Oasis each issue of this review well reminds us that the choice of the title is connected with the famous statement of John Paul II in his address in Damascus at the Omayyade Mosque on 6 May 2001 indicates here a precise pathway. That of an encounter with merciful God, with our brothers and with our sisters within the bond of religion. It will not be useless to remember, as well, that the method with which we want to operate a dialogue to the full in relation to the questions and issues that derive from the process of an unprecedented mixing of peoples, is that of passing humbly through the presence of minorities, who are tested but intensely witness-bearing, made up of our Christian brethren. The effectiveness of this method has already been documented on a number of occasions at the level of its capacity to force we Christians of the West to go beyond the intellectualism that afflicts us endemically, and to provoke our brethren of the East to take on to the full the task of accompanying us to the encounter with religions, and in a particular way with Islam in its various forms.

In the first issue of this review, with a ‘bold metaphor’ we spoke about the ‘inevitable imposition of a kind of hybridisation of civilisations’. And we went on by detailing
this hybridisation in a figurative sense as a ‘mixing of cultures and spiritual facts that are produced when different cultures enter in contact’, concluding, however, that ‘we have in common human nature on which is based the family of peoples’. At a distance by now of almost three years since those first statements, it was necessary to explicitly focus in on this interpretative category. We did this during the annual meeting of the scientific committee, an occasion for an assessment, both theoretical and practical, of the objective limits within which to maintain or forgo the thesis of hybridisation; many of the articles that follow are the outcome of this shared work.
The choice of the category of hybridisation had in me the character of an intuitive in-ventio which was provoked in me by a question posed by a journalist. It was not born from the study of the literature in the field but rather from my trips in Mexico and in particular from a consideration of the strongly hybridised character of the Mexican people. Recourse to this category also arose from the dissatisfaction that the employment of traditional terms such as identity, dialogue, integration, multiculturality and even interculturality continued to produce in me in the face of the many forms that the process takes.

Historical processes first and foremost belong to the order of events and are thus in the final analysis unpredictable and uncontrollable. However, because of the interaction and duration of the factors that make them up, not only can they be better known about but they can also, within certain limits that definitely cannot be established a priori, be directed. The process of the hybridisation of civilisations and cultures as well, albeit with its tumultuous and often violent realisations, demands to be addressed with this positive critical aptitude. In the final analysis it is based upon a dual firm belief to which we have referred in the past on a number of occasions. First of all, the aspiration to the universality and the constitutive unity of the human heart, which is made for truth. The elementary human experience, which is common to all men of all times and cultures, is the most striking confirmation of this. Each man and each woman, every day, lives by affections, by work and by rest. These are the symbols of a universal dynamic language that never ceases to make the members of the human family brothers. And we well know the reason. This and this is the second belief lies in the fact that a Father opened His home by creating the whole of mankind and, lovingly welcoming us from everywhere, He is taking us to His home with open doors. God guides history with a precise design which the contradictory movements of our freedom and the power of freedom of evil cannot, in the end, resist. He wants all men to be saved, He wants them to be ‘sons in the Son’. The human adventure of the freedom of every individual and of every people only demonstrates the profundity of the love of God who chose, in order to communicate Himself, to pass, with the cross of Christ, through finite freedom and constant wandering.
This state of things calls us to the responsibility of the hard work of reading historic circumstances. A reading that can never avoid self-exposition witness. Religions and cultures, in their insuperable polarity of the universal and the particular, are within this unitary design. Indeed, they exalt it in the interplay of differences which through the power of the Trinitarian event exist, ultimately, solely in unity. Unity, and thus universality, is the alpha and the omega of history because it does not fear difference, given that it lives in a perfect and non-contradictory way in the same supreme foundation (the Trinity). From where and why in the final analysis does a religion arise if not from the humble recognition that the mystery of God goes beyond all human understanding? ‘Si comprehendis, non est Deus (Augustine). ‘Incomprehensibile incomprehensibiliter comprehenditur’ (The in-comprehensible [the foundation] becomes understood in-comprehensibly: a formulation taken from a passage of De Trinitate of St. Augustine, echoed by Anselm in his Monologion and by St. Thomas in Summa). This is the way in which the mystery of God attracts us to It as is demonstrated, in a freely-given and splendid way, by the wonders of Christian Revelation. This takes place at the level of personal intelligence but what applies to personal intelligence, which is anyway an ‘incarnated’ intelligence and solidarity-inspired in relation to the whole of humanity, takes place also for cultures and religions, which in essential terms are nothing but a personal and communitarian expression of the self-awareness of a specific people. Thus God after a fashion gives Himself to men, all of whom are marked by an inextirpable religious sense. He gives Himself fully in Jesus Christ, His living and personal Revelation. He, as the Second Vatican Council puts it, comes ‘for all men of good will , in whose heart grace works invisibly’ [GS 22].

