Dear Martini,
Your letter has lifted me out of one awkward position only to deposit me in another equally as awkward. Until now, I have been the one (not by choice) to open the dialogue; and whoever speaks first in such a dialogue inevitably formulates his questions in anticipation of the others response. Hence my feeling that I was cast in the role of inquisitor. That being so, I have very much appreciated the decisiveness and humility with which, all three times, you disabused our readers of the myth that Jesuits always answer a question with another question.
Now, however, I find that addressing your question is awkward too. Had I had a secular education, my answer might be worth something. But I was heavily influenced by Catholicism up until (to mark the precise moment of my fall) I was twenty-two years old. Secularism was not a legacy I passively absorbed, but rather the fruit of a long, slow, and painful process. And I am still unsure whether some of my moral convictions are not somehow dependent on the religious teaching that had such influence on me at the beginning. Now, at my advanced age, I have seen (in a foreign Catholic university that hires secular professors, but then asks them to manifest full religious observance) my colleagues draw near the sacrament without believing in the literal “presence” — and therefore without even having confessed. With a shudder I still felt, after so many years, the horror of the sacrilege.
Nonetheless, I do believe I can say on what foundations my secular “religiosity” is based today, because I firmly hold that there are forms of religiosity, and therefore a sense of the sacred, of the finite, of investigation and expectation, of a communion with something greater — even in the absence of faith in a personal and provident divinity. But I understand from your letter that this is something you know as well as I do. Indeed, you are asking what is in these ethical systems that is binding, compelling, and unrenounceable.
I would like to put things in a larger context. Certain ethical problems become more clear to me when I reflect on certain semantic questions — and it doesn’t matter if some find our discussion too difficult: they have doubtless been encouraged to think in simplistic terms by mass-media “revelations” which are predictable by definition. Let them learn to think hard, for neither the mystery itself nor the evidence is easy.
What is at issue is knowing whether there is a “universal semantic,” elementary notions common to everyone in the human race that can be expressed in all languages. Not a simple matter when one understands that many cultures don’t recognize notions which seem evident to us, such as, for example, the idea of substance endowed with certain properties (when we say “the apple is red”), or the idea of identity (a=a). I am nonetheless convinced that notions common to all cultures exist, and that they all refer to the position of our bodies in space.
We are animals of erect stature, for whom it is painful to remain upside down for long. We therefore have a common notion of up and down, and tend to privilege the former over the latter. We likewise have a notion of right and left, of immobility or motion, sitting up or lying down, crawling or jumping, of being awake or asleep. Because we have arms and legs, we know what it means to hit against something hard, to reach into something soft or liquid, to squash, to shake, to batter, to kick, maybe even to dance. The list could go on and include seeing, hearing, eating and drinking, swallowing or spitting. Most certainly every man has a notion of what it means to perceive, to remember, to feel desire, fear, sadness or relief, pleasure or pain, and to emit sounds that express those sensations. As a result (and here we enter the realm of rights), we have universal conceptions of constraint: we don’t want someone to keep us from talking, seeing, listening, sleeping, swallowing or spitting, from going where we want. We suffer if someone binds us or segregates us, strikes us, hurts or kills us, subjects us to a physical or psychic torture that diminishes or destroys our ability to think.
Up to this point, I’ve only presented a sort of bestial and solitary Adam, who does not yet know what sex is, or the pleasure of dialogue, or parental love, or the pain of losing someone you care about. And yet, even in this phase, at least for us (if not for him or her), this semantic has become the basis for an ethical system: we should, above all, respect the physical rights of others, including the right to speak and think. If our own kind had respected these rights, we would never have had the Massacre of the Innocents, Christians fed to the lions, the Night of St. Bartholomew, the burning of heretics, extermination camps, censorship, children working in the mines, atrocities in Bosnia.
But how is it possible, given this instinctive repertory of universal perceptions, that the beast (or beastess) that I’ve depicted here — all astonishment and ferocity — manages to comprehend not only that he wants to do certain things and not have other things done to him, but also that he shouldn’t do to others what he doesn’t want done to himself? Because, fortunately, Eden was quickly populated, and the ethical dimension comes into play when the other arrives on the scene. Every law, moral or civil, regulates interpersonal relationships, including relationships with those who impose the law.
