Oasis: interpreting tradition at the time of metizaje of civilisations. On the inevitable cultural interpretation of faith

“Oasis is called to an exploration of the role of traditions in the time of the mestizaje of civilisations as a place of the inevitable interpretation of every faith. These interpretations are the subject of a continual narrative and dialogue between the subjects that live in our plural societies. Without, however, ever forgetting the ultimate assent required by Truth, because, as Pascal observes, ‘however much such antiquity may have force, truth must always have the better of it, however much it is of recent discovery, since it is always older than all the opinions that have been held of it’”.

Here some excerpts of the card. Angelo Scola’s contribution.

Scientific Committee of the Oasis International Foundation
Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, 22-23 June 2009

INTERPRETING TRADITION AT A TIME OF MESTIZAJE OF CIVILISATIONS
ON THE INEVITABLE CULTURAL INTERPRETATION OF FAITH

“A year after the stimulating meeting in Amman, which was concerned with religious freedom considered even to the extreme foundation of freedom to convert, we are reunited again today in the magnificent seat of the Giorgio Cini Foundation in order to analyse the subject of traditions and their interpretation.
The growth, at a numerical level as well, of those taking part in this scientific committee and their variety of religious backgrounds and loyalties bears witnesses to how deeply is felt the need for a place of shared encounter. It was precisely the perception of this need that inspired, by now six years ago, the idea of a reality of communion that would unite Christians of the East and of the West in a work involving the reading of the historical circumstances in which to actuate the increasingly urgent relationship with Muslim believers.
Whilst I believe that by now the goodness of that initial insight has been ascertained in the light of the fruits that it has produced in recent years, there remains in front of us, always open because inexhaustible, the task of refining our comprehension of a historical process that calls on us in an increasingly imposing way.

An Ineluctable Horizon: the Mestizaje of Civilisations
This year’s title, ‘Interpreting Traditions at a Time of Mestizaje of Civilisations’, contains in its second part an important clarification. Our analysis, indeed, seeks to develop by taking into account a context evoked by the category of ‘mestizaje of civilisations’.
To the benefit of those of our guests who are joining the deliberations of Oasis for the first time, I would like to observe that through this term, which has a explicative and not a prescriptive meaning, we seek to read the process of the unprecedented mixing of peoples that is in front of everyone’s eyes. The qualification ‘of civilisations’ by which we connote the term ‘mestizaje’ is often not seen in all its delimiting range perhaps because the term ‘mestizaje’ produces at the outset a certain counter reaction.
For us, the mestizaje of civilisations – and I would like to stress this clarification – is not a political programme: its circumstantial character, indeed, excludes the possibility of erecting it into a goal to be pursued down the historical future. At the same time, it is something more than a simple description of a process (as an enunciation of a physical law or a detached observation of a biological phenomenon could be) because it is offered as a horizon that is able to provide space for all the categories that are necessary to creating the conditions by which such a process could become an opportunity for a broader mutual acknowledgement on the part of all the actors in the field. I am referring to the subjects of identity, otherness, difference, relationship, interculturality, integration, etc. Decisive weight amongst these categories should certainly be given to the factor of ‘tradition’.
(…)
As we have always done, we will take advantage of the specific expertise of each participant, but for the sake of a shared work which, taking them as given, goes beyond them. In this sense, our coming together constitutes a practical illustration of that unity of forms of knowledge which today is increasingly seen as necessary. It constitutes the great challenge and the reason for existence of the Studium Generale Marcianum, in whose cultural project Oasis participates to the full.
First of all – by now this is something that we know – we are dealing with unity of the subject of knowledge in its capacity to host the whole of the real, but because of the special configuration of the disciplines that involve us in Oasis this reflection can attempt to express itself also as unity of the various forms of expertise, albeit in obvious respect for the methodologies that are specific to each form of expertise. In this field, in fact, the building of humanistic knowledge does not appear to be as yet imploded.

Although one of the finest fruits of Oasis for me and for many other people has been the possibility of getting to know better the fascinating Islamic civilisations and the rich Easter Christian traditions, it is evident that we cannot think that we will all dedicate ourselves full time to Islamic studies or to the study of Eastern Christianities or to the theology of religions. Is this a limit destined to condition the future developments of Oasis? Decidedly not, because the specific object of our work is not directly the study of Islam or of Eastern Christianities, nor even inter-religious dialogue stricto sensu, but a reading of the process of the mestizaje of civilisations, in which both Islam and Eastern Christianities come into play, as indeed do the various traditions of the West. This is a process that concerns all of us in the first person, beyond specialisations, so important has it become. I, for example, can touch it with my hands as a bishop every time that I make a pastoral visit in any Venetian parish.

The Implications of Faith
If faith is inevitably destined to become culture because it always offers an interpretation of the real, and culture in its turn interprets faith, the dialogue between the subjects involved in the mestizaje of civilisations will take place first of all, even though not solely, at this level, in an adventure of reciprocal edification. The subject is of capital importance for a plural society which seeks to promote the fundamental practical good of being together.
The dual risk is that of falling into deductivism, on the one hand, or into extrinsicism, on the other. Giving way to deductivism, from the principles of faith would flow in an automatic way certain applications, certain consequences. In opposite fashion, in giving way to extrinsicism, culture would be the field of the ‘human’ on which faith would then be grafted from the outside as a superadditum. Both these paradigms have experienced at different times broad success within the Christian world but by now they display with clarity their limits.
On the ridge between the two fronts is, in my opinion, located a more suitable pathway. Not mechanical applications, nor extrinsic juxtapositions, but dynamic implications. An implication, as is known, is an aspect contained – implied – in a reality that precedes it. If we talk about the implications of the Christian Mysteries, the primary reality is the Christian Mysteries, but these mysteries according to the sacramental logic of Revelation (FR, n. 13) are dynamically embodied in the present of the subject who lives them. They this bear upon how men conceive themselves, on the way in which society is conceived, and on the way in which the relationship with creation is conceived, and they are subject in their turn to the inevitable cultural interpretations that this subject practices. The commitment of a Christian as regards people, society and the cosmos is not a consequence of these Mysteries. And yet it does not immediately coincide with the Christian Mysteries as such: it is implied in them. Indeed, the Christian Mysteries are not given once and for all in the form of a package of dogmas from which to draw opportune consequences; they are dimensions of the event of Jesus Christ which constantly proposes itself anew to the freedom of man, which is always historically located.

Tradition and Truth
Here, therefore, is outlined the pathway that I have tried to follow through brief points: Oasis is called to an exploration of the role of traditions in the time of the mestizaje of civilisations as a place of the inevitable interpretation of every faith. These interpretations are the subject of a continual narrative and dialogue between the subjects that live in our plural societies. Without, however, ever forgetting the ultimate assent required by Truth, because, as Pascal observes, ‘however much such antiquity may have force, truth must always have the better of it, however much it is of recent discovery, since it is always older than all the opinions that have been held of it’.