This means that Christian Revelation is by its nature meta-cultural As Fides et ratio states in sections 70-72, it can be received in every form of culture and specifically for this reason it cannot be reduced to any specific culture. The Revelation of the One and Triune God is revelation of the Ineffable, it is like the burning bush of Moses that is never consumed, to which one cannot draw near in a direct way without covering one’s face, without taking off one’s shoes. Cultures and religions are like the veil and the shoes of the history of mankind. Nothing more and nothing less. Something that historically cannot be renounced but which is never absolutely definitive. This vision, emphasised authoritatively in Fides et ratio, is extraordinarily important because it is doubly liberating. On the one hand, it makes us understand that the conversatus est cum hominibus of God in Jesus Christ proclaims the infinite mercy of the Absolute in relation to our contingency. This is embraced to the point of the lowest and most secondary cultural and religious expressions of the customs and life of a people, and sent on into eternity. On the other hand, the otherness in which mystery maintains itself opens up to the human experience the critical capacity for purification and possible detachment from cultures and religions, according to the insuperable methodological principle enunciated by Paul: ‘test everything; hold fast what is good’ [I Th 5:21]. The proclaiming of the love-logos in John, the incarnated Son of God, Jesus Christ, very God and very man, allows those who adhere to this in the faith to appreciate to the full cultures and religions specifically, also, by forgoing what shows itself to be perishable.

These notations appear at first sight to be more referable to the category of interculturality than to that of hybridisation. At first sight the category of interculturality seems to allow the more effective construction of a shared area of recognition, beyond the trenches of identity but also behind chaotic hybridisations and dangerous forms of syncretism. Personally, however, I take the liberty of laying stress on a certain preference being given to the category of hybridisation. All the more because, given that it is unthinkable to attribute the description of the process of the mixing of men and peoples to a single category, it is inevitable that the privilege given to one will involve the need to have continual recourse to all those others that can be brought into play so as to be more effectively aware of the process in the attempt to direct it. In this sense no category, even that of hybridisation, can become ‘the’ method by which to address the phenomenon of mixing. It would be grave were we to transfer it from the level of a description of facts to the level of prescriptive direction. And all the more because, like every category, it is heavily prejudged not only biologically but also ideologically.
However, if well maintained within the limits imposed by the specification ‘hybridisation of civilisations and cultures’, it seems to me that despite the risks to which it is exposed it is a category that we should privilege. And to which, after a certain fashion, we should subordinate the others (interculturality, integration, dialogue, etc.) and not vice versa, The reason for this preference of mine comes from the extremely realistic character, which is sanguine so to speak, that the term ‘hybridisation’ expresses. This makes it more capable of reading the historical process underway while leaving it open to necessary rigorous delimitations, something which, for that matter, would be required all the other categories as well. Indeed, in this sense I take the liberty of adding that, while returning often over recent years to this subject, albeit, obviously, not in a rigorously academic way, I have been convinced that even the metaphorical use of this category must be attenuated and that connection with the nexus with its biological genesis must not be lost. Must Christianity I return here to the example of Mexico perhaps fear the fusion of races and peoples that has taken place through the generation of people by parents from different peoples? With all the pain that this involves, does this fact not conserve an echo of that breaking down of the wall that separates so as to make ‘us both one’ to which the Letter to the Ephesians [cf. Eph. 2:14] refers?
Does not the given fact of hybridisation, which implies a recognition of the fact that history is inevitably a place of encounter that often, however, passes by way of clashes, and the fact that peace, which should always be pursued, is given to us, as Paul says, ‘if possible’ [cf. Rm 12:18], tell us that only God is the lord of the future?
Without falling into examples of facile Irenism or ingenuous forms of optimism about a process that calls us to think anew about our cultural and also juridical instruments (passing, to take up the phrase of Prof Cesare Mirabelli, ‘from a hybridisation of laws to a law of hybridisation’), we can, however, be certain that this, at the level of facts, is the road that is outlined before us today. A road that has perhaps not been thought of, one that is certainly difficult, but which we have already begun to walk down. It is of no use, therefore, to tarry in the illusory trenches of an identity, understood as closure, forgetting that the danger for the West lies, rather, in becoming increasingly, as the poet Eliot said brilliantly, ‘straw men’.

