15 Origen comments the Lord’s deeds as his wish to educate, his offer to make them gain consciousness of their impiety, ‘by freeing them of the alibi they use to justify their sins and so bring them onto the course of conversion’; but this will occur after death, in the immortal course of the soul of creatures that passes from one condition to another, angels, devils, human beings through ‘revolutions’ of the Pantheist universe Origen prefigures mentally. And with respect to the devil himself, he too will convert to good through divine grace, states Origen, a point he will falter about later in life. This ‘system’ of punishment clearly bears enormous significance for the existence of the Church, its organisation, the deterrent nature of sins, the ‘profitable’ value of divine justice, which is preached to gain believers’ hearts and minds, its psychological consequences, moral behaviour it enhances, and the obeisance it generates before the ecclesiastical structure, particularly in the religion’s more popular and common forms. When the final restoration is accomplished, it rationally follows that those who have not become Christians, either out of ignorance or for being subjected to ‘angels of other nations’, are still worthy of redemption, and if sinners they may atone through the healing punishment, if not sinners they are rewarded the due time and means. Origen believed apocatàstasis to be a mandatory idea as it bound the union of God with a reasonable inference with respect to the existing Babel of creeds. Jacques Dupuis, the courageous Belgian theologian who was investigated by the Prefect of Faith cardinal Ratzinger at the close of twentieth century, had a deep knowledge of Origen’s teaching, and being well aware of the ground-breaking nature of apocatàstasis—attacked much earlier in fifth century in a council at Constantinople—defined its significance. The author of ‘pluralist theology’ wished to assemble favourable, and possibly convincing argumentations in the Church to rekindle the ideas of the Second Vatican Council. This is why he took on the view that Origen’s ‘universal restoration’ was merely a ‘temporary opinion’, perhaps abandoned later, and thus left the most important Alexandrian Bible scholar with his ‘ambiguities.’16 We can explain this caution because Origen’s vision of redemption is troublesome and laden with elements unacceptable without a Neoplatonic and Pantheist context, as noted above: the procession of stages the created being goes through and returns to himself following the ‘circumstantial and forever eternal revolutions’, which accounts for Giordano Bruno’s admiration of Origen and his teaching 15 centuries later (not the least reason why he was burnt at the stake). This universal vision of a final redemption for all distances him from the then-­ current interpretation of an exclusivist tenet ‘EENS’ put forth by his contemporary

 Luke 10:13–16.  Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997) p. 87. 15 16

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Cyprian, bishop of Carthage. Yet even Cyprian was not perfectly ‘exclusivist’ in a strict sense, for he pronounced practical rules for his brethren, a harassed minority, such as baptism had to be administered by other Christians only inside a church. It was an evangelical-missionary invitation to enter Church. Nor did he mean to exclude pagans or not-yet-redeemed Hebrews from redemption.17 The denial of ‘eternal hell’ is a key element in the ‘history of God’ in human thought which often makes a comeback under the guise of ‘Origenism’, whose followers, rather than Origen himself, were heavily criticised and excommunicated throughout centuries. The esoteric-sounding word ‘apocatàstasis’ itself has become dangerous, because, as Vito Mancuso points out, Justinian’s condemnation, the 543 Synod of Constantinople and the four ecumenical councils (the second Constantinople council of 553; the third Constantinople council of 680; the second Nicaea council of 787, the fourth Constantinople council of 869) still had their effect.18 As a matter of fact, when it was proposed again, “La Civiltà Cattolica” did not hesitate to remind Mancuso himself that this was ‘a theological error’ and that it had been ‘condemned forever by the Magisterium of the Church.’19 Yet the Origenist path in the history of ideas cannot but be followed when the reconciliatory theology—from Gregory of Nyssa to Hans Urs von Balthasar, from Henry de Lubac to Karl Rahner, and lastly Jacques Dupuis—resumes the universal theme of redemption and ‘seeds of truth’ of other religions. During the formative years of Christian orthodoxy Origen and Augustine represent alternative opposite poles which create two contrasting conceptions of the human subject. They are divided by a person’s free will, for the first, who exercises his accountable autonomy on a course ruled by learning and logos, and, for the second, a person thought as corrupt flesh exposed to a likely salvation only in gratitude to the arbitrary divine decision the human will can do nothing about.20 In the history of ideas Origen deserves an outstanding place alongside other modern giants, such as Leibniz and Pascal, who sought ‘styles of thought’ in contrast to the Augustinian surrender to damnation and incurability through human forces alone and with every means of determination, be it in the form of religious doctrine or a philosophical system or political ideology.

 Dupuis, pp. 87–88.  Vito Mancuso, L’anima e il suo destino, Raffaello Cortina Editore, Milano 2007, pp. 234–276. 19  Corrado Marucci, ‘L’anima e il suo destino’ in Civiltà cattolica, Volume I Quaderno 3783, 2008 2/02, p. 256. 20  Gaetano Lettieri has studied this contrast in depth in ‘Apocatastasi logica o Apocalisse della carne? Origene e Agostino paradigmi divergenti d’identificazione storico-sociale cristiana’, in Lessico intellettuale europeo. Anima-corpo alla luce dell’etica. Antichi e moderni, ed. Eugenio Canone (Florence: Olschki, 2005). Concerning the Augustin/Origen divide see also Riccardo Fedriga and Roberto Limonta in their study on free will Metter le brache al mondo. Compatibilismo, conoscenza e libertà (Milano: Jaca Book, 2016). 17 18

Chapter 4

NICHOLAS OF CUSA: A Vision—From Verity to Variety

Abstract  It was a visit to Constantinople that inspired Nicholas of Cues, the greatest fifteenth century philosopher and a powerful cardinal with the idea of “learned ignorance”. His partially successful attempt to settle theological disputes with the Byzantine Church led him to envisage a plan for unity, not only involving Christianity (Byzantium Rome, the Hussite schism), but all humankind’s religions, however, then Constantinople fell to Turks and a massacre followed (rather like a 9/11 of over five centuries ago). Soon after Mehemet II’s bloody victory in May 1453, the philosopher wrote De Pace Fidei, a dream of a celestial conference held in the presence of God Himself and in which religions are manifested as complementary, una religio in varietate rituum. This was an idea that for some time circulated at the very summit of the Church and among the elite leading it (including Pope Pius II, Enea Silvio Piccolomini). Keywords  Constantinople · Turks · 1453 · Schism of Orient · Cassirer · Religious pluralism · De pace fidei · Perfectionism · Imperfectionism · Limits of knowledge · Docta ignorantia · Negative theology · Tolerance · Peace

4.1 Constantinople, September 1437 Under the golden dome of Hagia Sophia overlooking the Golden Horn, a promising young German cleric from Kues on the Moselle is attending the Byzantine Mass as the special envoy of the Pope of Rome. Another cleric of a high doctrinal rank of the Eastern Church, Isidore, the Metropolitan of Kiev, is with him. They immediately understand one another despite representing two opposite sides of the schism that occurred four centuries ago. Their main mission is to attempt to draw the Eastern and Western Churches into communion. The Roman legates further political mission consists in convincing the Emperor to join the Council of Ferrara in Italy so as to strengthen the Pope’s position against the hostile Council proclaimed by an Antipope at Basel during a particularly turbulent period of the Church. And everybody has a third mission: to prepare a necessary Crusade by sponsoring the military © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Bosetti, The Truth of Others, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 25, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25523-6_4

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help from Rome, Venice, Genoa and entire Europe against the Turks now threatening the frontiers of the Eastern Empire, already reduced to no bigger than its increasingly isolated capital Constantinople, with its allegedly unconquerable walls. The prelate of Kues, before this journey, by siding with the Pope Eugenius IV when he found himself in minority, had not only determined the outcome but was turning into the best source of intelligence for him, who called Nicholas jokingly the pope’s ‘Hercules’, ‘Hercules Eugeniorum.’ Nicholas was to become friend with his successors (rather, his friends were ordained popes). He was German, had studied at Padua and Bologna and entertained close ties with Florentine humanist scholars. Later in life he was named bishop of Brixen, then cardinal in his titular Church, St. Peter in Chains, at Rome. He was a man of authority, a deeply learned ecclesiastical figure, highly skilled at solving legal and theological problems, a gifted diplomat who also had military qualities despite his altogether different reputation today: he is the most significant philosopher of the fifteenth century. The mission at Constantinople 16 years ahead of the Ottoman conquest in 1453 was to leave a deep and permanent mark on Nicholas of Cusa.1

4.2 An Aegean Island, February 1438 The mission ends successfully. After months of theological and political debate all members leave: the union of the Eastern and Western Churches seems ready at hand, the Eastern Emperor has accepted to join the Pope in Rome and to help him, and the crusading forces will be dealt with in detail once they come together in Italy. Together with Nicholas and Isidore, numerous Byzantine representatives are also sailing to meet Pope Eugenius IV. No fewer than 700 men, that is a fleet. And due to the rough weather conditions in the winter of 1437–1438 the crossing lasts several long weeks. There are voyages that have changed the course of history, but this is not one of them. It became an event because of the splendor and exoticism of the Byzantine dignitaries who, once landed in Italy, would visit Italian cities. The procession at Florence with oriental costumes, aligned in popular imagery with the cortège of the Three Wise Men, with philosophers’ and powerful men’s faces from both shores of the Mediterranean, entered the art history, inspiring Piero Della Francesca, Benozzo Gozzoli and many other painters. But it certainly did not suffice to invert the course of history that was to end with the end of the Byzantine Empire. They failed to start the Crusade campaign. In our tale, however, what concerns us is that voyage, which did not change the course of history, did change the course of the history of ideas, because it provoked a sudden and revolutionary, essential swerve in Nicholas of Cusa’s thinking. The  For extended information on Cusanus’ life, see Morimichi Watanabe. Nicholas of Cusa. A Companion to his Life and his Times, ed. Gerald Christianson and Thomas Izbicki. London: Routledge, 2016. 1

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idea initially occurred to him while resting on a Greek island, somewhere between the Turkish coast of Hellespont and the Peloponnese, perhaps at Andros or Euboea (Evia), or at Candia (Crete), depending on the force of the northern winds meltemi that drifted the vessel south with its precious freight of John VIII Palaiologos and his group of delegates onboard. As the storm raged, Nicholas of Cusa recalled St Paul, who had been flung for 2 weeks all the way to Malta, but the Emperor’s fleet was much better fitted out and could certainly circle the Peloponnese—the Corinth Canal was built in 1893—, and sail up the Ionian and the Adriatic to Venice. The difficult voyage and severe sea-sickness that made many members suffer for days on end meant having to stop several times. Comfort would come immediately as soon as they set foot ashore solid Greek soil, Venetian territory. It was here, next to solace and comfort, that an idea like a flash of light crossed the mind of the 36-year-old Papal envoy, a clear and dazzling idea that had remained in the back chambers of his thoughts in a nebulous form. It was the fruit of month-­ long contrasting views on theology and liturgy, mixed up with the hardship endured during the rough crossing: all those hours of debate concerning details and aspects of the organisation of the Mass, order of prayers, baptismal formulas, and then what expressions to employ for the Trinity in Credo, differences that had caused the 1054 schism yet to be debated in the forthcoming Council. As a highly learned doctor decretorum he had often determined the outcome and mediated between the contrasting views and turbulent debates. But now, after months at the Byzantine capital, next to the fatigue he began to perceive a vague suspicion of ‘vanity’, even ‘uselessness’ of all those debates. Words Nicholas with much hesitation allowed to enter his mind, apprehensive of their blasphemous nature. How can one suspect the futility of a conflict concerning the nature of the Trinity, and particularly the expression ‘filioque’? This last was a clause of the Nicene Creed, belonging to the Roman-Catholic orthodoxy, meaning a conception according to which the Holy Spirit proceeds ex patre filioque (from the Father and from the Son), from both and not only from the Father as in the one-father version accredited in the Eastern schism in 1054. Only in the twentieth century did the popes decide to omit the filioque clause in the Credo and thus brought the two positions closer to one another. A compromise at Nicholas of Cusa’s age had also been reached despite upholding the liturgical differences, a decision taken only in view of the Emperor’s request to reinforce his military power with Europe. In actual fact, the hierarchy of the Byzantine church behind the Emperor opposed it. This was the conflict that had drained energies for centuries and now had been consuming several months of Nicholas of Cusa’s own life. But a new idea suddenly began to emerge in his thoughts like a lightning and rushed with the force of a conversion. His thoughts turned to St. Paul once again, not to his stormy voyage but when on the road to Damascus suddenly a bright light shone on and stunned him, causing him to fall from horse; he also thought of St. Augustine’s ecstatic experience in the garden in Milan, where he received the illumination that would change his life. What occurred to the devout believer, priest, and papal envoy Nicholas of Cusa, though, was not a religious conversion but a revolution of the thought, what we could call today with Thomas Kuhn’s words, a paradigm shift. It was a vision, the

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emergence of a discovery, the intellectual unveiling of a theological, philosophical mission that still needed to be carried out, which disclosed a hitherto inarticulate aspect. There was now a new philosophy that had to be formulated and new books had to be written about it: and someone had to do it right away. As Nicholas of Cusa later confessed in a letter, this was what he had always yearned for, what he could never have achieved through doctrines, but had now came to him on this journey, ‘I was led by, as I believe, a heavenly gift from the Father of lights, from whom comes every excellent gift, to embrace incomprehensible things incomprehensibly in learned ignorance (docta ignorantia) and through a transcending of incorruptible truths which are humanly knowable.’2 What was the ‘heavenly gift from the Father of lights?’ What was the idea? ‘Learned ignorance’: this was the name, the flower that bloomed during those sea tempests and endless theological debates. Here is his core thought which from that instance would guide his entire work and that would appear and return in all his writings: when seeking the truth, we judge by comparing what is uncertain with what is certain, but we never come into its possession, be it about God or things of the world. Truth is unreachable through our mind. How very naïve not to grasp it earlier! Only Socrates had taught us that we know that we do not know. ‘There can be nothing greater in existence than the simple, absolute maximum; and since it is greater than our powers of comprehension—for it is infinite truth— our knowledge of it can never mean that we comprehend it…Being by nature indivisible, truth excludes ‘more’ or ‘less’, so that nothing but truth itself can be the exact measure of truth…In consequence, our intellect, which is not the true, never grasps the truth with such precision that it could not be comprehended with an infinitely greater comprehension.’3 We know by means of comparison, confronting, measuring so as to improve our knowledge. But we never reach its conclusion. There is always something more or less left beyond our final target. And therefore, we need to accept ‘finiti ad infinitum nulla proportio’, that it there is no proportion between the finite and the infinite, where the infinite does not designate God alone but all and every kind of knowledge, we seek in order to attain full and absolute truth. Full comprehension of the supreme being and the being of things is ‘beyond proportion’ for ‘our measures’; it is other and can be pursued only in the conjectural otherness, in alteritate conjecturali.4 His mind, which had been tempered by thorough humanistic studies at Padua, Cologne, Paris, Leuven, Rome, and absorbed in controversial debates between those who sought reconciliation and those who fought bitterly against it, was deeply moved by month-long discussions in a city, already under the constant threat of Turkish conquest. Shortly after that stop on the Aegean island he would resume the voyage, initiated in November from the Golden Horn and concluded it on 4 February the

 From a Cusanus’ letter to Cardinal Giuliano published at the end of De docta ignorantia, ed. Raymond Klilbansky, Leipzig 1932, 263–264. 3  De docta ignorantia, quoted edition, I 4,11–12. 4  Nicola Cusanus, De coniecturis, Joseph Koch – Karl Bormann ed., Hamburg 1972, I, Prologus. 2

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following year in Venice. He would have to travel to the Council for the re-union of the Eastern and Western Churches, held at Ferrara rather than Florence due to the outbreak of plague. Nicholas of Cusa now had to deal with a pressing task he had already formed a clear outline of mentally: human knowledge is bound to be ‘conjectural’ and acknowledging its limits—the impossibility of the accomplished possession of truth—involved several philosophical consequences which began to dawn mentally: that unbreachable gap, the inconclusiveness of knowledge was valid both for the Christians in Rome and in Byzantium. And it was also valid for the Bohemian Reformation: the Hussites. Could it then not include all other faiths? Jews, Moslems, Hindus and Zoroastrians? Would it not be simpler to compound the differences that led to theological and even armed conflicts with their incompleteness on the basis of their mutual ‘learned ignorance’? The conjectural nature of all our possible knowledge and consequently its unavoidable inadequacy, once garnered through intuition, should therefore serve as bearers of tolerance, because they inevitably lower the walls that separate us from the truth of others, inevitably displaying the cracks and weakness of our truth, and begin to appear in relation to truth like a condition common to all humankind. As such, this is the condition we all share at all latitudes.5 The plurality of creeds, visions and knowledge is tightly interwoven with our condition—a condition that appeared crystal clear to Nicholas of Cusa with all its import and had to be treated with equal skill as it was not free of perils for the Catholic doctrine, as a matter of fact for any doctrine, for it questioned their claim on single truth. Claims that were never to find complete satisfaction: this weakness (centuries later named ‘human fallibility’ by Voltaire, Popper, Berlin and all the pluralist and ‘antiperfectionist’ modern culture), this ‘frailty of the shell’ (the formula anticipated by the great philosopher Origen) of the human language that must needs express even the most divinely accredited truth in holy scriptures, is a state that should hold us from excommunicating others in the name of an absolute truth we can never own and which compels and condemns us to tolerance. Frailty is the natural mother of tolerance. In relation to the burning of heretics or those claimed as such, Montaigne noted: ‘After all, ‘tis setting a man’s conjectures at a very high price upon them, to cause a man to be roasted alive’ (or a woman, as was the case with witches).6 The higher the wall that separates us from the Truth, the wider and

 Karl Popper, who wrote extensively on Cusanus, views him with Erasmus of Rotterdam among the fathers of tolerance: ‘It was this doctrine of an essentially human fallibility which Nicholas of Cusa and Erasmus of Rotterdam (who refers to Socrates) revived; and it was this ‘humanist’ doctrine (in contradiction to the optimistic doctrine on which Milton relied, the doctrine that truth will prevail) which, Nicholas and Erasmus, Montaigne and Locke and Voltaire, followed by John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell, made the basis of the doctrine of tolerance. ‘What is tolerance?’ asks Voltaire in his Philosophical Dictionary; and he answers: ‘It is a necessary consequence of our humanity. We are all fallible, and prone to error; let us then pardon each other’s follies. This is the first principle of natural right’ (Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1962, 22). 6  Michel de Montaigne, Œuvres complètes, Édition de Maurice Rat et Albert Thibaudet. Introduction et notes de Maurice Rat, 1963, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, III, XI, p. 1380. 5

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easier is the door we need to open to encounter others in the same condition, limited and constrained to ‘go down a wall’ without being able to surmount it. The idea in Nicholas of Cusa’s mind was now formed: he was to work on it on his return to his hometown Kues on the Moselle. It was the most important work of his life, therefore would require a while. On 12 February 1440, De Docta Ignorantia was completed.7 Knowledge appears like a progression, a limitless course that continues admirably, but it never reaches the ‘precision’ of a definite result, because there is an unsurmountable ‘alterity’ between the one who knows and what is known, ετεροn, the other always present as the founding instance in the relation between the human and the divine and all knowledge. The said separation, this division between the one here and the other there is an unsurmountable barrier for our intellect which, though, can conceive this ‘incomprehensible’ that transcends it, this latter also in an incomprehensible manner. We are now before a condition where the opposites come together against the rules of discursive reason: coincidentia oppositorum. The wall is the word Nicholas of Cusa uses insistently to describe the border between the finite objects of our ordinary reasoning and the infinite domain our intellect aspires to.8 That domain is what we infer by intuition to be the area where the infinite mystery of God as well as all mysteries disclose themselves. The division between the finite and infinite, the cut, separates the two dimensions in an insuperable manner like an irreconcilable difference between a polygon and a circumference: ‘For the intellect is to truth as an inscribed polygon is to the inscribing circle: the inscribed polygon grows more like a circle the more angles it has. Yet even though the multiplication of its angles were infinite, nothing will make the polygon equal the circle unless the polygon is resolved into identity with the circle. Clearly, therefore, we  Nicholas Cusanus, whose full name in German was Nikolaus Krebs von Kues because he was born in a small town today called Bernkastel-Kues on the Moselle in 1401 and to which von Brixen was added later, where he served as bishop, has long occupied a prominent place in the history of philosophy, which did not come immediately after the publication of his works circulating mainly in the monastic world. His cosmological anticipations were respected by Campanella, Kepler, Descartes, Mersenne and Gassendi, but it was Lessing who first realised the power of theological and philosophical pluralism of De pace fidei he had translated into German while still at work on his play Nathan the Wise, a work I discuss at length in a separate chapter (for Cusanus’s entrance onto the stage of modern thought, see Giovanni Santinello. Introduzione a Nicola Cusano. Rome-­ Bari: Laterza, 1971, p. 143 onwards, and also Marco Moschini. Cusano nel tempo. Letture e interpretazioni. Rome: Armando, 2000). Although Hegel does not mention him in his history of philosophy, Cusanus’s renown increases in the nineteenth century when his thought is discovered as the path leading to the modern age, Kantian transcendentalism, and the passage from the negative assessment of the limited human knowledge to considering it as the condition for a more determined and mature knowledge. The work that was to launch this transition is Ernst Cassirer’s Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance of 1927 (English translation by Mario Domandi. The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2011). Ever since important scholarly ‘Cusanus Societies’ have been founded in Germany, America and Japan. 8  This concept of “wall” runs throughout all the essay on the Vision of God, De visione Dei, in Nicolai de Cusa opera omnia, vol. VI: De visione Dei, Adelaida Dorothea Remann ed., Hamburg 2000. Especially X-XI-XII-XIII. 7

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know of the truth only that we know that it cannot be comprehended precisely as it is.’9 Nicholas of Cusa would have yearned to confess not only to his intimate friend and cardinal Julian Cesarini, to whom he dedicated his work, but also to himself that next to the ‘heavenly gift’ those months spent in Constantinople and the sea voyage with his Byzantine friends had deeply influenced his intuition. Long conversations with Gemistus Pletho and Basil Bessarion, Neoplatonic philosophers of important schools and their discussions of Plato’s works had not ended without a philosophical consequence. Once his On Learned Ignorance began to be read, the first to grasp the true significance of its novelty were, as we shall see, its adversaries. And soon enough they sought to accuse him of heresy.

4.3 Constantinople, 2 June 1453 Fifteen years after that voyage and the light of learned ignorance, under the massive dome of Hagia Sophia, the Christian cathedral built by Constantine in the new Rome of the East, and where Nicholas of Cusa had attended Mass, after 11 centuries of liturgy and the Eucharist in Latin and Greek, now Muslim prayers were heard: Allahu Akbar. the Adhān, the call to prayer, chanted by the muezzin in a new age for Constantinople, now officially named Konstantiniyye, later to be changed to Istanbul. The news had not reached the Christian world yet, but the mosaic-covered arches with the images of the Redeemer were now being covered with a thick layer of lime on the order of the then just 21-year-old Mehemet II’, who had just stopped his troops from demolishing the entire church. Only 4 days had passed since the end of the victorious siege the sultan had conducted with fierce determination. Four days since the woeful fall for Christians, 4 days since the glorious conquest for the Turks. Four days since when the last remaining believers, priests and royal dignitaries had taken refuge in that church waiting for the inevitable end, and since when, so go the tales of miracles, a handful of priests with an ostensory had vanished in a passage in the walls opened suddenly by a heavenly hand. The passage had been shut immediately until the day of justice, if not until the Last Judgment. Just 6  months earlier on that same spot, under the bright golden mosaics, the emperor Constantine XI had celebrated the reunion of the Eastern and Western Churches together with the Byzantine cardinal Isidore of Kiev, mentioned above, and the Latin envoy Leonard of Chios, an objective that had been actively pursued by various popes and Nicholas of Cusa. With this solemn celebration of a reunification, which in actual fact failed (and remains to be accomplished in twenty-first century) and was to break up before the fall of the Byzantine empire, Isidore and Leonard had hoped to be recalled as the authors of the union after the schism;

 De docta ignorantia, quoted above,! 3, 9–10.

9

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instead, they became witnesses to the fall of Constantinople and authored its dramatic accounts. They stayed there to oversee the application of certain agreements and after the solemn function of December 1452, they had to defend themselves on the city walls against the heavy artillery attack of the Janissaries. They managed to flee the massacre and wrote about it. Isidore was to become even more renowned among Orthodox Christians after being convicted of apostasy, a charge that often and nearly always has befallen men and women seeking dialogue.

4.4 Mediterranean Sea, Europe, Summer 1453 But let us turn our attention to the bloodier and more famous event of the age, the 4 days after the fall of a Christian city to the Muslims. Massacres had ended. Now at the pyres the last remaining corpses of the 4000 fallen soldiers and civilian victims of the massacre were burning, while 40,000 prisoners, tied by their neck in endless lines, were being marched to ships, fields, and slave markets. The head of the last Byzantine Emperor stuffed with hay was now ready to make the triumphant tour in various Muslim capitals, such as Cairo, Tunis and Granada, together with some distinguished Greek as prisoners and groups of children, as a gift, to prove the conquest. ‘The red apple’ placed in Justinian’s hands in his sculpture astride a bronze horse, and the world map with the cross symbolising the universal power of the Emperor, the Logo of Christ and the authority of the power and the right had been finally picked and broken into pieces. Islam’s ‘bone in the throat’—this is how the capital of Eastern Christendom had always appeared to Mohammed himself—was finally removed forever. In the eyes of the Christian world this defeat presaged a threatening expansion of Islam: the Turkish terror was now replacing the terror of ‘Saracenes’ or ‘Moors’.10 The news did not spread instantly but at the speed of sailing boats at the time, from Constantinople to the Aegean and Ionian islands, Negropont (Euboea), Candia (Crete), Corfu to Venice; from Venice to Bologna, Rome and Naples; from Constantinople to the patriarch in Moscow, thence to Serbia, Rumania and Bulgaria; from the Bosphorus straits directly to Genoa and Milan. Despite this, the news that summer caused the same effect as the exceptionally shocking facts in our contemporary age, recalled by the exact occurrence of their date no matter when it may have reached us: 11 September 2001.11  Roger Crowley’s monograph study is here the main source about the fall of Constantinople: 1453. The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West. New  York: Hyperion, 2005. 11  I have always found it astonishing that a work like De pace fidei was made so quickly and immediately after the fall of Constantinople (although the news took several weeks to reach Italy). Raymond Klibansky lists in detail the reasons that have led to conclude the precise date of the composition of the work, in circulation as early as in September, in Nicolai de Cusa. Opera Omnia. 10

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Nicholas of Cusa heard of the Constantinople event on his way from his bishopric Brixen to Rome: by word of mouth the news of the dreadful massacre and the humiliation Christians had to endure spread everywhere; voices added to the horror of real facts, saying Turks had slain everyone over the age of six, blinded 40,000 prisoners, demolished all the churches and that the Sultan was now getting a massive army ready to invade the Italian peninsula. For a second time Nicholas’s own life was thus influenced by the same city. After receiving ‘God’s gift’ in February 1438 with the idea of learned ignorance during his return trip from there, he now aimed to seek a shimmer of light in dismay for its fall. After his work in 1440, he had authored De coniecturis, to round up his system of thought, followed by Apologia doctae ignorantiae to defend his major work against promptly launched charges of heresy and pantheism. When the news of the fall reached him, he was at work On Complementary Mathematical Considerations. But he promptly decided to lay it aside. In addition to the voices, he was to receive a very detailed letter from Enea Silvio Piccolomini, bishop of Siena and later Pope Pius II. The letter was sent from Graz, then the Habsburg capital, where his friend served as chancellor to the Emperor Frederick III. Piccolomini did not express just his sorrow but gave a full analysis of the event and of its cultural, religious, political and economic consequences.12 The fall of Constantinople meant the fall of a fundamental centre of the Greek culture, fall of the patriarchate’s headquarters, the interruption of the rich flow of commercial ties all across the Mediterranean, and the beginning of a state of unforeseeable dangers for all Christians in Europe. Nicholas of Cusa, now having grasped the news, reacted very oddly. It was an unexpected reaction for a man with his political personality, complex nature as a Church cleric, a demanding reformer of religious habits, yet also a man

Hamburg: F. Meiner Verlag, 1970, vol. 7, p. XII. This is why I have sought to delve deeper into the impact of the bloody tidings of those weeks, when the Mediterranean, from Egypt to Andalusia, had already come under the Arab and Muslim control and now the Byzantine Empire’s bastion was falling to (Turkish) Islam. See the essential source: Agostino Pertusi, ed. La caduta di Costantinopoli. Le testimonianze dei contemporanei. Milan: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, Mondadori, 2012. It includes accounts by Nicolò Barbaro, Leonardo of Chios, Isidore of Kiev and of others. To give an idea of its emotional impact, see the Venetian Nicolò Barbaro’s pages published entirely in Nicolò Barbaro. Giornale dell’assedio di Costantinopoli 1453, with notes and documents added by Enrico Cornet. Vienna: Libreria Tnedler & Comp., 1856. In Venice itself, no one could ever forget that instance. Many residents had relatives, personal interests, and owned houses and trading companies in Constantinople. In the morning of 29 June, a galley from Lepanto docks in the lagoon and Venetians, ever eager and apprehensive of overseas reports, rush out for the news. On hearing the fall and the massacre, first a clamor rises, followed by cries of grief; people pound their chests, writhe in grief for losing a beloved father, son or a property. The Serenissima at once dispatches messengers across the country to inform of the fall of Constantinople and of Galata, the Genoese quarters (Pertusi, p. XXXIII). The news reaches Bologna on 4 July, Genoa on 6 July and Rome on 8 July, just when the Pope has concluded diplomatic discussions with the king of Naples and the Genoese and Venetian republics to set sail to aid Constantine. The devastating news arrives with the fleet docked in some port. All in vain. 12   About the Piccolomini’s letter Cusanus receives on route see Pertusi ed., La caduta di Costantinopoli, quoted above, p. XXXIX.

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accustomed to worldly legal battles to defend the goods and rights of a bishop against feudal lords; moreover, he had proven his international vision of the events and had all his life worked closely and cordially with three popes, that is three heads of states. This is why one would expect him to come forth with political judgements and strategic hypotheses: the necessary funds, armies and alliances against the Islamic threat. Instead, his thoughts now pursued a different direction. His response came as an account of a ‘revealing vision’. Cusanus was a philosopher, a Christian and a philosopher again. And the extraordinary portent of the event, whose nature immediately made itself felt like a watershed, led to a reflection he intended to leave for all humankind, for all people of any faith and even those without one. He wrote thus: ‘There was a certain man who, having formerly seen the sites in the regions of Constantinople, was inflamed with zeal for God as a result of those deeds that were reported to have been perpetrated at Constantinople most recently and most cruelly by the King of the Turks. Consequently, with many groanings he beseeched the Creator of all, because of His kindness, to restrain the persecution that was raging more fiercely than usual on account of the difference of rite between the [two] religions.’ It came to pass that after a number of days—perhaps because of his prolonged, incessant meditation—a vision was shown to this same zealous man.’ No longer, this time, an instant appearance of a flash of light. ‘A vision was revealed to this zealous man who ‘concluded that of a few wise men familiar from their own experience with all such differences which are observed in religions throughout the world, a single easy harmony could be found and through it a lasting peace established by appropriate and true means.’ Hence, ‘he wrote down plainly, in what follows, as much of it as he recalled’.13 Having set aside his previously initiated mathematical project, Cusanus set to work on De pace fidei (On the Peace of Faith). It is the vision of a heavenly

 Nicolai de Cusa Opera Omnia: Vol. VII: De Pace Fidei. Edited by Ramond Klibansky and Hildebrand Bascour. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1970. Quotation from Nicholas of Cusa’s De pace fidei and cribratio alkorani: translation and analysis (Second Edition) by Jasper Hopkins. Th Arthur J. Banning Press Minneapolis, 1994, p. 633. https://jasper-hopkins.info/DePace12-2000.pdf. Nicholas receives the news on 28 June, when still a papal envoy in Germany after the Habsburg emperor Frederick III was crowned in Rome by the Pope. Cusanus could rely on ample authority to reform the church in Germany, but first he had to overcome the opposition of Sigismund, Archduke of Further Austria including Tyrol. In those months of 1453, Cusanus had to endure serious adversity in Brixen, which he had to stay away from after receiving death threats. He also had to deal with the powerful abbess Verena von Stuben, now lodging in her castle in the Puster valley and showing more skill at military alliances than observing the rules of convent life. About Cusanus’ biography, see Morimichi Watanabe. Nicholas of Cusa. A Companion to his Life and his Times, ed. Gerald Christianson and Thomas Izbicki. London: Routledge, 2016. Despite his very busy life, Cusanus shows a very clear reaction to the fall of Constantinople: leaving aside everything, he starts to compose a work that should come as a response, whose principles his friends Juan de Segovia and most certainly Enea Silvio Piccolomini agree with. (Cf. Hervé Pasqua, ed. Nicolas de Cues. La paix de la foi, suivi de la lettre à Jean de Ségovie. Paris: Pierre Tequi éditeur, 2008). 13

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assembly where representatives of all religions and nations are called to seek harmony before the Lord, Jesus, Virgin Mary and all the powers of the hereafter. Before the representatives of these various faiths start to speak, one of the celestial messengers, angelic creatures, ‘intellectual powers’, having reached from the heavens every corner of the earth to gather complaints about on-going wars that befall human history, addresses the King of heavens in this manner: You set over Your people different kings and different seers, called prophets—very many of whom, in their role as Your legates, instituted (in Your name) worship and laws and instructed an uneducated people. [Men] accepted these laws just as if You Yourself, the King of kings, had spoken to them face to face; they believed that they heard not kings and prophets but You Yourself in and through kings and prophets. Now, to various nations You sent various prophets and teachers—some at one time, others at another. But the earthly human condition has this characteristic: viz., that longstanding custom, which is regarded as having passed over into nature, is defended as the truth. In this way there arise great quarrels when each community prefers its own faith to another [faith].14

Cusanus could not have forgotten that he was party in question and that he had to support and advise the Pope on a likely war, but now another matter urged him, how to answer the question: what metaphysical grounds do wars rely on? And the response he proposed was that dissensions among faiths were the consequence of the human condition, its incompleteness and fallibility. Religious differences were not a consequence of immovable deviations in relation to one single viewpoint, upheld by a group of people. No, these were all expressions of human partiality that would never attain a visio intellectualis fit to bridge the gap between the finite and the infinite (not only with relation to God but all things). Behind the variety of times, ways of revelations, prophets and kings was hidden the unique God, as the reality of the world was the same for all humankind. But You know, o Lord, that there cannot be a great multitude without much diversity and that almost all [men] are compelled to live a hard life full of troubles and miseries and to be underlings, in abject subjection, to kings who wield dominion. Consequently, it has come about that of all [men] few have so much leisure that by using their freedom of choice they are able to arrive at a knowledge of themselves. For they are distracted by many corporeal cares and tasks; and so, they are unable to seek after You, who are a hidden God.15

Cusanus is once again here the philosopher of the docta ignorantia: God is unique and infinite, the human way to approach it that varies.16 Cusanus certainly did not  Translation by Jasper Hopkins from the above quoted edition: De pace fidei and cribratio alkorani p. 634. https://jasper-hopkins.info/DePace12-2000.pdf. 15  There. 16  The theoretical premises of this work is clearly outlined earlier in On Learned Ignorance of 1440. The learned ignorance is the ‘fundamental idea’ of Cusanus’s entire work, Karl Jaspers notes in his work of 1957, re-edited by Hannah Arendt in Anselm and Nicholas of Cusa. Fort Washington: Harvest Book, 1974, p. 30 ff. I we were to follow Isaiah Berlin’s category of ‘the fox’ and ‘the hedgehog’, according to which ‘the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’, Cusanus no doubt belongs to the second category. His major idea is the one that was revealed to him during the crossing from Constantinople in February 1438. For Cusanus it is entirely novel although Augustine made use of the expression docta ignorantia previously and 14

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forget being a Christian, a bishop (later a cardinal), nor did he forget defending the idea that the Catholic view was the most appropriate to seek to approach truth. But in this work he appears to be voluntarily relinquishing a privileged doctrinal teaching. The archangel addresses God as follows: But the theoretical premises of this work of Cusanus is clearly outlined earlier in On Learned Ignorance of 1440 (in Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. H. Lawrence Bond. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1997). The learned ignorance is the ‘fundamental idea’ of Cusanus’s entire work, Karl Jaspers notes in his work of 1957, re-edited by Hannah Arendt in Anselm and Nicholas of Cusa (Fort Washington: Harvest Book, 1974, p. 30 ff.). If we were to follow Isaiah Berlin’s category of ‘the fox’ and ‘the hedgehog’, according to which ‘the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’, Cusanus no doubt belongs to the second category. His major idea is the one that was revealed to him during the crossing from Constantinople in February 1438. For Cusanus it is entirely novel although Augustine made use of the expression docta ignorantia previously and Cusanus himself refers to Socrates’ ‘I know that I do not know’; yet it is neither a repetition nor a bland quote, because its originality lies in the way it has served and ‘manifests a uniquely irreplaceable quality, a fundamental tone, so to say, that governs the development of his work as a whole and that emerges in all his works.’ Learned ignorance thus ‘governs’ also Cusanus’s reaction to the fall of Constantinople (Jaspers). For this reason, my chapter has followed the relationship between Cusanus and Constantinople: first the crossing and the long return, then the shocking news of the catastrophe which may be compared with 11 September 2001. The fundamental idea—our limited knowledge as the basis of pluralism and tolerance—was born on the first voyage on the Bosphorus and was confirmed through successive events taking place in that city, the scene of first the battle of diverging rites and dogmas and a tragic war 15  years later. In both instances we witness a purely philosophical response whose central theme is human inadequacy, the irreparable imbalance between the extent of knowledge and the completeness and ‘precision’ of reality, be it reality of the world in all its aspects and things, be it reality of the Sublime Being, of which nothing can be thought higher. Humanity always Cusanus himself refers to Socrates’ ‘I know that I do not know’; yet it is neither a repetition nor a bland quote, because its originality lies in the way it has served and ‘manifests a uniquely irreplaceable quality, a fundamental tone, so to say, that governs the development of his work as a whole and that emerges in all his works.’ Learned ignorance thus ‘governs’ also Cusanus’s reaction to the fall of Constantinople (Jaspers). For this reason, my chapter has followed the relationship between Cusanus and Constantinople: first the crossing and the long return, then the shocking news of the catastrophe which may be compared with 9/11 of 2001. The fundamental idea—our limited knowledge as the basis of pluralism and tolerance—was born on the first voyage on the Bosphorus and was confirmed through successive events taking place in that city, the scene of first the battle of diverging rites and dogmas and a tragic war 15 years later. In both instances we witness a purely philosophical response whose central theme is human inadequacy, the irreparable imbalance between the extent of knowledge and the completeness and ‘precision’ of reality, be it reality of the world in all its aspects and things, be it reality of the Sublime Being, of which nothing can be thought higher. Humanity always stumbles; we always clash with something our mental faculty can neither compare with nor fathom.

