Dear Carlo Maria Martini,
I hope you won’t think me disrespectful for addressing you by the name you bear, without reference to the robe you wear. Take it as an act of homage and of prudence. Homage, because I’ve always been struck by the way the French avoid using reductive designations such as Doctor, Your Eminence, or Minister when they interview a writer, an artist, a political figure. There are people whose intellectual capital comes from the name they sign their ideas with. This is how the French address someone whose own name is his principal title: “Dites-moi, Jacques Maritain”; “Dites-moi, Claude Lévi-Strauss.” Using a persons name is a way of acknowledging an authority that he would have had even if he had he not become an ambassador or a member of the French Academy. If I were to address Saint Augustine (and again you shouldn’t mistake the extravagance of my example for irreverence), I would not call him “lord bishop of Hippo” (because there were other lord bishops of Hippo who came after Saint Augustine), I’d call him “Augustine of Tagaste.”
Act of prudence, I also said. Indeed, what has been asked of the two of us could prove awkward — an exchange of opinions between a layman and a cardinal. It might appear that the point is for the layman to solicit opinions from the cardinal in his role as a prince of the Church and a shepherd of souls. Such a thing would constitute an injustice, to the one appealed to as well as to his listener. Better that we carry out this dialogue the way the newspaper that brought us together intended — an exchange of ideas between free men. What’s more, by addressing you this way, I mean to underscore the fact that you are considered a leader of intellectual and moral life, even by those readers who are not committed to any belief or teaching other than that of reason.
Having resolved the problems of etiquette, we are left with those of ethics. I believe this is what we should be primarily concerning ourselves with during the course of our dialogue, as the goal is to find some points of commonality between the Catholic and secular worlds (and I wouldn’t think it realistic in these pages to open a debate on the filioque). But even here, as I am called on to make the first move (always the most awkward), I don’t think we need to focus on the immediate questions of the day — which may be where our positions would most immediately be too divergent. Better to aim high, and only touch on subjects that, while topical, have their roots far enough back in history, and have been a source of fascination, fear, and hope for all members of the human family over the course of the last two millennia.
I’ve uttered the key word. We are indeed at the end of the second millennium; and I do hope it is still politically correct in Europe to use a calendar based on an event that has had — and even an adherent of another religion, or of no religion, may allow me this — a profound influence on the history of our planet. The approach of this terminal date can’t help but evoke an image that has dominated twenty centuries of thought: the Apocalypse.
Vulgate history teaches us that the final years of the first millennium were obsessed by the notion of the end of time. It’s true that historians have already branded as legend the notorious “horrors of the year 1000,” the vision of hordes of howling people waiting for a new dawn that would never come. But historians also point out that the notion of the end preceded that fatal day by some centuries and, what’s even more curious, persisted after it, too. From there ensued the various millenarianisms of the second millennium, which did not grow only out of religious movements, orthodox or heretical as the case may be, but also — because by now we tend to classify many political and social movements as forms of millenarianism — out of secular, even atheist, movements whose purpose, racing headlong toward the end of time, was not to reach the Kingdom of God but to realize a new Kingdom on Earth.
The Revelation of St. John is a terrifying, conflicted book, as are the apocryphal apocalyptic sequels associated with it — apocryphal according to the canon; authentic in the effects, passions, terrors, and movements they have given rise to. Revelation can be read as a promise, but also as an announcement of an end, and thus gets rewritten at every step, even by those who have never read it, as we await 2000. No more the seven trumpets, the hailstorm, the sea turned to blood, stars falling from the sky, horses rising in a cloud of smoke from the deepest abyss, the armies of Gog and Magog, the Beast emerging from the sea. In their place: the uncontrolled and uncontrollable proliferation of nuclear waste; acid rain; the disappearing Amazon; the hole in the ozone; the migrating disinherited masses knocking, often with violence, at the doors of prosperity; the hunger of entire continents; new, incurable pestilence; the selfish destruction of the soil; global warming; melting glaciers; the construction of our own clones through genetic engineering; and, according to mystical principles of ecology, the necessary suicide of humanity itself, which must perish in order to rescue those species it has already almost obliterated — Mother Earth, denatured and suffocating.
