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/2006/09/01/todays-and-tomorrows-scenarios-for-competitive-strategies-religions-and-politics/ http://english.angeloscola.it/2006/09/01/todays-and-tomorrows-scenarios-for-competitive-strategies-religions-and-politics/#comments Fri, 01 Sep 2006 14:15:50 +0000 ufficiostampa http://english.angeloscola.it/?p=190 1. The “Gods Are Back”
With the end of the age of utopias, the end to what Lyotard refers to as the age of the “Grand Narratives” , the growing influence of religions and sects around the world, especially of Islam, is at odds with the view that prevailed after 1945, namely that religion’s social and political relevance in the modern world would wither away. Then there were expectations that the process of secularisation would usher in the so-called mundane world. Instead, we are witnessing the Sacred making an almost furious comeback . All the tragic conflicts that have inflamed every corner of the globe after the fall of the Berlin Wall are proof enough of the naiveté behind the idea that in the 21st century the Western Way of Life would spread globally under the sign of “an awkwardly-labelled Humanity with a capital H” .
In order that this overly brief remark about the socio-political importance of religion not be seen as uncritically biased, it is necessary to take into account the objectively dialectical nature of the relationship between religion and modernity. If we want to respect the history of Europe, whose mind has tended to think globally, we must explicitly look at the dialectical between Christianity and Modernity?
What is it?
Let us begin at one extreme of this dialectical relationship. Today we can dispassionately say that modernity led Christianity to rigorously explain the consequences caused by the necessary and sound process of differentiation of religion from politics, a distinction that was already announced in the Gospels when Jesus said: “Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God” (Mt: 22, 21). Modernity, especially with the advent of the Enlightenment, held in check a certain ideological drift in the Christian experience itself, a drift due to a doctrinaire point of view that reduced revealed truth to just a “system of conceptual propositions from which one could deduce individual aspects of reality”. This reductionism denied reality’s historical, unpredictable and perplexing nature and underestimated the importance of the relationship of truth to freedom. Quite a few occurrences connected to the inculturation of Christianity in Europe-and there are no reasons to disagree with this-are proof of this ideological failure.
From early modernity, the one-way vision that governed the relationship between truth and freedom found itself progressively in crisis. This vision correctly claimed that freedom had to provide space for all the truth, but it did not clearly show how to integrate the truth of freedom into the meaning of freedom for the truth, which implies the objective recognition of freedom of conscience, when the latter is correctly understood.
Nonetheless, and this is the other extreme of the dialectical relationship between Christianity and modernity, we must stress that if European modernity was, in a certain sense, able to force Christians to accept this greater authenticity, it was able to do so thanks to the essential and permanently vital core of the Christian faith itself. This core was passed on, from Jerusalem to Rome, by way of the unbroken Christian traditio, and continues to this day to be a key resource for contemporary Europe but also other parts of the world.
I am referring here to the principle of difference in unity which lives in the mystery of the Trinity and passed into History because of the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ and became, by analogy, the principle of understanding and positively valuing all differences. At both individual and collective levels, this difference is not only tolerated but it is actually extolled because it is held in unity by that Truth-which is an event before it is ever a doctrine and ethics (cf. Deus caritas est n. 1)-that reaches into the farthest point (sort of a Ultima Thule) of the human experience, so that even the most radical difference is not allowed to degenerate into something that would more or less violently dissolve society.
In this context, the practice and theories of democracy evolved in the West in such a fashion that democracy came to be understood as an ensemble of citizens, intermediary organisations and peoples living together, freely and in an orderly fashion. In so doing, the latter gave rise to a civil society adequately served by the state.

2. Religion removed from the public sphere
And yet we cannot forget one important fact that, historically, came out of this dialectical relationship between modernity and Christianity in Europe. The precious outcome of this relationship, i.e. the truth of freedom of conscience and thus a satisfactory distinction between religious faith and political action, came with a hefty price, namely the removal of religion from the public sphere of civil society. A perceptive historian wrote that with modernity “religion starts to be viewed from the outside. It is categorised as a custom or something that is historically contingent. As such it is seen as opposed to reason or nature. ” Starting in the 16th century, various alternatives to the former relationship between religion and politics appear. There are attempts to reduce all confessions to one (integralism/fundamentalism); to find a supposedly universal natural religion that predates historically-contingent religions (naturalism of the Enlightenment); to attribute to “politics” the same function as a catalyst for citizens, intermediary organisations, civil society and nations once performed by religion (totalitarianism); and finally to subscribe to the notion of “provisional morality”, i.e. to scepticism (agnostic liberalism).
This fundamental process had a two-edged historical outcome. On the hand, religion came to be politically used in either an authoritarian way (as state religion) or liberal way (as a socially valuable tool) . On the other, religion was restricted to the private sphere, irrelevant and inappropriate for the public sphere. What modernity failed to do was to consider religion’s public relevance in and of itself.

