Modernism and religious sense
Tradition is the most modern of modern
do not have to keep everything you did yesterday, but transmit the essential
Within the series of meetings organized by the Cultural Center of Milan on "The desire and the contemporary man. Confrontations on the evening of Thursday, March 3rd in Milan, Aula Magna Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, held a conference which we anticipate large chunks.
Fabrice Hadjadj
The modern era of Péguy still had human ambition. Now all this is over. The century that has elapsed between the time of Péguy and our time has created the conditions for a complete disappearance of humanism. The novelty lies in the consciousness of the finiteness no longer individual but collective human species. The twentieth century, Kolyma, Auschwitz and Hiroshima (I use especially of proper names because common names are not sufficient to define these events), the twentieth century was the era dell'apoteosi at the same time and then the death of ideologies of progress. Why? Because progress has been in power, and instead of creating a more just society, has produced totalitarianism. So, as Rimbaud says in A Season in Hell : "What is a modern world, if it is to invent similar poisons." If you then put on top of these disasters that Darwinism explains how humanity is nothing but a DIY due to chance and the competition becomes difficult to believe in the future, history and posterity.
This is why we are witnessing a crisis of modernity and we're going to the post-human. A post-human that can take three forms: a technocratic, theocratic and a label.
The first was to create a superman. In the second case is promoted a fundamentalist who crushes the human culture, while the third witness a return to so-called Mother Nature. In each case we have lost all hope for the old man, who promoted the modern world. We no longer believe in continuity, in the culture of long duration. Technocracy, as efficiency demands, it crushes us immediately. The theocracy propels us in the afterlife. Environmentalism us back to the natural cycles.
These three mistakes are opposed to each other, but just to make us fall more easily into the trap. Denouncing one is always in danger of falling into another. Thus the devil played on all sides of the table with a broom.
Questa situazione nuova di crisi della modernità ha tuttavia alcuni vantaggi notevoli: sposta le barriere di un tempo. Il figlio della Chiesa e il partigiano dei Lumi possono diventare alleati di fronte a questa distruzione massiccia della cultura umana. Il moderno può ammettere che la tradizione cristiana aveva qualcosa di buono.
D'altronde - e ve lo accenno solo al volo - la prima occorrenza conosciuta dell'aggettivo basso latino moderni si incontra nel V secolo e serve a designare i cristiani. Ecco perché abbiamo assistito in Francia a una certa difesa della storia e della tradizione da parte di intellettuali piuttosto di sinistra (Max Gallo, Régis Debray, Alain Finkielkraut, e così via).
How could this new alliance? We could explain it through a logical and simple psychological trick: in front of the post-modern, which is the common enemy, modern and traditional supporters formed a common front.
But there is a deeper reason, linked to language. The love of words, the taste of the language, the certainty that is not a means of communication but a place of truth and communion, a place where the world gathers and therefore we must strive to heal and to speak well, this is what unites ancient and modern against with the technocrats, the bombs of theocrats and nitrites fanatics environmentalists.
The language has this singular in its essence is at once traditional and modern. It is traditional because the language has always been: I speak because someone spoke to me and speak a language whose name refers to a nationality and then to a community that exists through time. The language, however, is at the same time modern, because it is through it that you can say "I", which you can say here and now, you can protest, you can invent new forms.
We do not speak only to repeat, but to sing and then to vary, renew the language to resonate in a new way. "Sing to the Lord a new song," says David King. This is the essence of the word allows us to feel the old commandment and sing a new song, and it is received and then again be given in a unique and personal.
What is particular to a real news is that it does not need to break with what precedes it to succeed. If it was only for new avant-garde spirit or strength, belong to the mutilated form of modernity which we call "fashion". Fashion news suggests a break with what precedes.
why these changes become old stuff soon: more new face on the horizon and fashion goes out of fashion. The news keeps its freshness and youth do not stray from what precedes it, but closer to the source. It is not eccentric original. This means that you do not leave the center, which tries to find a place not only in relation to what preceded it (which is to distance or to approach). The news turns to the source.
speak in a truly new, as did Dante, for example, does not mean to break but to communicate with the origin of the word, and this source lies in a double silence: the silence of death and the silence of the Lord. All those who spoke with a new force, all those who sang a new song, they were able to come between the anxiety before the silence of death and hope in front of the silence of the Lord: they have gone through hell and are been blinded by heaven. The fact remains that the modernity of the language is secondary compared to its tradition. You must first learn the rules before playing. One who attacks his parents can only do so if they have first heard and if it is to them that still turns.
Yet the tradition of the language is appropriate to its modernity: the learning of rules is not an end in himself, but according to a new game to play. We do not come into the world to repeat what they told us our parents, let alone to insult, but to talk to them, to respond, to enrich our great choral melody of life.
This structure of the word, both modern and traditional, provides insight into the theory of Romano Guardini The end of the modern era. According to Guardini modernity has essentially taken over by Christianity some really educated to revolt against Christianity itself. On the basis of the revelation of the dignity of a person is individualism. On the basis of the truth of Free will is built liberalism. On the basis of the need for social justice to build socialism, and so on.