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stumbles; we always clash with something our mental faculty can neither compare with nor fathom. You… are the one who is seen to be sought in different ways in different rites, and You are named in different names; for as You are [in Yourself] You remain unknown and ineffable to all. … nor can the creature comprehend the concept of Your infinity, since there is no comparative relation of the finite to the Infinite…do not hide Yourself any longer, o Lord… if You will deign to do the foregoing, the sword will cease, as will also the malice of hatred and all evils; and all [men] will know that there is only one religion in a variety of rites… this difference of rites cannot be eliminated; or perhaps it is not expedient [that it be eliminated], in order that the diversity may make for an increase of devotion… If so, then at least let there be one religion—just as You are one—and one true worship of You as Sovereign.17

A radically novel thought is revealed in these pages; it reaches far beyond the desire to resolve conflicts and establish peace among faiths, a troublesome aspect for the theological Church tradition: the angel of the said vision describes these differences of faith as if they were ‘complementary’ to one another, various moments of a unique divine design which fulfils itself through diversity. Cusanus does not use the word ‘complementary’, but it can be deduced from the text, as the late Belgian theologian Jacques Dupuis (1923–2004) does, for he was aware of the theological weight and risks embedded therein. The same import was also acknowledged by cardinal Ratzinger, who fought against it in his capacity as the Prefect of Faith, before being ordained pope, in his epistle Dominus Jesus. Cusanus’ diversity is justified in God’s eyes even if the followers of each different faith are not aware of it and believe theirs to be the only true one in their limited worldly condition and dependency upon local and accidental circumstances. This is why, seen from the divine perspective (so states De pace fidei) not a great number of heterodoxies exist in comparison with a single orthodoxy. And this puts the most orthodox Catholic interpreters, fearful of injuring the Church doctrine, in a very difficult position. What learned ignorance discloses seems to hold true for religions what is actually true for knowledge in general: each revelation can multiply its attempts without ever accomplishing a complete and exclusive possession of God’s truth; and different faiths can be considered similar to various angles of a polygon, where none can close off the circle of perfect knowledge of the truth of faith. What is more, not even all faiths put together can accomplish it, because they each share the unbalanced portion between the finite and the infinite, which Cusanus names ‘the Wall of the Paradise’ in another work.18 Besides Greeks, Italians, French, English, Germans, Bohemians, Chaldeans, Cusanus’ vision encompasses also Arabs, Indians, Shiite Persians, Turks, Syrians, Armenians, Jews and Tatars. Cultures, nationalities and ethnicity come together with religions. Hence the prospect of a convergence to peace concerns not only Christians but all other monotheist and polytheist religions, entire humanity with all religions and cultures and languages. Further, peace alone is not the issue here, rather shared commitment to truth, which no one can possess or safeguard exclusively. Hence for Cusanus, the Church is both universal (in that it 17 18

 De pace fidei, quoted translation, p. 635.  De visione dei, quoted above, IX 35–37 ff.

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encompasses all humanity) but also conjectural, that is all the truths of different faiths and rites have their share of the truth but never attain it totally. It is not difficult to realize that in Cusanus’ view Christians occupy a more privileged position, yet neither they can conclude their quest for truth; they too have to contemplate this divine design in its incompleteness of a variety of cults, each constituting some part of true knowledge. The Lord remains whole, it is hidden truth for all, and all can see that others grasp it in a diverse manner. But what is different is not false, it is simply different. At the end of the dream, the Lord tells everyone to go back home and work hard to ‘lead their nations unto a oneness of true worship’,19 and to come together with the help of the ministering spirits in Jerusalem, the city most suited to become the center of one faith and thereupon establish everlasting peace. This is an arduous programme whose merit does not reside in admitting a generous need for peace only. The philosophical leap Cusanus takes presents the divisions as a result of a divine initiative enlarged upon by sending forth its emissaries in time and place. Afterwards, to enable men to rise to truth, God would send the Son as the rescuer and here the primacy of Christianity with his declared capacity to reclaim the swamp of human disorders in Cusanus’ mind is out of question—but the ensuing theological status that acknowledges variety of religions is of previously unknown significance; because it suggests that they occupy a place in divine economy that weakens the exceptional nature of Christianity as the only redeeming religion. The multiple implications of this intellectual and theological jump will be a remarkable support to the future evolution of the Enlightenment’s thought and later to the philosophical, anthropological, and pluralist perspective of the twentieth century. De pace fidei does not directly talk about redeeming those outside of the Roman Church—it does not challenge directly the principle extra ecclesiam nulla salus; but the longing for dialogue and establishing peace bring it close to the vision of gaining access to universal salvation, a far cry from Thomas Aquinas’ teaching, that has been rightfully defined as essentially «a theological programme to convert non-­ believers».20 With Nicholas we find ourselves in an altogether different dimension.21 It took a long while for the Church, where Cusanus by the way served as high dignitary, to start to engage with a similarly acknowledging attitude. It certainly did not happen before the Vatican Council II, which the official theology sought to withdraw from in various attempts, particularly with Benedict XVI. In the years of the  There IX 669–670.  The sharp remark on Thomas of Aquinas’s work comes from Maria Teresa Fumagalli Beonio Brocchieri, in Profilo del pensiero medievale. Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2002, p. 52. 21  The fundamental idea—our limited knowledge as the basis of pluralism and tolerance—was born on the first voyage on the Bosphorus and was confirmed through successive events taking place in that city, the scene of first the battle of diverging rites and dogmas and a tragic war 15 years later. In both instances we witness a purely philosophical response whose central theme is human inadequacy, the irreparable imbalance between the extent of knowledge and the completeness and ‘precision’ of reality, be it reality of the world in all its aspects and things, be it reality of the Sublime Being, of which nothing can be thought higher. Humanity always stumbles; we always clash with something our mental faculty can neither compare with nor fathom. 19 20

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said council, Urs von Balthasar, a reformer who was familiar with Cusanus’ teaching, noted that the latter’s thought was so ‘adventurous that it would only be surprising if it had not been shifted to the Index.’22 Adopting the form of a ‘vision’ in this work no doubt was prudential; but in Cusanus’ more confidential letters, such as the one to Juan de Segovia, the Bishop of Caesarea, it clearly emerges that a group of important Church leaders, Pope Pious II included, intended at least for some time and as a conjectural attempt to seek a peace strategy and dialogue with Turks that would not exclude the potential to convince them of the common features of the two religions. Convert them?—writes his Spanish friend on 2 December 1453, asking to be very discreet about the content of his letter—we could at least pursue ‘the more convenient course of dialogue than waging war to forestall the Turkish peril.’23 Cusanus responds on 29 December: I agree with your line and ‘in this regard I have written a short book called De pace fidei. I am sending you a copy shortly even if it contains nothing new you already know.’ Our thought and our reasons are the same, adds Cusanus, ‘both in terms of divine and human law, because if we acted with Christ’s teaching, we would not be mistaken…but if we chose aggression and invasion with the sword, we would have to fear that we could perish with the sword’, as in St. Matthew 26:52. The letter continues with a detailed series of possible negotiations. In short, the heavenly dream of the congress of Jerusalem condensed in that ‘short book’ not only a powerful pluralist theological vision and a courageous historicizing of the (plural) revelation, but also an allusion to a precise strategy to seek dialogue, which religious figures close to the pope were well acquainted with. This is proven in the correspondence between Cusanus and Juan de Segovia, and in the letter Enea Silvio Piccolomini writes to Mehmet II, a rich and complex document of obscure significance that was never sent to its addressee. Indeed, interpreted as a provocation to the feudal lords and the fugitive Christian Emperor, the letter offered nothing less than the imperial crown to the Turkish sultan on the condition he converted to Christianity. It further discussed at length Christ’s teaching shared by Christians and Moslems, and ‘the good reasons’ for agreeing upon the Christian principles of the Trinity, evidently drawing heavily on Cusanus, who once ordained cardinal was to carry out a detailed critical study of the Qur’an.24  The Index librorum prohibitorum, the black list of books considered heretical or harmful for morality, according to the doctrine of the Catholic Church, was created in the sixteenth century and abolished by Pope Paul VI in 1966, after the Second Vatican Council. Urs von Balthazar’s quotation in his Das Ganze im Fragment. Aspekte der Geschichtstheologie, Einsiedeln, Benziger, p. 187, quoted in Jacques Dupuis. Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, 1997, p. 108. 23  This exchange of letters in Hervé Pasqua, ed. Nicolas de Cues. La paix de la foi, suivi de la lettre à Jean de Ségovie. Paris: Pierre Tequi éditeur, 2008, p. 155 ff. 24  See the extensive collection of essays in Ian Christopher Levy, Rita George-Tvrtković, Donal F.  Duclow, eds. Nicholas of Cusa and Islam, Polemic and Dialogue in the Late Middle Ages. Boston: Brill, 2014. In these studies, ‘the moment of vision’ becomes central as ‘Latin Christians viewed Islam in a broader, clearer and more realistic perspective than as it had appeared before and was to appear at least many centuries later’ (R.W. Southern. Western Views of Islam in the Middle 22

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Rising above the religious diversity was a prospect clearly contemplated earlier in the Christian culture and by few leading members in Pope’s entourage in Rome. In addition, it suited the Neoplatonic inspiration coming to the fore as expounded by Cardinal Bessarion, who attended in his life five conclaves and had been educated by Gemistus Pletho (who together with Cusanus had sailed from Constantinople in 1438), a philosopher equidistant to Christ and Mohammed. One of his adversaries, the Aristotelian and conservative Neo-Thomist George of Trebizond, called Trapezuntina, noted that he had heard Bessarion say ‘within a few more years the whole world would accept the one and the same religion with one mind, one intelligence, one teaching.’ And when I asked him ‘Christ’s or Muhammad’s?,’ he said, ‘Neither; but it will not differ much from paganism.’25 Cusanus certainly did not go so far, as his opponents such as Johannes Wenck26 would gladly impinge on him and charge him with pantheism on account of De docta ignorantia. The former’s reply had to wait until he established stronger ties with Rome, further enhanced after becoming cardinal. Nevertheless, he committed himself sincerely to prove that doctrinal obstacles among Christians of different

Ages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1962, p.  103). Cusanus and Juan de Segovia were among these visionaries; in their correspondence they talk of a conference for peace negotiations rather than a crusade. In their reserved opinion exchange, De pace fidei emerges as a hypothesis at certain points, adding to its ‘vision’ aspect that of a ‘project’. As a project it must have been known to Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the pope of Pienza, who ‘then sought to cross one of the most arduous religious barriers known in Western history’; Piccolomini represented ‘an unusual mixture of old-world culture and the modern cult of personality’ and was ‘a candid nepotist and familist’ (Adriano Prosperi, in the introduction to Luca d’Ascia. Il Corano e la tiara. L’epistola a Maometto II di Enea Silvio Piccolomini. Bologna: Pendragon, 2001). As pope, he sought to organize a crusade which ended at birth in the port of Ancona where he died, and had simultaneously written to the sultan the famous epistle, offering him the imperial crown. Whether the long letter was a literary joke, a provocation against the European inertia towards the Turks or a genuine offer to Mehmed II is still an unanswered question. Similar contradicting views also concern Cusanus’s life with regards to his stand to Islam, between prospect of peace, dreams of inclusion and his commitment to the crusade that he could not arrive at Ancona to join forces with his friend, pope Piccolomini, as the news of the latter’s death reached him on the road at Todi. 25  Silvia Ronchey, L’Enigma di Piero: L’ultimo bizantino e la crociata fantasma nella rivelazione di un grande Quadro, Milan: Rizzoli, 2006. With its focus on the painting the Flagellation of Christ by Piero della Francesca, Ronchey gives detailed information about the intellectual life around Cusano during the Ferrara and Florence councils, his voyage from the Byzantine court to Italy in 1438, and the Platonic political landscape (Basil Bessarion and Gemistus Pletho) shaping both Cusano and the leaders of the Church, Pope Pius II included, to the point of hypothesizing a secret society that advocated forms of syncretism. In particular, it discusses the bold pagan-like projects (as Bessarion’s opponents claimed) to initiate a religion that was neither Muslim nor Christian, pp. 165–69. 26  A theology from Heidelberg whose text, De ignota litteratura, was for a long time known only through the Apology of Cusano and was first published by E. Vansteenberghe, “De ignota litteratura” by Jean Wenck de Herrenberg contre Nicolas de Cuse, Münster 1910. See the Italian version with the original text in Latin in front of Niccolò Cusano, Opere filosofiche, teologiche e matematiche, edited by Enrico Peroli, Bompiani 2017, p. 2520 n.

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sects and between Christians and Muslims could be overcome.27 The problem regarding the different perspectives of the Trinity, for example, could be resolved because God, as creator, is three and one. As an infinite being, He is neither three, nor one, nor anything that can be stated with the precision that is not attenable by our mind. This is what we know from the Learned Ignorance and its negative theology,28 where different versions of the Trinity risk being reduced to insignificance, a risk that could have led to the suspicion of heresy and wherefore he was to back off to more traditional views. But pluralism was still clearly legitimized and rendered theologically explicit, because in his view the diversity of religions and worship was always ‘to the greater glory of God’. His opinion concerning salvation also could not but follow a far more liberal perspective than the exclusivist dogma of ecclesiastical tradition; salvation of the soul comes ex fide, not ex operibus, that is from conviction and sincerity of the belief rather than its external manifestations. Salt on the wounds of dogmatic and exclusivist theologians. Rites are instituted as sensible signs of the variety of faith. The signs, not the signified, assume variability. Baptism ages, even its absence, circumcision, and all the rest do not constitute an insuperable difference from the viewpoint of plurality as Cusanus sought to explain in the very nature of the religion or that of the Absolute Being. Neither does the age-old controversy concerning ‘transubstantiation’ of the Eucharist seem insuperable, for it is a teaching that concerns the intuitive power of the mind that can never entirely grasp its object through knowledge or faith as both come to a standstill before unattainable alterity, hence must do with conjectures.29 It  On the parable of Cusanus’s attitude to Islam, see the wide selection of essays in Nicholas of Cusa and Islam (quoted above) which bring to light his life-long interest that was translated into his everlasting critical analysis: contrasts can be overcome, at times for an advantageous purpose, by putting to good use all the passages in the Qur’an as long as converging points consented it (such as the presence of Christ and Mary), and leaving contrasting views to a later consideration (Islam’s negation of the crucifixion, its refusal of the Trinity). For an analysis on Cusano’s studies of Islam, see: Morimichi Watanabe. Cusanus, Islam, and Religious Tolerance, 9–19; Walter Andreas Euler. A Critical Survey of Cusanus’s Writings on Islam, 20–30). Yet the depth and radicality of Cusanus’s pluralism does not relate to his more or less critical views of the Qur’an expressed in his critical study of the sacred book of Islam, Cribratio Alkorani, requested by and dedicated to Pope Pius II (Jasper Hopkins, trans. Ed. Nicholas of Cusa’s De Pace Fidei and Cribration Alkorani: Translation and Analysis. Minneapolis: A. J. Banning Press, 1994.) In real fact, it manifests itself in the partial nature of the participation of the finite in the infinite, common to all religions without exclusion, Christianity included. This shared incompleteness and limited knowledge, and the conjectural condition belong to the Church too, providing thus De pace fidei and all Cusanus’s writings with sound premises of a tolerant, open perspective to diversity. ‘Conjectural Church’ (as Cusano writes in a letter to Rodrigo Sanchez de Arevalo in 1442) is discussed in a collection edited by Graziella Federici Vescovini. La pace della fede e altri testi. San Domenico di Fiesole: Edizioni Cultura della pace, 1993, p.  20 ff.; Vescovini further discusses Church practice or the Church in itinere that justly tolerates minorities and diversity, for ‘to demand exact conformity in everything is rather to disturb the peace’ (Il pensiero di Nicola Cusano. Turin: UTET, 1998, 123–25). 28  De docta ignorantia, XXVI 86. 29  De pace fidei (18:66), quoted translation, p. 668. 27

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follows that it is no longer necessary to inflict damnation if one does not believe in transubstantiation, the teaching that did cost imprisonment and recantation to the eleventh-century theologian Berengar of Tours, who stated that bread and wine had only a symbolic sense. No, said Cusanus, ‘believing—and thereby eating of the food of life—suffices for salvation.’30 No answer to a question about God is proper or precise, for precision is only one and infinite and is God, but every answer, for precision is one, infinite and God only, but every answer is a part of the absolute answer that is infinitely precise. And if every answer is a part with its share of truth, it follows that between the one and the other answer there is little distance separating salvation from damnation or true from false. Although Cusanus never ceased proclaiming the primacy of the Catholic faith, the dignity granted to different religions is essentially the same: they all contribute to ‘make an increase of devotion since each region will devote more careful attention to making its ceremonies more favorable to God’.31 The Primacy of the Church is accepted, but it is also an imperfect militant in itinere, with changing practice in time and not error-proof. In the end it should not surprise if such a practice leads to interpreting Scripture once in one way and another time in another. There is no unhealable contrast as the end of the world and of the Church is peace in primis. It is therefore profitable for a majority to reconcile with a minority and accept its existence, for ‘For to seek exact conformity in all respects is rather to disturb the peace.’32 It is the same flashing intuition, the spark which made Cusanus break with the Aristotelian medieval universe, and under the powerful influence of Platonism anticipate the essential principles of new cosmology. ‘The earth is mobile and of spherical shape…it is a noble star, to which is given light and warmth, and an activity of its own different from that of all other stars. Indeed, no part in the whole cosmos is dispensable; each has its own special kind of activity and, correspondingly, its own incomparable value’.33 ‘In the cosmology of Cusanus the universe dissolved into an infinite multiplicity of infinitely different movements, each circling around its own center, and all held together both by their relationship to a common cause and by their participation in one and the same universal order’. The same theoretical musicality of the disproportion between the finite and the infinite, so argues Cusanus, leads to a pluralist conception of faith, knowledge, God and the cosmos. ‘The same is true of spiritual being. Every spiritual being has its center within itself. And its participation in the divine consists precisely in this centering, in this indissoluble individuality. Individuality is not simply a limitation; rather, it represents a particular value that may not be eliminated of extinguished.’ The partiality and the resulting plurality of individual perspectives are thus a value by themselves. ‘The One that is ‘beyond being’ can only be grasped through this value… a

 Ibid.  There, I 6, quoted translation p. 635. 32  There, XIX 67, quoted translation, p. 669. 33  E. Cassirer, quoted work p. 27. 30 31

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theodicy of religious forms and practices is attainable only by means of this thought. For only by virtue of this thought do the multiplicity, the difference, and the heterogeneity of these forms cease to appear to be a contradiction of the unity and ­universality of religion and become instead a necessary expression of that universality itself.’ These are Ernst Cassirer’s words, the major Cusanus scholar to date. ‘From this point of view Cusanus infers a truly grand ‘tolerance’ which is anything but indifference. The multiplicity of forms of faith is not tolerated as a mere empirical juxtaposition but rather is speculatively required and epistemologically founded.’34 Tolerance and endeavor to establish peace, renouncing claims on uniformity and acceptance of cultural and religious plurality necessarily stem from the incompleteness of every human perspective, which only by means of variety and multiplicity of world views are spurned on their course; even if the course never comes to ‘precision’ in the end, it makes headway and increases both God’s glory, for those who believe in it, and the incomplete yet precious resource of the human culture in its multiple manifestations for all.

34

 All Cassirer’s quotations, Ibid., pp. 28–30.

Chapter 5

LAS CASAS: Duel of a Lifetime in Valladolid

Abstract  Bartolomé de las Casas, the privileged son of a New World encomendero, an important representative of the class of conquerors of the American Indies, a man who had received a young slave to serve him as a gift from his father, became persuaded that the devastating actions of the Spanish were a dark page in history. He believed that the massacres perpetrated during the Conquest had destroyed a civilisation that should have been respected (in spite of human sacrifices and cannibalism) and committed himself to a lifelong battle to persuade King Charles I of Spain, who became the emperor Charles V, to change the laws and abolish Indios slavery. He fought a battle that saw him opposed to those who had once been his companions in war and trade, and who accused him of betrayal in the famous Valladolid Debate, in an unforgettable oratorical duel with Juan Gines de Sepulveda. Keywords  Cannibals · Pluralism · Relativism · Cultural anthropology · Human diversity · Pascal · Ethnocentrism · Habit On a suffocating Pentecost Sunday in Castile in 1550, fourteen outstanding scholars were entering the collegiate church of San Gregorio at Valladolid to bring to an end the dispute concerning the Indies and listen to a duel-debate, a six-day oratorical marathon, between Juan Ginés de Sepùlveda, the Latin preceptor to the hereditary prince Philip II, and Bartolomé de Las Casas, the bishop of Chiapas. It was a session of the so-called ‘Junta’ summoned by Charles V, the Habsburg Emperor and King of Spain (as such, Charles I). The forthcoming debate was awaited with much tension which may be explained here in a preliminary note. Fifty-eight years after Christopher Columbus had disembarked on the other side of the Atlantic, the situation in the territories of the Conquista appeared more troublesome than ever and became a source of legal and theological conflicts (two levels of justification with rather indistinct borders at the time). The wide-ranging Spanish misappropriation was now out in the open. And to render it public had been the bishop Bartolomé, who was fully aware of being the cause of the controversy as he himself had started a relentless campaign against the futile war against the Indians and their slavery

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Bosetti, The Truth of Others, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 25, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25523-6_5

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thirty-four years earlier. For Las Casas, this signified a principal battle of his life, a mission he thought he was called to as a Christian. Don Bartolomé, the ‘clérigo’, as he used to refer to himself in the third person in his writings, was now 62 years old.1 As early as at the age of twenty-eight, he had begun to serve the Spanish court, first under the reign of King Ferdinand, later with young Charles, while he sailed back and forth between the Caribbean and the capital; he never ceased to denounce the inhuman violence, atrocities, massacres and forays of the conquistadores. He succeeded in making himself heard by founding his critique on the superior interest of the monarchy and on Christian tenets, while demonstrating such equal political, theological skill and passion that enabled him to endure and surmount a huge amount of despite and hatred accumulated and directed against his own person. Taking action against the encomiendas system (territorial concessions and degradation of native peoples to slavery) and repartimientos (sharing out the Indians as if they were cattle without taking into account their families and communities) undermined the colonists’ privileges of the colonists he was ready to renounce. The fury directed against this cleric, who appeared a subversive threat to the settlements in the New World created in the last fifty years, added insult to injury since the enemy was or had been ‘one of them’, who had undergone a change of heart. The encomenderos regarded their privileges as permanently acquired rights and aspired to pass down the possession of their properties to future generations. And it is equally true that Dominican friar Las Casas employed not only arguments concerning natural law according to Thomas Aquinas but also substantial means he had collected with that slavery formula (other means he was to receive from the King) to strengthen his cause. Both the Imperial court, where the combative bishop had easy access, and that of Valladolid had been assailed with rancorous messages and requests from upper ranks in order to stop the ludicrous campaign orchestrated by this deceitful creature said to be ‘suborned by the devil.’2 So, at Valladolid, in the dispute that was about to begin, his adversary Sepúlveda sought to build on the discontent and give it a final blow on a theological level. But Las Casas was a tough nut to crack, not only because of his tenacity and subtleness. He had allied with religious orders, made friends and always kept up ties with the Emperor who trusted him, without ever conceding him all he had asked for. On that suffocating morning after the formal inauguration, Sepúlveda opened the debate.3 And he exhorted by stating His Majesty’s war against the Indians ‘was not

 Marianne Mahn- Lot, Barolomé de las Casas et le droit des indiens (Paris: Payot, 1982). Most references and biographic information are taken from its Italian translation: Bartolomeo de Las Casas e i diritti degli indiani, trans. A. Pedrazzi (Milano: Jaca Book, 1998). 2  M.Mahn Lot, quoted work, p. 235. 3  The Valladolid debate as recorded by Domingo De Soto in Sumario, the summary of the events, on the order of the King of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, has been accurately translated into Italian and published together with other documents about the controversy to document the dispute and its context (Saverio Di Liso, ed. Preface by Costantino Esposito. Bartolomé de Las Casas, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, La Controversia sugli Indios. Bari: Edizioni di pagina, 1

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only lawful but advisable’, and certainly ‘faith’ could not be preached ‘to them first’, for they were essentially ‘idol worshippers and sinners against nature’.4 At that instance looking at all fourteen members of the Junta one by one, four of whom were theologians, three Dominicans like himself—the members of the Council of the Indies, nearly all on his side, one member of the Council of Castile who had criticised him for his ideas on confession—Bartolomé knew he could subdue them this time again. Las Casas reflections went back to the long journey before being appointed the ‘Procurator and Universal Protector of All Indians in the Indies’, a journey that concluded now with this assembly to listen to the torrential assault of the Aristotelian theologian (that was to last the entire day). And his thoughts went back to his father, Pedro, a merchant from Seville, a descendant of conversos, hence with Jewish blood, who had undertaken the adventurous crossing to the Americas in the company of seventeen ships on Christopher Columbus’s second voyage in 1493. On his return, Pedro had brought with him a young Indian slave and given him to the then young Bartolomé.5 The native was among a group of children and women taken to Spain that stirred such a scandal at Queen Isabella’s court that they had had to be shipped back shortly after their arrival. Bartolomé would meet the Indian few years later at Hispaniola (today Haiti- San Domingo), the island of his father’s encomienda and where Pedro had taken his son on his successive voyages. Here, from the age of seventeen the young man learned how to assist his father in the family business but also pursue his religious studies to lead a religious career. The Las Casas made a discreet fortune out of their business thanks to the labour exploitation Bartolomé was to fight against later. The detested bishop of Chiapas, now at Valladolid, had not at all forgotten his family’s life story as he listened to his adversary Sepúlveda’s description of the gross and servile nature of the homunculi. Bartolomé recalled clearly his first encounter with the reality of the Indies. As soon as they had docked at the bay of Santo Domingo, Spanish colonisers came rowing to give the ‘good’ news: a big piece of gold nugget had been found and Indians in a certain province had revolted, 2007). Here is an excerpt from the ‘Preface’ (p. 74): ‘Here follows a dispute or a controversy between the Bishop Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, or Casaus, the bishop of the royal city of Chiapas located in the Indies, in New Spain [Mexico] and Doctor Ginés de Sepúlveda, official royal chronicler of Charles V. Regarding the dispute, the Doctor affirmed the conquest of the Indies against the indigenous people was lawful, while the Bishop contrasted this, affirming it was—and could not have been but—an act of tyranny, unjust and unequal. This question was debated and argued in the presence of many intellectuals, theologians and jurists in a Commission His Majesty had ordered to summon in the year fifteen hundred fifty in the city of Valladolid. Year 1552.’ Both Las Casas’s Apologia and Sepúlveda’s argumentation (also called Apologia) in the debate of 1550–1551 have been jointly published, with an introduction and Spanish translations by Angel Losada (Madrid, 1975). An English edition of Las Casas’s Apologia: In Defense of the Indians. The Defense of the Most Reverend Lord, Don Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, of the Order of Preachers, Late Bishop of Chiapa, Against the Persecutors and Slanderers of the Peoples of the New World Discovered Across the Seas, translated, edited, and annotated by C. M. Stafford Poole (Northern Illinois University Press, De Kalb, Illinois, 1974). 4  Saverio di Liso, ed., p. 81–82. 5  M.Mahn Lot, p. 14.

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which meant sufficient justification to attack and take captive the natives, and then sell them as slaves. ‘You’ve come just at the right moment…the news made them rejoice.’6 The rule to treat the natives as ‘free subjects’ of His Majesty, which is humanely and moderately, proved to the intelligent young man a hypocrisy that concealed a different practice. Bartolomé’s ‘conversion’ did not happen on the spur of the moment. It was a slow process that grew in the aftermath of a succession of events. Few days after he had disembarked for the first time in the Indies, the queen of the Xaragua area had summoned three hundred ‘chiefs’ in the neighbourhood to welcome the Spaniards: their songs and dances had been abruptly followed by a massacre ordered by the commander Ovando, the queen together with a great number of natives had been killed and fugitives had been taken captives. And Bartolomé himself had been given a captive as booty.7 The young man had realised he was involved in an adventure far bigger than himself, something he could not keep under control: he was to witness atrocities, without having either the force or the means to keep clear of or change the course of events. Yet he was ordained a priest and soon celebrated his first Mass before Diego Columbus, the son of the Admiral, to whose family he always remained close, collecting also their documents, an essential source for his History of the Indies and all future historians. Yet other experiences were to follow until his definite change of heart and mind. Three Dominican friars, once fully aware of the true nature of the expeditions, soon founded a convent at Santo Domingo: one of them, Antonio Montesinos, in a fiery sermon declared: ‘I who am a voice of Christ crying in the wilderness of this island…This voice says you are in mortal sin, that you live and die in it, for the cruelty and tyranny you use in dealing with these innocent natives.’ In addition to this passionate homily, he pronounced a threat that had a much stronger effect: unless they asked for penance, he and the other friars would refuse to absolve any of the colonists.8 The initial revolt was thus sown on the strength of the sacrament. The news reached Spain speedily and Montesinos was summoned to render account of it before King Ferdinand. The abuse and massacres he had witnessed were now out in the open: men treated like beasts, Indian women who had to eat abortive herbs so as not to rear unhappy children. The King was forced to pass the first corrective measures, the Laws of Burgos of 1512 which, without bringing any substantial change to the encomienda system, introduced a slight improvement to the condition of the Indians, such as limiting their work hours to nine months and making the instruction of the Christian faith compulsory for all. Consequently, Bartolomé too would deny confession to a number of colonists, while simultaneously administering it without heeding the rules laid down by Dominican preachers. Once in Cuba, where he spent four years, he incurred more atrocities: a native cacique (chief) was burnt live at the stake as he refused ‘to die

 M.Mahn Lot p. 18.  M.Mahn Lot p. 20. 8  M.Mahn Lot p. 28. 6 7

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like a Christian’ because ‘if the door of heaven was open to the Spaniards…let me go to Hell that I may not come where they are’9; another senseless massacre where he was to give the extreme unction once the young victim’s body was entirely gutted out. Many Indians began to distinguish him from other Spaniards and in appreciation brought him fish and other produce. And Bartolomé regarded it as usurpation when a new repartidor in charge of distributing Indians to encomiendas was sent to relieve Columbus from his position. Gradually he was approaching a conclusion strengthened particularly through his regular moral teaching where he had to formulate ideas that needed to coincide with the reality in the Indies. He read the Bible again and reflected on his own deeds: ‘He that sacrificeth of a thing wrongfully gotten, his offering is ridiculous; and the gifts of unjust men are not accepted…He that taketh away his neighbour’s living slayeth him; and he that defraudeth the labourer of his hire is a blood-shedder.’ (Ecclesiasticus 34:18,22).10 The choice he stood before was a difficult one; it did not consist in owning up a new idea or altering his sermons accordingly, for the young priest himself owned an encomienda. His position left no room for negotiations: it suffocated him. Denouncing the system meant having to renounce and deliver immediately all his Indians to the governor. And then? Such a gesture would no doubt unleash a series of consequences: the immediate reactions he would have to respond to, the necessity to give a political mould to his sort of revolution, the Spanish government he had to convince. The entire architecture of a grand resolution with its complicated aftermath that was to change his life appeared now clearer than ever. It was not merely an act of condemning a social practice, it meant dedicating his whole existence to unmask ‘the destruction of the Indies’ perpetrated throughout centuries and becoming thereby the titular of the so called ‘Black Legend’, still weighing on Spaniards’ conscience. There was no in-between; he had to take a life-changing leap. When he discussed it secretly with the governor of Cuba, Fernandez, the latter remained in awe: an encomendero priest himself who sided with the Dominican view, just preposterous! But Bartolomé, perhaps even wishing to precipitate events, shocked his parishioners on Pentecost Sunday in 1514.11 And everything precipitated rapidly indeed. Simultaneously, as though it were the last straw, his friend Pedro de la Renterìa had also come to the same conclusion. Bartolomé left Cuba for Santo Domingo. Very cautiously (for they needed the money immediately), they sold off their properties and returned to Spain to initiate a battle that would last even after the Junta in 1550. They had to subvert the established order and shift the monarchy onto the side of the just cause, call a new legislation and make new history. And we are at Valladolid again. Before Bartolomé, in the oppressive heat Sepúlveda is still arguing, now his second point: the Indians have gross intelligence,

 M.Mahn Lot p. 30.  M.Mahn Lot p. 33. 11  M.Mahn Lot p. 35 ff. 9

10

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they are servile, barbarous, and destined to be subjected to more developed nations like the Spaniards. Las Casas takes note of this. His opponent’s view as argued in Democrates Alter12 is well-known to him, a work Bartolomé has succeeded in suppressing and had the King ban its publication.13 Indians’ ‘inferiority’ was common currency in the colonies; he was too aware of the difficulty to uproot an assumption of common sense which sustained and justified the entire encomiendas system. While the question whether those creatures had a soul and therefore could be considered human beings to all effect is being debated, our bishop recalls that more than half a century has passed since the beginning of the Conquest and the fully accomplished dehumanization of the Indians. The first phase of the Conquest, which Bartolomé reported to the King, was concluded with the extermination of millions of homunculi: Hispaniola’s population alone, at three million residents at the time of Cortés’s arrival, had nearly vanished forty years later when Columbus disembarked there. Across the Indies there were no fewer than 12-15 million victims. Bartolomé was also acquainted with the Papal Bulls and treatises (of the partition between the Spanish and the Portuguese) that mentioned natives’ rights, referring to them as ‘rational beings’—all empty words that had done nothing to stop their enslavement. Under these circumstances it was no surprise that Bartolomé entered the Dominican Order in 1522. Everything had started with Montesinos’s homily, his friends’ teaching at Hispaniola and with the founding principle of the Thomist Order which recognized the soul, full humanity, and natural rights of the Indian. But the question of ‘inferiority’ would be taken up in the debate repeatedly on the strength of mere facts and by appealing to common sense. Besides, could he have run his own estate in the colonies without Indian labor? And how could one sail between the Americas and Spain on a modest budget? ‘For his big enterprises,’ he said, ‘God employs human means.’14 What master Bartolomé had in mind were colonies with Spanish merchants and farmers where, instead of slavery, there should have been human working conditions. In particular, the Indians should not have been taken away arbitrarily from their own communities and mixed marriages should have facilitated a broader social equality. And from the start the Indians should not have been distributed personally to settlers but to companies with anonymous shareholders. Bartolomé, together with his friends, had also read Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516.15 However strange it may be, the very adjective

 Ginés de Sepùlveda, Democrates segundo o de las justas causas de la guerra contra los indios, edición crítica bilingüe, traducción castellana, introducción, notas e índices por A. Losada, segunda edición, CSIC, Madrid 1984 (1951). 13  M.Mahn Lot, quoted work, p. 171. 14  Ibid p. 77. 15  Marcel Bataillon, “The Clérigo Casas, Colonist and Colonial Reformer,” in Friede and Keen, eds., Las Casas in History, pp. 384–385. Quoted by Benjamin Keen, “The Legacy of Bartolomé de las Casas,” Ibero-Americana Pragensia, (Prague), vol 11 (1977) 57–67. Keen adds: ‘Whether Las Casas borrowed from More or More from Las Casas remains a subject of dispute. Some Lascasistas even question Las Casas’s authorship of the 1517 Memorial cited by Bataillon. A study by Victor 12

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‘utopian’ had been attributed to his own projects before the book’s publication— this he recalled clearly—in a pejorative sense, although his ideas certainly deserved a qualification, perhaps more in the form of an appreciation. While Sepúlveda keeps expounding his view that the Indians are naturally destined to slavery as inferior beings, justifying thereby both their servile status and exploitation of their lands, Bartolomé is keenly aware that the native Americans were for his accuser mere labor force; but he is waiting for the more crucial debate on idolatry, human sacrifices and cannibalism. And he is waiting particularly for a Sepùlveda’s mistake that could prove fatal to him, a mistake concerning the true reasons of the Spanish Conquest. His opponent, however, first looks into the question of faith: he states the Indians first need to be rendered subjects to facilitate and speed up their Evangelical instruction. Then he comes to the point: they commit evil by offering human sacrifices. This was the key concern of the Junta and Charles V: the justification ‘if it was lawful for His Majesty to make war to the Indians before propagating the Christian faith to make them his subjects’ so that—Sepúlveda sustained—it would be easier ‘to rule and enlighten them’ in the Christian doctrine that they may ‘acknowledge their own mistakes’ and ‘learn the Christian truth.’16 But apart from the question regarding the timing, whether before or after the teaching of the doctrine, there was a bigger issue: the war was not only lawful but necessary to extirpate the atrocities they stained themselves with through human sacrifice and by devouring human flesh. Sepúlveda’s torrential oratory was blatantly bent on casting ridicule on the bishop’s rather mild suggestions. In addition, he recalled (to strengthen his thesis) the Conquest had been accomplished in line with the Pope’s and the King’s instructions: first subjugate, then propagate. What ‘manners had been employed during the Conquest was no secret to them, as with the succeeding popes…’, for cathedrals, dioceses and convents had been authorized by Papal Bulls. It may be recalled that Pope Paul III banned the slavery of American natives if carried out ‘without the Prince’s consent’ and if the natives were reduced to an inhuman treatment. If the two instances were to be differentiated, so argued Sepúlveda, ‘they should continue to be slaves until they are instructed, their idolatry is abolished and they have fully converted to Catholicism, and only then should they be freed and receive their former possessions’17; whereas asking them first to abandon their idol worship, then Evangelize them and then by force take away their possessions to prevent them leaving the new faith would be contradictory, something akin to punishing them at

N. Baptiste, Bartolomé de Las Casas and Thomas More’s Utopia: Connections and Similarities (Culver City, California, 1990), offers a different hypothesis: He suggests that a first Latin draft of Las Casas’s Memorial de remedios of 1516, proposing the establishment of associated communities of free Indians and Spanish peasants, was sent to Flanders, where King Charles resided in 1515. There it was shown to More by his close friend Erasmus, then a member of the Royal Council, and inspired him to write his famous work. Baptiste cites numerous tantalizing similarities between the two “utopian” schemes in support of his thesis’. 16  Saverio di Liso ed., pp. 80–82. 17  Ibidem.