3. Etsi Deus non daretur?
Quickly moving to the present, we can see that the rapid development of today’s civilisation of networks has transformed the nature of political participation and humbled intermediary organisations. In Europe, for more and more people a proper relationship between an individual’s fundamental rights and the state can only exist if other points of reference and mediation are excluded-only this way is a society deemed democratic and pluralistic. In this context, religion is seen as an “unwelcome third party” to be tolerated in so far is it is confined to a person’s private life. This view corresponds to the current phase of globalisation which focuses on cultural neutrality whereby in modern Western democracies all religions are “equal” (in-difference). The public sphere is said to be neutral as far as religions are concerned (…). All religions are asked to see their own universalism as a private affair, [at best] limited to their own sphere of influence. ”
This outlook is best exemplified by Kelsen’s well-known assertion that the “appreciation of rational science and the tendency to keep it free from any metaphysical or religious intrusion are traits of modern democracy “.
In very different ways countries like France, Italy and Spain have been the scene of heated discussions with regard to secularism. In each the prevailing view has been that the modern state ought to be secular and neutral. But we must really understand what this formula means. In the more passionate interpretations, the term “secular” does not only mean “a-religious” but sometimes even rhymes with “antireligious”.
Scholars do point out that in the United States, expressing one’s religiosity in public life is an accepted practice, albeit not a predominant one. The Founding Fathers somewhat tried to build “a secular state without a secular civil religion” . In this country, the political sphere is clearly separate from that of religion, but it is open to the latter because it is aware that government alone cannot fashion ethical citizens. On the contrary, ethical citizens are often inspired by religion to favour democracy. American Evangelicals, whether Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals, whose appeal is currently reaching into places like Latin America (Brazil), Asia, Africa, and even in predominantly Muslim regions, are able to go quite far in integrating their faith and the American culture. Whatever we may think of these faith-based movements, and we should not underestimate their appeal, they do seem to confirm that “an important lesson in the American experience of religious diversity within a democratic political and social structure is that its religious foundation of culture is broad enough to accommodate those attempting to live according to one of the three great Abrahamic faith traditions while preserving individual freedom of belief and practice [as well as the freedom not to believe or practice].”
Kelsen’s thesis is thus coming under closer critical scrutiny today not only by people like David Novak, an American Jew who argues that “religious people are capable of building a secular order based on their own revelation-based traditions” , but also by those in Europe who are calling for a fresh approach to pluralistic democracy. Thinkers like Böckenförde and Habermas for instance, who, each in his own way, argue that whilst the modern state can only be based on a consensus over procedures, this does do not exclude that “the liberal secular state can also be sustained by normative premises that it alone cannot generate” .
Isn’t forcing believers to act etsi Deus non daretur, by not mentioning the relationship between rationality and the ultimate divine origin of a given rule (norm), ultimately a price to high to pay in order to live in society ? Are we actually sure that this omission isn’t depriving society of something good?
Ultimately, it is not possible to exclude, at least in principle, the notion that religion, too, can play a role in the public sphere.

4. Religions, social capital and “cultural métissage”
In particular we must ask ourselves: Can the principle of difference in unity, whose roots are Christian, ensure that democracy is real, now and in the future, in Europe as well as elsewhere? A democracy that not only can face rapid intercultural and inter-religious transformations, but can even turn the world’s new traits into cultural resources ? I think so. And I am certain that there is nothing nostalgic about it; it does not in any way, shape or form imply returning to bygone models of Christianity.
With regard to this I would like to say a few things.
First, I believe that recognising the religious dimension in civil society can fill the gaps left, among other things, by the liberal view of religion as a private matter.
Above all democracy needs trust and shared ideals without which it turns into a set of purely procedural conflict-resolution mechanisms between opposing interests. Von Kutschera realised this when he said that even ethics, whose main task is to “mediate between interests and moral needs, cannot motivate men’s desires and interests. Ethics need to be more grounded in anthropology, the more so since markets and economies are increasingly globalised. The fact that today there is no other form of democracy than the procedural model not only does not rule out Böckenförde’ thesis but rather proves it. In other words, democracy needs a certain societal background.
Secondly, it is by now obvious that marginalising religion from the social sphere is unacceptable to those non European cultures for which religion is essentially a public matter . In this sense, modern solutions to the relationship between religion and politics become obsolete as a result of the sometimes violent historical evolution of the process-I stress process-of civilisational and cultural métissage. This expression, which tentatively appeared some 20 years ago in anthropology departments and is by many still perceived apprehensively and with suspicion, has a broader application, in my opinion, than terms like identity and integration .