We are living out (albeit with that degree of apathy to which new modes of mass communication have accustomed us) our own fears about the end. One could even say that we live our fear in the spirit of bibamus, edamus, cras moriemur [eat, drink, for tomorrow we die], celebrating the end of ideology and solidarity in a whirlwind of irresponsible consumerism. In this way, each one of us flirts with the specter of the apocalypse, exorcising it; the more one unconsciously fears it the more one exorcises, projecting it onto the screen in the form of bloody spectacle, hoping in this way to render it unreal. But the power of specter lies precisely in its unreality.
I’d be willing to bet that the notion of the end of time is more common today in the secular world than in the Christian. The Christian world makes it the object of meditation, but acts as if it may be projected into a dimension not measured by calendars. The secular world pretends to ignore the end of time, but is fundamentally obsessed by it. This is not a paradox, but a repetition of what transpired in the first thousand years of history.
I do not want to linger on exegetical questions that you are more familiar with than I am, but I will remind readers that the idea of the end of time comes out of one of the most ambiguous passages of John’s text, chapter 20, which gives us the following “scenario”: With the Incarnation and the Redemption, Satan is imprisoned, but after one thousand years will return, and that is when the final battle between the forces of good and evil occurs, crowned by the return of Christ and the Last Judgment. John, unambiguously, speaks of a thousand years. But some of the Church Fathers already explained that a thousand years for the Lord can mean one day, or one day can last a thousand years, and so this calculation should not be interpreted literally. Augustine’s interpretation of that passage is in keeping with a “spiritual” reading. The millennium or the promise of the Kingdom of God are not historical but mystical events, and Armageddon is not of this earth. This is not to deny that one day history may complete itself, and Christ descend to judge the living and the dead, but the emphasis is not on the end of the centuries but on their passing, dominated by the notion (one of regularity, not of history’s expiration) of Parousia, the Second Coming.
This approach, which isn’t only Augustine’s but also the Church Fathers’ as a whole, casts History as a journey forward — a notion alien to the pagan world. Even Hegel and Marx are indebted to this fundamental idea, which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pursued. Christianity invented History, and it is in fact a modern incarnation of the Antichrist that denounces History as a disease. It’s possible that secular historicism has understood history as infinitely perfectible — so that tomorrow we improve upon today, always and without reservation, and so that in the course of the same history God reconstitutes himself and in a manner of speaking educates and enriches himself. But the entire secular world is not of the ideological view that through history we understand how to look at the regression and folly of history itself. There is, nonetheless, an originally Christian vision of history whenever the signpost of Hope on this road is followed. The simple knowledge of how to judge history and its horrors is fundamentally Christian, whether the speaker is Emmanuel Mounier on tragic optimism or Gramsci on pessimism of reason and optimism of will.
I suspect desperate millennialism will occur whenever the end of time is seen as inevitable, and hope gives way to a celebration of the end of history, or to a plea for a return to a timeless and archaic Tradition that no act of will and no reflection — I don’t say rational, but reasonable — could ever enrich. From this is born the gnostic heresy (the secular versions of it, too) whereby the world and history are the fruits of error, and only by destroying both can the elect few redeem God himself. Various superman ideologies are also born from this, whereby only the members of a privileged race or sect will be able to celebrate their blazing holocaust on the miserable stage of the world and its history.
Only by having a sense of history’s trajectory (even if one does not believe in Parousia) can one love earthly reality and believe — with charity — that there is still room for Hope.
Is there a notion of hope (and of our responsibility to the future) that could be shared by believers and nonbelievers? What can it be based on now? Does an idea of the end, one that does not imply disinterest in the future but rather a constant examination of the errors of the past, have a critical function?
If not, it would be perfectly all right to accept the approach of the end, even without thinking about it, sitting in front of our TV screens (in the shelter of our electronic fortifications), waiting for someone to entertain us while meantime things go however they go. And to hell with what will come.
Umberto Eco