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a wrong time; it would be—so he continued—like a Prince pardoning someone’s serious misconduct and crimes (which was the current view, so with Sepúlveda), welcoming him to his house and, after the latter’s penance, sending him to jail to prevent his change of heart. Calling up an earlier case of postponing war-making to Bible-teaching, the preachers ‘could be massacred as in Florida the previous year’, where the natives had killed the entire expedition. In addition, he noted—even if this hadn’t been the case, ‘not in a hundred years could preaching impact as much as fifteen days of subjugation.’ Only then ‘could the Spanish priests instruct and convert them openly without fear.’18 Las Casas had no doubt that his response to this point would have come swiftly as he had already illustrated his line of thought, for Charles V’s use, systematically in A Brief Account of the Indies. He would have it printed soon after the Junta, so he reflected, while seeking to suppress his adversary’s Democrates Alter, because he knew the emperor to be on his side. The starting point of his response would be his own book. The Conquest ended up with ‘abominable cruelties and detestable tyrannies committed on such a number of innocent souls.’ Therefore, his response to the central debate at Valladolid was a clear ‘no’: ‘waging war cannot be allowed before spreading the Gospel’, the sole reason for the unjust and tyrannical inequality of the Conquest. He would also state ‘without compassion towards the poor creatures…God should destroy it [Spain] in his anger for the sins which it hath committed.’ Who stood for the Conquest stood for a ‘poisonous cancer.’19 Was this a Conquest in the name of God? For the love of faith? To spread the Gospel? He knew how to answer it. But Bartolomé kept waiting until Sepúlveda’s far more serious fall, when inadvertently certain words slipped. It was the expected ‘mistake’, the point Bartolomé would seize upon in his address: the Aristotelian humanist indeed admitted that what pushed people to the New World was the hope to gather temporal goods: wealth. For Bartolomé was just like a lawyer who during a debate in court glimpses the door swing toward his triumph. In the heat of the debate, wishing to stick to clear facts, Sepúlveda stated: if the purpose of the expeditions had been the instruction in the faith and protection of clerics, no one would have left, because people ‘had risked their lives for the sake of gold and silver mines, to get rich and gaining the Indians’ work.’ This was it. The engine behind the armed Conquest – Sepúlveda had inadvertently admitted – was far different from the declared judicial premises.20

 “La controversia di Valladolid” in Nuovo mondo. Gli spagnoli, ed. Aldo Albonico, Giuseppe Bellini and others, Einaudi 1997, p. 841. 19  Ibidem p. 853. 20  Ibidem, p. 854. This passage is not recorded in De Soto’s account, who several times seems to be in difficulty and laments the lengthy arguments of the bishop (Las Casas) against the doctor (Sepùlveda); Bartolomè having noted the omission added it to his own summary of the Valladolid disputation, published two years later in Seville: Aqui se contien una disputa o controversia, publisher Sebastian Trujillo, 1552, now in Obras escojidas de Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas. Opusculos, cartas y memoriales, Madrid: Juan Péres de Tudela y Bueso, 1958, vol. V, 293–348. References on the true economic and non-missionary reasons of Spanish settlers are from the latter 18

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Bartolomé would now exploit his key counterargument extensively. On the one hand they had come for gold, silver, slavery of the Indians; on the other they spoke of civilizing, evangelization, ending idol worship and through constant contact with the Spaniards maintaining their conversion of faith without letting them resume their former barbaric rites and customs. How about building riches, was this just a secondary purpose? ‘But if Sepúlveda states it as the true motive’ and indeed neither for the love of God, nor for the zeal of their faith, nor to rescue next of kin’s soul ‘nor to serve the King (whom they boasted as false)’ had the colonists gone to the Indies. ‘They had come out of greed, they went there to deprive the Indians of their freedom, put them in the fiercest captivity, to share them as a property, like beasts, allocated in perpetual custody’21 The Bishop of Chiapas felt he now had sufficient energy and ideas to keep all the Junta members busy throughout the following five days, during which time Domingo De Soto in a tour de force would record it and deliver the text of the debate, as we read it today, with supplementary remarkable details added by the Bishop himself.22 And as regards human sacrifices and cannibalism, his response would be based on his life experience and the commitment entered after his confession to the governor of Cuba. His response did not only bring him victory but continues to speak to our conscience even today. To appreciate Bartolomé’s line of thought, however, we should not simply rely on our current sensibility and moral standards of the twenty first century where the discourse of Christian compassion and empathy towards the victims of colonists’ atrocities comes much closer to than to the cynicism of Cortés’ armies, of the encomenderos who benefited from it, or even of Francisco de Vitoria, the judiciary theorist behind the Conquest, and Sepúlveda, the lawyer who stood for their views before the King. Despite being considered currently to be beatified in Rome (after the Anglican Church declared him a saint on 20 July), the Dominican friar Bartolomé’s benign views for the Indians made things more complicated for him. His opinion that regarded instruction in the faith necessary prior to waging a war and even justifying the very instruction only if the said Indian community entirely agreed to it was highly hazardous in a context where the law was established by means of Papal Bulls and rules (and material interests) of the staunchly Catholic monarchs of Spain and Portugal. We also need to bear in mind that witness accounts of human sacrifices and widespread cannibalism by priests and friars serving in the New World were regularly dispatched, all concurrent with their description of atrocious rites and repulsive practices. At Valladolid, therefore, Las Casas stood before an embarrassing commitment, for he had to come out in favor of the ‘inferiority’ and atrocities of idolaters. His adversaries could easily hold against him the detailed accounts of unspeakable

source. Las Casas added that the doctor had not only admitted these facts verbally in front of the Junta but had also written them previously. 21  Ibidem. 22  See note 20.

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rites, of countless diverse sacrifices, and how, having extracted the still beating heart of the victim, the rest of the human body was served as food. He would testify for those gentle savages who ‘honored the devil with the worst idolatry…and the most ruthless sacrifices ever witnessed until today’, ‘the predecessor to Moctezuma, the Lord of Mexico, by the name of Ahuizotl offered to the gods in one single temple and in one rite that lasted three or four days 84,000 men, marched in columns down four streets…’23 The accounts, memories, letters and books written by mostly religious men, who succeeded the conquistadores, refer to events that, instead of ‘the black legend’, deserve to be called ‘black reality’. Las Casas’s severe accusation against the bloody Spanish colonization was at times deemed just a matter of hyperbole or mystified polemics, while at others the radically anti-Indian attitude depended on what Cortés and his armies had witnessed. The fact is, however, as the sources converge and clearly show the deeds of both first-hand and second-hand knowledge, which often contradicts the preferences and assumptions of the account writer, the practice of human sacrifice was on such a massive scale that even a twentieth-century ethnographer could not read it without reacting or seeking a humanitarian intervention, against that practice not less than against the atrocities carried out by Europeans. This brings us face to face with a double ‘black reality’ which challenges the contemporary culture in every sense, both the culture of Las Casas’s age but ours as well, for it injured the Spanish and Portuguese national pride, dealt a blow to the Church as an accomplice to genocide and opened an immense wound in Mesoamerican nations, who continue to hide from tourists the archaeological finds that reveal the nature of many of their monumental sites and the extent of human sacrifice and cannibalism practiced there merely five centuries ago. Here below is a couple of accounts of human sacrifice among the Aztecs sent to European capitals: The victim was led by five caches (sorcerers) and stretched over the techcatl, an oblong block of stone…Two priests held his head down by his arms and two by his legs while the fifth forced back his head with a wooden yoke that choked off his screams. The officiating priest plunged a stone knife upwards and behind the sternum, put his hand through the opening and reached the victim’s heart like a tiger and extract it still alive; he would then put it on a dish, pass it onto the priest who would bathe the idols’ faces with the fresh blood. They sometimes did it on a stone or the highest step of the temple, then they would hurl the dead body down the steps. Servants would catch it and flay its skin except that of his hands and feet; and the officiating priest would put on this skin and all would dance with him…they used to do this in the square of the temple, otherwise they would eat as food among their lords or five the rest to others. The victim’s hands, feet and head were reserved for the officiating priest and his assistants, and the victims were considered holy.24 They have a most horrid and abominable custom which truly ought to be punished and which until now I have seen in no other part, and this is that, whenever they wish to ask something of the idols, in order that their plea may find more acceptance, they take many

23 24

 See the letter by Toribio de Benavente (Motolinia), in Nuovo Mondo, quoted work, p. 860.  From Diego de Landa’s account, ‘Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan’ in Nuovo Mondo, pp. 228–29.

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girls and boys and even adults, and in the presence of the idols they open their chests while they are still alive and take out their hearts and entrails and burn them before the idols, offering smoke as sacrifice. Some have seen this, and they say it is the most terrible and frightful thing they have ever witnessed… The hearts plucked out and placed in a wooden dish called the cuauhxicalli, or ‘eagle dish’, the idea being originally that as the eagle is nourished by the tuna fruit so the sun is nourished by the human heart, which thus received the name cuauhnochtli, or ‘eagles’ food’ The bodies were thrown down the temple steps, then flayed and cut up; the skull went to the skull rack, the thigh to the emperor and the remainder was eaten with great solemnity by the victim’s captor. They cooked it with maize and gave each a piece of that meat in a bowl or caxete with its broth and cooked maize and called it tlacatlaolli. After supper they began to drink…These rituals were attended by big crowds and ceremonies where captured enemies were sacrificed were attended by enemy tribes, too. ‘They came secretly and stayed to see that ritual, many people Mocteuzoma was at war with, people who came from Huexotzinco, Tlaxalla, Nonoalco, Cepoalla and other parts. Mexicans pretended not to have seen them so that they could tell their own tribes what befell the prisoners.25

As Todorov points out the various accounts of New Spain, starting from Columbus’s geographical discovery, are concerned with the central question of each observer’s cultural belonging from their side. Cortés’s knowledge of the Indians is even better than that of Las Casas, and he employs it to his own end, to rule them. While figures such as Duran and Sahagun study the Indians, their customs and their religion more analytically, but with the explicit aim to abolish their idol worship. Others such as Cabeza de Vaca, after a life-long journey, witness both their own culture and the Indian as insiders and eventually experience a deep inner conflict when they are asked to take up arms. But Las Casas did not side with the Indians only for a genuine law reform that would improve their condition and treatment. His position disclosed a further and far more unexpected step at his age in the direction of the discovery of the other and cultural pluralism. For this reason, we need to underline his difficult context to make full sense of it: the gaze of his contemporaries was unquestionably conditioned by Christian monism and its horror of wild, bloody idol worshippers. The whole cycle of events concerning the New World is tied to the Christian perspective, exclusively and monistically Christian. We need to recall that it all starts with Columbus’s voyage and that Columbus set off to find a western passage to Cathay with the hope of raising funds for yet another crusade to liberate Jerusalem. Columbus sees himself within ‘the spread of Christianity…the glory of the Holy Trinity and to that the holy Christian religion’26; in a certain sense it is his monist and missionary vision that moves him onto his voyage that would open the European gaze to other worlds. That this would end in a genocide was inscribed in monism all along, which inevitably leads to an asymmetrical relation, ‘superiority’ towards the other with its different and wild customs as well as its fragile self-defense. In their reports, Ortiz and Oviedo describe the most replete human race with vice and 25  Bernardino de Sahagùn, Historia general de la cosas de la Nueva España., 1569, in Nuovo Mondo, pp. 188–192. 26  Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper Perennial, 1984), 10.

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bestiality God ever created, without the least trace of benevolence or culture, more beastly than a donkey. The sort of idol worship that appeared before European eyes in bloody rituals every day would provoke even in the most liberal, welcoming hearts and minds the desire to destroy its traces, to abolish objects, designs and emblems that could uphold and reproduce their demonic horror. Not surprisingly the Franciscan friar and bishop Diego de Landa, one of the earliest advocates of Indians’ rights who stood against the colonists’ abuse of Indians and was a true scholar of Mayan culture, was also among the greatest destroyers of all material documenting that culture. Altar stones, skins inscribed with pictograms, vases and all the remains were turned to ashes in a solemn auto da fé, for they represented demonic objects that might continue to inspire Mayan faith even after the nation had converted to Christianity. He could never have followed Las Casas in a direction he considered rather akin to condescending towards the culture of idol worship. The Bishop of Chiapas did not only have idol worship and the above noted barbaric atrocities in mind but also the massacre of the natives at Hispaniola, Cuba, wherever the conquistadores had set foot27. They came with their Horsemen well-armed with Sword and Lance, making cruel havocs and slaughters among them. Overrunning Cities and Villages, where they spared no sex nor age; neither would their cruelty pity Women with child, whose bellies they would rip up, taking out the Infant to hew it in pieces. They would often lay wagers who should with most dexterity either cleave or cut a man in the middle, or who could at one blow cut off his head. The children they would take by the feet and dash their innocent heads against the rocks, and when they were fallen into the water, with a strange and cruel derision they would call upon them to swim. Sometimes they would run both Mother and Infant, being in her belly quite through at one thrust. They erected certain Gallowses, that were broad but so low, that the tormented creatures might touch the ground with their feet, upon every one of which they would hang thirteen persons, blasphemously affirming that they did it in honor of our Redeemer and his Apostles, and then putting fire under the, they burnt the poor wretches alive. Those whom their pity did think fit to spare, they would send away with their hands half cut off, and so hanging by the skin. Thus upbraiding their flight, Go carry letters to those who lye bid in the mountains and are fled from us… One time above the rest I saw four of the Nobles laid upon these perches, and two or three other of these kind of hurdles furnished after the same manner; the clamors and cries of which persons being troublesome to the Captain, he gave order that they should be hang’d, but the Executioner whose name I know, and whose parents are not obscure, hindered their Calamity from so quick a conclusion, stopping their mouths, that they should not disturb the Captain, and still laying on more wood, till being roasted according to his pleasure, they yielded up the ghost. Of these and other things innumerable I have been an eye-witness…and  Las Casas’s direct testimony of Spanish violence is in A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, trans. Nigel Griffin (London & New York: Penguin, 1992). Originally translated by John Phillips as The Tears of the Indians: Being an Historical and True Account of the Cruel Massacres and Slaughters of about Twenty Millions of innocent People (London: Nath, Brook, 1656), 8–9. The bishop’s most radical views concerning the human sacrifices practiced by the Indians and his attempt to justify them from the religious standpoint of the natives are in his Apologetica Historia Sumaria, In defence of the Indians, trans. Staffor Poole (De Kalb: Northwestern Illinois UP, 1974), 28–53. See also B. de las Casas, Brevissima relaciòn de la destrucciòn de las Indias, 1552, in Nuovo Mondo. Gli spagnoli, p. 62–72. 27

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because the Indians did now and then kill a Spaniard, taking him at an advantage, as justly they might; therefore the Spaniards made a Law among themselves, that for one Spaniard slain, they should kill a hundred Indians… One day they [the Indians] brought as much fish, victuals and food as they could. All of a sudden, the Devil took possession of the Christians; they ran, with no reason, with the point of a sword through the bodies of more than three thousand men, women and children sitting before us. I have seen such iniquities and cruelties that can ever be imagined by humankind.

Todorov, who dedicates his book ‘to the memory of a Mayan woman devoured by dogs’, takes his epigraph from Diego De Landa: ‘The captain Alonso López de Avila, brother-in-law of the adelantado Montejo captured, during the war in Bacalán, a young Indian woman of lovely and gracious appearance. She had promised her husband, fearful lest they should kill him in the war, not to have relations with any other man but him, and so no persuasion was sufficient to prevent her from taking her life to avoid being defiled by another man, and because of this they had her thrown to the dogs.’28 Las Casas seeks to attenuate the impact of the cruel, bloody and mass-scale human sacrifices and of cannibalism practiced by the Indians, especially the Aztecs; but he also assumes a novel position with respect to the current legal assumptions (held by the conquistadores) and in contrast with de Vitoria’s authority who legitimized war against nations that practiced human sacrifices. For Las Casas, the Indian practice of human sacrifice was no exception in the history of religion as we are familiar with; it has always been with us (Abraham was ready to sacrifice Isaac). Next to the numerous examples from the Old Testament, he adds from the New Testament Jesus being sacrificed by his loving Father, which is the central evangelical message. Apart from such analogies, Las Casas states the decisive passage which renders his gaze different from his contemporaries, projecting him towards an explanation of religion that relativizes it in terms of time and culture: the Indian savages—so he assumes—thought in their adoration to satisfy their God; ‘their ignorance can be excused because nature herself teaches those who have not faith, grace or doctrine, those who love under the direction of only natural light.’29 While he unmasks and denounces the inhuman, unjust, atrocious aspects of the Conquest and questions its legitimacy, his sixteenth-century Christian perspective enables him to look beyond mere compassion for the indigenous population; having witnessed the latter’s most cruel customs and practices, he seeks to respect their natural laws and assumes a view we may define as anthropologic or perspectivist.

 T. Todorov, p.1. Originally in Diego de Landa, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, p.32. Yucatan Before and After the Conquest, trans. William Gates (Dover Publications, 1937); Global Grey ebooks (2018), p.97. Hernán Cortés. Cartas de relación, Messico was first published in Mexico City by Editorial Porrúa in 1523 (Letters from Mexico, trans. Anthony Pagden. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001). 29  Saverio Di Liso, ed. p. 131–132. 28

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For the bishop of Chiapas, they are ‘simple and kind savages’, stray sheep Jesus found company with and having shouldered them now would be—here comes the ironic question to Sepúlveda before the Junta at Valladolid—‘content to see His disciples with lance and sword attack a population that has never received the word of the Gospel and has done no wrong’ and thus convert them to faith? The savages were not only entitled to but had to defend their idols ‘because they believe their idols are the true God, their belief in reality is turned in the direction of the true God.’ Las Casas does not accept the Aristotelian and racist idea espoused by Sepúlveda that the Indians ‘are naturally destined to be slaves.’ On the contrary, he proves they had a well-organized society and the practiced rituals were not at all ‘perversions’ but were rites established in line with their own laws. He explains his anthropological perspective in Apologetica Historia. The key idea is human beings adore God according to their capacity and knowledge; secondly, ‘the highest manner of adoring God is to offer Him sacrifice’, sacrifice of precious and excellent things ‘we offer God, whose debtors we are for so many reasons…So, according to human judgement and truth, there is nothing in nature greater or more precious than the life of a man himself. This is why nature herself teaches who have not faith, grace or doctrine, those who love only in the direction of natural light, that, despite any positive law opposing it, they must sacrifice human victims to the true God or those false gods they hold to be true, in such manner that in offering him this supremely precious thing they may manifest to Him their gratitude for the multiple favours they have received…In religious terms they are far ahead of other nations, because the most religious nations in the world are those that sacrifice their own children for the common wealth of the nation.’30 The two ‘black realities’ are, therefore, not the same for Las Casas. Human sacrifice is a religious crime while the massacre of the inert Indians is a crime against God, and if for Sepúlveda the salvation of a single soul is worth the death of so many innocent victims, for Las Casas the death of a single man has more weight than his salvation. While his anthropological, cultural, and pluralist perspective from the other end of the world will not stop him from viewing the Turks and other Moors as the barbaric fiends to protect Christianity from, he sees the Spaniards as the demon to be chased in the New World. Las Casas thus opposed and challenged his age. The Franciscan fray Toribio de Benavente, called Motolinìa, complained of this Dominican friar in a letter to the Emperor: that terrible pest ‘thinks everybody is wrong and he alone is right, because he even states words later quoted to the letter: ‘All the conquerors are thieves, looters and the worst evil doers and the cruelest beings on earth, as is well-known to everyone’…I wonder how Your Majesty and the doctors of Your Councils could have tolerated for such a long time such a grievous man, restless, importunate,  These quotations come from Bartolomé’s replies to his Aristotelian opponent. The arguments were synthetically presented in De Soto’s report and were certainly developed extensively during the Bishop’s several day-lasting speech. They would have gone amiss if he had not recorded them in the above quoted Aqui se contiene una disputa, in Opusculos, p. 308b-348, and in Marianne Mahn-Lot, p.180–181. 30

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turbulent, injurious and prejudicial. As for myself, I have known him for fifteen years…’ The Fray of the Assisi order penned all these negative qualities in few lines in a virulent attack because the Dominican friar had refused to baptize collectively the Indians as the Franciscans used to with their wholesale Evangelizing method. To be precise, Las Casas had succeeded in not validating similar baptizing practices and forced missionaries to baptize single individuals. This explains Motolinìa’s vexation against the man who ‘continued to travel…and tried to prove he liked the Indians. But he heeded little to this in these provinces except for oppressing Indians by putting on their shoulders files of accusations and complaints against the Spaniards and a lot of devilish things of little importance.’ Motolinia had more than one reason to be furious with Bartolomé, a man who had been able in Chiapas to impose the principle that no Spaniard could be absolved from his sins not even in articulo mortis. For this reason, Don Toribio himself travelled to collect all the written accusations of the injurious bishop so as to protect any Spanish soul and would set them on fire, ad majorem Dei gloriam. Moreover, he also insinuated that in his territory much more care was taken to excommunicate a Spaniard than to convert an Indian. ‘This is how the Biblical message gets watered down by those who honour others’ faith too much.’31 These are familiar attacks of cowardice and treason of ‘our’ sacred values once the natural ethnocentricism of a culture gets challenged, contradicted, shaken. The Junta at Valladolid ended without decreeing a clear winner. A series of moderate reforms succeeded it in the direction as Don Bartolomé had favored. If the reforms are in relation with the dispute is still being questioned today. But the door it has opened towards other worlds, the worlds of others, deserves our admiration as seen from the not-perfectly immaculate tower of observation of our times.

 Motolinia’s furious complaint in “Letter by Toribio de Benavente (Motolinia)”, in Nuovo Mondo, p. 861 ff. 31

Chapter 6

MONTAIGNE, Cannibals and Us: Who are the Barbarians?

Abstract  This is the controversial history of the famous pages that Montaigne, one of the founding fathers of cultural pluralism, wrote about cannibals. It is one of the most radical manifestos on the truth and the god of others, one of those against which Monists fought. More recently Michel Onfray, one of the most evident examples of Monism (be it conscious or not) has considered it a crucial stage in the Western world’s decadence, a belief that is typically associating the West and the Absolute Truth. Montaigne’s provocation goes as far as to defend the rituality and civility of human sacrifices. His challenge is still alive and defying our contemporary faith in the oneness and certainty of our domestic ethnocentric Cosmos. Keywords  Enlightenment · Deism · Spinoza · Leibniz · Nathan the wise · Three rings · Esoterism · Exoteric · Leo Strauss · Dissimulation · Tolerance · Religious pluralism ‘Notre monde vient d’en trouver un autre.’ The discovery of the Indies enters European consciousness several decades after the Spanish, Italian and Portuguese witness accounts. And it is Michel Eyquem de Montaigne who delivers it from his retreat in his family chateau in Périgord: ‘Our world has just discovered another world (and who will guarantee us that it is the last of its brothers, since the daemons, the sibyls, and we ourselves have up to now been ignorant of this one?) no less great, full, and well-limbed than itself, yet so new and so infantile that it is still being taught its A B C; not fifty years ago it knew neither letters, nor weights and measures, nor clothes, nor wheat, nor vine.’1 Who can say there are no other new worlds? The single offspring now perceives he is no longer alone, and the arrival of new brothers or siblings heralds enhancement of our family but at the same time an anxious-filled loss of centrality. With Montaigne emerges the idea of ‘the plurality of worlds’, which reaches back to Greek and Latin classics—as early as to Democritus, Anaximander, and  Michel de Montaigne, Essays, in The Complete Works, trans. Donald M Frame. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Book II:6, 842. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Bosetti, The Truth of Others, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 25, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25523-6_6

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Epicurus. As the last noted, things that we see here exist also identically in numerous other worlds. For the author of Apologie de Raimond Sebonde and les Essais, plurality circumscribes our capacity to know everything and to see ourselves as owners of the only unquestionable truth. If we on this earth, ‘have been able to observe here some traces of his [God’s] deeds’, so asks Montaigne, ‘do you think, O man, that he has used all his power and put all his forms and all his ideas into this work?’ ‘You see only the order and the government of this little cave where you dwell in, at least if you do see it. His divinity has infinite jurisdiction beyond; this part is nothing in comparison with the whole…It is a municipal law that you allege; you do not know what the universal law is.’2 The most plausible and the most solid ground left to the reason is to convince itself of ‘the plurality of worlds.’ Since ours is only a ‘municipal’ one, how can we perceive the universal? The first lesson to draw from the post-Columbian events is we are not alone; we are but a small municipality. Pronounced by the mayor of Bordeaux, this statement beckons us to amend and reinforce the concept put forward by our Indian contemporary, Dipesh Chakrabarti, that Europe, in order to adapt adequately, should own a more mature, conscious and less ethnocentric perspective towards a world that has buried colonialism; while Chakrabarti suggests ‘provincializing’ Europe, Montaigne’s proposal is ‘municipalizing’ philosophy. Our knowledge has a limited range of action. Indeed, the age of the Essays witnessed the revival of the classical scepticism of Sextus Empiricus and Pyrrho. Among the works widely read at the time were those by Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, who underlined the vanity and inadequacy of philosophical theories and scarcity of reasoning to attain truth. To this Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences and the Arts should also be added. New and revised translations of Sesto Empirico’s and Pyrrho’s works further spread the sense of the limits of reason, undermining the conviction that it alone could help grasp the truth of things.3 Then came Pascal, who opened the way to the bet of faith, the only true anchor of salvation, followed by Hume, who came up with a theory of knowledge conscious of its limits, and fitted out to prepare the grounds for Kantian critique. New worlds mark the end of unitary, stable certainties concerning the nature of the universe which we hitherto believed could grasp and contain mentally; this brings the moment of the Galilean and Copernican revolutions ever closer, the swerve science was to accomplish; but it is also the atmosphere Giordano Bruno’s pantheism associates with, announcing the end of the perfect system of celestial spheres: ‘Thus the earth no more than any other world is at the centre; and no points constitute definite determined poles of space for our earth, just as she herself is not a definite and determined pole to any other point of the ether, or the world space; and the same is true of all other bodies. From various points of view, they may be regarded either as centres, or points on the circumference, as poles, or zeniths and  Essays , op. cit. Book II:12.  About the revival of skepticism in the sixteenth century and the sources of inspiration well known to Montaigne see among many others the brilliant profile of Peter Burke, Montaigne, Oxford University Press, 1994. 2 3

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so forth. Thus, the earth is not the centre of the universe; it is central only to our surrounding space’ and ‘in the universe, no centre or no circumference exist, but the centre is everywhere.’4 We cease to be the centre, we are the periphery, a ­‘surrounding space’ just like all the rest ad infinitum. For Bruno it is a ‘surrounding space’ what for Montaigne is a ‘municipality’. Isaiah Berlin, in his study on this particular age dominated by Montaigne, follows how scepticism, having shaken the ‘monist’ grounds of truth, prepared with Bodin and Montesquieu the political and judicial premises for a conception of sovereignty guarding against religious prosecution and with Pascal and Hume (against Descartes) opened epistemologically a new critical vision of human cognitive faculty.5 Montaigne, however, makes a far more significant breakthrough with his discovery of cultural pluralism. With him, for the first time ever and intentionally, a new perspective opens up and relativizes moral judgement within hitherto never practiced broad limits. And this discovery is demonstrated best in his works relating to the New World. The author of the Essais repeatedly discusses the adventures in the Indies and firmly and energetically condemns all the atrocities of the conquistadores. Montaigne read The Conquest of Mexico by Lopez de Gomara6, who had travelled after Cortés, and other witness accounts, most probably about Peru and the Incas. He might have read Las Casas as well, his A Short Account of Destruction of the Indies; in line with Las Casas’s position, he also condemns the massacres, judges negatively the whole process of claimed civilization, praises the indigenous populations’ courage, endurance and the Indian princes’ heroism (like that of Montezuma and Incas rulers), and criticises the Spaniards’ greed, cruelty and miserable souls. Montaigne thought the Conquest destroyed magnificent cultures. ‘How easy had it been to have made advantage of souls so innocent, and so eager to learn, leaving, for the most part, naturally so good inclinations before? Whereas, on the contrary, we have taken advantage of their ignorance and inexperience, with greater ease to incline them to treachery, luxury, avarice, and towards all sorts of inhumanity and cruelty, by the pattern and example of our manners. Whoever enhanced the price of merchandise at such a rate? So many cities levelled with the ground, so many nations exterminated, so many millions of people fallen by the edge of the sword, and the richest and most beautiful part of the world turned upside down, for the traffic of pearl and pepper? Mechanical victories! Never did ambition, never did public animosities, engage men against one another in such miserable hostilities, in such miserable calamities.’7  Bruno, Giordano. On the Infinite, the Universe and the Worlds: Five Cosmological Dialogues (Collected Works of Giordano Bruno Book 2), translated and introduced by Scott Gosnell Huginn, Muninn & Co, (p.74). 5  Isaiah Berlin on Montaigne. 6  Montaigne gives a detailed account of human sacrifice rituals in the new world in his Essays (I, XXX), whose source relies on Lopez de Gòmara’s Histoire Générale des Indes Occidentale (II, 90, 180ff). 7  Essays, Book III 6. 4

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Montaigne’s conceptually outstanding move, itself much akin to the pluralist vision we can now entertain in our age despite the recriminations by a good number of monist custodians of truth8, consists in introducing the principle of relativity to our knowledge, which we actually attribute to our ‘intelligence’ in the conviction that intelligence alone can attain genuine universality. But in point of fact, the variety of knowledge and human certainties at different times and places reveals an altogether different quality. Judgements vary ‘by every nation and by every man, according to the proportion of his ignorance. How many occult properties and quintessences do we daily discover? For, for us to go "according to nature," is no more but to go "according to our understanding," as far as that is able to follow, and as far as we are able to see into it; all beyond that is, forsooth, monstrous and irregular.’9 Hume would call it the force of habit, while Montaigne talks of ‘nature’, revealing thereby it is an ‘acquired quality.’ Whatever does not fit in our order of habit or custom appears monstrous and disorderly; we call them rules—and ‘prescribe them to nature…undertake to bind even God to them’—and attempt to bind everything to them which, though, depend on our ‘municipality.’ As Pascal was to note in response to Montaigne: ‘Odd kind of justice that is bounded by a river! Truth on this side of the Pyreness, error on the other side.’10 And Montaigne: “What kind of virtue is that which I see one day in repute, and that to-morrow shall be in none, and which the crossing of a river makes a crime? What sort of truth can that be, which these mountains limit to us, and make a lie to all the world beyond them?’11 Montaigne thus advances towards moral relativism; this is not an unlimited move, rather, a bold step with deeply reflective knowledge of someone who does not wish to imprison his thoughts. He does it with such nonchalance to the point of ridiculing even Protagoras, considered the founder of relativism. The Greek philosopher said: ‘Of all things the measure is man, of all the things that are how they are, and things that are not, how they are not.’ Montaigne countered Protagoras, he  To indicate monists’ aggressive spirit, Michel Onfray deserves a mention for choosing to attack Montaigne’s views on cannibals and cannibalism as a nodal point in the history of ‘decline of the West’, typically monistic refrain. He’s doing it through an extraordinarily oblique reading of Montaigne’s Essays. Onfray criticizes also Las Casas for his exaggerated rhetoric against the Spaniards. Ultimately, he chooses to miss the point, and washes his hands of perpetrated massacres and gratuitous stabbings, with the view ‘nothing is new under the sun.’ This is what every army has done for time immemorial. When it comes to Montaigne, however, Onfray contests the veracity, the authenticity of Montaigne’s encounters with Indian cannibals, suggesting the author of the Essays ought to have modified the circumstances, dates and places of these encounters so as not to displease the King and circumvent any diplomatic controversy. In Onfray’s view, Montaigne’s accounts cannot be but second-hand tales, many heard from his house servant – something explicitly said in the Essays – who supposedly had spent a decade in the West Indies. Onfray’s objections fail to reverse the essence of these pages on the cannibals, which, far from being an ethnographic documentary, are reflections on the variety and plurality of customs and traditions. M. Onfray, Décadence. Vie et mort du judèo-christianisme. Paris, Flammarion, 2017, pp. 337-52). 9  Essays , Book II, 12, Apology for Raimond Sebond. 10  Blaise Pascal (1623–1662).  Thoughts.The Harvard Classics.  1909–14 p.293. 11  Essays, Book II, 12. 8

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deceived himself by pretending so much from ‘man’. ‘Protagoras told us a pretty flam in making man the measure of all things, that never knew so much as his own’. Because every opinion can be countered by another, that statement was ‘so ‘favourable’ to human vanity as to be merely laughable, ‘which induced us necessarily to conclude the nullity of the compass and the compasser’12. What really appears to be missing is that dimension capable of measuring things with respect to such a vast variety of convictions, laws and moral rules. Where then is the compass to enable us to reduce to a single canon the value of human things? There is none. We can illustrate the question with an example from Herodotus’s Histories (38:3,1): ‘When Darius was king, he summoned the Greeks who were with him and asked them for what price they would eat their fathers’ dead bodies. They answered that there was no price for which they would do it. Then Darius summoned those Indians who are called Callatiae, who eat their parents, and asked them (the Greeks being present and understanding through interpreters what was said) what would make them willing to burn their fathers at death. The Indians cried aloud, that he should not speak of so horrid an act. So firmly rooted are these beliefs; and it is, I think, rightly said in Pindar’s poem that custom is lord of all.’ Customs and habits provide a protective circle to every society, nation or ‘municipality’; they are the legitimizing source of its own deeds. As in the example of the Roma myth of ‘doneness’: when God sets out to cook to create human beings, at his first trial he overcooks it and as a result the black race is born; next he leaves it too short in the oven and so he creates the white race; finally, when he cooks to perfect doneness the result is the Roma race, neither too dark nor white. A perfect ethnocentric mythology fit for any degree of cooking as one wishes to adjust it. It is the custom that makes us establish ourselves as the norm and the others as the deviation so that we can strengthen our self-defense. The question ‘who are the true barbarians’ appears to get lost in an endless game of mirrors, yet Montaigne does not lose his way in his argument about the cannibals in New Spain: the ‘barbarous’ oddities in Indians’ behavior who practiced the ritual of eating their dead enemies are viewed by Montaigne as a ritual to celebrate victory, which he confronts with the religious persecutions in Europe. Is it a more barbarian act to cook and eat your enemy’s flesh after his death or to burn alive and torture our fellow citizens? His essay on cannibalism13 has a two-fold significance: on one hand it provides the foundation for an anthropological interpretation of radically different customs from our own, on the other it serves as a rhetoric device to arouse scandal, to denounce the outrage of our behavior as Europeans perpetually carrying out religious massacres among Christians. Instead of being easily comprehended, this is often cited as inaugurating the tradition of anthropological relativism; in other words, as the fundamentalists of Truth suggest, this is the source of all evil, of indifference towards any kind of human behavior (be it mutilation of female genitals, polygamy or cannibalism). The sarcastic Montaigne’s question above is

12 13

 Essays, , ibidem.  Essays, Book I, XXX.