You too attribute to our virtuous secular man the belief that the other is in us. This is not a vague sentimental propensity, but rather a basic condition. As we are taught by the most secular of the social sciences, it is the other, his gaze, that defines us and determines us. Just as we couldn’t live without eating or sleeping, we cannot understand who we are without the gaze and reaction of the other. Even those who kill, rape, rob, and violate do so in exceptional moments, and the rest of the time beg love, respect, praise from others. And even from those they humiliate, they ask recognition in the form of fear and submission. Without any such recognition, the newborn abandoned in the forest will not become a human (or else, like Tarzan, he will look for the other in the face of an ape). We might die or go insane if we lived in a community in which everyone had systematically decided never to look at us and to behave as if we didn’t exist.
Why then is it that certain cultures condone, or have condoned in the past, murder, cannibalism, the humiliation of another human body? Simply because those cultures restrict their concept of the “other” to those within their own tribal community (or ethnicity) and think of the “barbarians” (the outsider) as inhuman. Not even the Crusaders thought of the infidels as brethren to love beyond measure. The recognition of the role the other plays, the necessity to respect in him those very needs we could not ourselves live without fulfilling, is the fruit of millennial progress. Even the Christian commandment to love was enunciated, and accepted with difficulty, only when the time was ripe.
You ask if consciousness of the others importance provides me with an absolute base, an unshakable foundation for ethical behavior. I could reply by saying that even what you define as an absolute foundation still has not kept many believers from sinning while being conscious of sin, and our discussion might end there. The temptation to evil lurks even in those who have a solid and revealed notion of good. But I prefer to offer two personal anecdotes that have given me much cause for reflection.
The first concerns a writer who calls himself Catholic — even if sui generis — whose name I won’t reveal because he told me the story in a private conversation and I am not a tattletale. This was during the time of John XXIII and my elderly friend was enthusiastically extolling the Pope’s virtues, saying (with evident paradoxical intent), “Pope John must be an atheist. Only someone who doesn’t believe in God could love his own kind so much!” Like all paradoxes, this one contained a germ of truth: without considering the atheist (a figure whose psychology eludes me because, like Kant, I don’t see how one can possibly not believe in God, can maintain that it is impossible to prove his existence, and yet also firmly believe in the nonexistence of God, maintaining that this can be proved), it seems evident to me that someone who has never experienced transcendence, or who has lost it, can make sense of his own life and death, can be comforted simply by his love for others, by his attempt to guarantee someone else a livable life even after he himself has disappeared. Certainly, there are those nonbelievers who are not at all worried about giving meaning to their own death. There are also those who claim to be faithful but would be willing to rip the heart from a living baby in order to preserve their own lives. The power of an ethical system is judged by the behavior of the saints, not of the benighted cuius deus venter est [whose god is the belly].
Which brings me to the second anecdote. I was still a young Catholic, sixteen years old, and I became involved in a verbal duel with a man I knew, older than I, who had been labeled a “communist” in the sense that this term had in the fearsome fifties. As I got worked up, I posed a decisive question: How could he, a nonbeliever, make meaning out of something as otherwise meaningless as his own death? His answer was: “By asking before I die for a public funeral, so that, though I am no longer, I have left an example to others.” I suspect that you too can admire this profound faith in the continuity of life, the absolute sense of duty animating his response. This is the sense of meaning that has led many non-believers to die under torture rather than betray friends, and led others to expose themselves to plagues so that they could cure the suffering of others. Sometimes it is the only thing that drives a philosopher to philosophize, a writer to write: to leave a message in a bottle, because in some way what one believes or what one finds beautiful can be believed or seen as beautiful by those who come after.