Card. Angelo scola, the Patriarch of Venice

]]> http://english.angeloscola.it/2007/06/10/between-the-east-and-the-west-a-mexican-suggestion/feed/ 0 http://english.angeloscola.it/2007/01/16/intercultural-forum-for-studies-in-faith-and-culture-introductory-paper-by-card-scola/ http://english.angeloscola.it/2007/01/16/intercultural-forum-for-studies-in-faith-and-culture-introductory-paper-by-card-scola/#comments Tue, 16 Jan 2007 10:07:48 +0000 ufficiostampa http://english.angeloscola.it/?p=62

On the occasion of his encounter with representatives of Muslim communities in Germany on 20 August 2005, Pope Benedict XVI re-emphasised that “interreligious and intercultural dialogue between Christians and Muslims cannot be reduced to an occasional option. It is in fact a vital necessity, and our future depends to a great extent upon it”.
Here the Pope was re-stating a personal conviction about interreligious dialogue which he had espoused some years before in his celebrated volume entitled Das neue Volk Gottes. Entwürfe zur Ekklesiologie (The new people of God). In this work the theologian Joseph Ratzinger had maintained: “[] it has become an integral part of our faith today that Christianity should have relations with the religions of the world: this is far from being a matter of a mere curiosity that is solely interested in constructing some theory of its own about the destiny of others this destiny is decided by God alone, who does not need our theories (…) But today there is more at stake: the sense of our being able and obliged to believe. The religions of the world have become a question mark for Christianity; faced with them it must start to think afresh about its claims, [] how it can understand them as playing a necessary role in the history of salvation”1.

Having acknowledged the centrality of interreligious dialogue, we next need to determine the few basic criteria to which Benedict XVI refers. They can then be the object of discussion and study in our dialogue. It is not possible in this brief introduction to offer a systematic presentation of these criteria. I will limit myself therefore to stating two; I cannot even hope to be able to offer an organic analysis of them.

a) Religions and good life
The first of these criteria – not in order of importance but because it is the most pacific was particularly and significantly emphasised by the Holy Father in his addresses to Muslim believers. This asserts that dialogue is proper to every believer as a member of the people of God or of the Muslim communities. It derives above all from the fact that every person is de facto a member of a society, and is thereby called to contribute to the good life of the society in which he or she lives. Here the Pope strongly emphasises the need for adhérents of religions to take the same path: “Certainly, recognition of the positive role of religions at the heart of the social body can and must impel our societies to explore more and more deeply their knowledge of the human person and to respect human dignity by placing the person at the centre of political, economic, cultural, and social activity. Our world must come to realise more and more that all peoples are linked by profound solidarity with one another, and they must be encouraged to assert their historical and cultural differences not for the sake of confrontation but in order to foster mutual respect.” (Pope’s speech to the diplomatic corps in the Apostolic Nunciature at Ankara, 28 november 2006).