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also an accusation: extermination of the Indians in the New World, extermination of protestants in the Old World; wars of religion in Europe should, in his view, be an outrage and should look like to contemporaries far more disgusting than Aztec rituals. Montaigne’s pluralist discourse has major force because it refrains from reducing the variety and relativity of human behaviour to mere recognition of what it is; it actually seeks to give an eloquent explanation to human diversity without losing its hold on moral commitment. Why do laws remain in credit? His answer follows: ‘not for being just, but because they are laws. This is the mystic foundation of their authority; they have no other.’14 ‘We follow the laws of our country, that is to say, this floating sea of the opinions of a republic, or a prince, that will paint out justice for me in as many colors, and form it as many ways as there are changes of passions in themselves’.15 And so it is from laws to religion (which we discover has even more drastically fallen apart), from the reign of the absolute and true to the wild and bloody contestations after which the winner, within his variable limits, declares what divine truth should be until yet another war begins. How could God more clearly accuse ‘the ignorance of human knowledge concerning the divine Being, and give men to understand that their religion was but a thing of their own contrivance, useful as a bond to their society, than declaring as he did to those who came to his tripod for instruction, that every one's true worship was that which he found in use in the place where he chanced to be? O God, what infinite obligation have we to the bounty of our sovereign Creator, for having disabused our belief from these wandering and arbitrary devotions, and for having seated it upon the eternal foundation of his holy word? But what then will philosophers say to us in this necessity?’ Variety and diversity of religions and laws, therefore, are the result of customs, not of a natural law or natural faith. We come upon differences produced by human beings randomly, by fortune, power and victory of the stronger, which become the law (Thrasymachus). The ceaselessly undulating differences are born of our ignorance not our reason; they are the result of the congenitally limited human condition that is exposed to mold and consolidate itself through different customs. (As in Cusanus’s dream in De pace fidei16, here too in the Essays, Montaigne imagines God religious differences by founding them on his eternal word). When Montaigne turns to the question of cannibals, he does so because of the lacerating war of religions which has provided the framework for the author of the Essais, who then concludes the wisest thing is to let everyman have his faith without a universal design or a mission to reduce it to one single true faith. Diverse confessions belong to our human condition and should remain so, complementing one another. What with Cusanus was suggested as pluralistic theology supported by

 Essays, Book III, XIII.  Essays, Book II, XII. 16  See Chap. 4. 14 15

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God himself, now becomes a clear philosophical declaration: barbarians do not exist because of laws, nor do they exist because of diversity of worship. Barbarians are always the others; consequently, this holds for the New World as well, cannibals included, as it was the case in antiquity. Montaigne, who has also read, as we said above, important books about the Conquista, employs a partly or entirely fictional strategy by stating his source was ‘a man who had lived ten or twelve years in that other world which has been discovered in our century’; ‘This man that I had was a plain ignorant fellow, and therefore the more likely to tell truth: for your better-bred sort of men are much more curious in their observation, 'tis true, and discover a great deal more; but then they gloss upon it, and to give the greater weight to what they deliver, and allure your belief, they cannot forbear a little to alter the story.’ The chapter on cannibals oversimplifies the topic which should serve for his argumentation. Montaigne omits here human sacrifices, which he knows and mentions in the previous chapter of the Essays17, because those widespread, violent practices could hardly suit his representation here of the Indians: ‘I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country. As, indeed, we have no other level of truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place wherein we live: there is always the perfect religion, there the perfect government, there the most exact and accomplished usage of all things. They are savages at the same rate that we say fruits are wild, which nature produces of herself and by her own ordinary progress.’18 Montaigne limits the practice of cannibalism to a war ritual: ‘The obstinacy of their battles is wonderful, and they never end without great effusion of blood: for as to running away, they know not what it is. Every one for a trophy brings home the head of an enemy he has killed, which he fixes over the door of his house. After having a long time treated their prisoners very well, and given them all the regales they can think of, he to whom the prisoner belongs, invites a great assembly of his friends. They being come, he ties a rope to one of the arms of the prisoner, of which, at a distance, out of his reach, he holds the one end himself, and gives to the friend he loves best the other arm to hold after the same manner; which being. done, they two, in the presence of all the assembly, dispatch him with their swords. After that, they roast him, eat him amongst them, and send some chops to their absent friends… I am not sorry that we should here take notice of the barbarous horror of so cruel an action, but that, seeing so clearly into their faults, we should be so blind to our own. I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man alive, than when he is dead; in tearing a body limb from limb by racks and torments, that is yet in perfect sense; in roasting it by degrees; in causing it to be bitten and worried by dogs and swine (as we have not only read, but lately seen, not amongst inveterate and mortal enemies,

17 18

 See Book I, XXIX.  Essays, Book I, XXX.

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but among neighbors and fellow-citizens, and, which is worse, under colour of piety and religion), than to roast and eat him after he is dead.’ Neighbours and fellow citizens were massacring one another in those years, such as the mob violence against the Huguenots in the streets of Paris in the night of St. Bartholomew. This is a severe blow to the claim that ‘reason’ or ‘truth’ or ‘justice’ should lead human beings in their society to lay down laws and moral norms. Montaigne uses these words with much circumspection, in the same degree as philosophers of last century such as Wittgenstein or Rorty, have adapted since the crisis of faith in metaphysics and after abandoning the conviction that our words and thoughts reflect an unquestionable rock-solid truth: our behaviour and convictions are everywhere the product of customs and habit; the claim to bind them to absolute principles is a deception. This is also why Montaigne has received the attribute of being a relativist, an attribute which needs significant boundaries. Admittedly, he states ‘in short, to my way of thinking, there is nothing that custom will not nor cannot do.’ ‘It is for habit to give form to our life, just as it pleases; it is all-powerful in that; it is Circe’s drink, which varies our nature as sees fit.’ 19And it is custom that convinces us of the legitimacy of our deeds. But in Montaigne’s view, our unique target does not consist in obeying these habits that define law; we can employ the liberty to think and criticize a law or a custom, for we are not hopeless slaves; we can reflect and confront events, much as Montaigne himself denounced the Christian fanatical bloodshed in France during the civil wars by confronting it rhetorically with the Indians’ cannibal rituals against their captive enemies. The barbarity is here presented in a different degree; if it is true that we can call cannibals barbarians in comparison to a general standard of humanity, ‘rules of reason’—which Montaigne hence does not relinquish—but not barbarians in respect to ourselves. Although absolutist criteria are accessible to God only, it is true ‘a wise man, within, ought to withdraw and retire his soul from the crowd, and there keep it at liberty and in power to judge freely of things; but as to externals, absolutely to follow and conform himself to the fashion of the time.' From reflections on costume and the way of dressing, in the face of extreme and eccentric choices Montaigne suggests to the individual to defend his freedom of judgment in a way that extends from clothing to the most important choices of life, work, fortune, all our actions. Not being in possession of absolute values on which to model rules, laws, and even ethical norms – nothing further from his style and his thought – he prefers to entrust the decisions to be made to the society in which one has to live, as Socrates did, ‘as did that good and great Socrates who refused to preserve his life by a disobedience to the magistrate, though a very wicked and unjust one for it is the rule of rules, the general law of laws, that everyone observe those of the place wherein he lives.’

 Essays, Book III:13, 1008 the relation between laws and costume ibid., Book I:23, 93-108; distance from a given man to a given animal Book I:42, p.229. 19

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This concludes that reason must and can be practiced in a manner which the Essays describe reflectively, not without oscillations and contradictions20, and accompany us once again to criterion to assess human conduct. ‘Whoever would disengage himself from this violent prejudice of custom, would find several things received with absolute and undoubting opinion, that have no other support than the hoary head and rivelled face of ancient usage. But the mask taken off, and things being referred to the decision of truth and reason, he will find his judgment as it were altogether overthrown, and yet restored to a much more sure estate’.21 Montaigne occupies a key position in the history of ideas as he led the way to human sciences which, in turn, started to interpret the existence of the other freed from ethnocentricity, anticipating thereby anthropology and cultural relativism. And he has received ample recognition, beginning with Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the outstanding anthropologists in the twentieth century. Montaigne’s radical relativism does indeed put him at risk, in that he could give up on a judgement about something that could universally be accepted as a just judgement; but he does not give in. His conversation does not come off as a rounded off, integrally coherent philosophical system. Someone has sought to prove that he contradicted himself, stating that national customs of a country are not always incompatible with the capacity to follow certain principles (such as refusal of religious violence) and do not always by force end in free will or folly. But the European and French scenario in Montaigne’s years was in such a grip of sectarian violence that he could not seek to rely on universal principles to relate them to human nature. It is the times he lived in that dictated him: ‘…there is more distance from a given man to a given man than from a given man to a given animal.’22

 Tzvetan Todorov discusses Montaigne’s, as though ‘trapped’, to avoid being a universalist in On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1994. 21  Book I, 22. 22  Book I:42, p.229. 20

Chapter 7

LESSING: Answer Coded in the Parable of the Three Rings

Abstract  As a matter of fact, the Leibniz’s never-published, compromising, page on the (non-) eternity of the pains of hell was on a piece of paper discovered by Lessing at the time of his work in Wolfenbüttel, in the large library he managed as Leibniz’s successor. Because of papers like this and many others, suspected as heretic, Lessing experienced the attacks of a dogmatic Protestant bishop who wanted to incriminate him in the eyes of the Prince of Braunschweig so he would be banished. As his work progresses, one reaches the culmination of the duel in which what was at stake was the outlawing of the great thinker of the German Enlightenment. Lessing could not continue because he risked losing the match and therefore entrusted his last answer, in code, to Nathan the Wise, the play that contains the parable of the three rings, which had already appeared in Boccaccio and returns in a new form in this play, that this chapter reinterprets in an original way. The unresolved subject of the equivalent truth of the three great religions reappears in an explosive form that the books published posthumously were to reveal in all their disruptive power. Keywords  Enlightenment · Deism · Spinoza · Leibniz · Nathan the wise · Three rings · Esoterism · Exoteric · Leo Strauss · Dissimulation · Tolerance · Religious pluralism The new director of one of the greatest libraries, Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, in Lower Saxony took charge on 7 May 1770; he was a distinguished scholar of arts, philosophy and theology, a successful dramatist and a free spirit of the German Enlightenment, Aufklärung, at the height of its maturity. He would have preferred a less peripheral location, such as Hamburg or Berlin, but the Crown Prince Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand’s ‘expedient’ had its economic benefits. In addition, it gave him full access to the rich collection that would provide the foundations for his future intellectual battles. The new director went about with much expertise in the immense HAG collection (Herzog August Bibliothek), itself a major historical monument of the German culture to this day. He knew what to look for and how to make the best of the holdings at his disposal. He had the authority to publish © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Bosetti, The Truth of Others, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 25, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25523-6_7

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everything to enhance the enlightenment of reason across the entire human horizon, history, art, religions, emancipation from dogmatism, intolerance and superstition. There was ample agreement with the Prince: Distinguished Professor, feel free to publish ‘anything so long as it should not unleash a religious reaction or offend common sense.’1 Ample yet not an unlimited formula of agreement. Presumably, the Prince might have also added: ‘Follow in the steps of your predecessors, we know who has been here.’ The new director could easily grasp the alluded figure, for one of those was no other than Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. And now it was his turn: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, by then an established literary talent with his comedy Minna von Barnhelm or the Soldiers’ Happiness and his treatise on Laocoon, where he took issue with the much-respected contemporary art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the founder of modern archaeology and German supervisor of classical antiquities in Rome. But Leibniz’s name inspired in Lessing a new idea as well, opening a much more difficult battle front. We are now in a Protestant country; the Wars of Religion had ended in the middle of the previous century but not intolerance towards free thought. Guardians of Lutheran theology are on the lookout to chase deists (those who reject revelation as a source of religious knowledge) and pantheists (such as Spinoza, Deus sive Natura). As for atheists, it is best not to mention them. The brilliant new librarian soon comes upon a writing by Leibniz on ‘the eternal punishment’, meaning the thesis of discussing their ‘non eternity’. It is still a burning issue like the fire of hell, as it can lead to censorship whoever handles it with little dexterity. It also has a Greek name, condemned in various Councils throughout centuries, we are now well familiar with: ‘apocatastasis’,2 condemned and feared like the name of its author, Origen of Alexandria. And throughout millenniums, it has lost nothing of its propulsive force of subversive reforms that break out of the limits of salvation of a dogmatic order, because the ‘not-eternity’ of hell signifies ‘universal restoration’, reintegration, hence final inclusion of all in the grace of God irrespective of one’s religion or one’s sins. Once the hellfire goes out, there is no other alternative but to fall within Origen’s embrace. The Alexandrian’s trace of thought from the third century has thus arrived at two Christian cities in the heart of Germany, first at a Catholic and now a Protestant town with their two monuments respectively standing to the glory of the history of German and European thought: Kues and Wolfenbüttel, a foundation-hospital and a library, the first on the Moselle in Rhineland-Palatinate, the second on the Oker in Lower Saxony. A waft of Origen’s heresy had entered earlier Nicola Cusanus’s life, from Kues, and his writings, held at the Stiftung Cusanus he himself had founded in his hometown in 1452. Three centuries later, it is to invest the secular dramatist (the  The letter oft he Prince of Braunschweig here: G. E. Lessing, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, hrsg. von Wilfried Barner u. a. zusammen mit Klaus Bohnen, Gunther E. Grimm, Helmut Kiesel, Arno Schilson, Jürgen Stenzel und Conrad Wiedemann, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1985–2000. VII, 981–82). 2  See Chap. 3. 1

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son of a pious and learned minister) Lessing in the great library where we have left him. Yet in the meanwhile, after Cusanus and before Lessing, we also discover reading the unpublished manuscript unearthed by the latter that ‘apocatastasis’ had already ‘contaminated’ the 17-century philosopher of ‘the best of all possible worlds’, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who had immersed himself in that headache called Origen, the denier of eternal hell or eternal punishment. More akin to a theological thriller, the breath of an idea that had lightly touched the Severan Roman Empire at a time of syncretism now has moved to the side of a philosopher of European élite, Leibniz, who in all evidence sought to manifest he was an orthodox believer. The trace the Greek bishop had left behind was as powerful as the anathema pronounced in his wake in the course of the first and second millennium, and even to date: ‘If anyone says or holds that the punishment of demons and of impious men is temporary, and that it will have an end at some time, or that there will be a restoration apocatastasis of demons and impious men, that is anathema,’ was the decree of the Ecumenical Council, held at Constantinople under the Emperor Justinian.3 It is worth recalling that the idea of salvation and restoration of all to the original integrity at the end of all times led to two conclusions: it reintegrated the ‘infidels’, everyone who had embraced a different faith or lived in a different country, it reintegrated the impious and perhaps even the devil (in most likelihood, after making him undergo an adequate, intense and prolonged corrective punishment). Although the Christians were granted the pre-eminence to enjoy their own truth, the first consequence meant also tearing down the walls between religions and hence inevitably seeing the differences of faith in the light of accidental elements, like the babel of cultures, languages, nations and policies (‘angels, good and hostile powers of nations’). The second consequence, however, was not the result of a more merciful but a more rigorous vision—the ontological result of the ‘supremacy’ of the Supreme being, manifestly incompatible with eternal punishment and eternal hell. These two threads left to weave their course through the centuries after Origen were both perceived as a ‘poison’ by orthodox Christians, be they Catholics or Protestants, after the Reformation. The first still for many remains an untouchable question, as evinced by Pope Ratzinger’s epistle, Dominus Iesus, in 2000 and the Vatican trial of the religious pluralist theologian Jacques Dupuis. Cusanus, despite his own dream ‘una religio in varietate rituum’, did not have to back from De pace fidei, thanks to the power he had in the Roman Curia and to his personal ties with the three popes, to the turbulence afflicting the Church history and, not least, to have left in the background his most provocative work on the reunification of all religions. The second thread, the non-eternity of punishment, may be today less provocative and less passionate due to the generally waning interest in hell, even though its  For the Ecumenical Councils on Origen, particularly his doctrine of apocatastasis, see Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. XIV, The Seven Ecumenical Councils, ed. Philip Schaff, Henry Wace and Henry Percival. New York 1900, p. 319. 3

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theological incompatibility with the Church doctrine remains an unresolved issue. In a homily delivered in March 2007, Benedict XVI himself stated ‘hell – of which so little is said in our time  - exists and is eternal…’ He must have undoubtedly insinuated ‘unfortunately’ as well. But in the second half of the eighteenth century, the idea of the end of hell was still extremely dangerous and could be reported to ‘secular’ authorities, especially those under Frederick II of Prussia, leading to serious consequences. Hence, the challenge that presented itself to Lessing before a page from Leibniz’s manuscript: the preface to the work by the Socinian Ernst Soner (Socinianism was a doctrine that rejected the views of orthodox Christian theology, the doctrine of the Trinity and eternal punishment). The famous philosopher, who died 50 years before Lessing arrived at Wolfenbüttel, did indeed criticise Soner’s views, rejected the non-eternity of punishment, accused the author of owning an imperfect idea of the infinite, yet his interest in his work was not immune from possible suspicion. Leibniz had apparently accepted to author the preface to an outspokenly heretical book and admitted that Soner had penned it in a manner ‘subtiliter et ingegnose’, in a subtle and ingenious way.4 In short, Lessing held in his hands the equivalent of a contemporary philosophically substantial ‘scoop’. What does this signify then? That Lessing could now demonstrate how a great philosophical mind had been attracted by apocatastasis, whilst keeping officially his distance to it. The book’s editor Johan Lorenz von Mosheim’s unpublished letter also proved that it had been Leibniz all along who had wished to publish Soner’s book. Leibniz wrote that he thought ‘it is often useful to publish such things, as just reading them is sufficient to refute and overthrow this opinion which has been received among people for a long time.’5 A noble point indeed, yet also a well-­ known expedient to ‘dissimulate’ perilous beliefs in the eyes of the censor. Despite serving as an expedient against the shrewd censorship of any regime, it proved to no avail and the great philosopher eventually dropped the idea of the book publication altogether. Now Lessing, an expert in the field, had to prove equally astute by relying on the memory of the deceased philosopher. And he meant to carry it out by devising a complicated conceptual choreography. Leibniz on Eternal Punishment of 1773 inevitably plays around with words, as it is the place where Lessing with much circumspection discloses how Leibniz actually came to refute ‘eternal punishment’ in his ‘exoteric’ teaching, intended for the general public (according to the distinction made since early Antiquity by Plato), while endorsing a different opinion in his ‘esoteric’ discourse made in a closer circle. Lessing was aware of stating an embarrassing accusation which he also attempted to diminish through understated irony, double-entendre, saying they were merely ‘two different teaching methods.’ He had no clue that Leibniz’s own interest in Origenism was expressed in yet another work which came to our knowledge only

 Leibniz’s unpublished views on eternal punishment are edited by Lloyd Strickland, in Leibniz on God and Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2016, p. 326. 5  Ibidem, pp. 325–326. 4

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in the century and bore the explicit Greek title ‘Aποχαταστασιζ παντων’. In addition, Leibniz had corresponded with another heretic, Johann Wilhelm Petersen from Lübeck, known for his conviction of Chiliasm (that the end of the world will be preceded by a thousand-year ‘kingdom of God’ on earth), and that he himself had believed in Origen’s teaching of universal salvation. The philosopher of Monadologie and Théodicée had also encouraged, helped and guided Petersen to write apocatastasis in verse. Eventually he had even reviewed it, providing thereby its content, without publishing his name, though subsequently owned up in his review. In a letter to friend, he had written that the book was such a joy to read as it listed all the ancient and modern thinkers of apocatastasis and that ‘although I have no intention to follow that doctrine, I cannot but acknowledge its merits.’6 Here again, as in the unpublished preface to Soner’s book previously, Leibniz distanced himself from Origen’s doctrine, while suggesting how eternal punishment would be scarcely compatible with his metaphysics and the concept of the world in a continuous progress towards improvement. A more explicit private confession could have been much more dangerous. Furthermore, intervening by means of a Protestant theological ‘justice’ would have brought the discussion to ruins. As is well known, Leibniz did everything so as not to disclose meeting Spinoza, who had been expelled, loathed, condemned and declared an outcast by the Jewish community of Amsterdam and by every prudish Christian for his outrageous heresies. Still, he could not renounce talking with him, as he had been so attracted by him. Just as he had been attracted by Origen’s heresy.7 The mole of apocatastasis had really well burrowed. Lessing and Leibniz gave it the German equivalent Wiederbringung, ‘restoration’, receiving from it the impulse towards plurality—it would be expressed differently in Lessing’s drama and other works, either published or left for posterity to his brother, a move that rendered him an expert in the continual bustle between exoteric and esoteric speech (between public teaching and teaching to adepts). And on this point referring to others and himself Leo Strauss noted: ‘Lessing was the last writer who revealed, while hiding them, the reasons compelling wise men to hide the truth: he wrote between the lines about the art of writing between the lines.’8  G. W. Leibniz, ed. Michel Fichant. De l’horizon de la doctrine humaine (1693), ‘Aποχαταστασις παντων (La Restitution universelle) 1715. Paris: Vrin, 1991, pp.22–23. For the quoted letter to Burnett of February 27, 1703, the original German source in G.W. Leibniz, Die philosophische Schriften, ed. C.I.Gerhardt, Halle 1855–1863, vol 3, p.283. 7  The question of Leibniz’s meeting with Spinoza, always kept a secret so as not to lead to controversy, see Matthew Stewart. The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza and the Fate of God in the Modern World. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006. 8  Leibniz on God and Religion. Quoted work. About the Lessing’s skill at ‘writing between the lines’, as Leo Strauss noted, ibid. p.325. Roberto Celada Ballanti has written extensively on Leibniz and his dissimulated theses enabling him, as Lessing noted, to teach in two different modes: La storia universale tra eterno ritorno e ‘progressus infinitus’, in G. W. Leibniz, Storia universale ed escatologia. Il frammento sull’Apokatástasis (1715), in Latin and Italian. Erudizione e teodicea. Saggio sulla concezione della storia di G. W. Leibniz, Liguori, 2004 The author of this volume has consulted the essay by Eleonora Travanti. Finiti ad  infinitum nulla est proportio. 6

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Having published Leibniz’s hitherto unpublished work, the director of the Wolfenbüttel Library now turned to another ‘treasure’ held in its collection: the master work of the deist Hermann Samuel Reimarus, An Apology or Defence of the Rational Worshippers of God. In truth, Lessing had received the manuscript from Reimarus’ daughter, more than 2000 pages long, but declared he had found it among the unpublished holdings and started to publish parts of it. He tested the ground with On the Toleration of the Deists: the explicit message is that an analysis of reasons of unbelievers enhances doubt, consequently, strengthens faith; the implicit message is religions are by necessity clothed in miracles and other fanciful inventions which help educate an infantile humanity. Five more fragments followed, refuting the truth of miracles, apostles’ lies and even those of Christ, resurrection and that Jesus was the Son of God. Lessing added ‘the antitheses’ to these fragments to weaken their impact, but they were of no help. Such explosive material inevitably led to counter his major adversary, Johann Melchior Goetze, the senior pastor of Hamburg, the highest Lutheran German authority. Lessing’s replies were collected under Anti-­ Goetze, all in all 11 pieces, known as the Fragmentenstreit, the controversy in which the orthodox doctrine contests the ‘lies’ of the librarian of Wolfenbüttel. Although Lessing kept on writing his responses to defend the importance of debate that should reinforce religion, the declared anonymous authorship (Reimarus) and the deprivation of privileges granted by the Duke of Brunswick (to whom Goetze had appealed) meant he had to stop. His twelfth Anti-Goetze piece would never be produced. Instead, it was transformed in his mind rapidly to his most significant work, Nathan the Wise, an encoded play that rounds off the debate and continues to go on stage after two and a half centuries. The Pastor of Hamburg would have easily identified himself with the fanatical Patriarch (of Palestine, Athanasios), who attempts to burn Nathan (the hero who renders homage to Lessing’s friend Moses Mendelssohn and endorses the author’s own thoughts). In the same years, shortly after the end of the Leibniz controversy, the director of the Wolfenbüttel Library read De pace fidei by Cusano on one of his journeys between Brunswick and Berlin. Only after that, in 1779, was Nathan the Wise written, where Origen’s, Cusanus’s and Leibniz’s teaching weave together and blend into each other. In the course of the golden years of the discovery of pluralism, the sojourn at Wolfenbüttel shines with a literally spectacular light. Lessing is unanimously considered the leading figure of the German Enlightenment; yet no one as much as he evaded the critique of ‘monism’, as Isaiah Berlin raised against the philosophes. Although his stature at a distance may appear just as gigantic, at the time he appeared less bright than Leibniz in the previous century. His voice could not be expressed wholly and thus had to look for other channels. For this reason, some relevant works of his against the religious censorship were published posthumously by his brother Karl, such as The Christianity of Reason and On the Origin of Revealed Religion. Eternità delle pene e giustizia di Dio nella controversia tedesca da Soner a Lessing, in Tradizione e illuminismo in Uriel da Costa. Proceedings of the International Conference, September 2015, Matera.

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With Nathan the Wise, Lessing found the right solution, the right voice and volume on stage, although the play itself was first staged only after his death, from 1800 onwards. Its performance was forbidden during the Nazi regime.9 Nathan the Wise is therefore more than a play; it has many qualities, among others it counts as the twelfth Anti-Goetze essay, as Lessing disclosed in a letter to his brother Karl in August 1778: ‘I believe I have invented a very interesting episode for it…and with this I certainly want to pay a more mischievous prank on the theologians than if I were to publish ten more fragments.’ This explains the theological subtlety added to the parable of the three rings whose arguments are taken up and further analysed in his successive essays On the Origin of Revealed Religion, The Education of the Human Race and The Vindication of Hieronymus Cardanus.10 The plurality of religions, first of all of the three revealed in sacred books as moving on a directly generative line—the second referring to the first as the preannounced one, the third to the previous two—is the central issue that draws Lessing, as it had done Cusanus, and it is the same question of plurality that, in the pre-­ Islamic period, had drawn Origen. For all three, the value of plural religious events is measured not by the question whether they are true or false, good or evil, but by the space they open up between the infinity of God and the finiteness of the human condition. The plurality of belief is in the very nature of religion itself and different confessions through their diversity represent the formative course of humankind: they are its civilizing tools. The parable of the three rings in Nathan the Wise is a condensed expression of Lessing’s idea of religion and the significance of religious diversity. His source was Boccaccio, who had taken it from a mediaeval tale: the episode of the Jew banker who, when asked by Saladin which of the religions is the true one, relies on his wits for an intelligent answer. Apparently, it is a simple tale of a fable with a riddle and a wise answer. In Boccaccio, the Jew is called Melchizedek and tells the story of a wealthy man who, to choose his heir, leaves his precious ring to the worthiest of his sons. This goes on from one generation to the next until one of his sons has three equally obedient and virtuous sons; as the good man could not decide to which son he should leave the ring, he has a goldsmith make two more identical rings, so well-­ made that even the father could hardly distinguish the true one. Before he dies, he secretly gives one to each of his sons who want his inheritance. Now, the metaphor aside, coming back to the question of three religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the story ends like this: ‘each believes itself to be His true heir, receiving His true law and His commandments directly from Him, and observing them; but the question of which is right remains, as with the rings, unanswered.’ As early as in  Lessing’s ‘On the Origin of Revealed Religion’ is in Lessing’s Theological Writings, trans. Henry Chadwick. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1956, pp.104–106; his treatise ‘The Education of the Human Race’ is in German History in Documents and Images, trans. John Dearling Haney (website: ghdi. ghi-dc.org). 10  Lessing’s letter to his brother Karl about Nathan the Wise, written on 1 August 1778, and other background information to his play are in Lessing’s Philosophy of Religion and the German Enlightenment (ed. Toshimasa Yasukata). Oxford: OUP, 2002. 9

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Boccaccio the story, which leaves the question of truth in suspension, is loaded with theology; with Lessing the load increases as he has Nathan declare (here below the most relevant lines in italics that differ from Decameron, full quotation at the end of this chapter): In days of yore, there dwelt in east a man/Who from a valued hand received a ring/Of endless worth: the stone of it an opal,/That shot an ever-changing tint: moreover,/It had the hidden virtue him to render/Of God and man beloved, who in this view,/And this persuasion, wore it. Was it strange/The eastern man ne’er drew it off his finger,/And studiously provided to secure it/For ever to his house. Thus  – He bequeathed it;/First, to the most beloved of his sons,/Ordained that he again should leave the ring/To the most dear among his children – and/That without heeding birth, the favourite son,/In virtue of the ring, alone, should always/Remain the lord o’ th’ house…/. From son to son,/At length this ring descended to a father,/Who had three sons, alike obedient to him;/Whom therefore he could not but love alike./At times seemed this, now that, at times the third,/(Accordingly as each part received/The overflowing of his heart) most worthy/To heir the ring, which with good-natured weakness/He privately to each in turn had promised./This went on for a while. But death approached,/And the good father grew embarrassed. So/To disappoint two sons, who trust his promise,/He could not bear. What’s to be done. He sends/In secret to a jeweller of whom,/Upon the model of the real ring,/He might bespeak two others, and commanded/To spare nor cost nor pains to make them alike,/Quite like the true one. This, the artist managed./The rings were brought, and e’en the father’s eye/Could not distinguish which had been the model./Quite overjoyed he summons all his sons,/Takes leave of each part, on each bestows/His blessing and his ring, and dies…/. Scarce is the father dead, each with his ring/Appears, and claims to be the lord o’ th’ house./ Comes question, strife, complaint – all to no end;/For the true ring could no more be distinguished/Than now can – the true faith…/. Each to judge/Swore from his father’s had immediately/To have received the ring, as was the case;/After he had long obtained the father’s promise,/One day to have the ring, as also was./The father, each asserted, could to him/Not have been false, rather than to suspect/Of such a father, willing as he might be/With charity to judge his brethren, he/Of treacherous forgery was bold t’accuse them…/. The judge said, If ye summon not the father/Before my seat, I cannot give a sentence./Am I to guess enigmas? Or expect ye/That the true ring should here unseal its lips?/But hold – you tell me that the real ring/Enjoys the hidden power to make the wearer/Of God and man beloved; let that decide./Which of you do two brothers love the best?/You’re silent. Do these love-exciting rings/Act inward only, not without? Does each/Love but himself? Ye’re all deceived deceivers,/None of your rings is true. The real ring/Perhaps is gone. To hide or to supply/Its loss, your father ordered three for one…/. If you will take advice in lieu of sentence,/This is my counsel to you, to take up/The matter where it stands. If each of you/Has had a ring presented by his father,/Let each believe his own the real ring./‘Tis possible the father chose no longer/To tolerate the one ring’s tyranny;/And certainly, as he much loved you all,/And loved you all alike, it could not please him/By favouring one to be of two the oppressor./Let each feel honoured by this free affection./Unwarped of prejudice; let each endeavour/To vie with both his brothers in displaying/

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The virtue of his ring; assist its might/With gentleness, benevolence, forbearance,/With inward resignation to the godhead,/And if the virtues of the ring continue/To show themselves among your children’s children,/After a thousand thousand years, appear/Before this judgement-­seat  – a greater one/Than I shall sit upon it, and decide./So spake the modest judge.

There are some significant differences from Boccaccio’s story. Why should Lessing have enriched the parable of the three rings? Are these ornamental, literary or rhetorical embellishments? No, we shall see this is not the case. These are substantial additions. The first refers to how the ring is crafted: In Boccaccio’s story the goldsmith himself, the jeweller, can scarcely distinguish the copy from the genuine ring. Whereas in Lessing, it is the father who cannot make out the original. So, Lessing tells us that the original and the copy are perfectly the same and thereby acquire a status of complete equivalence. In Boccaccio, the father is said to give one ring to each his son secretly, whereas in Lessing such secrecy is unmentioned; he only summons his sons and gives each one of them a ring. The father in Nathan the Wise increasingly comes forth as the symbol of God, the author of revelations, whom the act of Revelation does not become as a secret gesture. Furthermore, there is in Lessing an entirely new element missing in Boccaccio: a human judge enters stage to settle the sons’ complaint over the genuine ring. Why is this judge employed who cannot pronounce a sentence but chooses to give advice only? There are four well-defined reasons for doing this: the first is to show that it is impossible to make a definite judgement on the true ring (that is the true revelation) because truth is beyond the reach of human beings; the second is to enable the brothers to prove their reasons, the authenticity that they have received the ring from their father with the ring’s additional benefits, which the narrator twice notes as ‘true’ insistently; the third very important point is to display the educational value of all three rings: ‘Do these love-exciting rings/Act inward only, not without? Does each/Love but himself? Ye’re all deceived deceivers,/None of your rings [your revelation] is true.’ So, let things stand and vie with another to show through your behavior who owns the ring of higher virtue. This lesson of the rings and the three revelations is overlooked in Boccaccio’s version where everything remains more or less implied as the father’s intentions. The fourth point is to announce the solution of the enigma ‘after a thousand years’ when, instead of a modest judge, it will be a wiser one to decide and announce final judgement. It should also be noted that it is preceded by ‘and if’, a highly interesting conditional in the parable logic, suggesting that if the father  – behind whom the first engine of the machine of Hebrew, Christian and Muslim revelations, God himself, is easily visible—does not tire of tolerating ‘the one ring’s tyranny.’ In Lessing’s variations, therefore, the entire story of the copies of the original ring surprisingly no longer derives from an embarrassing question of inheritance – one ring for all three equally good sons- but from the very dissatisfaction of having

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one single ring and one single son. The plurality of rings, therefore, probably stems from the father’s intimate wish to multiply them. And this brings us back to Cusanus’ ‘audactio devotionis’, increase in devotion born of plurality. The very idea of the plurality and diversity of religions, a formula that implies the desire for God, significantly alters the relationship between the three revelations (the rings): no longer a clear-cut hierarchy between the original and its copies, but complete equality which places all three sons – the Jews, Christians, and Muslims- on the same level before their quest for truth.11 The question of equality and complementarity of all revelations, with their diverse chronology and modes as decided by God, resurfaces here again, as it did in Cusanus’s dream: the learned ignorance, human imperfection, and approaching truth through conjectures that never reach their objective entirely in this life. To the limits of human beings, the King of heavens responds with a different revelation at a different time and in different manners; it manifests itself gradually, through various stages which, though, make up with all its fragments of a single design or of a single history of humankind, hence as complementary parts in need of one another to complete the whole. In Nathan’s plot, the recognition serves as the expedient to disclose the brotherhood between the Muslim Sultan, Hebrew Nathan’s adoptive daughter Recha and the crusader Templar knight. And such a theatrical geometry of recognition does not stand for a general desire or enhancement of dialogue and good relations only; it has a precise theological significance, as well. The most relevant aspiration in Lessing’s line of thought is not merely a declaration of peace and the need for dialogue but the endeavor to elucidate the nature and the mechanism of plurality. ‘Liberal’ theology underpins Nathan, if by ‘liberal theology’ we mean a theology that allows revelations to be interpreted freely in accordance with each individual’s personal relationship with the reading and interpretation of sacred texts; it certainly is liberal because Lessing’s interpretation presumes the ‘spirit’ to be free of the text’s ‘letter’, here again another example of Origen’s influence on Lessing. However, ‘liberalism’ of Lessing’s theology does not consist in toleration and generosity shown to the extent of the space at the service of individual intellect; it takes a further step to seek a clearer meaning of plurality. This is why Lessing defended Hieronymus Cardanus against the orthodox theologians’ accusations who suspected him of atheism and theological impieties, for he had placed ‘in a better light also the false religions and all their dangerous sophisms’.12 And to those who accused  A splendidly documented list of the origins of the parable of the three rings is provided by Roberto Celada Ballanti in La parabola dei tre anelli. Migrazioni e metamorfosi di un racconto. Rome: Edizioni di storia di letteratura, 2017. He follows its course of unexplored sources in Eastern literatures, such as the dialogue between the Nestorian Patriarch Timotius and the Abassid Caliph al-Mahdī. In Timothy’s Apology for Christianity, the story is that of a precious pearl that happens to fall at night and which everyone would strive to pick up among many other pieces of glass and only with the morning light can know who possesses the real pearl. 12  Lessing, ‘Riabilitazione di Girolamo Cardano’ in Opere filosofiche, Giulio Ghia ed., Torino, UTET, 2008, p. 391. 11

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Cardanus of having compared the arguments of other non-Christian religions in favor of its own exclusive validity to the point of displeasing the staunch Christians, Lessing replied that Cardanus had in point of fact made use of very bad arguments. So, once again, by the same strategy of dissimulation Lessing vindicated far more efficiently and elucidated some thorny issues as follows: such as Judaism has not at all ‘fallen to ruin’ as Cardanus says because ‘the arm that saved its people today is stronger than ever’; or that Mohammed was not a foolish deceiver, and his religion was not ‘merely a badly sorted cluster of silly, false things’.13 Lessing accuses in all the major religions the tendency to sensual, unrefined concepts born of the passe-par-tout word ‘mystery’ which results in numerous distortions, or ‘the veneration of sacred phantoms cudgeling one’s brains’ in an inextricable maze of religious doctrines. Where then does the difficulty arise of positive religions which rely on natural religion, where each man ‘is bound by his own force’? Lessing answers it at length in a treatise published posthumously by his brother (On the Origin of Revealed Religion) and also in another he himself published anonymously (revealing his name only as the editor) – The Education of the Human Race. In the first, he explains natural religion could not have been practiced universally by all men alike, conventional elements were needed to bind the community; and the founders of positive religions made to understand that the said conventions descended directly from God.14 Positive religion is unavoidable, for it varies from country to country depending on each country’s natural or occasional characteristics, but each positive religion has its interior truth. So, Lessing concludes ‘all positive and revealed religions are equally true and equally false. Equally true in so far everywhere it has been equally necessary to come to an agreement over various things in order to get uniformity and unity in public religion. Equally false in that the matters on which agreement is reached not only stand beside what is essential but also weaken and supplant it. The best revealed or positive religion is that which contains the fewest conventional additions to natural religion, and least hinders 1the good effects of natural religion.’15 They are, therefore, all true because they contain an element of internal truth that belongs to natural religion and all false to the inevitable measure by which they distance themselves from it. What then is religion for Lessing? It is in its essence the instrument that enables man to educate and to raise himself in society, making him grow out of a child-like condition into a mature one where he can think and reflect. Successive revelations accompany him through this process. The Old Testament announced to the Jews their story of being the chosen people by a message most suitable to their development at the time when they were in a state of childhood: that irascible God taught his message through direct physical punishments and rewards. Nothing bad, nothing less true than what followed; with the people of Israel God educated the future