5. A public sphere religiously qualified
What new role can religions play at this point in history, at least in the West? First of all, I think we ought to recognise the need for a religiously qualified public sphere that is well separate from that of the state and quite distinctive within civil society itself .
This means that in its attitude towards religion, the state must shift from one of passive tolerance to one of “active openness”, in which religion’s public relevance is not reduced to whatever public space religions have negotiated with the state. For their part, religions must abandon their self-centred or fundamentalist attitude and engage in direct exchange with other religions and cultures so as to create an arena of dialogue in which religions can express their views and be heard in public debates over cultural values.
In other words, “a religiously qualified public sphere exists within a civil society defined as the meeting place where people engage in social exchanges (market-oriented or socially integrative), not deprived of their religious self but defined by it, and who, through their mutual interaction, give value to their respective selves as part of a democratic political system that regulates the presence of different religions in the aforementioned spheres of exchange. [A religiously qualified public sphere] is the place in which religions themselves elaborate social relations by acting outside of their own immediate realm through the influence they exert on social actors.”
Such a proposal recognises the fact that, “increasingly, freedom is viewed as a relational phenomenon” in tune with a one-to-one relationship between truth and freedom that is still being explored, since early modernity, in various modern cultures.

6. Religions and the Good Life
We must therefore imagine in more rigorous terms the type of state that can create an adequate space for a civil society that is truly plural, a state that is not afraid of the inevitable conflicts that will occur in such a society, but one that is able to positively regulate them. The type of state that I have in mind is not “detached” (i.e., falsely neutral); it is a state that is openly in the service of its citizens and their needs (like freedom, happiness, fulfillment) but without a specific worldview (Weltanschauung). And whilst fully respecting democratic procedures, it assimilates the values that underlie democratic life itself (civil and political liberties) to which intermediary groups give rise. I am neither ignoring nor am I worried by the fact that history teaches us that values are rooted in specific traditions which institutions certainly shape but which are in turn shaped by them. What I mean is the notion of “dominant traditions” similar to what Habermas had in mind when he spoke of “better opinion” . In the same way that someone arguing for an authentically formal and procedural democracy is not necessarily taking a “relativist” position, so anyone who thinks that the same procedural focus endowed with its own validity must be understood in axiological terms is not automatically a “fundamentalist”. I speak on purpose about the “axiology” and not the “foundations” of a procedural democracy, because this way we can refer to a “pre-political” level, one that is also religious in nature, and something that is quite useful for implementing human rights legislation and make democracies work. On another occasion I dealt with the same issues, when I spoke of “new secularism” in relation to the Italian situation .
Fundamental rights-if viewed in terms of the needs that constitute everyone’s basic experience and in terms of the values of living together in a democracy which are rooted in the particular history of a given people-represent the positive features of a truly secular society. In such a society, the state organises (and supports) the ways different identities and religions live side by side. The state I have in mind is not a state conceived as an empty and unremarkable container that one fills as one pleases (this is a weak and for all intents and purposes an unworkable proposition), certainly not one that is confessional, but rather one where everyone can make his or her own contribution to the common good. And this can only occur as part of an inevitable and respectful mutual process of give and take and recognition that preserves the real nature of power, which is and ought to be service to the people, even when the state must resort, as Kant put it, “to the use of force to uphold the law”.
It is no accident if it is the only proposition that, by avoiding the opposite dangers of unrestrained individualism and oppressive collectivism, can adequately take into account the “relational” nature of power . None of us can conceive ourselves outside of a relationship. The “individual” does not exist as a separate atom, self-sufficient and thus unrelated to others. We always exist in relation to a “different other” . Each one of us is both “oneself” (identity) and the “other” for “someone else” (difference). In actual terms, as Ricoeur pointed out, this relationship expresses itself in a process of dialogic confrontation and recognition (whose flip side is non recognition) which are the bases for sensible co-existence and legitimate rule .
As mutual confrontation and recognition evolve, the tie between identity and difference, in addition to being important for democracy, appears as something indissoluble. From this perspective the relationship between religion and politics only requires respect for religions’ nature as concrete universals. This nature is no less important than the universality of fundamental rights, which are often too abstract when they are reduced to a simple list of poorly understood and historically contextualised rules.
A civil religion alone is not enough for a sound democracy, nor can democracy rely on religions that are simply privatised. What democracy needs to do is to fully recognise that personal faith is inseparable from group ties (religions), which operate as independent actors in the public sphere and offer everyone without distinctions their own proposals for the good life to individuals and society in a process of exchange of ideas that is open, democratic, secular, public and plural.