b) Faith, reason, and religions
The second and more demanding criterion is the one emphasised particularly in the celebrated lecture at the University of Regensburg. It deals with the nexus of faith, reason, and religion and the capacity of human reason to grasp this nexus. In this connection the Holy Father affirmed at Regensburg: “theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences (…) precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith. Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. (…) A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. (…) For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity (…) is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. (…) The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time.” [Official translation from Vatican website]
This long quotation from the Regensburg lecture can help us to determine a few essential elements which can be the object of our dialogue.
The correct relationship between faith, reason, and religions, perfectly comprehensible to human reason when not enslaved to reductionisms, involves a recognition of the two inseparable sides to dialogue, neither of which can be dispensed with.

c) The principle of integration
The first of the above criteria can be identified as the principle of integration. What does it consist in? It can best be described in the words of Hans Urs von Balthasar. The Basle theologian acknowledges the necessity of a comparison of the actual contents of religions at all levels. In this way “something like a scale of recognisable truths will be born, which can be co-ordinated according to the principle: “The one who has more truth is more right and has more rights on his side” (…) The one who turns out to be in a position to integrate the maximum of truth into his vision would have the presumption of a maximally true truth”2. From this point of view it is possible to grasp why the Holy Father proposes to understand interreligious and intercultural dialogue in a unitary fashion. A definition of culture which does not take into consideration the religious dimension constitutive of the ultimate requirements of reason is reductive (Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?)

d) Truth and freedom
The second indispensable aspect of dialogue concerns the truth-freedom nexus. While it is true that the principle of integration is essential, because required by the quest for truth proper to religions, at the same time it does not manage to encompass all of the horizon of truth on its own. By its very nature truth requires the act of a freedom which is ready to give active assent.
The principle of integration cannot but bow to the “freedom of God in His Self-revelation”3, proposing a kind of absolute knowledge of hegelian stamp. The same principle must also respect the truth of the finite freedom of man, which is called actively to welcome the statement of truth rather than merely enduring it! That is why Balthasar himself speaks of truth in terms of “love that gives itself in freedom (“only love is credible”)”4. Pope Benedict also fully took on board this crucial aspect of interreligious dialogue when, in his Message on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Interreligious Encounter of Prayer for Peace (the second of September 2006), he opted to speak expressly of the «language of testimony».Christians and Muslims in particular must bear testimony, in reciprocal dialogue, to their faith in the one God and in the ineradicable distance constantly present in the Islamic faith between Creator and creatures. They must not however undervalue the differences – beginning with the trinitarian monotheism central to Christianity. Defending in continuous open dialogue the freedom of religion in every civil society, Christianity and Islam are then called to testify that every form of violence is by its nature alien to the authentic raison d’être of religion as such.

————-

1. J. RATZINGER, Il nuovo popolo di Dio, Queriniana, Brescia 1971, 391-392. [Das neue Volk Gottes. Entwürfe zur Ekklesiologie, 1972]

2. H. U. VON BALTHASAR, La mia opera ed epilogo, Jaca Book, Milano 1994, 97-98. [My Work: in Retrospect, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993]

3. Ibid., 98.

4. Ibidem.

]]> http://english.angeloscola.it/2007/01/16/intercultural-forum-for-studies-in-faith-and-culture-introductory-paper-by-card-scola/feed/ 0 http://english.angeloscola.it/2005/01/10/the-truth-of-calling-on-god-unites-men-and-cultures/ http://english.angeloscola.it/2005/01/10/the-truth-of-calling-on-god-unites-men-and-cultures/#comments Mon, 10 Jan 2005 08:42:34 +0000 ufficiostampa http://english.angeloscola.it/?p=11 On 27 October 1986 the representatives of the principle religions of the world were convened by Pope John Paul II to prayer together. Twenty years later that action still unlocks a great force of witness. Man perceives the need for his personal commitment to peace and realises that there is a profound connection between the will to power, and thus war, and sin.
Hence the decision to place one’s hope in God.