 Ibid. pp.391–392.  Lessing’s Theological Writings, quoted above, pp.104–106. 15  Ibid. 13 14

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teachers of the human race: a new subsequent message or revelation could not have been anticipated, just as a child cannot be taught at the beginning what he is to comprehend and learn at the end of the school years. Consequently, the doctrine of the unity of God and immortality of the soul could only be alluded to at that stage, but not entirely stated as in the New Testament. But in the Babylonian captivity, Jews began to come into contact with a more advanced religion and measure it against the being of all beings, ‘as recognized and revered by a more proficient reason’.16 So, also the contact with Eastern religions, Sabianism and Persian wisdom, averse to the sensuous representation of God, urged the Jews to distance themselves from idolatry still in practice in the lands they had left. Reason and revelation performed the first reciprocal service to their education. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul began to be revealed through allusions and preparatory exercises, and Christ was the most reliable practical teacher. He needed miracles to make himself understood, which were then necessary but are no longer now. Lessing, like the philosophes, suggests that human race follows a course of perfection, a typical characteristic of the Enlightenment; a major part of that course can best be described as ‘the development of revealed truths into truths of reason.’ The historical truth of a religion thus appears ‘dubious’, Lessing unhesitatingly calls, because of its child-like simplicity, but on whose basis human judgement can ‘speculate’. Speculations cause no harm, they are not detrimental to the human race; on the contrary, harm is caused when tyrants attempt to impede speculations.17 For Lessing free inquiry into religion and intellectual exercise about the truth of religion are the ‘most fitting exercises of the human understanding’,18 because generally the human heart is capable of loving virtue not for virtue’s own sake but of its eternal blessed consequences, for the reward of the eternal beatitude, the promise of the great Master, high above, paternally showing to the pupils to discipline them by exercising it on spiritual objects. Religion, better still, religions in the plural are not an impediment to the Enlightenment but a path to reach it. The way to the highest level of enlightenment ‘has its goal for the race no less than the individual’.19 Human education and divine education of man have the same prospects: they both begin from a child-like condition, both need to be exercised on spiritual and intellectual objects, and both require time for their fulfilment. Human understanding grows gradually through time; it does not reach its goal on a straight line, as many enthusiasts themselves caught a glimpse of, or as Joachim of Fiore taught the Old Covenant of the Old Testament would be superseded by the New Covenant and the New Covenant had to become just as antiquated as the Old

 G.E.Lessing, Excerpts from The Education of the Human Race (1777), in German History in Documents and Images, Vol 2, §35 https://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/12_ EnlightPhilos_Doc.1_English.pdf 17  Ibid. § 76–77. 18  Ibid. § 79. 19  Ibid. § 82. 16

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(Lessing’s italics). For these visionaries, it was ‘always the same economy of the same God…the same plan for the universal education of the human race.’20 Providential design for humanity is eminently plural; it needs to carry in its eternal wake so many things that it must advance by ‘side steps’. The path to truth and virtue is not one, nor is it linear or like a big wheel. It grows and like ‘a slow wheel that brings mankind nearer to this perfection…put in motion by smaller, swifter wheels, each of which contributes its own individual share.’21 Such varied progress towards the education of the human race in the economy of one God, the same for all, is a result of the diversity of religions, which being plural are also diverse paths of access to formative growth. The trajectory leading to Enlightenment traverses the diversity of beliefs; Lessing covers all beliefs with the light of truth and complementarity but also in a sense of ‘falsehood’ or ‘partiality’. What time performs on human understanding illuminates this variety as it adjusts those claims on absolute truth, which like a child each revealed religion proposes, to their real import as equally relevant wheels. The measure of the success of education, reaching adulthood, coincides with owning a pluralist perspective: each religion and each culture are not the center, but a part. The loss of centrality and the loss of the absolute, referred to as ‘reflexivity’ in the twentieth century, are an enlightening characteristic of education in Lessing; it helps the individual and the human race to grow out of an under-age condition and reliance on a human or divine tutor. And plurality of religions provides the major support in this growth process. In a certain sense, if with Kant ‘leaving minor age’ was to mean the very essence of Enlightenment, that is making autonomous use of one’s own reason, with Lessing it was the awareness of multiple true faiths, without a hierarchy of truth, otherwise put, accepting religious and cultural plurality as the eternal character of humanity through God’s grace. At the conclusion of The Education of the Human Race, the plurality of religions based on reciprocal equality makes Lessing return to Origen’s doctrine of reincarnation: rather than a mysterious miracle it is more like a hyperbole with a keen message of equality as he wonders: ‘Can he have been, in one and the same life, a sensual Jew and a spiritual Christian?’22 Most likely not. How to illustrate it better than that what befalls one by chance can equally befall another? And that wherever we happen to be in the course of our education we can leave the under-age condition, free ourselves from a tutor to the measure of uses and customs of the place where we happen to live? In order to attain an enlightened vision of the plurality of possible educational courses. For Lessing, the secret of the discovery of pluralism resides more within religion, rather than without. Depending on the place where we happen to live, enlightenment consists in accepting and developing not the centrality but the complementarity and partiality of both a revealed religion and a non-religious philosophical

 Ibid. § 88.  Ibid. § 92. 22  Ibid. § 93. 20 21

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position. The inquiry that paves the way to the discovery of diverse wheels and the side or backwards steps in the direction of the education of the human race prepare us for the mature age, the goal of the formative process at whose end we no longer need to look for mysteries or rewards. Human condition consists in this multiplicity of possible beliefs, and befits being represented through reincarnation, a doctrine that plastically shapes the idea that each individual may have existed more than once in this world and may have had many diverse beliefs, all in accordance with humanity, as it constitutes the substance of his humanity. Few beliefs such as reincarnation lead to such a pluralist potential. Lessing’s reference to reincarnation at the end of The Education of the Human Race renders his radically pluralist conception of human cultures more explicit. If a daring comparison should be allowed by jumping two centuries from Lessing to John Rawls, reincarnation entrusts us with many lives in many cycles: once as a Jew, once as a Christian, once as a Muslim, and another time as a Hindu…and brings our arguments about rewards and punishments closer to Rawls’s model as he addresses it in A Theory of Justice,23 where the American philosopher of neo-contractual liberalism discusses distributive justice behind the doctrine of ‘veil of ignorance’. In order to apply an egalitarian criterion of justice in political decisions, fiscal issues, distribution of assets and alternative priorities, decision makers must imagine that they know nothing about the lives, sex, family assets, talents, physical appearance or health of those who will receive them; they need to be in an ‘original position’ that enables to abstract all these conditions. The economy of the Providence, if it exists at all—so Lessing thought—, should therefore first send one to hell or heaven, ignoring the religious community of where one happens to be born; similarly, the justice of political economy, Rawls argues, should be conceived independently from its conditioning interests and features. Hence the best justice concerning what religion may be for the human race is what we should conceive ‘behind a veil of ignorance’ in relation to any religion under whose dominion we may happen to be born. For reasons similar to those suggested by Lessing, Origen believed the eternal punishment (not incidentally in Neoplatonism the spirit also pre-exists and survives our death) to be incompatible with the plurality of religions: the overall liberation issuing from apocatastasis unifies once again what may have been left divided in the course of human education. Seen in the perspective of Origen (and Lessing and Cusanus), religion holds in it ‘the discovery of pluralism’ despite apparently negating it, because believers of a religion, confronted with other religions, not only initiate conflicts or atrocities but also pause to reflect. Reflections can erode the seemingly fated ethno-, faith-, sociocentric monism in the most illuminated minds of any tribe. The disclosure of the diversity of courses of faith, belief (and non-­ belief) brings about a thinking process, a gradual deliberation that hacks into the harshest exclusivism, potentially transforming every rational theology into a pluralist one, as with every rational philosophy.

23

 J.Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Belknap Press, 1971.

Appendix

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Appendix The following is Giovanni Boccaccio’s version of the parable of the three rings in Decameron, First Day – Third Story (trans. J. G. Nichols. Richmond: Alma Classics, 2008). I have shortened it to Saladin’s question and the Jew’s answer, who is called Melchizedek of Alexandria. Lessing names him Nathan and sets the scene in Jerusalem.

The Parable of the Three Rings (pp.36–38) Saladin: ‘You are an honorable man, and I have often been told that you are wise and far advanced in the study of divinity, and so I would be glad to hear from you which of the three laws you regard as the true one: the Jewish, the Saracen or the Christian. The Jew, who was a truly wise man, realized only too well that Saladin was waiting for an opportunity to fault him whatever he said, and that he could not praise any one law more than another, lest Saladin should achieve his desire. So he cudgeled his brains for a reply which would not leave him vulnerable, and he soon came up with one. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘that is a very good question you put to me, and in order to convey my opinion on the matter I must tell you a tale. Unless my memory deceives me, I have frequently heard tell that there was once a great and wealthy man, whose most prized possession was a very beautiful and precious ring. Wishing, because of its worth and beauty, to honour it and leave it to is descendants in perpetuity, he ordained that whichever of his sons he left the ring to should be regarded as his heir and be honored and revered by all the others. And the son to whom he did leave the ring gave the same command to his descendants, doing what his predecessor had done. In short, this ring was passed on through many generations, and at last it came into the hands of one who had three sons, all such fine and virtuous men, and so obedient to their father that he loved them all equally. These young men knew the tradition of the ring, and all of them wished to be the one most honored, so each, as fervently as knew how, begged their father, who was already old, that when he came to die he would leave that ring to him. The good man, who loved them all equally, and could not decide to which of them he should leave the ring, having promised it to all of them, thought of a way of satisfying them all. He went secretly to a master goldsmith, and had him make two other rings, so similar to the first one that he who made them could scarcely say which was the true one; and when he came to die, he secretly gave one to each of his sons. After his death, every one of them desired the inheritance and the honour, and wished to deny it to the others, and each produced his ring to assert his claim. The rings were found to be so similar to each other that it was impossible to tell which one was genuine, and the question of who was the

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father’s true heir remained unanswered; and it still is. So I say to you, my lord, that it is the same with the question you have put to me concerning the three laws given by God the Father to three peoples: each believes itself to be His true heir, receiving His true Law and His commandments directly from Him, and observing them; but the question of which is right remains, as with the rings, unanswered. Saladin saw that the Jew had clean escaped from the snare he had put before his feet, and so decided to explain his need and then see if the Jew would help him. And this he did, admitting what he had had in mind, if the Jew had not answered him so wisely. Melchizedek willingly lent him the whole sum he asked for, and afterwards Saladin repaid it, and in addition presented him with fine gifts, regarded him always as his friend, and kept him by his side in great.’

Chapter 8

KALLEN: America, the Diversity to Orchestrate

Abstract  The concept of cultural pluralism has a very well-identified father in the American pragmatist Horace Kallen, a pupil of William James. The beginning of twentieth century was a decisive age for the formation of the concept of citizenship in the United States, for now one of pluralist culture’s most successful expressions. It is no coincidence that it is attacked by Monists who see multiculturalism as a poison to be removed from the American social context (Allan Bloom, Samuel Huntington etc.). Kallen entered the debate on the melting pot, a mono-cultural metaphor for the crucible in which ethno-cultural diversities mix to give life to a new “league”, the homogeneous one of American citizens, and defended the importance of the different identities that mingle in the harmonious unity of American society like the different instruments of a well-harmonized orchestra. He thus defended Americans’ right to the ‘hyphen’ that can characterizes a united people, but one in which every element (Italian-Americans, Jewish-Americans, etc) defend the first part of their identity alongside the second. Keywords  Citizenship · Melting pot · Cultural pluralism · Pragmatism · Zangwill · Theodore Roosevelt · William James · Richard Bernstein · Michael Walzer ‘Ah…what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward!’ With these words the two heroes David and Vera declaim the American glory of immigration on stage: hope, prosperity, pursuit of happiness, future in a society with wide open arms. The Melting Pot by the British dramatist Israel Zangwill,1 who had already made a name on both sides

 The full text of the play The Melting Pot. Baltimore: The Lord Baltimore Press 1909. It bears on its cover ‘To Theodor Roosevelt in Respectful Recognition of his Strenuous Struggle Against the Forces that Threaten to Shipwreck the Great Republic which Carries Mankind and Its Fortunes, This Play is, by His Kind Permission, Cordially Dedicated.’ The play was reprinted by The American Jewish Book Company, New  York, in 1921 and can be accessed on the internet, the Gutenberg Project where all the quotations are taken from: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23893 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Bosetti, The Truth of Others, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 25, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25523-6_8

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of the Atlantic as a popular fiction author, opened on Tuesday, 5 October 1908 in Washington. In attendance that evening was also Theodore Roosevelt, who had finished his mandate at the White House at the beginning of the year to be succeeded by William Taft. The presence of the former President would undoubtedly be noticed, but Roosevelt decided to leave his mark. At the end of the play, he leaned over the rail and shouted so the audience and the playwright could hear clearly: ‘That’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill, that’s a great play.’2 Indeed, Mr. Zangwill’s work was genial. As the press put it, it was a deliberate political action. And so, it proved, leaving forever the metaphor of the play’s title in the international political discourse, that of a container in which to melt metals or a crucible, a melting pot, a model of absorbing immigrants in the American society. Multiplicity becomes union; from the many, one; e pluribus unum, the scroll the eagle holds in its beak on U.S. dollar bills. Roosevelt’s letter written 3 years later to Zangwill confirms that his was not a merely temporary outburst: ‘That particular play I shall always count among the very strong and real influences upon my thought and my life.’3 Many cultural and political factors of high density certainly contributed to increase the tension at the performance: the United States had experienced the height of an immigration wave at the turn of the century; the previous year alone a million three hundred new immigrants had registered, which kept steady at a million every year until 19154; immigration was now the central debate on the political agenda; some thought of limiting it to north European immigrants, from Protestant countries, thus barring entry to the Catholics from southern Europe as they were suspected of theocratical leaning; lengthy discussions raised the question whether the entire human river waiting at Ellis Island could be ‘Americanized’ at all. Zangwill, born into a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia and nicknamed ‘the Dickens of the Ghetto’, stood for assimilationism, the school that favors the process of shedding one’s own ethnic, cultural traditions, in Zangwill’s case Jewish, and adapting the dominant values of the new society. He later changed and became a ‘territorialist’, the Jewish political movement whose main goal was to find an alternative territory to that of the Land of Israel, free of other inhabitants (such as Uganda or Canada). But in that period, he chose to make this a play of marked fusionism despite the painful sense of belonging to the Jewish identity and the tragic nature of the drama. David, the main character in The Melting Pot, emigrates to America after the Kishinev pogrom in which his entire family is killed. He is a musician and composes a symphony called ‘The Crucible’ expressing his hope for  Roosevelt’s attendance at the opening of The Melting Pot by the dramatist Israel Zangwill is in James S. Robbins. Native Americans: Patriotism, Exceptionalism, and the New American Identity. New York: Encounter Books 2012, p. 117. 3  Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race by Thomas G. Dyer 1980 Louisiana State University Press, p. 131. 4  On immigration statistics in early 1900s, cf. website of the Department of Homeland Security (DOI): Table 1. Persons Obtaining Lawful Permanent Resident Status: Fiscal Years 1820 To 2016 | Homeland Security (dhs.gov). 2

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a world in which all ethnic differences have melted away. ‘…Listen! Can’t you hear the roaring and the bubbling? There gapes the mouth…the harbour where a thousand mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour in their human freight. Ah, what a stirring and seething!... Jew and Gentile…the palm and the pine, the crescent and the cross…Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God.’5 David falls in love with Vera, a Christian, and united they will declaim these words. When he meets Vera’s father, at the climax of the play, he learns the latter has slain his family at Kishinev. Nevertheless, the young couple’s love overcomes all this. Happy end. Roosevelt’s enthusiasm was an expression of the common desire that integration through employment, respect for the law and prosperity would help resolve major current conflicts. The emigrant who came to settle in the new country was expected to put aside his past and think of the future for himself and his descendants only. But not everyone agreed with this assumption that meant discarding one’s own roots: that Jews had to leave their cultural identity or that the differences between the Catholics and Protestants, Latins and Germans and Scandinavians could and should be wiped out to shape a new ‘American’ humanity. The desire of cohesion, legality and happy coexistence was unanimous, but not ‘how’ to make it come true. After its opening, the play was staged in New York, and the New York Times did not mince its words: ‘a very bad play…hardly second rate, stereotypes, melodramatic descriptions, too much symphony.’6 Still, thanks to Roosevelt and its famed title, the play did achieve to graft a higher standard onto the public debate in the United States, which bore its fruits. To assess the artistic worth of Zangwill’s The Melting Pot more accurately, it should perhaps be staged again today and viewed in the light of the present surging immigration in the United States and Europe. At any rate, soon after its first performance the play became a political manifesto and caused a significant reaction by initiating a discussion that was to lead to the most modern, inclusive, and pluralist concept of citizenship, the American one. Among those who were not in the least persuaded by Zangwill’s view that invalidated so many different languages and national histories in an undistinguished humanity was a young professor who had arrived from Germany as a child with his family. He had taught English for a couple of years at Princeton, the first Jew to ever teach at the university, hired by future American President Woodrow Wilson, then Princeton University’s president.7 Kallen received his doctorate from Harvard just as The Melting Pot started being performed; so, dismantling the thesis crucible or melting pot was now his major challenge. It was one of the most promising fruits of the American social and political culture.

 Roosevelt’s quotation in http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/08/nyregion/08melting.html  The play’s New  York performance review quoted in The New  York Times, in Sam Roberts. A Passover Sermon, A Play, and a Century of the Melting Pot, 8 April 2007, from The New York Times archive: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/08/nyregion/08melting.html 7  A. Scott Berg, Wilson. New York, NY, G.P. Putnam, p. 158. 5 6

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Together with him, two other elements of extraordinary relevance entered the discussion on the nature of the society to account for pluralism at the turn of the previous century when the migration wave reached its peak: American pragmatist philosophy (William James and John Dewey) and the anthropological cultural turn spurred on by Franz Boas and his school (Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead). ‘Cultural pluralism’ was a term coined and taught by Kallen at Harvard during his teaching career throughout 24 years. Presented first at a lecture in 1915, he was to work on and develop the concept his entire life. Through his acquaintance with James, whom he collaborated with, Kallen was much inspired by the leading thinker; in fact, even after his academic career James continued to write and lecture until the very end (he died in 1910), publishing in the last 2 years Pragmatism and A Pluralistic Universe. Roosevelt and Zangwill’s simplification contained the energy pushed ahead by the desire, charged with highly significant optimism, and expressed an understandable urge to stand united to oppose the racist attacks against the Irish first in the middle of the previous century and now against the Italians, as in the play: ‘God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming…[the real American] …he is only in the Crucible…he will be the fusion of all the races, perhaps the coming superman.’8 In the 1850s, Ralph Waldo Emerson had celebrated the image of this unifying force against the threatening rise of the racist American Party, known as the Know Nothing movement, mainly anti-Irish but also anti-Chinese: ‘Man is the most composite of all creatures…so, in this continent – asylum of all nations, the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, − of the Africans, and the Polynesians, − will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting pot of the Dark Ages, or that which earlier emerged from…barbarism. La Nature aime les croisements.’9 Emerson describes his crucible slightly differently: the fusion metaphor was used for ‘extracting’ (smelting) a metal out of a compound, not to fuse many into one alloy. Still, this equally powerful image had been in the waiting in silence. It would become a formulaic phrase after that evening in Washington, half a century later. And Kallen would become its outstanding critic in defense of cultural pluralism. Michael Walzer and Richard Bernstein, two American political philosophers, have extensively written about Kallen’s commitment. The first has illustrated Kallen’s ‘soft multiculturalism’ against the ‘monist’ current attacks and the sort of cow boys of the western culture, in whose view any opening to cultural differences

 The full text of Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot, available here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ files/23893/23893-h/23893-h.htm 9  Luedtke, Luther. “Ralph Waldo Emerson Envisions the ‘Smelting Pot.’” MELUS, vol. 6, no. 2, 1979, pp. 3–14, https://doi.org/10.2307/467543. Accessed 12 Apr. 2022. Quotations of Emerson’s smelting pot and the contribution of the most varied cultures to the future of America, see ‘Europe’ by Jan Stievermann in Ralph Waldo Emerson in Context (ed. Wesley Mott). Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014, p.38; cf. Werner Sollors. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986, p. 95. 8

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is a ‘vile’ concession of civilization (needless to say, western civilization); the second has illustrated Kallen’s thought in the frame of pragmatism, described by Richard Rorty as ‘the chief glory of our country’s intellectual tradition’10 and a major trend just when the US was being shaped as we now know it – a nation under construction, where and for which no one as much as the pragmatists came up with ‘such a radical philosophical proposal as it was capable of making our future different from our past’, the most valid inspiration for wise reformism and social experimentation for tolerance, pluralism, liberalism and democracy.11 In his famous essay ‘What does It Mean to Be an ‘American’?’,12 Walzer takes his cue from Kallen. The younger philosopher, who wished to counter the assimilation theory, employs at times mysterious language to describe America as a ‘nation of nationalities’. ‘The United States is an association of citizens. Its ‘anonymity’ consists in the fact that these citizens don’t transfer their collective name to the association’, like the Greeks or the French, but ‘are Americans only by virtue of having come together.’13 There exists another conception ofAmericanization, which says that ‘the process requires for its success the mental erasure of all previous identities’ or ‘absolute forgetfulness’, asking people to shed all trace of their original culture so that everyone can fuse into a homogenous mass.14 This is precisely the conception Kallen challenges through his own alternative model: by proposing to preserve the cultural heritage of each ethnic group within the fundamental and wider frame of the common use of English and by adhering to a political and economic system, respect for democracy, each individual’s dignity and freedom  – a model with a higher value when everyone behaves both as a member of their ethnic cultural group and a member of the American society composed of each single one of them. To distinguish his model from the melting pot metaphor, Kallen makes use of a highly effective new term, an orchestra where each instrument likened to a cultural group provides its specific timber and tonality, its unique contribution to the symphony of civilization. For Kallen, the American nation is a federation of nationalities which cooperate voluntarily and autonomously through common institutions engaged in self-realization. English is the common language, but each individual expresses its emotional and voluntary life in its own language too. The common life

 Richard Rorty. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982, p.  160. Rorty’s referring to pragmatism as ‘the chief glory’ of the American intellectual tradition is taken from Neil Gross. Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2009, p.331. Cf. Giancarlo Bosetti. ‘Il pragmatismo di Rorty tra filosofia pubblica e privata’, in Reset, no.108, January–February, 2008. 11  Dewey’s words are in ‘Pluralismo culturale’ by Richard Bernstein and others, in Omnia mutandur. La scoperta filosofica del pluralismo culturale, ‘Preface’ by Giancarlo Bosetti. Venice: Reset-­ Marsilio, 2014, pp. 21. 12  Michael Walzer, What Does It Mean to Be an “American”? “Social Research” Vol. 57, No. 3, Johns Hopkins University Press. See here walzer-what-is-american.pdf (cuny.edu). 13  Ibid, p. 637. 14  Ibid, p. 636. 10

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of the national community is united and serves as the basis and background for the ‘realization of distinctive individuality in each nation that composes it’, which flows into general harmony. Kallen concludes his metaphor: ‘The ‘American civilization’ may come to mean the perfection of the cooperative harmonies of ‘European civilizations,’ the waste, the squalor, and the distress of Europe being eliminated  – a multiplicity in a unity, an orchestration of mankind.’15 Americans are allowed to remember who they were and insist on what else they were but are not required to remember and insist on this. Just like their ancestors escaped the old country, so they can, if they choose, escape their old identities, the inwardness of their origins and change their names. Someone who wants to be an American only has a right to anonymity. And this is part of what it means to be an American. If the multiplicity of America is cultural, its unity is political; even citizens who are ‘free from non-American cultures will commit themselves more fully to the American political system.’16 Perhaps this freedom, cultural anonymity, is the best possible grounding for its unity to comprehend and protect its multiplicity, because, as Michael Walzer put it, ‘the conflict between one and the many is a persuasive feature of American life’.17 Kallen’s great invention was ‘the hyphenated citizen’: Italo-Americans, Jewish-Americans etc. This meant ‘hyphenated’ citizens can live in terms of both identities and what distinguishes their nationalities is their not exclusive nature, because the American nation is not ‘jealous’ of them. The hyphen does not subtract but it adds, like a mathematical plus sign; Kallen describes ‘cultural pluralism’18 as the coexistence of communitarian and political components of citizenship, something which is precarious as it has no corporate form or coercive power. ‘Continued large-scale immigration’ which in the 1990s reached the levels of what it was at the dawn of the previous century, Walzer notes, ‘reproduces a Kallenesque pluralism, creating new groups of hyphenated Americans and encouraging revivalism among activists and believers in the old groups. America is still radically an unfinished society, and for now, at least, it makes sense to say that this unfinishedness is one of its distinctive features.’ And he concludes: ‘It isn’t inconceivable that America will 1 day become an American nation-state, the many giving way to the one, but that is not what it is now; nor is that its destiny. America has no singular national destiny—and to be ‘American’ is, finally, to know that and to be more or less content with it…a radical program of Americanization would really be un-American.’19 John Dewey was also committed to cultural pluralism and Kallen’s notion of an ‘orchestra’, but not without reservations, and sought to define it more accurately in the same direction. He wrote saying he agreed with the idea of the orchestra, but on  The orchestra metaphor in ‘Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot: A Study of American Nationality’, in The Nation (18 and 25 February 1915). 16  Michael Walzer, ibid., p. 638. 17  Ibid p. 639. 18  This notion is developed at length in H. M. Kallen. Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea: An Essay in Social Philosophy. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1956. 19  Michael Walzer, ibid. p. 652. 15

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the condition, it really succeeded in playing a symphony, not a lot of different instruments playing simultaneously. What mattered for Dewey was even in the case of assimilation, genuine assimilation should be assimilation not to ‘Anglosaxondom’ but ‘to one another’. He also believed that it was essential for each cultural section to maintain its distinctive artistic and literary traditions so that it might have more to contribute to others. Dewey was more concerned with harmonizing the orchestra: ‘I want to see this country American and that means the English tradition reduced to a strain along with others.’20 Richard Bernstein gave significant credit to the inclusive and pluralist conception of Kallen’s proposal of American citizenship in the context of the pragmatic tradition; he also showed it was of utmost value in Kallen’s culture to recognize the importance for the psychological equilibrium of each individual, of their ties with their ethnic origins – a value that has become, thanks also to Ruth Benedict’s studies, common sensical today in contrast with as its conception at the age of the melting pot debate. But to all those who have made a caricature of Kallen, saying he favored segregation of cultural communities in line with the ‘monistic’ rhetorical policy that confounds differences with disintegration and in the twenty-first century still insistently takes cultural pluralism for whatever version of multiculturalism intended to isolate the other, the outcast to their own destiny; to all those who refer to multiculturalism not to describe Canada but as the failed attempts at political integration; to all those who have not grasped that similar divisions of non-communicating communities or communities in conflict with one another do not constitute pluralism, but a sum of mono-culturalism21; to all similar comments a careful reader of Kallen can remind that the author of hyphenated citizens never ever stopped declaring explicitly that his ‘orchestra’ required from every single ethnic group the rule and acceptance of democracy, rule of freedom and unity and cohesion of the nation. He was simultaneously aware of the tyranny of the group on individuals and the legitimate wish of every individual of each group to integrate with other groups. His passion for pluralism was never severed from that of democracy; and defending the relevance of ethnic differences in individuals’ lives did not stop him from agreeing with leading intellectuals in public life, such as Walter Lippman, a German Jew, who had instead deliberately chosen to distance himself from his group of origin to be accepted, as cosmopolitan intellectual, into the Anglo-American group he wished to identify with entirely. Kallen’s 1915 essay Democracy versus Melting Pot brings us to the very heart of the democratic ethos of pragmatist culture, which is constituted first of pluralism, because it relies on a theory of pluralist conscience, a general conception of the world, and pluralism being dominated by the idea of human fallibility, hence the  Dewey’s words are in ‘Pluralismo culturale’ by Richard Berstein and others, quoted work, p. 21. See also, Richard Bernstein, Pragmatic Encounters, Routledge, 2016, p. 80 ff. 21  Amartya Sen distinguishes genuine multiculturalism from ‘plural monoculturalism’ and rhetorically raises the question: ‘Does the existence of a diversity of cultures, which might pass each other like ships in the night, count as a successful case of multiculturalism?’, in Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007, p. 98. 20

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need to submit each conscience, each claim on truth, moral or political judgement, to a public trial, revision, and critique. ‘Cultures live and grow’, notes Bernstein quoting Kallen, ‘in and through the individual, and their vitality is a function of individual diversities of interests and associations. Pluralism is the sine qua non of their persistence and prosperous growth. But not the absolute pluralism which the concept of the unfaltering and inalienable Monad discloses. On the contrary the sine qua non is a fluid, relational pluralism which the living individual encounters in the transactions wherewith he constructs his personal history…’.22 Despite its gentle linguistic elegance, pragmatism’s pluralist ethics non only has produced good reading but also continued to bear its benefits until very recent times. The philosopher Alan Locke, a student of Kallen and William James, went to Oxford with Kallen himself, and was the first black student on a Rhodes Scholarship, where he was largely ignored by other American students. Locke, who remained Kallen’s friend throughout his life, is heralded as the ‘Father of the Harlem Renaissance’. African-Americans was perhaps the most difficult group to become a part of hyphenated Americans. The pragmatists fought against their discrimination, violence and lynching they were exposed to at the beginning of the century, lasting well into the 1960s. Dewey had earlier planned to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. But extending cultural pluralism to include blacks was the achievement of the essayist and the poet W.E.B. Dubois and Kallen’s student Locke; they developed and asserted the notion of ethnic race as a social and cultural issue with its own artistic and literary traditions to contribute to the American identity. While this meant they had to fight against biological, racial determinism, they also relied on the anthropological studies conducted by Boas – studies that dismantled the claimed fixedness of races and revealed the ideological nature of racism, and the pragmatist notion that human beings can change culturally depending on their environment and education.

22

 R. Bernstein, Pragmatic Encounters, quoted work p. 81.

Chapter 9

DUPUIS: The Alexandrian Spark Lights Up Again

Abstract  At the end of the twentieth century there was a vicious conflict within the Church of Rome. A Belgian theologian, Jacques Dupuis, who had lived for a long time in the East and was imbued with that part of the world’s strong pluralist experiences, returned to teach in Rome having prepared a history of Christian theology in pluralist tones. Despite the care he took to avoid all forms of heresy that he was well aware of, he was tried and forced to retract. By then elderly, Dupuis’s last years on earth were embittered by these events and he died soon after being suspended from teaching at the Gregorian University. One of the darkest pages in the history of the contemporary Church was the notification undersigned by Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, backed up by the declaration Dominus Iesus, issued by the Vatican in 2000. This put the brakes on the open attitude of the Second Vatican Council, which encouraged, without reticence, a dialogue between religions and acknowledged the seeds of truth also in other faiths. But Dupuis left a trace of historical and theological analyses available for a new revival of that pluralist legacy. Keywords  Theology · Religious pluralism · Dominus Iesus · Vatican council · Notification · Ratzinger · Syncretism · India This is the story of a defeat of pluralism in the Christian world and the story of a defeated man burned by a spark that, nonetheless, kindled anew, led the way, and later bore its consequences. On the eve of the third millennium, the Catholic Church once again stood at a crossroads, never definitely blocked, between a version of the inclusive doctrine welcoming dialogue with non-Christians and a purist, restrictive version, between ‘salvation exists also for non-Christians’ and ‘yonder it nothing but eternal punishment’, between Origen and Augustine, between the Second Vatican Council and its

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Bosetti, The Truth of Others, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 25, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25523-6_9

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opponents, an between ‘scrutinizing the signs of the times’1 and getting stuck in the trenches of decline. In the Great Year of Jubilee, a silent clash came to an end with the second version of the two gaining the upper hand. And the person who paid for it bitterly was a gentle but tenacious extremely cultured Jesuit, a prolific author of theology and other subjects, and senior lecturer at the Gregorian University: Jacques Dupuis. On 28 December he was found dead in the canteen of the university on Piazza della Pilotta in Rome: at 81, after spending his final years suffering from severe depression and the Vatican ordeal as a victim of a penal arsenal, he thought was unjust, he had slipped and hit his head against the edge of a table. His friend and religious brother John Navone, known for his relationship with the American press, phoned the States the person he knew was the reliable American editor of the deceased, William R. Burrows to give the sad news: ‘Father Jacques has died.’ The man, The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had relentlessly accused of first ‘grave deficiencies’ (read inadmissible heresies), then ‘difficulties on important doctrinal points’ (read risking grave heresies), had thus ended his life in bitterness. Burrows was fully acquainted with the ordeal and in his last meetings with Dupuis had received all the relative documents from him. He intended to publish them so that the meek but not defenseless Jesuit could have cleared his position, leaving behind not only the bulky history of Christian doctrine told from the viewpoint of the above crossroads, but the complete investigation and the counter defense-­ argumentation left unheeded by the plaintiff. However, it soon emerged that this courageous, yet not anarchic man of the Church had left his material to be released after the end of the Woityla’s Papacy, without imagining the likelihood of Benedict XVI’s election and even less his following resignation.2 With the publication of his most important work, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism,3 immediately followed by an investigation, things had started taking a bad turn for poor Jacques as early as in 1997. Hans Peter Kolvenbach, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, sought to protect him and asked a colleague Gerald O’Collins to prepare his defense. All this occurred at the defendant’s complete dismay as he had invested all his energies to elucidate his courageous theses with argumentations inspired by the Conciliar spirit and without lending support to anathema (repeatedly pronounced throughout the two-thousand-year long Church history he mastered with expertise).