Is this feeling strong enough to justify an ethic as determined and inflexible, as solidly based, as that of people who believe in revealed morality, in the survival of the soul, in reward and retribution? I have tried to base secular ethical principles on the natural fact (and therefore, for you, the result of a divine plan) of our corporeality, and on the notion that only the presence of the other makes us understand instinctively that we have a soul (or something that functions as such). What I have defined as a secular ethic is at its root a natural ethic, one that not even a believer denies. Isn’t natural instinct, carried to proper maturation and self-awareness, a basis that offers sufficient guarantee? We can of course think that there might not be sufficient impetus for virtue: a nonbeliever might think the evil he is doing in secret goes unseen. But keep in mind, if the nonbeliever thinks that no one is watching him from on high, he thereby also knows — for this very reason — that no one will forgive him. Knowing he’s done evil, his solitude will be infinite, his death desperate. This person is more likely than the believer to attempt to purify himself through public confession; he will ask forgiveness from others. He knows his predicament from the core of his being, and so he also knows in advance that he must forgive others. Otherwise how does one explain that nonbelievers are also capable of feeling remorse?
I’m not in favor of instituting a clear-cut opposition between believers of a transcendental God and those who don’t believe in any notion of a superior being. Let’s not forget that Ethics is precisely the title of Spinoza’s major work and that it opens with the definition of God as his own creation. This Spinozian divinity, as we well know, is neither transcendent nor personal. Yet even the vision of a great and unique cosmic Substance into which we will one day be reabsorbed can generate a vision of tolerance and of benevolence, precisely because we are all invested in maintaining the equilibrium and harmony of the only Substance. We think it impossible that this Substance is not somehow enriched or deformed by what we have done through the millennia — that is why we care. So I’ll dare suggest (not a metaphysical hypothesis, but only a timid concession to the hope that never abandons us) that the question of some kind of life after death can be reproposed even from this perspective. Today's electronic universe teaches us that message sequences can be transmitted from one physical apparatus to another without losing their unique characteristics, and seem even to survive as purely immaterial algorithms from the instant they leave one physical apparatus to when they reach the other. Who knows if death, rather than being an implosion, may be an explosion — the impression, from somewhere between the vortices of the universe, of the software (what others might call soul) created by our living, made up of memories and regrets, and thus our implacable suffering, or sense of peace for a duty fulfilled, and love.
You say that without the example and word of Christ, secular ethics lacks the basic justification that would endow it with the strength of ineluctable conviction. Why are you taking away from the layman the right to avail himself of the example of a forgiving Christ? Can you, Carlo Maria Martini, for the sake of our discussion and the confrontation in which you believe, try to think for a moment that there is no God: that man appeared on Earth through a clumsy accident, consigned to mortality but also condemned to be aware of this, and that therefore he is the most imperfect among all the animals (and permit me my gloomy Leopardian tone for this hypothesis). This man, to find the courage to face death, would out of necessity become a religious creature and aspire to construct narratives capable of providing an explanation and a model, an exemplary image. And of those that he can dream up — some illuminating, some terrible, some pathetically self-consolatory — in the fullness of time, he has at a given moment the religious and moral and poetic strength to conceive the model of Christ, of universal love, of forgiveness of one’s enemies, of life offered in terrible sacrifice for the salvation of the other. If I were a traveler from a distant galaxy and found myself before a species that knew how to construct such a model, I would be captivated, I would admire all this theogonic energy, and I would judge this wicked and miserable species, this species that committed so many horrors, redeemed solely because it had succeeded in desiring and believing that all of it was the Truth.
Abandon my hypothesis; leave it for others. But admit that even if Christ were only a character in a great story, the fact that this story could have been imagined and desired by featherless bipeds who only knew that they didn’t know,’ would be as miraculous (miraculously mysterious) as the fact that the son of a real God was really incarnated. This natural and earthly mystery would never stop stirring and softening the hearts of nonbelievers.
This is why I believe that on fundamental points a natural ethic — worthy of respect for the deep religiosity that animates it — can match the principles of an ethic founded on faith in transcendence, which cannot but recognize that the natural principles were carved into our hearts in anticipation of salvation. If there are still — and of course there are — smaller matters that don’t harmonize, the same happens in the confrontation of different religions. And in the conflicts of faith Kindness and Prudence should prevail.
Umberto Eco