“To generate a world movement of prayer for peace” [cf. Homily of 25 January 1986]. This is the reason why John Paul II invited the representatives of the principal religions of the world to Assisi on 27 October 1986. It is rather significant that those who accepted the invitation of the Pope were many in number. This was an important confirmation of the fact that in the thousands of million of men who were symbolically present at Assisi through their religious leaders, the belief that the destiny of mankind, and of every individual man, is at stake in the complex and dramatic problem of war, is becoming increasingly rooted.
At this point to whom can man turn? Where can he find the energy to dominate the irresistible irrational forces that accompany the threatening preparations for war, and for nuclear war? Ordinary man, who is distant from the complex and balanced strategies of the few who can decide for war, perceives the need for his personal commitment to be at one with the commitment of other men so that peace can be established. He also realises that there is a profound connection between the will to power, and thus war, and sin. Hence the decision of people to place their hope in God.

Only God’s initiative in relation to man can infuse meekness of hearts, which is the necessary pre-condition for a peaceful life at a personal level, and at the level of intermediate communities and planetary powers.

A Unique and Identical Nature
To place again one’s own hopes for peace in a world movement of prayer and to invest one’s own energies in it means to uphold a very precise conception of peace itself. Indeed, who would not be led to smile when faced with an attempt to erect a bulwark of peace side by side with complex and insecure equilibriums that are built upon weapons endowed with the capacity to destroy the planet: an unarmed movement made up of humble and fervent prayer? A banal observation is sufficient to demonstrate the apparent paradox of this initiative. Has man during his history ever not been able to use objects that he has built at the price of so much hard work and the deployment of so many resources? Will the memory of Hiroshima be enough to halt the logic of the will to power that seems to push contemporary man towards applying to every field the irrational technological imperative: I can, therefore I must?
It is precisely this troubled question that opens up the path to understanding that peace is first and foremost a gift of God. Indeed, peace is not first of all the outcome of a balance between forces that diverge around interests of various kinds. It is, rather, a dimension of the life itself of man his good.
The anthropological foundation of peace can be experienced by every man in his daily existence. In that existence man realises that to obtain peace means to address the truth and the moral task that this comparison inevitably generates. The indissoluble relationship that peace has with truth bears witness to the fact that peace is a gift of God. Indeed, how could man find peace of heart outside the relationship with other men and with the things whose ultimate foundation is God Himself? The anthropological dimension of peace, that is to say being at peace with oneself and with all men, discovers a beginning in God, a beginning of order that governs the very idea of justice and thus of co-existence between men and between peoples. Indeed, only in truth is there freedom, and only in freedom is there the dignity of every man and of every people. This explains why men who share albeit very disparate religious experiences replied with readiness of spirit to the invitation that was extended by John Paul II.
There is no break in the continuum between peace understood as a dimension of the existence of each man and peace understood as the overcoming of the logic of war within a concordant co-existence between peoples. To state that peace is a gift of God means to recognise the unique and identical nature of peace which nonetheless expresses itself in different ways. Without falling into alienating simplistic concepts, one may say that there cannot be peace without the passionate work of every person for truth in itself and the construction of a civilisation of truth and love. War, however, beyond the various theories of experts on its origins, is always a decision taken by the few. This is a profound meaning of the great statement by St. Augustine which John Paul II tirelessly echoes: ‘peace is only obtained through peace and not through war!
But peace is a gift of God entrusted to man. It thus becomes a primary task for the life of every man, a task to which man is called to educate himself. The avoidance of war is possible only through a slow and patient building up of a new mankind. Education is the supreme pre-condition for this edification. St. Francis composed a famous prayer that may rightly be seen as constituting the contents of this pedagogic task: ‘Lord make us the builders of peace; where hatred reigns let us preach love; where offence wounds let us offer forgiveness; where discord hurts let us build peace!’
For Christians, to await the final return of Christ ‘living as far as this is possible in peace’ [cf. Rom 12:18] means to be aware that peace between peoples, and thus the peace of mankind, is only possible beginning with the peace of the person. In addition, Christians know that peace requires a struggle, and a struggle that can always endure a setback. For this reason, God, who is the only creator of peace in the full sense, should be called upon.