 Gaudium et spes, promulgated by Pope Paul VI, December 7, 1965. https://www.vatican.va/ archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-etspes_en.html 2  For the news of Jacques Dupuis’s death and the quotations, see J. Dupuis. Perché non sono eretico. Bologna: Editrice Missionaria Italiana, 2015. Original edition in William R.  Burrows. Jacques Dupuis Faces the Inquisition. Eugene Pickwick Publications, 2012. This book is a collection of the material Dupuis himself left to his American friend, editor and confidant, as well as the testimony of their last personal encounters in Rome. 3  Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism. New  York: Orbis Books, 1997. 1

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In the course leading to the Notification (the ruling that noted the above ‘ambiguities’),4 a pontifical letter was issued, edited by the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Cardinal Ratzinger, entitled Dominus Iesus,5 a doctrinal document that would be known for its closure to dialogue, interpreted as a pitfall threatening the exclusivity of the only true religion’s salvation. This text was drafted, issued, and accompanied by Ratzinger’s own remarks aimed deliberately against Dupuis. The Prefect, the future Pope, subsequently had some second thoughts about Dupuis; it emerged posthumously from documents he had provided that Ratzinger, in a tête-à-tête with Dupuis, had admitted not reading personally with due attention the indicted texts, but had trusted them to the care of the Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who in turn had looked to the sub-­ secretary Angelo Amato. Once Dominus Iesus had been issued, severely criticized even by the high-ranking Church authorities with the exception of the non-­ reconciliatory section, it was too difficult to step back and accommodate Dupuis’s views; this would have equaled the denial of the highest Vatican office, which had already emitted an outspoken opinion. That letter, still held in the official church archives, did not mention Dupuis but with all evidence referred to him personally. The argumentative points in the Notification and the epistle perfectly overlap with one another. This story is no longer a secret today, but it has not been honoured in the light it should have been, it is a process opened by the judiciary organ of the doctrine of the Roman Church against the pluralist theology of religions, a theoretical development that takes up the challenge to illustrate pluralism of faiths in the light of the Christian conception of the world. So, what did Dupuis do? In his work written in 1997, he sought to investigate the theological question of the history of the Revelation (why God manifested himself to different human communities at different times and in different ways), and the universal possibilities of salvation from a Christian perspective for non-Christians, thereby daring, in line with the Second Vatican Council, to question the principle ‘extra ecclesiam nulla salus’, no salvation outside the Church,. The Belgian theologian knew it was a ‘sensitive’ issue, at peril as it has always been in the entire course of Christian history, because it took up the quintessentially pluralist feature of the degree of truth and salvation granted to non-Christians, where the Council had left it open, with the declaration Nostra aetate (1965)6: the

 The Notification, January 24, 2001, in memory of St Francis of Sales. Joseph Card. Ratzinger Prefect, Tarcisio Bertone, Archbishop Emeritus of Vercelli, Secretary is accessible on: http://www.vatican.va/roman__curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc__con__cfaith__doc__ 20010124__dupuis__en.html 5  The Declaration ‘Dominus Iesus’ on the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church, of 6 August 2000. Joseph Card. Ratzinger Prefect, Tarcisio Bertone, SDB Archbishop Emeritus of Vercelli, Secretary: http://www.vatica.va/roman__curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc__con__cfaith__doc__20000806___dominus-iesus__en.html 6  Nostra Aetate, proclaimed by Pope Paul VI, October 28, 1965. https://www.vatican.va/archive/ hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html 4

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Catholic Church ‘rejects nothing that is true and holy’ in other religions; ‘She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.’ Dupuis thus had addressed the question in the hive of a tradition that universally extended the possibility of redemption in the divine plan and had come to the point at which John XXIII and Paul VI had extended this concept. For the publication of his most significant work, he had studied extensively the Church history, from the Church fathers until the debates prior and subsequent to the Second Vatican Council, with the contribution of the new theological review ‘Concilium’ founded in 1965 in the wake of the renewal initiated in those years by Edward Schilleebeckx, Marie-­ Dominique Chenu, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner and Hans Küng. Dupuis always remained within the borders of a very Christo-centric perspective, hence based on the redeeming figure of the Son of God and His universal task of redeeming humankind from the original sin. In his work Dupuis reads the variety of religions through the history of Christianity in four elementary stages: first when the principle ‘nulla salus extra ecclesiam’ is affirmed in all its exclusivism, that of a minority and besieged Christianity in the Roman Empire before Constantine the Great; a second period witnesses a limited degree of openness to other religions as the covenant of a primordial revelation; during the third stage the existence of positive values of other religions are accepted as preparatory to the Christian Event; and the fourth stage seeks an answer to the question: what meaning do other traditions have in God’s plan for humankind’s redemption?7 This is the core issue of the theology of religions, in the plural. For Dupuis the doctrinal question was of utmost significance, one deeply rooted in the coexistence of diverse religions and spiritualities. He had completed his doctorate on Origen. And similar to the Adamantius of Alexandria, he had also lived in a pluralist environment colored with a religious mosaic – where Empire’s persecutions against the Christians had alternated with relatively peaceful coexistence with Hebrews, heathens, Eastern worships with Neoplatonic, stoic, gnostic philosophies – similarly Dupuis’s life had come under the influence of the mosaic of religions in India, where he had spent 36 years before coming to teach in Rome as an elderly man.8 His idea of Christianity, which characterizes his religious and intellectual life, was strongly marked by dialogue with other faiths. Dupuis had written on India’s social and religious history, as well: from Ashoka to the Moghul Dynasty, on Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Islam, the caste system, the intensively spiritual life of the subcontinent and its diversities. He had had an engaging dialogue with the emblematic figure in Hindu-Christian syncretism, French Benedictine Henri Le Saux, who assumed the name Swami Abhishiktananda, and died in 1973. Dupuis

 J.Dupuis, quoted work, pp. 10 ff and pp. 385 ff.  Gerard O’Connell. Do Not Stifle the Spirit: Conversations with Jacques Dupuis. (Ossining: Orbis Books, 2017). This is an extended autobiography. 7 8

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believed religious pluralism went well beyond tolerating coexistence or accepting the other, but also commitment to it, an exchange of communications and experiences, a human encounter, an active attempt to achieve understanding through the differences while respecting others as such. As a young man, he began teaching at a Jesuit high school in Calcutta in 1948, was ordained at Kurseong in 1954; after the doctorate at the Gregorian University in Rome he resumed teaching Dogmatic Theology in Delhi and was an adviser to the Catholic Bishops conference of India. After this long experience in India, he returned to Rome at the age of 61 to teach at the Gregorian University and serve as an advisor to the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. This should prove his significant position within the Church’s organization, without rising though in its hierarchy. We need not identify or confuse the fact that Dupuis’s theological thought ‘was in part shaped by his experience in India’ with that of Abhishiktananda.9 As is typical of the Jesuit tradition Dupuis also worked at the ‘inculturation’, in its radical forms, of Catholicism in the Indian world, which undoubtedly attracted him, with the creation of ecumenical ashrams. Such an initiative implied creating a space for meditation and withdrawal in the Indian tradition of that expression, but now open to other religions for the formation of priests. In Dupuis’s view, the inculturation of the Catholic faith in a local tradition, an age-old Jesuit practice, must not be taken for syncretism, which designates the fusion of different religions into a different identity of religion; the mystical monk, Le Saux, instead had followed a complete transformation of Christian monasticism through Indian spirituality. Dupuis presented its theology firmly rooted in orthodoxy; while Le Saux stayed away from theology and concentrated on the mystic experience of the Upanishads, of which it professed ‘the truth’. We need not go into the complex question regarding the concept of Trinity of Roman Catholicism in comparison with the Advaita Vedanta mystique (the not-­ duality or the monist unity of Brahman that Swami Abhishiktananda develops). But what is here important in this context is that Dupuis is keeping a clearly different position from Swami, despite his strong ties with the Indian culture and religion, because his theology remains grounded as a Christian doctrine oriented to a pluralism open to all religions and to the whole world, not just in the key of a Hindu-­ Christian dialogue. In the wake of the Conciliar renewal, many enterprising spirits, including Dupuis, were encouraged to believe that through their Indian experience they could form Christian priests in India as a sign of ‘radical inculturation’ of the local Catholic Church. The Satchitananda Ashram, a Benedictine monastery founded in 1938 in Tamil Nadu by Le Saux and the French monk Jules Monchanin, later joined by the English monk Bede Griffiths, moved in that direction. Dupuis together with Ramon Panikkar, the future president of the Abhishiktananda Society, took part in this  Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins (eds.), Many and Diverse Ways: In Honour of Jacques Dupuis. New York: Orbis Books, 2003. See George Gispert-Sauch’s Chapter ‘Jacques Dupuis and Swami Abhishiktananda’. 9

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experience. The ashram projects neither received the approval of the Episcopal Conference in India nor were they rejected as heretics. In many similar experiences a ‘symbiosis’ between Hinduism and Christianity has been mentioned, but Dupuis, who until 1997 had strong credentials in the Vatican, always had a different opinion from the heroes of free spiritual paths, as in the example of Panikkar or even Le Saux.10 Panikkar went so far to seal his spiritual experience with the lightness of an intellectual adventure, not a systematic theological doctrine, when he stated: ‘I started as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without having ceased to be a Christian.’11 Inspired entirely differently, Dupuis set out to seek something more incisive, more permanent to uphold a reform of the Christian doctrine so as to renew the character of the Church of Rome, to impede its decline and make it universally capable of speaking to everyone in the whole world. Dupuis’s philosophical and theological barycenter is Patristics, beginning, as noted, with his first author of reference: Origen of Alexandria, his great contribution to the history of Biblical exegesis to whom Pope Ratzinger himself has paid homage in recent years (exalting the importance of Biblical exegesis), but leaving out all reference to aspects of his doctrine held as anathema from the very beginning. As already illustrated in the chapter on Origen, his was the doctrine of apokatastasis, universal restoration, rehabilitation after death of all mankind (Christians and non-­ Christians alike), of all in all, and consequently the negation of the eternal punishment inflicted on the damned after Judgment Day. In his most important work, Dupuis elucidates the history of the doctrine of the Salvation and its doctrinal treatment in other religions, always paying great care in connecting his to the precedent codified by the Fathers of the Church. He was also courageous in addressing the theses of the Second Vatican Council and coherently developing all their pluralist potential. In the end, Dupuis does not espouse the doctrine of apokatastasis; his analysis seeks to highlight how Origen himself presented it as a hypothesis, rather than certitude. Dupuis is also a careful reader of Nicholas of Cusa; it cannot have escaped him that great philosopher and theologian may have been capable of settling controversy with the schismatic Eastern Church had the unity of the Roman papacy not disintegrated and the Byzantine Empire fallen to the Turks; soon after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Cusanus wrote his treatise De pace fidei, a passionate dream of reconciliation: one religion in the variety of religious rites. The pages Dupuis dedicates to Cusanus12 discuss the most contentious proposition, one that more than others was to bring the Vatican’s wrath upon his head: If  His Indian experience is described in detail in Toward a Christian Theology, quoted work and in D.Kendall, quoted work. 11  Raimon Panikkar’s quotation is in Laudatio of Raimon Panikkar Alemanyduring the solemn academic ceremony of his investiture as Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Girona Presented by Prof. Josep-Maria Terricabras, https://www.raimon-panikkar.org/english/laudatio.html 12  J.Dupuis, pp.107–109. 10

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there is ‘a ray of truth’ in non-Christian religions, it is because God placed it there. And if the divine plan is plural, this envisages a sort of ‘complementarity’ between the faiths. What kind of complementarity is this? Are non-Christian faiths just a form of preparation for the true faith (which the theologians call the historical thesis of ‘accomplishment’) or do they have their significant role in a divine plan for redemption (thesis of ‘eschatology’)? In the passages quoted Cusanus seems closer to the latter view, the more ‘dangerous’ one. At the end of the chapter on Cusanus, Dupuis admits he is aware his arguments are not fully equipped to withstand the impact of an orthodox analysis; he is drawn to Cusanus, acknowledging him as the ‘pacesetter’ because he undoubtedly envisages and perhaps goes further than Dupuis’s ‘Christian theology of religious pluralism’ seeking an answer to that very question of ‘complementarity between world religions and Christianity.’ Why does Dupuis give up defending Cusanus? Despite his modesty and prudence, Dupuis was an exponent of the innovative spirit and sought to pull in that direction the entire Church to which he was deeply bound through deep faith and love of belonging; this stopped him from falling out of orthodoxy. That intimately torn condition made him challenge the powers in the border area with the ‘forbidden land.’ The visionary Cusanus had been more defiant; but he had eventually stepped back, changed his mind and fought in a Church undergoing a catastrophic crisis and split between two popes.13 He had also kept afloat thanks to his Cardinal powers and political skills. As a matter of fact, the idea that one religion may exist in a variety of religious rites and human instances had already appealed to the minds of different Church leaders, including that of Pope Pius II, as noted earlier. Dupuis, by contrast, was crushed under the censorship of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and humiliated by being suspended from teaching at the Gregorian University. His ideas emerged at a critical stage in the Church’s life; towards the end of his pontificate John Paul II, who had other priorities, left the theological guidance to the conservative Ratzinger. The future pope was dedicated to fight relativism conceived broadly as pluralism and dialogue in a defensive entrenchment, locked up in the Roman Curia and holding onto a Eurocentric vision, all of which would change once he resigned, and Pope Bergoglio came to power. The Declaration Dominus Iesus dated 2000, a solemn document on Catholic religious ‘exclusivity’, would be followed by the 2001 Notification, a genuine ruling in which, despite conceding mitigating circumstances in extremis to the Author’s recognized ‘attempt’ and ‘his desire to remain faithful to the doctrine of the Church’, ‘ambiguities and difficulties’ were reported ‘which could lead a reader to erroneous and harmful opinions’, and thereby demanded from Dupuis henceforth to respect the provisions in the Notification. He was to include the text of this Notification ‘in any reprinting or further editions of his book, as well as in all translations.’14 On the authoritarian nature of the procedures of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the

13 14

 See Chap. 4 of this book.  The Notification, quoted above.

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Faith – formerly the ‘Santo Uffizio’, that tried Galileo, the name of which was abolished by Paul VI – whose practices remain extremely influential when punishing and discrediting, Catholic authors have rightly commented such practices reveal the weakness of a Church incapable of reforming and opening itself to the non-­European world.15 With the publication of that document in the Year of Jubilee, the Prefect of the Faith Ratzinger (who became Pope a few years later) appeared to wish to communicate a correction to the Pope’s universal openness. The conclusion of the procedure against Dupuis, according to the Cardinal König, at that time Archbishop of Vienna, also appeared to respond to ‘the unease caused by Dominus Iesus’ and ‘also to the discomfort of who openly questioned whether Dominus Iesus was not an attempt to correct or limit the actions of John Paul II or others, in Rome and elsewhere.’16 After all, the Cardinal pointed out in those days: ‘It seems that according to the Pope religious pluralism is positive, while for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith it is instead a problem.’17 And the fact that the Anti-Dupuis document was drafted several times, the Pope had signed the third version, indicates how ‘the Asian issue’,18 in other words Dupuis, represented a crucial point that would determine the future orientation of the Church against the pluralistic theology and the Second Vatican Council. The most serious charge was ‘to consider the different religions of the world as ways of salvation complementary to the Church.’ The word ‘complementary’ returns like a nightmare in Ratzinger’s words, as does the rejection of the idea that ‘inter-religious dialogue places all religions at the same level.’19 This attitude once again provoked a reaction from Cardinal König who, in an open letter, accused Ratzinger: ‘The members of the Congregation of the Faith, most of whom are westerners are, of course, very much afraid that interreligious dialogue will reduce all religions to equal rank. But that is the wrong approach for dialogue with the Eastern religions. It is reminiscent of colonialism, and smacks of arrogance. The Indian way of thinking is very different, and we must learn to understand other sorts of spiritual life.’20 The elderly archbishop of Vienna, a leading force of the Second Vatican Council and the first cardinal to propose the name of the future Polish Pope Wojtyla in the  Comments by Alberto Melloni on the Notification against Dupuis and the two other contemporary cases, ‘Recenti Notificazioni sull’opera di Reinhard Meßner, Jacques Dupuis e Marciano Vidal, in Concilium, 38 (2002)/5. 16  Cardinal Franz König quotations from Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins eds, quoted above, p.14ff and from F. König. ‘Let The Spirit Breathe’, in The Tablet, 7 April 2001, p.484. The same archbishop’s observations are also in Vittorio Prisciandaro. ‘Un chiesa a porte aperte’, in Jesus, 5, 2001. 17  Ibid. 18  On the ‘Asian issue’, the following Italian website provides ample material, most of which are more orthodox and Ratzinger-leaning views: Questioni disputate. Quale salvezza fuori dalla Chiesa. Da Tokyo, l’analisi di uno dei punti più controversi del pontificato di Giovanni Paolo II. Con epicentro l’Asia. By Sandro Magister: http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/19632 19  The quoted Notification. 20  Cardinal Franz König, In defence of Fr Dupuis, The Tablet 16 January, 1999. 15

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1978 conclave, had undiplomatically identified the pair leading the Congregation of the Faith, Ratzinger as Prefect and Tarcisio Bertone as secretary (and future Secretary of State until August 2013), an anxiety of Roman-centric opinions that were to characterize the next papacy. Cardinal Ratzinger’s answer to König, also published by the weekly Catholic magazine The Tablet, clearly indicated the importance of the clash occurring place around Dupuis – a conflict that the pro-Council elements among the Church’s leaders had clearly underestimated and would continue to do so. The series of errors that Pope Benedict XVI was to commit against Judaism and Islam, in backdated enunciations of catechism and the liturgy, were in fact in line with the mediaeval-style case brought against the gentle Belgian theologian.21 Dupuis had neither the courage nor the calculated intention of assuming an openly critical and challenging attitude, as Hans Küng did later. Nor did the support from the cardinal of Vienna and other Church representatives prove helpful, despite the publication of their opinions in The Tablet, and especially, in the book in honor of Dupuis published in 2003. This book begins with the words of the Archbishop Emeritus of Kolkata, Peter D’Souza, openly appreciating ‘the pioneer efforts’ made by Dupuis in addressing ‘the complex issues of religious pluralism.’ The archbishop added that the Church could have done better if more Asian theologians had been admitted to Rome’s congregations. In the same book, König protests anew against the inquisitional methods of procedure against Dupuis, and, with reference to the combined action of Dominus Iesus and the Notification, the maneuver of theological policy which clearly indicated that the central vigilance office of the Catholic doctrine, despite few circumstantial declarations, had abandoned the Conciliar line. A good part of the Church’s troops and generals had already abandoned the theological battle for a Conciliar orientation and closed their ranks in favor of a conservative alliance around Ratzinger. Dupuis carried a global vision of the religious phenomenon far more open to concrete international experience, as his own life had been between Asia and Europe, than that of the future Pope and his inner entourage. In his view, which remains centered on Christ, a theology of religions must be more generous when assessing other traditions and better equipped for a dialogue with their members; but above all, as it is of a confessional nature, it cannot but adopt a global perspective that embraces wholly the religious experience of humankind. Besides, how could a Church aspire to be universal, coexist or conflict everywhere around the world with so many other faiths, while remaining anchored on a perspective bereft of any explanation of the place that religious differences occupy in its vision? How can the centrality of this issue be ignored in face of infinite questions rising about the significance and the aim of the religious variety surrounding us, its role, and the purpose of attaining salvation?  If the comparison with mediaeval methods seems excessive, I would invite the reader to consider the words of the theologian Yves Congar, later cardinal, and often compared the methods of the Santo Uffizio to those of the Gestapo. Journal d’un théologien 1946–1956 (introduction and editing by E. Fouilloux). Paris, 2000. 21

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The Dupuis question is a theological dispute, but its distinctive elements echo in other philosophical, moral and political contexts. The course Dupuis traverses with his acute knowledge of the history of the Christian doctrine is interspersed with a pluralist impulse, as conveyed in these recurring expressions: generosity, reciprocity, dialogue, new humanism, mutual enrichment and mutual fecundation, abandoning only defensive attitudes, positive disposition towards others, openness and empathy, interaction, common commitment; vocation to hermeneutics (effort to interpret the position, language and ideas of the other), to brotherhood beyond cultural borders and those of species (as in San Francis), to the significance of variety and plurality of worlds, to the question ‘why’, causes and ends, of its plurality, to the principle of their possible and necessary complementarity, to the reflexivity that enhances to meditate about one’s acquired positions and reinterpret them, about principles that seem unquestionable but can move dogmas after arduous efforts of adaptation. Opposite to this vision stand the typical pillars of ‘monist’ culture gathered in Ratzinger’s 2000 Declaration, Dominus Iesus22 with the precise aim to shut any possible alternative ‘door’, ‘parallel’ or supposedly ‘equivalent’ to the ‘salvific unicity’ of the ‘evangelizing mission of the Church’, the sole true representative of the Revelation. As regards dialogue, it was evoked amidst solemn ‘but’ or ‘however’, noting it should be practiced with ‘attentive discernment’, with the overt theological purpose to turn to ‘contents of the faith’, ‘the indispensable elements of Christian doctrine’, refuting specific positions that are ‘erroneous or ambiguous’ (as was precisely the case with the simultaneously inquisitorial procedure against Dupuis), and impeding any possible reference to what the theologian of pluralism thought as the desirable fourth stage in his restoration history of the Christian doctrine, the one that designates to non-Christian traditions a ‘complementary’ role in the divine plan of the Salvation. The entire catalogue of the monist vocabulary – unicity, definitive and complete character, absolute truth – and the series of incumbent dangers – relativism, doubt, insecurity, and particularly menacing ‘complementarity’- is employed to arrest, circumscribe the Conciliar opening to ‘the ray of truth’, the ‘preparatory’ version (Dupuis’s third stage) that views other religions in a theologically inferior position with respect to ‘the truth of a unique divine economy.’ Equal dignity admitted in the inter-religious dialogue refers to the ‘equal personal dignity’ of the parties in dialogue, ‘not to doctrinal content.’ Hence, any ambiguity or inadequacy in these explanations here, as in the Notification, is not admitted. The fact remains that Dupuis’s book, translated into many languages, paved the way for the possible development of a pluralist theology, emphasizing passages not only in the twentieth century debate and post-Second Vatican Council discussions, but throughout the history of the Christian doctrine that would support a season of theological renewal. The focal point that provides strength to his pluralism that breaks the dogma of the Dominus Iesus, although Dupuis himself declines to assume

22

 Declaration, quoted above.

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the more heterodox conclusions, relates to the historical nature of the Revelation, which occurred not at just one time with the advent of Jesus, but in ‘all times’ as the Alexandrians sensed, between the second and third centuries after Christ. Clement, who believed that God was always ‘present among all intelligent men’23 (which is why the Greek philosophers had been able to ‘catch a glimpse’ of Him) and Origen who insisted on the continuity of the Revelation of the Logos during the various periods of history, the various kairoi, propitious moments in the history of the Revelation. God revealed himself over time, dia kronou, from the very beginning, without sudden events. St. Augustine also believed that only one single religion was followed since the primeval times under different names and symbols – making thus possible the salvation before the advent of Christ -, but for the radically universalist Origen the moments of the Revelation are equal, for at the end of times the salvation for all will be a process of universal restauration or reintegration: the often-noted central notion of apokatastasis. It is not up to non-religious people to decide on theological matters in this or any other Church; but theological battles no doubt interest even those who do not belong to any religious denomination. Cultural pluralism can garner triumph or defeat in theology as well consequences that go beyond churches and enhance the history of tolerance and coexistence with the other. A more pluralist and open religious life can attenuate the nationalist fervor and contribute to defeat racism and ethnocentrism. Dupuis’s story ends in his political defeat, one that was also a defeat for the Catholic Church. But it leaves to contemporary thinkers a heritage of ideas on whose basis a meaningful dialogue on religious pluralism can be initiated again. The Church could thenceforth resume the path of the Second Vatican Council. And his posthumous material now released still awaits to be employed.

23

 J.Dupuis, p. 66 ff.

Chapter 10

MARGARET MEAD: Samoan Adventure with Much Ado

Abstract  A young woman who having recently graduated set off to study the sexual mores of the population of an island in the Pacific. She had studied under Franz Boas and her name was Margaret Mead. This adventure was to transform her and her most famous book, Coming of Age in Samoa, had shattering effects on the Victorian morals of early twentieth century America. Together with her colleague Ruth Benedict, with whom she also had a relationship, who was also inspired by Franz Boas, she paved the way for overcoming ethnocentrism, for the cultural relativization and, not lastly, for sexual freedom, not the least important derivate of pluralism. Boas, was a person who explained that we need to acknowledge an embarrassing truth, hence that the value we attribute to our culture depends on the fact that we are part of it and that this culture has nourished us from the moment we were born. Keywords  Anthropology · Sexual liberation · Feminism · Victorian education · Ruth benedict · Franz boas · Japan · Natives · Pre-marital sex The fact of having sexual intercourse before marriage was ‘normal’, morally irreproachable and socially acceptable for girls of a Pacific Island would have remained a simple ethnographic curiosity, scandalous elsewhere outside that island inhabited by strange ‘primitives’, a curiosity without any further ado. Instead, due to a chain of events and ideas, the discovery led to many consequences first for American girls, followed by men and other women in the Western world in the twentieth century: one, above all, sexual revolution. To initiate this chain of events the arrival of a young, enthusiastic scholar was needed, who came equipped with determination, notebooks and other conceptual instruments of a wholly new discipline called ‘cultural anthropology.’ She was a student of Franz Boas, an American of German descent, who had inaugurated that discipline and sent off his student to the Samoan islands. She had recently married a fellow student and the two-year long fieldwork away from her world and husband would dissolve the marriage rapidly; but on account of the major success of her subsequent unions, one could say this had been worth the try. Her adventure had to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Bosetti, The Truth of Others, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 25, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25523-6_10

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give its fruits rapidly in the form of a book destined to leave a deep mark then and enter the series of perennials. Her name was Margaret Mead and she had been introduced to the new discipline by Ruth Benedict, fourteen years her senior and a student of Boas, whom Mead referred to as ‘Papa Franz’. Beginning with these two women nothing has ever been the same again. The enemies of the free society – that was triumphant at the close of the century but at the beginning of the following, that is our own, under duress – still blame these two figures for opening Pandora’s box of so-called ‘permissivism’, of non-­ repressive education, of 1968 and all the rest. They lost no time to attack them and to date have still not stopped: the liberating vision of individual personality, especially of women and women’s choice, the possibility of divorce, legalizing abortion, and further homosexual rights brought with it a lot of active enemies ever on the increase. The book that inaugurated the new season was entitled Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 19281, and soon translated into all world languages. America in 1920s was still immersed in a kind of Victorian culture, firmly hostile to any deviance from the staunch orthodoxy of customs and sacraments, particularly of marriage. The ‘difference’ in adolescent education methods was the chief cause of the scandal; not only did Mead document how young Samoan women deferred marriage for many years while enjoying casual sex, but particularly because her research addressed precisely the difference between their customs and the home traditions in the United States: trying to understand ourselves better by studying differences and understanding them. The mission of cultural anthropology had a clear, well-defined scheme: to study ‘others’ to see our home in a clearer light, to understand different customs in order to view our own from a different angle that should make our way of life one among many different possibilities. As Boas explained in his lectures: ‘Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, goods manners, and ethical standards is not universal.’2 The ethical content of socially accepted norms varies as latitude and longitude vary. Thoughts stated earlier by Montaigne, Pascal (‘Odd kind of justice that is bounded by a river! Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other side’)3, and Vico’s and Herder’s historical and national visions that inspired Isaiah Berlin (every nation and every historical era has a different ‘center of gravity’) were now put to test in a field study reliant on set analytical criteria, in situ interviews, and measuring methods as much cleansed of the errors of ‘projection’, prejudices and interferences of the researchers as possible. This is how ‘cultural pluralism’ enters stage in the first half of the twentieth century. That new way of considering the relationship between the individual and his culture, the circumstances of their growth, would join forces with philosophical

 Margaret Mead. Coming of Age in Samoa. A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. Prefaced by Franz Boas. New York: W. Morrow. 1928. 2  Ibid. All Boas quotations are taken from the ‘Preface’. 3  Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). Thoughts, The Harvard Classics. 1909–14 p. 293. 1

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pluralism of the American pragmatists and influence the debate on American citizenship (William James, John Dewey, Horace Kallen, and Michael Walzer)4, providing the hyphen as we have seen earlier. With Samoan research a systematic apprenticeship opens up for the question what is human ‘culture’ that manifests itself in so many different ways, each with its own characteristics – some with certain common features -, all with a different order of values, and their well-­ describable, distinct character. The series of varieties inevitably lead to questions and answers in the direction of ‘moral pluralism’, causing such a dread for those conservative people that earns them the title ‘monist’; the said pluralism may lead even further towards the bigger horror called ‘moral relativism.’ The school of cultural anthropology was named after its founder: ‘the Boasians’. It would be more correct to name it ‘the Boasians’ to indicate the gender of its two heroines who occupied centre-stage with their studies and commitment to propagate their knowledge outside the academia through publications, television interviews and popular talk-shows, especially in Mead’s case, who lived until 1978. Mead’s book is the analysis of the daily life of a Samoan community of six hundred people on the island of Ta’u; it tells the story of a typical day of the village, how they educate their children, particularly young girls, their sexual formation, differences between tasks allotted to men and women, the enlarged family that includes the elderly, widows and widowers, the role of dancing and singing, ritual requirements that encourage transgressing certain rules of age which are otherwise mandatory. And precocity is considered favorably. Mead, who grew in a Quaker household, always focuses her attention on the comparison with American adolescents. This yields a clear result: the passage from childhood to adulthood in Samoa is smoother, not marked by distress; girls are not pressured to choose from a variety of conflicting cultural models and, particularly, nothing concerning copulation, birth, menstruation, or death is hidden. If a Samoan man commits adultery with a chief’s wife, he could be punished even to death; but an adulteress is only cast out by her husband and may even find shelter in another household. Young girls may also leave their own families for a variety of reasons and choose to live in a different household. But sexual relations among the young are far more readily accepted than laziness or ineptness. The latter, not the loss of virginity, can compromise the prospect of a good match. The social critique of the contrasting American society becomes increasingly clear, targeting the suffocating authority of middle-class families where fathers, mothers and grandparents perceive the duty to pass on an education rigidly centered around religion and hereditary moral credo. Coming of Age in Samoa opened at this juncture windows and doors to a different, freer, disinhibited sexual life model. As Mead noted, she wrote it without the paraphernalia of scholarship designed to mystify the lay reader and confound one’s colleagues. She wrote it to be meaningful to the peoples of the industrialized world. This is how she hoped to communicate the scientific message of Papa Franz so that it would never lose its significance. From

 See Chapter 9.

4

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its very first print Margaret’s mentor Boas, in the Preface, explained she did a great service because the way in which the personality reacted to culture was a matter that should concern us deeply. He wrote: ‘We are accustomed to all those actions that are part and parcel of our culture standards which we follow automatically, as common to all mankind. They are deeply ingrained in our behavior. We are molded in their forms so that we cannot think but they must be valid everywhere.’ They ring very much like Montaigne’s words suited to the times after some century-long scholarly maturation: ethnocentric automatism. And as a consequence – entrapped in our field of vision – we assign to human nature what by contrast depends on the limits a civilization, a certain culture in particular, imposes on us. After numerous reprints, Margaret added a new introduction in 1973: ‘When this book was written, the very idea of culture was new to the literate world. The idea that our every thought and movement was a product not of race, not of instinct, but derived from the society within which an individual was reared, was new and unfamiliar…but the birth of racism…makes me wonder if the world today can better understand the meaning of culture.’5 This slight and exceptionally active woman, partially disabled after breaking her right ankle several times, had ceaseless strength, a remarkable memory and immense organizational skills that made her produce nearly thirty authored books, thousands of essays in magazines and conferences too many to be counted. Moreover, she served as ethnology curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and last but not least kept up her fieldwork in Samoa, where she returned several times, New Guinea and among the native Americans. Fieldwork was Boas’s favorite study method. Margaret’s intensive work and interest in a wide range of disciplines - from mental health to environmental issues, alcohol and drug addiction, from education of children to civil rights - also drew a lot of criticism. She was accused of being eclectic and scientifically superficial. Even her Samoan book came under attack for its allegedly unfounded statements on Samoan sexual freedom, for, so the critic noted, her Samoan female informants merely joked about sexual escapades they did not have. Mead thought all this was ‘rubbish’. Although many other scholars came to her defense, the debate about her work continued a while. It is odd to assume that after such a long stay and relying on such personal relations with Samoan young girls, especially with Fa’apu’a who lived until the age of ninety, Mead could have missed the point between a fact and a joke or a lie. Mead’s opponent Derek Freeman6, himself a repentant Boasian anthropologist, stated his scholarly criticism was based on the interview with the said Samoan woman sixty years after Mead. On a political level the book on Samoa garnered an array of criticism from people who view sexual freedom in the 1960s and feminism, of which Mead is considered the generating ‘grandmother’, as a recrimination for a whole host of reasons.  M.Mead, Coming of age in Samoa: a psychological study of primitive youth for Western civilization. New York, Museum of Natural History, 1973. p. X-XI. 6  Derek Freeman. Margaret Mead and Samoa. The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. 1983. 5

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With his unmistakable knack of conservative moralizing and ‘monist’ nostalgia, Allan Bloom places Margaret Mead in his personal hell of the damned, responsible for The Closing of the American Mind 7 – the title of his famous book – as one of the ‘sexual adventurers…who [having ] found America too narrow told us that not only must we know other cultures and learn to respect them, but we could also profit from them. We could follow their lead and loosen up, liberating ourselves from the opinion that our taboos are anything other than social constraints. We could go to the bazaar of cultures and find reinforcement for inclinations that are repressed by puritanical gift of feelings.’8 So everything was to be ditched and railed at! The scientific discussion among anthropologists and beyond is absolutely legitimate and will continue in the Samoan book and the ideas of this hyperactive anthropologist determined to make women’s views respected. Her fieldwork as a young scholar of only 23 has made far more inroads than long thought-out scholarly publications, perhaps because it discussed the 1920s America more than the distant villages of the Pacific. Just when the book was a best-seller and she had become an icon, the following memorable cartoon appeared in The New Yorker,1956: a tribe chief stands before a group of youth who have reached the age to know the rites and rituals and tells them: ‘Rather than go into them in detail, however, I’m simply going to present each of you with a copy of this excellent book by Margaret Mead.’9 The other great Boasian Ruth Benedict had an altogether different temperament. At first, Benedict and Mead were sentimentally very close, then severe remarks would follow, but they worked in the same directions. It was mainly women’s pride that bound them as they succeeded against all adversity to make headway in the field of science under the male dominion. When Boas passed away, the president of the University of Columbia preferred to appoint another Boasian male as the head of the Anthropology Department despite Benedict’s scientific merits. Perhaps the times were not ripe to have a woman occupy that position, so must have been the President’s reasoning. Both Margaret and Ruth shared the anthropological view that an individual’s personality was strongly shaped and influenced by the culture that reared them. Benedict did field research also in Mexico, among the native Americans, New Guinea; but she was more of a theorist suited to work in libraries. Her first important work of 1934 was a theoretical anthropological study: Patterns of Culture.10 Every culture with respect to its environment, human activities, and age cycles presents a different configuration of traits, and accentuates different segments in its broad arc of human potentialities. We must learn to assess it as it actually is, not with the parameters of our own society, as though ours were the standard reference  Allan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Preface by Saul Bellow. 8  Ibid p. 33. 9  Nancy Lutkehaus, Margaret Mead. The Making of an American Icon, Princeton University Press, 2008 p. 159, fig 6.2. 10  Ruth Benedict. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1934 (reprinted 2005). 7

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on whose basis we should make a judgment depending on its proximity to ours. By contrast, Benedict employs culture analysis different from the home standards in her age to criticize the American society’s rejection to see other cultures in their own light, in their uniqueness, and responses devised to address their problems. Her criticism concerns the inability to acknowledge one’s own blindness to prejudices, for instance with respect to homosexuality. It is a significant example that helps prove the extent to which the deviance concept could be relevant and applied differently in other cultures. Taken as an unbearable perversion in America in 1930s, homosexuality was notably accepted not only in ancient Greece but also among the contemporary pueblos of New Mexico. What is considered abnormal varies according to a series of elements; it is equally important for anthropology to study these criteria of inclusion and exclusion a culture applies on the basis of its normality parameters. Human beings are characterized by their ‘plasticity’, one of Benedict’s favorite words that defines their character of incompleteness with respect to animals. ‘The human animal does not, like the bear, grow itself a polar coat in order to adopt himself…to the Arctic.’11 But it is with this being unaccomplished that his intelligence learns to make progress which is not biologically transmitted but through the transmission of human cultural heritage. The race ‘purists’ are victims of their own mythology. A degree of generosity is a necessary gift for a successful anthropological study; at the end of their work anthropologists instill doses of generosity in the society where their ideas circulate. Together with deeper and better knowledge of other cultures, anthropology reinstates in the society of its departure a view that is to a major or minor degree protected, cleansed, vaccinated against ethnocentrism. During the second world war, the American government needed to learn among other things the cultures of other warring countries and countries it was to occupy before and after a military intervention. This was a prerequisite in Japan more than any other European country because the Far East was perceived as a distant alien entity full of enemies. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, it assumed an increasingly hostile image. Americans of Japanese ancestry, seen as a potential threat, were relocated, and incarcerated in concentration camps in the United States. Benedict was invited to study Japanese culture and psychology in order to understand and predict how the Japanese would react to defeat, how their ethical response could be without a monotheist religion, and how to treat the emperor under the responsibility of the occupying powers of general McArthur. Benedict had only anthropology to rely on to answer all these questions. As she could not go to Japan for fieldwork, she had to work with whatever was available of Japanese humanity at home. Her report was published after the war (and after the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) under the title The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.12 Widely read and printed all across the globe, her study looks into the contrasting

 Ibid p. 14.  Ruth Benedict. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Patterns of Japanese Culture, Preface by Ian Buruma. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005 (first printed in 1946). 11 12

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features of the Japanese culture: the cult of aesthetics, the honor to grow chrysanthemums or cherry flowers against the cult of the sword and warrior’s prestige, a culture both aggressive and gentle, insolent, and polite, rigid and adaptable, submissive and resentful. How then, with the humiliation of the defeated, eschew the kind of behavior that resulted in monsters similar to the ones produced in Germany after the First World War with the treaty of Versailles? The study of comparative cultures, observes Benedict in her book, cannot flourish when men are ‘defensive about their own way of life that it appears to them to be by definition the sole solution in the world. Such men will never know the added love their own culture which comes from a knowledge of other ways of life. They cut themselves off from a pleasant and enriching experience.’13 One key element in Benedict’s report is the distinct centrality of the feeling of obligations expressed with the word ‘on.’ It covers a wide concept of someone’s indebtedness from loyalty to kindness and love, gratitude and moral duty towards who with a gesture, help or aid or simple courtesy, has put on us the burden of ‘on’. The burden of obligation, gratitude, debt and love, is symbolically told in the tale of Hachi (1930s). It is the story of a cute dog, Hachi, that would go to the train station of Shibuya every day to wait for the return of his commuting master. When the master suddenly passed away, the dog kept looking for him every day; he went to the station for ten years. People began to comfort him. Hachi became famous all over Japan and people came to see him. A statue was raised when he was still alive, and Hachi would go to wait on the same spot until his last day. When he was eventually found dead on the street in Shibuya, national mourning was declared because Hachi rose so high to represent the on. Benedict notes ‘on is always used in the sense of limitless devotion.’14 It is reciprocal. And knowing this particular trait of the Japanese national soul helped the Americans to decide their occupation regime more than in any other defeated country: administrative duties were trusted to national offices, whereas the military commando served as the headquarters responsible for the realization of a reconstruction process by the Japanese. The high commander exercised his authority through the national government and its administration and safeguarded the role of the Emperor. Despite Americans’ fears, the method proved a wise one because it relied on the Japanese sense of loyalty, good faith, and obligation, without causing further humiliation. A truly clever move which American foreign policy in the twenty first century seems not to be equipped with. Boasian culture, so accurately represented by Benedict and Mead, had a strong influence on the twentieth-century ideas. Not merely through the historical and philosophical intuitions of their predecessors (Vico, Herder and the romantics), but through lived, systematic experience on the field it established that cultural plurality Franz Boa is a fundamental feature of the humankind and that the specific cultural

13 14

 Ibid p. 15.  Ibid p. 55.