Modernity Gospel recognizes such a flower, pick it up and puts it in a jar. The flower is actually enhanced, so they seem even more wonderful. The isolation gives it a special light, a scent entrancing, almost to the thinking that the flower has nothing to do with his roots. The truth is that it is condemned to rot.
Oblivion can only work for a certain period of time long enough for the mask of progressivism get to be only a substitute della speranza teologale.
Ma cosa vediamo oggi? Ve l'ho detto: il crollo dei progressismi e, al contrario, la moda di un catastrofismo generalizzato, e quindi la crisi radicale della modernità. Sarebbe dovuta arrivare prima o poi, poiché tutte queste nozioni recise dalle loro radici e dal loro sole non possono fare altro che perdere a poco a poco la linfa vitale. Paradossalmente oggi la modernità può essere salvata solo facendo ricorso alla tradizione, e più specificamente alla tradizione ebraica e cristiana.
Le speranze mondane sono morte. È impossibile partire da queste e riuscire ancora a credere in una via d'uscita per l'umano. Ma la speranza teologale can not die. It does not depend from the future: it depends on the eternal. I always remember this: when I feel that by the end of the world will not miss a single year, will not give up to love my wife, to have another child with her, to do my other five children discover the poetry of Dante ... Because I know that this life is not for everyone because they have a future but have eternal life.
Modernism, the modernity that is claiming to be based on itself, so it can only destroy modernity. It is always blown away by the post-human. Because you can not play without first having learned the rules. In an instant the protest goes out and gives way to the program code or toward the animal, because we came from the tradition and the tradition of the word. From this moment to revolt against modernity, modernism and modernization systematic if it wants to remain alive and human. Must regain its tradition, that tradition is echoed in the commandment of the Bible: "Sing to the Lord a new song."
Tradition is not opposed to modernity as well as you might imagine, since the tradition is neither conservative nor fascination with the past.
What oriented towards the destruction of all tradition has been its historical knowledge for its own sake: propagating information from the past, only to put them on display. Nothing is further from the tradition of a folk museum. The truth is that the tradition does not consist of a mere transmission of knowledge: it is the transmission of a living.
I can know with great precision everything that Jesus did and I even know the Bible by heart, I can even be the editor of a great museum of Christianity. But this relationship with the museum is not a relationship with tradition: the culture has nothing to do with the cult. The scholar knows the tradition perfectly, but does not live in the tradition.
The old lady who prays Jesus lives in the tradition, even if he knows far as he knows the tradition of the scholar. In Jesus' temptation in the wilderness, Satan quotes from memory Deuteronomy, proving to be an expert in historical-critical exegesis: nell'erudizione lives to avoid being in the tradition alive. On the other hand, the tradition is not a conservative. A good example is given by the motu proprio of John Paul II, Ecclesia Dei adflicta . This text notes the schism caused by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and what we call "fundamentalist" or "traditionalists."
What is the principle of this schism? Not love for tradition, says John Paul II, but the love of conservatism, which is a form of preservation that he wants to keep everything absolutely intact, and thus petrified by default to keep alive. Did you know: If you want to keep all of a living being, you can not keep him alive and you have to freeze it. "The root of this schismatic act can be identified in an incomplete and contradictory notion of tradition.
Incomplete, because it does not sufficiently take into account the living character of tradition - as the Second Vatican Council clearly taught - progress in the Church the assistance of the Holy Spirit. " Traditionalism is opposed to the tradition perché uccide l'organismo vivente per divenire un adepto del fossile. La vera tradizione non consiste nel conservare tutto di ciò che si faceva ieri, ma nel trasmetterne l'essenziale. E per poterlo trasmettere occorre saper riconoscere i segni del tempo e quindi adattarsi a certe nuove condizioni di trasmissione. Josef Pieper scrive con forza: "Una coscienza autentica della tradizione ci rende liberi e indipendenti di fronte a coloro che pretendono di esserne i "guardiani". Può accadere che questi famosi "difensori della tradizione", proprio per il fatto che si limitano a forme storiche, ostacolino quella che invece è la vera e necessaria trasmissione (che non può avvenire se non con forme storiche mutevoli)".
The real tradition is a living relationship with the mystery, to the extent that this report is received and transmitted, as the word and life, through word and life, from the outset. Tradition is therefore even more critical, because it is compared with that which escapes the criticism, with what is beyond us, with what makes us more questions than we do ourselves, with what he calls us to respond more to what we know .
Also in this tradition is the most modern of modernity: it is always on, to the extent that it is based on hope, not in the near future holds, but on the eternal, and therefore on what that rises even after the end of time. This tradition is still the youngest of modernity, because tradition requires that fathers are also and above all the children and then the children have not had the initiative of the word, did not invent the life, are mainly received.
The Oedipus complex exists only out of tradition. The revolt of the Titans only exists outside the tradition. Within the tradition the child has no reason to kill the father because he discovers that his father is also a son, and every pure originality, every true genius, is always subsidiary. Why be a child of the Lord is infinitely greater than to be padre per un breve momento.
Lo scrive anche Josef Pieper a proposito della speranza: "La gioventù dell'uomo che aspira all'eterno è per sua natura indistruttibile. Non è esposta né all'invecchiamento né alla delusione".
(©L'Osservatore Romano - 4 marzo 2011)