A Privileged Condition
The world movement of prayer for peace that John Paul II helped to create has solid roots. Indeed, in the history of peoples and religions prayer for peace has occupied a position of primary importance. This imposing flow of innovations indicates that the daily wish for peace has always been a reason that leads to an exploration of prayer that privileged form of the relationship between God and man. Essentially, it is a request. And a request that is born within the concrete historical circumstances in which it takes place. It is precisely these circumstances that lead man to explore this constitutive dialogue with God. From the core of this request arises the supplication for peace as a privileged condition in which man can know himself, and in which truth, goodness and beauty are experienced dimensions.
But this prayer also arises from the perception, which is dramatically confirmed by history, that man does not know how to give himself peace on his own because on his own he cannot dominate the will to power that sin sows in the heart. Peace, in its personal and planetary dimensions, is structurally threatened by the arbitrariness by which man is tempted to experience his relationship with himself, with God, and with other men.
In the always invoked gift of peace man discovers that He who creates us, creates us moment by moment. We are bound to Him, the tenacious vigour of being. In Him, St. Paul said, ‘we live, and move and have our being’ [Acts 17:28]. This is because we are, to a certain extent, His line. Invoking peace from God in this way becomes the best guarantee of peace. Certainly not because this can exempt us from an incessant and complete work in favour of the creation of the multiform conditions that allow a state of peace but, rather, because God alone can change the heart of man and oppose the peace-inducing power of His love to the will to power.

The Demand for Truth
At Assisi the representatives of the principal world religions found themselves together to pray to the God of peace to preserve mankind from destruction. Every representative brought the riches of his religious tradition and of the peoples that live out that tradition. For this reason, after being welcomed by the Supreme Pontiff, each group went to a pre-established place to pray according to its own religious rite. And secondly, when all the groups were subsequently in the Superior Basilica of St. Francis, each one of them in turn prayed in front of the others who listened in silence. More than praying together, this was a matter of being together to pray. Indeed, each person took part in this great movement of prayer for peace with their own countenance. This fully corresponds to the idea of life of those men who look for peace through prayer as well. In praying for peace, they bear witness to the fact that peace is not obtained without truth. Indeed, prayer, in the final analysis, is a request for truth. For this reason, every authentic religion, when it explores its own identity, increasingly comes to truth. And to objective truth, which is not understood as being on the level of an eclectic and undifferentiated synthesis of different religious identities but is, instead, passionately pursued, recognised and welcomed where its manifests itself.
Peace, therefore, is a value only if it is pursued. Otherwise, like every other value from within the request for truth, from the experience of truth by which every person sacrificed their own identity, it would become an empty word, and thus the path of peace would become impossible. Indeed, it has always been the case that men have called for peace from the four corners of the earth andwage war! What men are profoundly divided about is not peace but truth.
But the desire for peace, which has become even more burning after the still fresh evidence on atomic destruction and beginning with the thousands and thousands of daily testimonies of new and more murderous instruments of war, can be the great path to which today God calls all men to truth, which is the irremovable foundation of a lasting peace.
For this reason, the meeting at Assisi, at the very moment when it became prayer, was an event of culture and civilisation.
It was an event of culture because prayer itself receives from form the specific nature of the encounter with God and one’s brethren. And thus in prayer, too, this cultural form is communicated. In this sense the meeting at Assisi was a symphony in which one voice was in an ordered way harmonised with the other voices, precisely because it was the same voice!
The yearning that cannot be extinguished for peace that brought together the representatives of different religions also became a sign of civilisation. It was, in fact, an appeal directed towards all men but above all to the powerful of this world to recognise that the moral advance of humanity, which cannot but rest upon peace, requires an overcoming of ideologies. Indeed, ideologies hinder man from receiving the truth given by the nature of each person, and thus after a certain fashion something which in an embryonic way can be experienced by everyone but which is above all revealed by he who came to bring ‘peace among men with whom he is pleased’ [Lk 2:14].

Card. Angelo Scola Patriarch of Venice