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environment structures much individual behavior. The founder of the discipline of these two famous students derived a message filled with hope and strength from anthropology: ‘…the data of anthropology teach us a greater tolerance of forms of civilization different from our own,…we should learn to look on foreign races with greater sympathy and a conviction, that as all races have contributed in the past to cultural progress in one way or another, so they will be capable of advancing the interests of mankind if we are only willing to give them a fair opportunity.’15 The ‘golden age’ of anthropology is a propitious season to hunt for pluralism in the history of ideas. It stirred the general public opinion, helped the Western traditions to evolve, made the Christian religious conservatism compare and measure itself with modernity, and by extension its pressure was noticed also in Muslim countries and the East. And it will continue to do so. But it also unleashed opponents of various nature, whose weak point we can pinpoint by putting them under the category of ‘monists’, to borrow from Isaiah Berlin. There are fundamentalist monists, religious radicals of their own revealed truth, who believe that human nature must be defended against dangerous deviating differences and perversions. There are also other monists in whose view universalism is founded on a uniform doctrine applicable to all humankind; it comes equipped with a philosophy always ready to deliver the right answers to organize the world on moral principles in line with the sole culture the monist takes great pride in: their own. A ration of cultural relativism is plainly indispensable for a reasonable and balanced look on the variety of ways in which societies are organized. The mention of ‘the superiority’ or ‘inferiority’ of this or that culture, way of life, religion, civilization employs parameters that are always polluted by the context of one’s provenance (Herskovits’s ‘loaded dice’16). Such a frame of mind represents, more or less explicitly, a vision of the evolution of humankind best described as ‘orthogenetic’, that is the development of an organism with the final intention towards improvement across a historical and natural period on whose course we choose to locate ‘the others’ as backward stations with our glorious civilization, strengthened on account of its instinctive ‘moral superiority’, leads it before all humankind. Could the rejection of such a hierarchical conception of the variety of human cultures mean giving in not only to cultural but also moral relativism? Would this be equivalent to paralyzing ourselves forcefully from assessing any event, any aspect or element of our and/ or others’ culture? Undoubtedly this is not the case. Pluralism and cultural relativism are a therapy needed to redress the natural ethnocentrism in question, which says no one is faultless and wherefore the hut we have grown in is our center of the universe; but it should not be mistaken for moral relativism. The confusion that arises between the

 Franz Boas, Franz is The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: Macmillan, 1911, p. 278.  Melville Herskovits’s remarks on judging ethnocentrically other cultures and the reference to ‘loaded dice’, in M.  Herskovits. ‘Some Further Comments on Cultural Relativism’, ‘American Anthropologist’, 60, April 1938, p. 270. 15 16

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two is a rhetorical exercise, a characteristic strategy employed by the opponents of pluralism. Monists who wish to reduce cultural pluralism to its kin state of ‘degenerateness’ make a merely distorted caricature of it; in so doing they can impose their own rules of the game more readily in an arena with ‘loaded’ debate. As the British theorist Steven Lukes observes; after the discovery of Boasian cultural anthropology, a long cycle of postmodernist drunkenness, waves upon waves of cultural, feminist, postcolonial studies, and after treating scientists like a tribe gripped by mythological beliefs as though they were a clairvoyant’s fantasies, we need to stop a moment before jumping into the void. We know a criterion to escape it is within our reach, even though its foundation is no easy task. We do know it is reasonable not to put evangelical creationists, who believe in the imminent end of the world, on the same epistemological level as oncologists who rescue human lives thanks to radiotherapy.17 ‘The big ditch’ separating modernity from premodernity, so the anthropologist and philosopher Ernest Gellner, is already jumped over; there is no turning back despite the search for eccentric alternatives. Creationists too are healed by expert medical doctors; Nietzscheans and Heideggerians, who believe there is no truth but interpretations, travel by plane and use the computer as well. On the cognitive level, relativism and pluralism can reckon with one another differently from how the Cardinal Ratzinger imagined they would just before being elected as Pope Benedict XVI – the Pope who entered the history of the thought as a bastion of theological, ethical, and philosophical monism  – : ‘…relativism, that is, letting oneself be “tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine”18, 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.’19 Clearly, this makes no distinction between relativism and pluralism. And again, Ratzinger in 2002: ‘A kind of cultural relativism exists today, evident in the conceptualization and defense of an ethical pluralism, which sanctions the decadence and disintegration of reason and the principles of the natural moral law. Furthermore, it is not unusual to hear the opinion expressed in the public sphere that such ethical pluralism is the very condition for democracy’20 That ethical pluralism, rather than relativism, is the natural background for a free and democratic society should be the result not of a theological context. How could public life be pictured otherwise with its political orientation and its multi-­ ethnic and multi-religious composition? Who can claim to have the right and power to interpret the ‘natural moral law’ in the face of such a variety of people, beliefs, and Churches, of believers, non-believers, and the religiously indifferent ones?  Steven Lukes. Liberals & Cannibals. The Implication of Diversity. New York: Verso, 2017, p. 18.  Ephesians 4:14. 19  Mass «Pro Eligendo Romano Pontifice»: Homily of Card. Joseph Ratzinger (vatican.va) https:// www.vatican.va/gpII/documents/homily-pro-eligendo-pontifice_20050418_en.html. 20  Doctrinal Note on some questions regarding The Participation of Catholics in Political Life Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 24 November 2002, https://www.vatican.va/roman_ curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20021124_politica_en.html 17 18

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Monism can hardly shake itself out of the slumber of the tribe of its own growth; the conviction that one stands for an unquestionable center of reference survives with inertia that rejects to take into account present and past changes. Such an immobile look on the world, experienced with utmost natural ease, is truly a document of faith, but instead of a radical faith, it is proof of blindness. Monism does not appear in the guise of faith alone; it manifests itself among the non-believers too. Allan Bloom was no less obsessed with relativism than Pope Benedict XVI; he also countered cultural pluralism by caricaturing it like moral relativism. He did not do this on religious grounds; he was inspired by the classics, Socrates and Plato, the study of the humanities like ‘submerged old Atlantis’ he wished to turn again to ‘find ourselves now that everybody else has given up.’ Thanks to Bloom’s vast culture, his 1987 best-seller The Closing of the American Mind has the merit of representing monism in its most learned and lively fashion, and of rendering, involuntarily, a highly enjoyable résumé of all the vices of the North American ethnocentric, Wasp as a metaphor, openly boasted of by the White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. In what would have intuitively become a cult book for neo-cons, Bloom picks out ‘cultural relativism’ as the target of his colorful debate, in other words he caricatures pluralism in the same manner and with the same intention as Ratzinger’s. Furthermore, Bloom is far more uninhibited to display the self-­ centered, ethno-centered element of the nucleus of the American society. He outlines much more clearly how the openness, the pluralist mental aperture, one of the formidable traits of the American culture and its intelligence during the first half of the century, in his view accounts for all the current problems inflicting the American culture and American universities; how openness, as well as equality, is even the ‘betrayal’ perpetrated to harm young Americans by their teachers distorted through cultural relativism, 1968, sexual freedom (hence the attack on Mead as noted above), rock music and Mick Jagger. Because of the loss of the reassuring homogenous white Christian and secular horizon which should not be tossed about in the global winds, in the whirling pluralism of our contemporary society, all this recriminatory mass was poured out in the last three decades in newspaper editorials, books, on TV as the decline of the West, decline of values, defeat to nihilism, to Third-Worldism and multiculturalism. The nostalgia for one’s identity in the face of the loss of the pride of one’s home civilization, the ruling classes’ ‘cowardice’ to give up on their role as ‘agents of civilization’ and give in to shame and guilt, is made of the same stuff: from the first Victorian-age reactions to the scholarly work of the two Boasian women scientists. Now, however, it is manifested in a refined and learned fashion by Bloom, or in a more direct, instinctive, and popular fashion by Donald Trump and his followers. Bloom, who believed in the ‘great books’ of formation and culture, found fault with the young Americans, for instead of following in the steps of classicism, going on a grand tour in Italy and France, they were now entangled in Third-World dreams. He wrote: ‘…relativism has extinguished the real motive of education, the search for

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good life’21 and has caused the American culture to follow minorities and their rights instead of holding closely knit around the project of the Founders, the project of the white Protestant majority that also established the pursuit of the common good. For Bloom, the classical culture of Plato represents the principle road for a sound education. The scrupulous endeavors of John Rawls or Robert Dahl to define a theory of justice and democracy that should yield a common method without infringing parts of the society, especially the weak, are presented as a parody of ‘the tendency not to despise anyone.’22 And who should take care of the stronger ones? Now that they have become weaker after 1968, after Marcuse, flower power, Woodstock, and the Rolling Stones!23 Liberal qualms give way to a monist statement that views power and knowledge capable of defining the common good in a power struggle that neither fears to appear ethnocentric nor needs justification. This is what one single cult book for monists and neo-cons (under the presidency of Bush Jr.), The Closing of the American Mind, has achieved single-handedly. Its ideas buoyed up Norman Podhoretz, the Jewish intellectual and a fan of Sarah Palin and the Tea Parties, who theorizes the fourth world war against Islam-Fascism and finds fault with American Jews who are mostly liberal thinkers. Had Allan Bloom been less refined, with a weaker sense of humor, coarser, openly racist and more obsessed with Islam than with blacks or Nietzsche, he might have become a hero in the eyes of Oriana Fallaci, Thilo Sarrazin or Anders Breivik. Instead, he became a hero for Saul Bellow, the author of Bloom’s book’s preface, winner of the Nobel prize for literature, who dedicated his novel Ravelstein24 to Bloom. Ravelstein gave rise to the Bloom cult among the monists world-wide. After all, the following came from Bellow’s eloquent pen: ‘Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read them.’25 He would at least partially apologize for the remark; to ward off the severe criticism of multiculturalists, he wrote a delicate article of correction26, where he gladly admitted studying with a Boasian, Herskovits, we just met above in this book, reading a Zulu novel, working on a thesis on French slave trade and studying anthropology however briefly. But he did not give up his free comparative judgement: what was not offensive for the Zulus would not be offensive for the Bulgarians or Americans, who have no Proust either. In point of fact, Bellow, even in this truly elegant escape route, did not wish to do away with establishing a literary hierarchy, behind which a glimpse of cultural hierarchy trails too. Boas would have had no difficulty reading here traces of Victorian or simply colonial anthropology upholding the scheme of one

 Allan Bloom, quoted work, p. 37.  P.30, 32, 229. 23  Ibid p. 325. 24  Saul Bellow, Ravelstein, Viking Penguin, 2000. 25  Sauil Bellow, in an interview in the ‘New Yorker’, 7 March 1988. 26  Op-Ed: Papuans and ZulusFor the New York Times, March 10, 1994, https://archive.nytimes. com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/04/23/specials/bellow-papuans.html 21 22

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human nature’s progress that, after a series of intermediate stations, culminates with the achievements of our times and our home; that of the Western world resting on the axis the United States-Europe, under the wings of the North Atlantic alliance, bastion of a civilization whose contemporary monist thought dreads decline and recognizes its signs coming from the outside, in the economic and political growth of the formerly Third World countries, and even more from the inside, cultural pluralism that ever since 1990s has become the target hidden behind ‘multiculturalism.’ This last notion is often employed freely in diatribes not as a thought representing and describing real situations, multi-ethnic societies and constitutional regimes that shape and order the life of multilanguage communities, such as Canada. Multiculturalism is also a political philosophy that encourages the recognition of group rights for what they are: Curds who reclaim the right to instruct their children in their own language in Turkey, the right to speak all three languages in the Swiss confederation, Muslim women’s right to wear a veil in public offices. But it should not be mistaken for the doctrine of separating communities against social integration, legal or communal restrictions of the state. When the word ‘multiculturalism’ is rejected as breeding isolationist, impermeable monocultures as pronounced in European state presidents’ and prime ministers’ speech – so the case with Sarkozy, Cameron, Merkel -, it is a bland caricatural definition, a rhetoric seeking to avoid the real question of the failure of integration. Because peaceful coexistence, dialogue and interaction among communities require integration to maintain a reasonable multicultural, multi-ethnic, and pluralist social order. Respect for cultural pluralism as part of the liberal and democratic standards has been practiced with satisfactory results in the United States, as the history of American citizenship debate and recognition of black civil rights in 1960s demonstrate through inclusive policies and target actions to safeguard minorities – affirmative actions or acceptance of Spanish in public administration; but since the end of the last century these actions have begun to be seen as ‘decline’, weakness, social Balkanization, loss of identity. The book that particularly intensified such criticism is Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations27, which targets multiculturalism, much more vehemently than Islam, and its proliferation in the very heart of the Western world, at American home. Huntington opposes chiefly ‘sustained onslaught from a small but influential number of intellectuals and publicists. In the name of multiculturalism they have attacked the identification of the United States with Western civilization, denied the existence of a common American culture, and promoted racial, ethnic, and other subnational cultural identities and groupings.’28 In this light he addresses the American policy from Kennedy-Johnson to Bill Clinton, from the Civil Rights Act to 1990s, which ‘wish to create a country not belonging to any civilization and lacking a cultural core.’ He explains this in these terms: ‘The multiculturalists also challenged a central element of the American creed, by

 Samuel P.  Huntington. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 28  Ibid. p. 16–17. 27

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substituting for the rights of individuals the rights of groups, defined largely in terms of race, ethnicity, sex and sexual preference.’ 29 Huntington himself tells us, by quoting from a colleague’s essay, that the ‘real clash’ (italics his) is between ‘the multiculturalists and the defenders of Western civilization and the American Creed.’30 This is anything but the fault-line between world religions! All too evidently the distortion up to Huntington’s further twist emerges, adding some radical and postcolonial version of multiculturalism on top of the idea of citizenship and pluralist openness practiced in the United States. Huntington feared that on this basis the multiculturalists could destroy ‘the family of Western civilization’, composed of Americans and Europeans, its cultural root members. He insisted defense and security embodied in the NATO also served as a guardian of democratic values, liberal capitalism, free trade and ‘the shared cultural heritage, emanating from Greece and Rome through the Renaissance.’31 He could not have foreseen that an attack against the NATO or that ‘family’ would not come from Third-Worldism and multiculturalism but from a President who gained votes by insulting Mexicans, by describing African countries with unrepeatable words, and who was far more bent on disintegrating Europe than integrating it with the United States. Now should we compare the pluralist idea, itself a truly American idea32, of citizenship as developed and practiced at the beginning of the twentieth century, with ‘Westernized’ extremism we hear in Huntington’s discourse and witness being practiced even in a more radical manner by an American President. Both situations evoke once again the awareness that the result so deeply contrary to the nature of an identity  – the American identity – remains forever incomplete. How can we maintain a pluralist conception of the society, open to cultural relativism but not paralyzed by a morally nihilist relativism – the ‘tous va bien’ notion -, with a stable pivot, a criterion, without the support of metaphysics, to reject the horrors of Nazism, genocides, gulags and endless futile massacres? Isaiah Berlin, one of the most convinced supporters of the pluralism of values, rendered only a slim account of the ‘values held in common’ in the form of ‘a minimum without which societies can scarcely survive.’33 Among these he mentions only few to be excluded expressly from the human moral context: slavery, ritual murder, Nazi gas chambers, the torture of human beings for the sake of pleasure or profit or political good, and few others. This does not suffice for a good number of theorists of liberalism to make up the grounding principles of a liberal society. In fact, Berlin did not intend to give a thorough theoretical answer; he had a limited objective but one very  Ibid p. 18.  Ibid. The colleague is James Kurth. See also James Kurth, The Real Clash, ‘National Interest’, 37, Fall 1994, pp. 3–5. 31  Ibid. p. 307. 32  I refer to the previous chapter on Horace M. Kallen’s and Michael Walzer’s idea on the essentially un-American concept of a radical Americanization of all citizens of the United States, the country/nation where citizenship is a permanently evolving and inclusive process. 33  George Crowder,Henry Hardy eds, The One and the Many,Reading Isaiah Berlin,Prometherus Books, 2002, pp. 293–297. 29 30

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important for him: to disclose the conflict between the normally accepted, prestigious and morally accredited values in human societies. His answer came when he was asked by his students to present more precisely his scheme of justification of the category of human values, and to describe the central, narrow value core within the widest human horizon of cultural varieties. This is the point where the most expansive discussion opens up, constituting perhaps the chief object of the contemporary political philosophy. The suspicion that liberal universalism could be spoilt of ethnocentrism always holds true, at least as a legitimate question. Not least of all due to how the colonial experience has been historically validated or how recent wars of occupation were fought bearing the flags of Western nations and their values. The description of values held in common for a shared liberal and democratic perspective seems still a feasible project, similar to how a human rights declaration – which we have  – seems distinctly defendable from a colonial outlook in its enactment worldwide. The plural vision, open to the anthropology of cultural relativism as inaugurated at the beginning of the previous century, seems compatible with the commitment to defend an ethical vision that rests on human dialogue and its shared elements rendering this dialogue viable. The capacity to consider cultures as live narratives  which all bear commonly characteristic traits-, as human creations, as ‘works of art’ (as Ruth Benedict noted) and even their controversial elements that divide them, making them available to change and/or thread together with other cultures, where boundaries often confound with one another34: all this is compatible with the progress of the rule of the law in the world, therefore with universality, together with which the progress of freedom and democracy makes rough and arduous headway despite numerous regressions.

 S.  Benhabib. The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002, p. 8. 34

Chapter 11

Isaiah Berlin: Monists and the Concoction of the Tragic Omelet

Abstract  Of all the stories told in this book, Isaiah Berlin is the guide who leads us directly and indirectly to discovery. He found some of the most brilliant moments of shooting stars in the words of Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu and Herder. During his eventful and intellectual life, in his work for British intelligence, in supporting the creation of Israel, in teaching the history of ideas in Oxford and exploring Russian culture, Berlin paved the way for equipping our world, fresh from Monist adventures and absolute ideological certainties, a shrewd basis for the idea that the moral values and ideal principles one can be inspired by are many and diverse and that conflicts occur even between the best of these principles. The pages of his discovery have the features of an adventure that holds sudden turns and improbable surprises. The treasures of pluralism are inexhaustible, but the Monist temptation is always lurking and is a danger. Keywords  Values pluralism · Tolerance · Moderation · Hamann · Machiavelli · Vico, Herder · Israel · Königsberg · Nationalism · Totalitarianism · Utopia ‘Either do nothing or everything; the mediocre, the moderate, is repellent to me; I prefer an extreme.’ ‘Think less and live more.’ These are Hans Georg Hamann’s words, words of the consistent, passionate romantic and radical enemy of the Enlightenment and of reason in every guise. Isaiah Berlin, the historian of ideas and the pride of Oxford, had already written drafts on Hamann’s thought in 1960s, left all unpublished. In 1993, four years before his death in 1997, Berlin meant to publish this material ad hoc in a new and revised volume; soon The Magus of the North1 came out with the above quotation in its epigraph. Truly a provocation by a liberal, an author who identified himself with twentieth century liberalism. But why this particular quote? Interestingly, it occurred at a time when the ethnic cleansing and bloodshed had just begun in the Balkans in autumn 1993. To all the questions to render account of  I. Berlin, The Magus of the NorthJ.G.Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism, ed.Henry Hardy, John Murray Publ. 1993, Hamann’s quotations are from the epigraph, p. 1. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Bosetti, The Truth of Others, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 25, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25523-6_11

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the disastrous outcome of a peaceful co-existence of different peoples, Berlin gave the same answer: Hamann, the German philosopher from Königsberg, a contemporary fellow citizen to Kant. Now, I would like to tell you the background story of how Isaiah Berlin, who enjoyed dramatizing his ideas, elucidated his famous thought on cultural pluralism. Rather, this is the process he would follow to disclose the ideas of his favorite authors. One of our meetings took place to discuss just Hamann. We met at Paraggi, in Liguria, where he and his wife, Aline, came to stay in their beautiful house every September. I had asked him for an essay to publish in the journal ‘Reset’ I was editing, with its first issue due out at the end of the year2. He handed me a pile of copied material, the essay, as a present and told me to anticipate its publication in Italy. It was a chapter of the above volume. I was rather taken aback, and honestly failed to see the point. I had read his Four Essays on Liberty but was not familiar with his other writings that might help me follow his thinking. I glanced at the title, leafed through the pages, wishing I could master things like Superman. Hardly could I pierce through a word. Hamann? German Romanticism? But why? Seeing me at such a loss, Berlin opened his reasons to full view, something he also took great pleasure in doing. It was not done without a tiny but kind portion of sadism. He would repeatedly pause and delay giving a definite answer to my question regarding Hamann until the very end of our discussion—which later became a conversation essential to understanding the publication of that essay about an extreme reactionary of the eighteenth century, together with Berlin’s comments on the ongoing massacres in former Yugoslavia. ‘Why Hamann?’ begins Berlin. ‘Because we are all its victims. For two thousand and five hundred years people have believed in this fundamental doctrine that says every genuine question must have one true answer and one only, all the rest being necessarily errors. Plato, Aristotle, St Augustine, later the Renaissance thinkers, Spinoza, Descartes, the French Illuminists, Kant, and all you can think of, including Marx and Freud, all believed in it. That the answer to a genuine question is one only. This raises then the following. What about the question of differences? We ask ourselves what is real. What are all these same questions? How should I live my life? What is good? What is evil? What is the best kind of social life? Why should we not kill one another? Why should ethnic cleansing not be allowed? For all these questions differences concern the method, the principle.’ Method? And how does Hamann come into this? What’s wrong with Romanticism? I will come to that shortly. I mean people give different answers not because they deny that there is one true answer but because they follow different methods. Some look for the  My original interview with him, under the title ‘Siamo tutti vittime del romaticismo Tedesco. Ora vi spiego perché’ ‘We are all victims of German Romanticism. Let me explain why’, and the chapter Berlin had given as a gift to the fledgling review were published in Reset, 5 (April), 1994. The interview was recorded in English and edited in Italian. Here it’s appearing in English for the first time. Translated like all this book by Sema Postacioglu. 2

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answer in the word of God as contained in His sacred books, others say it is to be found in a laboratory, others believe in metaphysics. Others say it is to be found in the pure heart of a simple peasant or a child. Now, bloody wars have been fought over these differences, because after all ‘salvation’ depends on the chosen method. If my method is right, it follows yours is wrong and I must kill you, because otherwise we cannot attain salvation and will perish spiritually. This is the nucleus of philosophia perennis, the heart of human philosophical life: that truth must be one. Despite all the difference between metaphysicians and dogmatic empiricists, atheists and believers, Greek and modern philosophers, positivists and anti-positivists, they all agreed on this: one answer is the true one and all the others are wrong. Romanticism cracked this unity: nothing has been the same afterwards.

Hamann accounts for this then, is that so? The crack is the decisive point. But the first to open this crack was an Italian, Giambattista Vico, because he was the father both of the modern concept of culture and of what one might call cultural pluralism. Although he was a practicing, devout Catholic, he believed the values of Homer’s world had passed away, Homer’s account of the Olympian gods could not have been composed by the poets of Vico’s own times…Each culture creates masterpieces that belong to it and it alone, and it must be understood in its own terms, and not necessarily be judged…His vision was a historical development with its cycles: the beginning, the middle and the end, the famous the recurring cycles, corsi e ricorsi. After the bestial condition comes the age of gods, followed by heroes, and then the human, followed by barbarians again.

Who comes after Vico? Herder, the German eighteenth-century thinker. Vico thought of a succession of civilizations, Herder went further and believed there were many cultures that existed simultaneously: what the French believe in the Germans do not, what the Italians value differs from what the Swedes do…In order to understand a culture, one must employ the same faculties of sympathetic insight with which we understand one another. It is a sort of a pluralism of knowledge together with a form of objectivism. There are many things which men do have in common, but that is not what matters. What individualizes them, makes them what they are…is what they do not have in common with all the others. What we Germans want is different from what the Portuguese want, and we have every reason to want it as Germans, so do the Portuguese. The concept of a universal truth, a single true answer to all questions, as Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant believed, could no longer hold. There are no universal values that men everywhere and always perceive in the same manner, as though it were a law of nature. The truth is not eternal but local.

And Hamann? We shall leave him for a while. Let us consider how the idea of universality begins to be subverted with Vico and Herder. It is not a great distance to the worlds of Byronic heroes in the nineteenth century, heroes who challenge conventions, Byron’s Don Juan, a key figure, and an outcast; we have Beethoven, who has no attention for rules, as he once wrote: ‘What I have in my heart must out: that is the reason why I compose.’ We meet Nietzsche and other thinkers on this road. And the road takes us to nationalism.

But isn’t this a giant leap from the names you have just mentioned to nationalism? What is nationalism? It is an attitude which makes one say: I do this not because it is the right, good or useful thing to do, not because it makes people happy, no, I do it because I am German and this is the German way of doing things. Being German means belonging to an organic body called Germany. And I exist solely as a member of this organism, this magnificent culture called German. Germany and the German culture are, therefore, the

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pursuit of a unique mission. Their values are created by this. And what I do is good for German ideals. It is something that does not depend on me: to be a German means to think in German, to eat or drink like a German, to walk like a German. That the Chinese do not do things in the same manner means nothing to me as a German.

With Vico and Herder—I attempt to raise a point—we have the discovery of the variety of cultures and perspectives. And we can also open it for the debate on pluralism. Nationalism instead can be intolerant, fanatical, and aggressive. It is not only nationalism that begins in the eighteenth century but also another phenomenon that can be called existentialism: the dedication to ideals not in an attempt to seek guarantee for moral beliefs in some vast, objective metaphysical order; no, for no reason, or rather for the only reason that it is the choice, the ultimate goal of my life. And what are ideals? They are not discoveries, they are inventions. Ideals are not found, they are invented. When we reach this stage, we are before something utterly new and dangerous.

Does this also include nationalism? Not only nationalism. It is true for anarchy, the Church, social class, and political party. For instance, let’s look at the ideal of anarchy. Now as an anarchist I do things because this is what I want to do, this is the reason I can die for. I do not accept the acts of the Parliament or the monarch; I am what goes for individualism, subjectivism, romanticism. And similarly, other people do what they do because they have dedicated their lives to the ideals of their nation, their church, social class, or political party. In other words, it is the super-ego that expands from the ego and becomes the centre of everything: I do what I do because my nation, my Church, my party, my history, the idea of progress tells me to do it. What others are told to do does not interest me because I belong to a movement or some organism that can be called a ‘nation’, or for that matter that can be called ‘Bosnia’ or ‘Serbia’.

Does this imply that nationalism that excludes and destroys starts with Romanticism? It was Herder who started stating that to be free means living in one’s own community where one understands what is being said because it is his language, that men congregate in groups, and the contrary is the life of exile, solitude. Belonging to a group means understanding the words, gestures, the behaviour of others, how they look, how they eat. Freedom, Hegel observed, is bei sich selbst sein—to be at home. The idea of being at home, here instead of there, is the beginning of pluralism. But if I start saying my house is better, more important than yours, or yours is inferior and has to be subjected or destroyed for your own good then I can even declare war against you. Imagine we are fighting a duel. Say I believe in X and you in Y. Now we have a challenge and have to fight. I might kill you or you might kill me, or we might both be killed. In the culture of expanded egos all these three things are preferable to a compromise because compromise is seen as a miserable thing, it means betraying the light that gives sense to our lives. This is what we have learned, right? That we have to die for our ideals. We are now coming closer to Hamann; but first I need to mention another concept.

You seem to have a very clear target which I may or may not have understood. Please go on, what is this concept? It is sincerity. It is a new virtue that did not exist in the sixteenth century. It is nowhere to be found, no one believed in sincerity. Martyrdom certainly existed; one could die for truth’s sake. Integrity and sincerity were not among the attributes which were admired—indeed, they were scarcely mentioned—in the ancient or medieval worlds, which prized objective

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truth, getting things right, however accomplished. In the fifteenth century no Catholic thought the heresies of the reformers, despite having souls condemned to perdition, earned respect because what they did was not done for money or glory, but out of sincere religious convictions. Respect for one’s intimate sincerity begins in the late seventeenth century and comes together with the variety of cultures, the idea that variety is, in general, preferable to uniformity, monotony. With Spinoza the truth was still one only, while the assumption that variety is preferable comes from the thought there is not only one but many answers to a question. This was to determine a new moral, political and philosophical situation.

Now we can turn to the reasons why you consider Hamann with so much attention. What role does this German thinker have in the history of the conflict between universal and subjective truths? After this introduction we can now turn our attention to him. And the statement should be quite clear at this stage: in my opinion Hamann was the first opponent in every respect of the French Enlightenment of his time. He attacked the entire outlook in all its particular aspects. He thought the basis of it altogether false and its conclusions a blasphemy against the nature of man and his creator; in contrast to the possibility of universal goals, he looked for evidence for the empirically perceived facts themselves. Hamann dissented from the discovery of general laws that govern human behaviour, as he rejected the assumption that everyman sought happiness or strove to believe in God. None of this made sense, nor could be true. He would have none of theory, generalisation, or the illusion of universal truth. The only thing that mattered was experience. Now if you believe in this and accept this mode of thinking, then you can say: ‘I was a devout Christian, I believed in the Bible, in God, I believed because God spoke directly in his sacred books.’ This is not what he alone, but all his fellow thinkers say: ‘We read the Bible and know God is speaking to us directly, he is communicating with us in his books, and his creation, trees, stones, rivers, he speaks with us through history.’ In short, if one wishes to hear the voice of God, he hears the voice of God, and needs to learn the Hebrew language of the age as God spoke it. But it is also a good thing to read Luther in German if his language was German, because our language is like ‘a wife’ and we have ‘the rights of the father of a family’, whereas ‘he who writes in a foreign tongue bends his own spirit to it like a lover.’ In Hamann’s view what really matters is direct experience of any kind. If one asks ‘what is good?’, one could say: ‘I will tell you what is good. It is good not to kill.’ ‘And why?’ asks the other. And the answer can be: ‘I know because this is what God told me’, or ‘I know because this is what I feel.’ Hamann’s thought goes like this: ‘I am a concrete person, you are a human being, so I like you and understand you. But if I start to make a theory of you then I understand nothing about you. Poetry, arts, prophecy: these are the vehicles for knowledge, not what scientists do. Similar statements have been attributed to him, although he did not put it exactly as: ‘The language of nature is not mathematics—God is a poet, not a geometer.’ But this suffices to recall what Hamann wrote, whom Goethe greatly admired. Hamann is the most passionate and consistent adversary of science, of the Enlightenment. But this alone does not explain the place he occupies in the history of ideas. Hamann was a reactionary. He hated liberalism, science, progress. Yet Herder revered Hamann as a man of genius, looked up to him as the greatest of his teachers, so did Jacobi. Kierkegaard gave the impression that he thought him one of the true philosophers of his time. Schelling regarded him as ‘a great writer.’ He was to influence and was greatly admired by the German romantics, while the French, in general, neither took notice of him nor even read him.

However, Hamann was certainly not the only opponent of the Enlightenment. There were others, like Burke.

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Hamann is far worse, because Burke, at least, appeals to the calm good sense of reflective men. Hamann is much further reaching and radical; he believed in passion, the direct relationship with something authentic, genuine, he believed that the only path to understanding was revelation.

You said you were interested in Hamann because he was the first to denounce the Enlightenment from all possible perspectives. But other thinkers of his age attacked the universalist vision that came from Paris, too. True, but his attacks were more uncompromising, more frontal. You see, Vico also denounced rationalism and believed it was wrong to be inspired by rationalism; but Vico was a good Catholic, he believed in Providence, a sort of rational test of history. Herder, too, criticised certain aspects of the Enlightenment, though this does not seem to be directed at science. On the contrary, Herder was interested in physics and chemistry. Despite being Hamann’s pupil, Herder did not show a tendency against sciences. Hamann abhorred and rejected every form of universalism, every form of theory. And he was against toleration.

Having clarified all that, now how can we follow this course of ideas from Vico to Hamann to understand the tragedies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries better? We can put it like this. In the last two centuries we suffered from the excesses of the Enlightenment as much as from the excesses of the Counter-Enlightenment. The excessive claims of uniformity, worn like a straitjacket, in the name of Illuminism were violent. And equally violent came the reaction against it, with all its excess of subjectivism, romanticism, nationalism. A reaction that is the origin of most of our malaise today and resulted in two important movements in our age: nationalism and racism.

And Hamann stands at the beginning of this historic development. He is the first to throw a bomb against the Enlightenment. The original bomb and he saw himself as a precursor. I do not speak as a champion of Hamann’s views, I think he is deeply biased, one-sided, and reactionary. I am a person of the Enlightenment and believe so are you; still we cannot stop from asking ourselves where such a reaction came from.

From the excesses on both sides: Enlightenment and Romanticism. Precisely. He is the person who challenges the Enlightenment. More importantly, the first challenge in two-thousand-and-five-hundred years to rational thought comes from this isolated, mysterious, humble, poor, unread writer from Königsberg. And ever since everything has been a bent twig.

Some thinkers believe the subjective passion of belonging to a nation has not only had negative results. For instance, it has served as an engine to build national states in the nineteenth century, which in itself is a sign of progress. This is true; Mazzini and some others believed this to be so; but this was not a prevalent thought. Neither Marx nor Freud thought nationalism to be a progressive phenomenon, the socialist movement did not think so, Proudhon did not think so. Popper did not think so.

Still, during the initial stage of nation-states Greece, Italy were born in the nineteenth century… No, also the movements that gave rise to the birth of nation-states in the nineteenth century depended on universal principles. The spirit of the age was dominated by cosmopolitism, internationalism, and great trust in sciences. I believe wherever it appeared, nationalism has

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never been progressive. And today it is far too evident that it is a pathological phenomenon. The deep consciousness of belonging to a nationhood, the need for a political self-identity as belonging to an autonomous entity are indeed positive phenomena, but inflamed nationalism, that is inflamed in the sense of belonging, is not positive at all.

The point that strikes me in your argument is that you place Hamann at the very beginning of those problems that followed the irrational attack he initiated; yet you also make concessions to some of his criticism regarding the Enlightenment. I have just said we suffer from a two-fold malaise: excess of uniformity on the illuminist side and extremism of the romantic reaction which results in our present malaise today.

Does this suggest we should follow the middle road? We must adapt to local varieties: we need to think that multiplicity and tolerance are virtuous characteristics of a kaleidoscopic world. We can say it in Mao’s words ‘letting a hundred flowers blossom...’ And hope to achieve a world of varieties and rationality, happiness and knowledge, justice, and recognition. Well, at this point it is quite clear we are talking about a utopia, because on the one hand we must deal with the worst consequences of the excess of the one and the other, and we are hoping people are tired of killing one another.

Your attitude towards the Enlightenment seems rather ambiguous. You consider yourself an enlightened person but still insist on the dangers of the excess coming from both directions. I shall repeat the words of the Delphic oracle: ‘Do not go too far.’ I mean to say do not push too far. Never too much of anything. If you adopt a solution and insist on it beyond measure, you risk burning out.

So, you are suggesting a kind of philosophy of counter-exaggeration. Yes, counter-excess. You must believe in some principles, but also remember Cromwell’s words.

A revolutionary, so someone who exaggerated. He undoubtedly exaggerated, but also said in his famous speech: “I beseech you, from the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be wrong.”

After this first meeting with Isaiah Berlin, I sat down to study all his works left unread: Against the Current, Russian Thinkers, his essays on Vico and Herder, on Herzen, Machiavelli and many others. He had chosen ‘the history of ideas’ as his field of study, rather than the traditional ‘history of philosophy’, because he wanted to make sure he could learn new things and not stay within the bounds of those questions philosophy could not break free from. This is how he succeeded in opening and legitimizing a new course of study at Oxford. A research field with wider room for imagination, Einfühlung, the understanding of literature, arts, and history. It was Vico who identified monists, beginning with Descartes, as his opponents: thinkers who reduced knowledge and understanding to a single principle. Vico initiated the course in the history of ideas towards the discovery of pluralism of cultures, and beyond that another pluralism, that of values that can exist within the same society and culture. According to Vico, we can know the symbolic products of the human mind and the different characteristics of different cultures because they are

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human inventions: geometrica demonstramus quia facimus. But we cannot prove natural and material, physica things because we did not invent them. His thought can instigate anthropological historicism. He is the first to propose a new conception of philosophy as the consciousness of the cumulative experience of an entire society thanks to the cardinal principle—with which the Neapolitan thinker earned ‘his claim to immortality’—which states that man can understand himself because he understands the past, ‘that is he can reconstruct through imaginative insight what he did and what he suffered from, his hopes, his desires, fears and trials—not only his own but also those of his own kind.’ After the war and having resumed teaching at Oxford3, Berlin said his attention turned first to the question of ‘monism’, in his view ‘the cardinal thesis in Western philosophy from Plato to our day’, and the second regarding the significance and application of the concept of liberty. These two topics – he used to say – would have characterized Berlin’s work for a considerable number of years. In his analysis of the history of ideas, conditioned by his personal curiosity to look into the life stories of thinkers and their own motivations, and the urge to respond with an explanation to the human catastrophes of the twentieth century in the evolution of ideas, Berlin underlines the uniformity of philosophia perennis, pursuit of one conclusive truth, as the dangerous illusion. For all authors and thinkers of the Enlightenment, from Helvétius to Condillac, Voltaire to Rousseau, whether they believed in sciences or introspection, there was no other course except the fact that for every genuine question there ought to be one moral, social, political and/or scientific answer only. The monists did acknowledge that the answer could be beyond one’s limits, it might not be attained due to the difficulty of the task; nevertheless, true answers did exist and would be found some time, somewhere. Finding it was what mattered. This ‘monist’ belief in one single true answer was not a trademark of the Enlightenment; it permeated the entire history of philosophy: Plato believed the true answer was mathematics, Aristotle biology, Jews and Christians believe to find it in their sacred books respectively. Berlin believed he was immune by temperament to this form of cognitive, moral, and political perfectionism, a trait he shared with his contemporary Karl Popper, whose critique of Plato was far more radical. It was Vico who first conceived the idea of ‘cultures’, their differences, observing that people living in different places at different times are subject to different causes, and that the cardinal questions of one culture can be entirely irrelevant for another. Different cultures give different answers to their genuine questions. Montesquieu began to admit this; although he was ‘convinced man was molded by his environment’, ‘by climate’, he was still a universalist and believed the central or cardinal truths were eternal. Herder, instead, created the concept that every culture has its ‘center of gravity’, and imagined the world like ‘a garden which can contain many flowers, each with its aggressive  Autobiographical notes on Berlin’s life in: Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berl,n Vintage, 2000, Ramin Jahanbegloo. Conversations with Isaiah Berlin. London: Halban, 1992 and 2000; other brief late writings by Sir Isaiah Berlin. ‘The First and the Last’ and ‘My Intellectual Path’, in NYRB, May 1998, and I. Berlin. Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy, introd. Avishai Margalit. Princeton UP, 2013. 3

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potentialities, its reasons, its past and its future.’ Herder is the inventor of modern ‘cultural nationalism’, but also warns of its radical, extreme form; he was ‘not a relativist’, explains Berlin, and cannot be held to account for the errors of ‘political nationalism’ and extremism, nor for the damage caused by the German Romantic tradition that ended in the metaphysical union of the ego with a collective entity, such as the church, nation, or political party. Vico and Herder open the intellectual path that leads to the discovery of cultures with their differing symbolic and moral horizons; it is, however, Machiavelli who sets the pace for another discovery nearly more than two hundred years earlier: the discovery of the variety and incommensurability of values, in his case not of nations, but of life ideals, life goals. Different men pursue different ends within a certain moral or political scope in their own society at a given historical moment.4 Berlin looks into and adds his original reading of the unresolved question of widely varying interpretations of Machiavelli, ‘a question,’ as Benedetto Croce once remarked, ‘that probably will never be closed.’5 Whether Berlin’s intellectual endeavor offers a more adequate interpretation of The Prince’s author is now beside the point; what Berlin does succeed in elucidating is the plurality of values which evinces clearly when differences and different morals come into conflict with one another. In Against the Current, Berlin argues that Croce’s attribute to Machiavelli ‘the emancipation of politics from ethics or religion’ does not constitute Machiavelli’s ‘crowning achievement’; rather, what ‘cuts deeper still’ is ‘a differentiation between two incompatible ideals of life, and therefore of two moralities. One is the morality of the pagan world: its values are courage, vigour, fortitude in adversity, justice, …above all assertion of one’s proper claims and power needed to secure their satisfaction… in ideal Athens or in the old Roman Republic.’6 Against this moral universe stands ‘Christian morality’ with its ‘ideals of charity, mercy, sacrifice, love of God, forgiveness of enemies, contempt for the goods of this world, faith in the life hereafter.’ Men who believe in such ideals can build no satisfactory community in his Roman sense. To choose to live a Christian life is to condemn oneself to political impotence. Consequently, a man must choose. Even if both these goals can be raised to sublime heights, men cannot bring themselves to follow either of these paths because they are incompatible. In Machiavelli’s words, ‘men take certain middle ways that are very injurious; indeed, they are unable to be altogether good or altogether bad.’ They fall between two stools, and end in failure. Christian faith has made men weak, ‘easy prey to wicked men’7; this is why Christianity is compared unfavorably with Roman religion, which made men stronger. Machiavelli’s values of civic ideals are therefore not Christian but Roman Republican morals.  Berlin’s thought on Vico and Machiavelli refer to Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy. New York: Viking Press, 1998. (Machiavelli, see pp. 25–79; Vico, see pp.  111–129). Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas. London: Chatto and Windus, 1980. 5  I.Berlin, Against the Current, quoted work, p. 131. 6  Ibid. p. 97. 7  Ibid. 4

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Monism is flawed on an ethical level, as well. It fails to identify a single principle for public and individual life; the world and human society avoid all attempts to be explained and goaded into a ‘single intelligible structure,’8 which lies at the root of natural law. It is Machiavelli who seems to have split open the rock that is the basis of the unifying monistic pattern at the heart of traditional rationalism, religious and aesthetic, metaphysical and scientific in Western civilizations. He has brought to light an unresolved dilemma, acknowledging ‘de facto goals equally valid and sacred can contradict one another, entire value systems can come into collision without the possibility of a rational arbitration.’9 Machiavelli did not seek to formulate a theory on ethical dualism or pluralism, which Berlin instead does in his reading of the former’s ideas, because Machiavelli himself was a monist as numerous studies explain and took it for granted that ‘the superiority of the Roman antiqua virtus over the Christian life as taught by the church.’10 With Machiavelli all monistic constructs were exposed to doubt and questioning, which made the Florentine chancellor become reluctantly ‘one of the makers of pluralism’ and of its - to him – perilous acceptance of toleration’11. What Berlin does not accept in monism is the assumption that once we do find all the answers to all our questions, including those we do not know or have not formulated yet, we shall have a harmonious and coherent universe. The conflict does not regard the difference between good or bad, but all the values worth following morally: liberty can come into conflict with equality or public order, mercy with justice, love with impartiality, social duties with pursuit of truth, knowledge with happiness, spontaneity with responsibility. Conflict of values is part and parcel of human nature: the idea of a perfect and total human fulfilment is a mere chimera, and the collision of values is their very essence, the essence of what and who we are. In addition to being different and diverse, values can also be incompatible with one another. They are incommensurable; that is, there is no unique standard yardstick to determine a definite judgement based on an abstract, quantitative, external scale. In a similar fashion, declaring the ‘superiority’ of one culture over another in Berlin’s pluralist perspective becomes a hardly feasible task. Such a practice, a typical feature of monism that readily pronounces a culture or civilization superior, often translates by chance or by design into a vehicle of ethnocentric or nationalistic worldview: ‘We are better’, indeed! Looking through a pluralist perspective does not imply renouncing comparisons; it signifies equipping oneself with a value judgement that always takes into consideration the inside perspective of different cultures. Berlin’s thought on pluralism has many common points with William James, an author Berlin regarded highly and admitted he wished he had known personally among the great thinkers of the past. He shared James’s pragmatism and his cultural

 Ibid. p. 99.  Ibid. p. 126. 10  Ibid. p. 129. 11  Ibid. p. 131. 8 9

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anthropological outlook (whose precursor, as he noted, was Vico). Nor does the rejection of monistic universalism lead to the paralysis or suspension of one’s faculty to make moral judgements: the distance separating the conception of pluralism from that of monism is too far, but it is felt sharply every time we hear the word ‘superiority’ pronounced in public debate. Where does the boundary lie between pluralism and relativism? ‘I’m not a relativist,’ observes Berlin, I do not say: ‘I have coffee with milk and you without; I prefer gentle manners, you instead concentration camps’, and everybody should hold onto their values and the differences can neither be overcome or integrated.’12 This is a mistaken view. There are a finite number of values men own and pursue, and they differ from one another. It is not infinite: the number of human values which can be pursued without altering a human physiognomy, character, is finite— say, for instance, 74, or 122 or 27, but it is finite whatever the total sum. If someone pursues one of these values, whereas I do not, I can still understand why and what it would mean were I to find myself under the same or similar circumstances. Pluralism must be kept apart from relativism: values are many and diverse, but they are objective and are part of the essence of humanity. They are not arbitrary creations of subjective fancies. They have something in common, otherwise they would not be human, and we would be unable to understand each other, which we instead do. If pluralism is a valid prospective, and if respect between not necessarily hostile value systems is feasible, ‘then toleration and liberal consequences will follow.’13 This is precisely what does not occur or hardly ever does in the monist outlook (as only one set of values is held true, while others are false), or in relativism, where everyone has their own values and if we happen to disagree and come to clash, well, no one can claim to be right. Monism is the major contrasting view to pluralism and lies at the root of ‘essentialism’, as Popper called it, the view that states whoever holds the key to truth—Plato being the philosopher king—is entitled to lead the rest to sacrifice in the name of all ‘isms’ of our age that took the place of the idols of Antiquity. Hence Berlin’s famous remark: ‘Most revolutionaries believe, covertly or overtly, that in order to create the ideal world eggs must be broken, otherwise one cannot obtain the omelet. Eggs are certainly broken—never more violently and ubiquitously than in our times—but the omelet is far to seek, it recedes into an infinite distance. That is one of the corollaries of unbridled monism, as I call it—some call it fanatism, but monism is at the root of every extremism.’14 A monist is then a person who is not even acquainted with the thought or fancy that his own vision may not be the morally admitted vision alone.

 Isaiah Berlin. ‘The First and the Last’ and ‘My Intellectual Path’, in NYRB, May 14, 1998.  Ibid. 14  Berlin’s speech delivered during the acceptance ceremony of the Senator Giovanni Agnelli International Prize came out in New York Review of Books, which published many of his essays prior to their book format. In fact, ‘On the Pursuit of the Ideal’, in NYRB, 35:4 (17 March, 1988), is now the opening chapter to The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991, p. 16. 12

13

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Isaiah Berlin was always critical of all radical forms of rationalism of philosophes and the doctrine that progressively universal civilization can issue from the work of illuminated intellectuals; as Michael Walzer poignantly notes, Berlin sided with the national independence and sovereignty movements in various countries, but always had a pragmatic sense of proportion and his sympathies never lost sight of a possible resolution of conflicting values. His firm belief in cultural pluralism and the relevance Berlin attributed to its discovery do not conflict with how liberalism, itself generated by the Enlightenment, serves as the most accommodating basis for tolerance and cultural differences.15 It may perhaps help to comprehend the sense of certain ambiguities in his writings if, as Michael Walzer suggests, we were to employ the metaphor Berlin himself referred to: the hedgehog and the fox. As the Greek lyric poet Archilochus noted: ‘the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ The latter, Berlin observed in his essay on Tolstoy, ‘relate everything to a single central vision, one system…a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance—and, on the other side, [we have ] those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory…their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory or incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.’16 In this respect, Berlin is a fox and needs to be studied and interpreted with the yardstick of a fox. When you try to entrap a counter-Enlightenment prey, ‘the fox runs away in an entirely different direction.’17 In recent times Berlin has been accused of utopianism, universalist abstractionism, determinism, and for the very arguments he himself felt drawn to focus on the enemies of ‘reason’ to the extent of being suspected of harboring much closer affinity with the Romantics, with Herder, Kierkegaard, Hamann than the true philosophes. Norberto Bobbio hinted at it when reviewing Against the Current in 198018; more recently, in 2006, Zeev Sternhell, looking into this question as his major thesis

 The appendix to The One and The Many tentatively proposes a diagram of Berlin’s ‘pluralism of values’ and ‘pluralism of cultures’ to demarcate them from moral relativism (pp. 293–97). Apparently, Berlin agreed it offered a fair overlook of his thought. The diagram sets psychopathic behavior outside ‘the human horizon’. Within the human horizon are the nucleus, the ‘core set of values’ common to different human cultures, and different cultures with their individual, varying values. This in itself reads akin to John Rawls’s thought discussed in Political Liberalism (1993), where Rawls observes that different doctrines, religions, and ideologies have an overlapping area, an intersection of common values, each with a boundary larger than ‘comprehensive’ doctrines which remain outside of the commonly shared humanistic core set of values. 16  Walzer’s review of John Gray’s book Isaiah Berlin, Harper Collins, 1995, in M. Walzer, ‘Are There Limits to Liberalism?’, NYRB, 19 October 19 1995. 17  Ibid. 18  Norberto Bobbio’s review of Berlin’s Against the Current can be accessed “in Il liberalismo di Isaiah Berlin’, Rivista storica italiana, XCII, 1980. 15

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in The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, started a straightforward polemic.19 In the Israeli historian’s view, Berlin is an author, thinker who ‘rejects’ the principles of the Enlightenment; Sternhell accuses him of being unconscious of the significance of Herder’s line of thought, of being ‘hypnotized’ by the Cold War, and rendering great service to all the enemies of rationalism and universalism of our age. In addition, Berlin is charged with providing evidence for endangering the very principles of the Enlightenment by employing a liberalist argumentation. Just like Croce who initially flirted with fascism, Spengler who attacked the Weimar Republic and Maurras who laid the principles of 1889 to eternal rest—all three gestures that led to the totalitarian degeneration—so too Berlin, in Meinecke’s footsteps, is added to the set of anti-Enlightenment figures.20 That Berlin should have caused such heedless provocations to be crowned as the inventor of the concept of Counter-­ Enlightenment is something Sternhell cannot endure; in his praise for Herder, ’the prophet of nationalism’, Sternhell argues Berlin does not distance himself sufficiently from Nolte who viewed Nazism as a logical response to the existential threat posed by the Bolshevik Revolution.21 According to this militant historian of the Enlightenment, Berlin is a relativist refusing to acknowledge it, a relativist who endorses the generalized suspicion regarding any moral view, and a member of the infamous club ‘anything goes’. With Sternhell, Berlin’s critique of Kant ends up in the dustbin; the foundations of a multiculturalist and pluralist manifesto, illustrated in Berlin’s works on liberty, Vico and Herder, so Sternhell sustains, inadvertently become close relations to twentieth-century nationalisms. As noted, Norberto Bobbio had also expressed concern over Berlin’s critical views of the Enlightenment both in his essays and more recently in an interview.22 Vico, for him, reminded of Croce’s battle against the Enlightenment. Still Bobbio was more precise, for he argued ‘by scrutinizing Vico, Herder and pluralism,’ Berlin confirms ‘his main goal was to attack monism in all its aspects—ontological (reality depends on a unique principle), methodological (all reality, of mankind and nature,

 The same question becomes the pivotal argumentation, the central and nearly exclusive topic in Zeev Sternhell’s Les Anti-Lumières: Du XVIII Siècle à la Guerre Froide (Paris: Flammarion, 2006). Sternhell openly accuses Isaiah Berlin, without endorsing in any degree the concept of ‘counter-Enlightenment’ of his invention, his praise of Herder ‘the prophet of nationalism’, his reading of Vico as the precursor of pluralism; he views Berlin as an accomplice to irrational, antidemocratic degenerations in the twentieth century, and as the father of multiculturalism and cultural pluralism tout court, which in Sternhell’s opinion inevitably lead to the worst form of nationalism. 20  Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-enlightenment Tradition, Yale University Press, 2010, pp.  278, 381 and passim. 21  Ibid. p. 438 and passim. 22  Questions regarding Berlin’s hypothetical counter-Enlightenment stance come up frequently. Eugenio Scalfari discussed it in a short book: Eugenio Scalfari. Attualità dell’Illuminismo [Relevance of the Enlightenment Today]. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2001, with essays by Carlo Bernardini, Norberto Bobbio (interview), Giancarlo Bosetti, Ralf Dahrendorf, Umberto Eco, Roberto Esposito, Umberto Galimberti, Sergio Givone, Sebastiano Maffettone, Sergio Moravia, Gianni Vattimo, Lucio Villari, Franco Volpi. 19

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can be known by one single reason, that of sciences), teleological (everything converges harmoniously towards a unique goal), and ethical (there is one single ultimate value, one single good common to all). Monism is always Berlin’s target, his eternal enemy to defeat and make pluralism triumph.’23 Berlin’s doctrine of p­ luralism is still subject to ongoing discussions and source of expanding literature. It was his central idea and any sensible reasoning on liberalism can hardly do without it. Bobbio’s view, despite its reserve on Berlin’s thought regarding the Enlightenment, restores to Berlin the topic and the cardinal purpose of his thought and his discovery, which unexpectedly occupy center-stage anew: the critique of ‘monism’ today offers a mental space to relate different cultures at an altogether different period from the war between dictatorships, followed by the Cold War. Cultural pluralism is a platform where different cultures stand complementary and on a par with one another, without a hierarchical order; they deserve equal dignity and cannot be classified with a qualitative and quantitative yardstick. The platform provides the framework necessary to enhance international policy, political confrontations, emigration issues, and reinforces dialogue between different cultures. Cultural pluralism has created the circumstances where judgements of ‘superiority’ or ‘inferiority’ of a culture have now become essentially unpronounceable; it generates dialogue and serves as an automatic step to stand by principles of liberty. Even the most archaic customs, such as the mutilation of female genitals, and similar repugnant traditions in the eyes of modern and developed societies do not simply disappear by means of repression or because they are deemed outrageous in western capitals; rather, to delegitimize and write them off, they need to be tackled from within their culture and confronted with knowledge. It is true that Isaiah Berlin drew copiously on obscure Romantic, irrational authors who were left in the darkness of the history of ideas; Berlin also felt sincere sympathy for some of them because he had ‘practiced’ their mental faculties, but he did not share their views, as Sternhell claims. They were often part of the problem to which they also offered a penetrating perspective, like a neurotic may provide a key to a psychic question glimpsing a solution in a wink. With his often a decidedly unilateral style, Berlin strengthened and proved pluralism as a means to comprehend history and to gain access to the imagination, Einfühlung, insight, empathy for people who live in different cultures. His principal doctrine is a key to understand our world today; it is not a political formula. It emerges both from his writings, not only as a display of his intelligence, but, as he repeatedly sought to explain, from the plurality of layers that make up his life and his political, intellectual story. To be precise, they are three layers, Jewish, English, and Russian; all his cultures, languages and nationalities. The first: he was born in Riga, today in Latvia—not far from Königsberg, the home town of both, Kant and Hamann, and like Königsberg, on the Baltic shore— into a lower middle-class Jewish family (at the very top of the local society were the

 Norberto Bobbio, Le illusioni del comunismo e la mia battaglia per i Lumi, interviewed by Giancarlo Bosetti, in E.Scalfari ed., p. 72. 23

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Baltic patrons, followed by rich Nordic merchants, wealthy German-speaking Jews, Russian Jews, and lastly the Latvians); at a young age he came to the attention of the Jewish élite in the diaspora, then became one of the key figures during the early stages of the formation of the state of Israel next to Weizmann, and an interlocutor to Ben Gurion (whom he compared to Mazzini); in Washington, he worked on behalf of the British Intelligence Service to convince the United States to enter the second world war, while simultaneously working for the formation of Israel, two tasks he accomplished successfully while keeping them distinct and conflict-free. Having declined to become the head of the Israeli Foreign Office, he returned to Oxford. For Berlin the birth of the state of Israel meant both creating a homeland for the survivors of the Nazi tragedy but also ‘full recognition of the human personality of every Jew’ in the world, ‘a return to a healthy condition’ which enables ‘all Jews to feel their situation has transformed.’24 He also fought with much apprehension as a ‘moderate Zionist’ against Shamir, Sharon and Begin, as ‘they have done great harm to Israel, culturally, morally, politically, materially.’25 He was equally critical of intellectuals such as Isaac Deutscher and ‘The New Left Review’, who viewed Israel an imperialist, colonizing power against the Arabs. Towards the end of his life, Berlin left a document to Avishai Margalit, where he expresses regret for not having done enough for the liberal cause in Israel.26 As for his services to the United Kingdom, he was, as noted, in the service of Her Majesty, sent on a mission to the United States first, then to Russia, where he was to meet with Pasternak, Zacharov and as early as in 1946 the poet Anna Achmatova, which led to serious trouble for the latter and her son Lev Gumilev. She was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union and her son was exiled to Siberia (where he invented a theory of Russian nationalism, a doctrine much in tune with Putin’s views today).27 Berlin is also the father of the concept of negative liberty (liberty from) as opposed to positive liberty (liberty to); in his late years he reduced the emphasis on the former, addressed to the ward off totalitarian regimes. He never endorsed the laissez-faire principle, such as Friedrich von Hayek; despite Thatcher’s high regard, he declined a life peerage at the House of Lords. He declared himself a leftist liberal and voted for Roy Jenkins, but never changed his view on the decisive power of national belonging when it came to politics, culture, and one’s individual identity.28 Nationalism, as he many times observed, may have led to infinite wars and massacres, yet it had to be understood, because whatever is not understood cannot be controlled: it dominates men, instead of being dominated by them. It is a delusion  J.Tarsh, J.Wolfson, On Israel, Zionism and the Jews, Jeremy Tarsh and Jonathan Wolfson, ‘On Israel, Zionism and the Jews’, Jewish Chronicle, 18 April 1986, 31 (reprinted without permission from Windmill, the magazine of the Oxford University Israel Society, no. 1, Hilary Term 1986) p.  31, quoted in Alessandro Della Casa, Isaia Berlin, quoted work p. 119. 25  Ramin Jahanbegloo, quoted work, p. 87 Italian edition 26  A.Della Casa, quoted work, p. 264. 27  Ibid. p. 90. 28  Ibid p. 240. 24

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to think it can be done away with. Berlin was in favor of national liberalism; he was for the European Union, but also foresaw the dangers of failing to consider different identities and languages with due and equal care. Lastly, he elaborated a highly personal interpretation of the Babel tower29— being an enigma, it still stands open to speculation. In his view, God was not angry because men tried to reach to the skies, but because with one language for everybody that endeavor was too uniform and boring; so, God gave the gift of different languages to break out of this monotony. Like many of his free analyses, this says perhaps far more about the author and his pluralist vision than the above Bible story.

 Two Concepts of Nationalism, interviewed by Nathan Gardels, in “New York Review of Books” (NYRB), 21 November 1991, 19–23. ISAIAH BERLIN “The Tower of Babel was meant to be unitary in character; a single great building, reaching to the skies, with one language for everybody. GARDELS The Lord didn’t like it. BERLIN There is, I have been told, an excellent Hebrew prayer to be uttered when seeing a monster: ‘Blessed be the Lord our God, who introducest variety amongst Thy creatures.’ We can only be happy to have seen the despotism of the Soviet Tower of Babel collapse into ruin, dangerous as some of the consequences may turn out to be – I mean, a bitter clash of nationalisms. But, unfortunately, that would be nothing new Babel.” 29

Index

A Abelard, 7 Abhishiktananda, S., 108, 109 Abraham, 27 Abu-Zayd, N., 9 Achmatova, A., 145 Adamantius, 28, 108 Agnelli, G., 141 Ahuizotl, 64 Akbar, 9, 16, 17 Albonico, A., 62 Alexander, 12–14, 23, 27 Alexander II, 13 Ali Jinna, 17 Aline, 132 al-Mahdī, 90 Alonso López de Avila, 67 Amato, A., 107 Ambedkar, 16 Ambrose, 21, 25, 29 Ammonius Saccas, 22, 30 Anaximander, 71 Angel Losada, 57 Anselm, 46 Anthony Pagden, 67 Antigonus, 13 Antigonus II Gonatas, 13 Antiochos, 13 Antiochos II Theos, 13 Antiochus I, 14 Antonio Montesinos, 58 Apollonius, 23, 27 Aquinas, T., 48, 56 Archilochus, 142

Arendt, H., 45, 46 Aristotle, 132, 138 Arius, 30 Ashoka, 9, 12–18, 108 Augustine, 6, 34, 37, 45, 46, 105, 115, 132 B Baptiste, V.N., 60, 61 Ballanti, R.C., 85, 90 Barner, W., 82 Bartolomé, 55–63, 68, 69 Bascour, H., 44 Basil, 25 Basil Bessarion, 41, 50 Bataillon, M., 60 Beethoven, 133 Begin, 145 Bellarmino, 31 Bellow, S., 4, 121, 127 Benedict XVI, 6, 7, 31, 48, 84, 106, 113, 125, 126 Benedict, R., 100, 103, 118, 121–123, 130 Benhabib, S., 10, 130 Berengar, 52 Bergoglio, 111 Berlin, I., 2, 4, 5, 10, 39, 45, 46, 73, 86, 118, 124, 129, 131, 132, 137–146 Bernardini, C., 143 Bernstein, R., 100, 101, 103, 104 Bertone, T., 107, 113 Bessarion, 50 Bindusara, 14 Bizumic, B., 2, 3

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Bosetti, The Truth of Others, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 25, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25523-6

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148 Bloom, A., 4, 8, 121, 126, 127 Boas, F., 3, 100, 104, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123, 124, 127 Bobbio, N., 142–144 Boccaccio, G., 8, 87–89 Bodin, 73 Bohnen, K., 82 Bond, H.L., 46 Bormann, K., 38 Bosetti, G., 101, 143, 144 Breivik, A., 127 Brown, P., 28 Bruno, G., 33, 72, 73 Buñuel, 32 Burke, P., 72, 135, 136 Burnett, 85 Burns, J., 25 Burrows, W.R., 106 Buruma, I., 122 Bush, Jr., 127 Butterworth, G.W., 25 Byron, 133 C Cameron, 128 Campanella, 40 Canciani, M., 29 Cardano, G., 90 Cardanus, H., 90, 91 Carratelli, G.P., 11–15 Casa, A.D., 145 Cassirer, E., 52, 53 Ceres, 23 Chadha, Y., 18 Chadwick, H., 87 Chakrabarti, D., 72 Chandragupta, 14 Charles, 56, 61 Charles I, 55 Charles V, 55–57, 62 Chenu, M.-D., 108 Christ, 49, 107 Christianson, G., 36, 44 Christopher Columbus, 55, 57 Clement, 22, 29, 31, 115 Clinton, B., 128 Columbus, 59, 60, 65 Condillac, 138 Congar, Y., 108, 113 Constantine, 6, 27, 41, 43 Constantine XI, 41 Corrado Marucci, 34 Cortés, 60, 63–65, 73

Index Croce, B., 139, 143 Cromwell, 137 Crowder, G., 129 Crowley, R., 42 Cusano, 50, 51, 86 Cusanus, 36, 38–40, 43–53, 76, 110, 111 Cusanus, Nicholas, 40 Cusanus, Nicola, 82, 83, 86, 87, 90, 94 Cyprian, 6, 34 D Dahl, R., 127 Dahrendorf, R., 143 Darius, 75 de Benavente, T., 68 de Landa, D., 66 de Las Casas, B., 7, 55–57, 60–68 de Lubac, H., 34 de Montaigne, M., 5, 7, 29, 39 de Montaigne, M.E., 71 de Sahagùn, B., 65 de Segovia, J., 44, 49, 50 de Sepúlveda, G., 57 de Sepùlveda, J.G., 8, 55 De Soto, 62, 68 de Vaca, C., 65 de Vitoria, F., 63, 67 Della Casa, A., 145 Demetrius, 27 Democritus, 71 Descartes, 40, 73, 132, 137 Deutscher, I., 145 Dewey, J., 100–104 Diane, 23 Dickens, 98 Diego Columbus, 58 Diego de Landa, 64, 67 Diocletian, 27 Domandi, M, 40 Domingo de Soto, 56, 63 D’Souza, P., 113 Dubois, W.E.B., 104 Duclow, D.F., 49 Dupuis, J., 4, 6, 8, 9, 33, 34, 47, 49, 106–115 Duran, 65 Dyer, T.G., 98 E Eco, U., 143 Einstein, 17 Elagabalus, 20 Eliade, M., 1

Index Emeritus of Kolkata, 113 Emerson, R.W., 100 Enea Silvio Piccolomini, 43, 44, 49, 50 Enrico Cornet, 43 Epicurus, 72 Erasmus, 39, 61 Ernst Cassirer, 40, 53 Esposito, C., 56 Esposito, R., 143 Eugenio Canone, 34 Eugenius IV, 36 Eusebius, 25, 26, 28 F Fa’apu’a, 120 Fallaci, O., 127 Fedriga, R., 34 Ferdinand, K.W., 56, 58, 81 Fernandez, 59 Fichant, M., 85 Frame, D.M., 7, 71 Francesca Ghedini, 25 Francis, 114 Franz, 118, 119 Frederick II, 84 Frederick III, 43, 44 Freeman, D., 120 Freud, 132, 136 Friede and Keen, 60 Frost, R., 9 G Galileo, 31, 112 Galimberti, U., 143 Gandhi, 9, 16–18 Gardel, N., 2, 146 Gassendi, 40 Gates, W., 67 Gautama Buddha, 14 Gellner, E., 125 Gemistus Pletho, 41, 50 George of Trebizond, 50 George-Tvrtković, R., 49 Gerhardt, C.I., 85 Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, 72 Ginés de Sepùlveda, 60 Giordano Bruno, 33 Giovanni Boccaccio, 95 Giovanni Paolo II, 112 Gispert-Sauch, G., 109 Giuliano, 38 Giulio Ghia, 90

149 Giuseppe Bellini, 62 Giuseppe Caruso’s, 32 Givone, S., 143 Godse, N., 18 Goethe, 135 Goetze, J.M., 86, 87 Gohl, J., 28 Gotse, N., 17 Gozzoli, B., 36 Gray, J., 142 Gregory, 25, 31, 34 Griffin, N., 66 Griffiths, 109 Grimm, G.E., 82 Gross, N., 101 Gumilev, L., 145 Gumplowicz, L., 2 Gurion, B., 145 H Hamann, H.G., 131–137, 142, 144 Hardy, H., 129, 131, 138, 139 Hegel, 40, 134 Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, 72 Helvétius, 138 Hemelrijk, E.A., 25 Herder, 5, 118, 123, 133–139, 142, 143 Hernán Cortés, 67 Herodotus, 75 Herskovits, M., 3, 124, 127 Herzen, 137 Hippocrates, 19 Homer, 133 Hopkins, J., 44, 45, 51 Howard, R., 65 Hultzsch, E., 11 Hume, 72–74 Huntington, S.P., 4, 8, 128, 129 I Iesus, 111 Ignatief, M., 138 Isabella, 57 Isidore, 35, 36, 41–43 Izbicki, T., 36, 44 J Jacobi, 135 Jacques, 106 Jacques Dupuis, 26, 33, 34 Jagger, M., 126

150 Jahanbegloo, R., 17, 138, 145 James, W., 8, 100, 104, 119, 140 Jaspers, K., 45, 46 Jenkins, R., 145 Jesus, 19, 22, 23, 28, 33, 45, 47, 67, 68, 86, 107, 115 Joachim of Fiore, 92 John Dearling Haney, 87 John Paul II, 111, 112 John VIII Palaiologos, 37 John XXIII, 108 Johnson, 128 Joshua, 31 Juan, 133 Juan Péres de Tudela y Bueso, 62 Julia, 21–26 Julia Avita Mamaea, 19–21, 25 Julia Aviva Mamaea, 27 Julia Domna, 23 Julia Maesa, 21 Julia Mamaea, 21, 25–27 Julian Cesarini, 41 Justinian, 34, 42, 83 K Kallen, H.M., 8, 99–104, 119, 129 Kant, 26, 93, 132, 133, 143, 144 Keen, B., 60 Kendall, D., 109, 110, 112 Kennedy, 128 Kepler, 40 Kierkegaard, 135, 142 Kiesel, H., 82 Kipp, D., 26 Klibansky, R., 38, 42, 44 Koch, J., 38 Kolvenbach, H.P., 106 König, F., 112, 113 Krauth, L., 26 Kuhn, T., 37 Küng, H., 108, 113 Kurth, J., 129 L Las Casas, 68, 69, 73, 74 Lawrence Bond, H., 46 Leonard, 41 Leonardo, 43 Leonides, 20 Le Saux, H., 108–110 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 6, 8, 40, 82–95

Index Levy, I.C., 49 Lettieri, G., 34 Levick, B., 25 Lévi-Strauss, C., 79 Limonta, R., 34 Lippman, W., 103 Locke, A., 104 Locke, J., 39 Lopez de Gòmara, 73 Losada, A., 60 Lot, Marianne Mahn, 56, 57, 60, 68 Luca d’Ascia, 50 Luedtke, L., 100 Luke, 22, 33 Lukes, S., 125 Luther, 135 Lutkehaus, N., 121 M Machiavelli, 5, 137, 139, 140 Maffettone, S., 143 Magas, 13 Magister, S., 112 Mairet, P., 1 Mancuso, 34 Mao, 137 Marcus Antonius, 26 Marcus Bassianus Alexianus, 27 Marcuse, 127 Margalit, A., 138, 145 Margaret, 120, 121 Margaret (Mead), 3 Maria, 25 Maria Ignazia Danieli, 28 Maria Teresa Fumagalli Beonio Brocchieri, 48 Marx, 132, 136 Mary, 45, 51 Mancuso, V., 26, 34 Matt, 28 Matteo, 28 Matthew, 7, 22, 27, 28, 49 Maurras, 143 Maxentius, 27 Mazzini, 136, 145 McArthur, 122 McGuckin, J.A., 20, 27 Mead, M., 100, 118–121, 123, 126 Meßner, R., 112 Mehemet II, 41 Mehmed II, 50 Mehmet II, 49 Meinecke, 143

Index Meiner Verlag, F., 43 Melloni, A., 112 Mendelssohn, M., 86 Merkel, 128 Mersenne, 40 Michel de Montaigne, 71 Migne, 25 Migne, B., 24–26, 32 Mill, J.S., 39 Milton, 39 Mocteuzoma, 65 Moctezuma, 64 Mohammed, 42, 50, 91 Monchanin, J., 109 Montaigne, 39, 71–79, 118, 120 Montejo, 67 Montesinos, 60 Montesquieu, 5, 73, 138 Montezuma, 73 Moravia, S., 143 More, T., 60, 61 Moschini, M., 40 Moses, 22, 32 Motolinia, 69 Motolinìa, 68, 69 Mott, W., 100 Muhammad, 50 N Navone, J., 106 Niccolò Cusano, 50 Nicholas, 6–8, 26, 36–41, 43, 44, 46, 48, 110 Nichols, J.G., 95 Nicola Cusano, 51 Nicola Cusanus, 38 Nicolai, 44 Nicola Pace, 32 Nicolò Barbaro, 43 Nietzsche, 127, 133 Nikolaus, 40 Noah, 31 Nolte, 143 O O’Collins, G., 106, 109, 112 O’Connell, G., 108 Onfray, M., 74 Origen, 6–8, 20–34, 39, 82, 83, 85–87, 90, 93, 94, 105, 108, 110, 115 Orpheus, 23, 27 Ortiz, 65

151 Ovando, 58 Oviedo, 65 P Palin, S., 127 Pandora, 118 Panikkar, R., 109, 110 Pascal, B., 34, 72–74, 118 Pasqua, H., 44, 49 Pasternak, 145 Paul, 19, 23, 37 Paul VI, 49, 106–108, 112 Pedrazzi, A., 56 Pedro, 57 Pedro de la Renterìa, 59 Percival, H., 83 Peroli, E., 50 Pertusi, A., 43 Petersen, 85 Philip II, 55 Phillips, J., 66 Philo, 22, 30 Philostratus, 23 Piccolomini, 43 Piero della Francesca, 36, 50 Pindar, 75 Pious II, 49 Pius II, 43, 50, 51, 111 Plato, 41, 84, 126, 127, 132, 138, 141 Plotinus, 22, 26, 30 Podhoretz, N., 127 Pope Paul III, 61 Popper, K., 2, 5, 39, 86, 87, 136, 138, 141 Porter, C., 79 Postacioglu, S., 132 Prisciandaro, V., 112 Prosperi, A., 50 Protagoras, 74, 75 Proudhon, 136 Proust, 127 Ptolemy, 13 Ptolemy II Philadelphus, 13 Putin, 145 Pyrrho, 72 R Rahner, K., 34, 108 Rajeev, B., 16 Rat, M., 39 Ratzinger, J., 4, 9, 33, 47, 107, 110–114, 125, 126

152 Rawls, J., 10, 94, 127, 142 Reale, G., 30 Reimarus, H.S., 86 Remann, A.D., 40 Robbins, J.S., 98 Roberts, S., 99 Ronchey, S., 50 Roosevelt, T., 97–100 Rorty, R., 78, 101 Rousseau, 133, 138 Rousselle, A., 20 Rufino, 32 Rufinus, T., 25 Russell, B., 39 Ruth, 121 Ruth (Benedict), 3 S Sahagun, 65 San Domenico, 51 Sanchez, R., 51 Sandrocotto, 14 Santinello, G., 40 Sarkozy, 128 Sarrazin, T., 127 Saverio di Liso, 56, 57, 61, 67 Scalfari, E., 143 Schaff, P., 83 Schelling, 135 Schilleebeckx, E., 108 Schilson, A., 82 Schlumberger, D., 15 Scognamiglio, R., 28 Scott Berg, A., 99 Scott Gosnell Huginn, 73 Sebonde, R., 72, 74 Sen, A., 16, 17, 103 Septimius, 20 Septimius Severus, 20 Sepúlveda, 56, 57, 59, 61–63, 68 Sesto Empirico, 72 Severus Alexander, 27 Sextus Empiricus, 72 Shamir, 145 Sharon, 145 Sigismund, 44 Simonetti, M., 24 Socrates, 38, 39, 46, 78, 126 Sollors, W., 100 Soner, E., 84, 85 Southern, R.W., 49 Spengler, 143

Index Spinoza, 82, 85, 132, 135 Springer, 26 Stafford Poole, C.M., 57, 66 Stenzel, J., 82 Sternhell, Z., 142–144 Stewart, M., 85 Stievermann, J., 100 Strauss, L., 85 Strickland, L., 84 Sumner, W.G., 2, 3 Swami, 109 T Taft, W., 98 Tagore, 16, 17 Taha, Mohammed (Mahmoud), 9 Tamir, Y., 2 Tarsh, J., 145 Terricabras, J.-M., 110 Thapar, R., 14 Thatcher, 145 Thibaudet, A., 39 Thomas, 48 Thrasymachus, 76 Timotius, 90 Todorov, T., 65, 67, 79 Tolstoy, 127, 142 Toribio, 69 Toribio de Benavente (Motolinia), 64, 69 Travanti, E., 85 Trigg, J.W., 28 Trujillo, S., 62 Trump, D., 126 Tyrannius Rufinus, 24, 32 U Uriel da Costa, 86 V Valerian, 27 Vansteenberghe, E., 50 Vattimo, G., 143 Vescovini, G.F., 51 Vico, G., 5, 118, 123, 133, 134, 136–139, 141, 143 Vidal, M., 112 Villari, L., 143 Vivekananda, 17 Volpi, F., 143 Voltaire, 5, 6, 39, 133, 138

Index von Balthasar, H.U., 26, 34 von Balthasar, U., 49 von Hayek, F., 145 von Leibniz, G.W., 6, 8, 34, 82–86 von Mosheim, J.L., 84 von Stuben, V., 44

153 Wittgenstein, 78 Woityla, 106 Wojtyla, 112 Wolfson, J., 145 X Xenophanes, 7

W Wace, H., 83 Walter Andreas Euler, 51 Walzer, M., 100–102, 119, 129, 142 Watanabe, M., 36, 44, 51 Weizmann, 145 Wenck, J., 50 Wiedemann, C., 82 Wilson, W., 99 Winckelmann, J.J., 82

Y Yasukata, T., 87 Z Zacharov, 145 Zangwill, I., 97–100 Zweig, S., 5