by Harvey Cox
When the Italian newspaper La Correra de la Serra invited novelist-scholar Umberto Eco and bishop-scholar Carlo Maria Martini to engage in an exchange of views on its pages, the editors had obviously hit on a fresh and imaginative idea. But I doubt they could possibly have foreseen how brilliant the result of their conception would turn out to be. The Eco-Martini correspondence lifts the possibility of intelligent conversation on religion to a new level. It proves that the partners in such a discussion can probe and challenge and still remain respectful, even congenial. These letters are now being translated into a number of languages and will appear all over the world. It is all for the good. For American readers, it might be helpful to know a bit more about the participants in the argument.
In Eco’s labyrinthine novel Foucault’s Pendulum, one character says to another, “I was born in Milan, but my family came from Val d’Aosta.”
“Nonsense,” the other replies, “You can always tell a genuine Piedmontese immediately by his skepticism.”
“I’m a skeptic,” says the first.
“No,” replies his interlocutor, “you’re only incredulous, a doubter, and that’s different.”
The reader has to wait a few more pages for Eco to pick up this twisted thread. But he does. And what he says might have served as a foreword to this remarkable correspondence.
Not that the incredulous person doesn’t believe in anything. It’s just that he doesn’t believe in everything. Or he believes in one thing at a time. He believes in one thing only if it somehow follows from the first thing. He is nearsighted and methodical, avoiding wide horizons. If two things don’t fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somehow, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that’s credulity.
Umberto Eco was born in 1932 in Alessandria, in the Piedmont area of Italy. Before becoming a renowned scholar in the field of semiotics (the branch of philosophy dealing with signs and symbols), he studied the aesthetic theories of the Middle Ages. At the University of Turin he wrote his thesis on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. He is now professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. By his own account Eco was a practicing Catholic until the age of twenty-two. But he is not an angry, antireligious ex-Catholic. He even seems at times to speak about his lost faith with a hint of regret, and suggests that the solid sense of morality that underlies his life and his writing may well have derived from his earlier Catholic formation. That formation is highly evident, some might even say on display, in his writing. His novel Foucault’s Pendulum makes extensive references to the medieval Templars and the Corpus Hermeticum. And who can forget the Latin citations, like the illuminated letters that embellish old hand-copied biblical texts, that garland each chapter heading in The Name of the Rose? If they were used by other writers, the average reader might have found these quotations a bit ostentatious. But, for some reason, we let Eco get away with them. Maybe because the luster of the whole novel and his evident command of European religious history demonstrate that he is not faking. He can write with equal ease about philosophy and aesthetics, Thomas Aquinas and James Joyce, computers and the Albigenses. And this is what makes him such a fascinating — and, I would say, from an American perspective — enviable collaborator in this conversation. Would that we American religionists had minds like his to engage with in this country, thinkers who know what they are talking about when they disagree with theologians, interlocutors who are incredulous but not principled skeptics. Would that we had dialogue partners who, as Eco himself puts it, may not themselves believe in God, but realize how arrogant it would be to declare, for this reason, that God does not exist. Eco is one of those mature sages who is not interested in refuting religious believers but in illuminating genuine differences and finding common ground.
In his first letter to Martini, Eco suggests that they both “aim high.” They do. There are no rhetorical gambits, no cheap shots. When they struggle with famously controversial questions, like abortion and women’s ordination, they do not trample the familiar ground but delve into the underlying paradigms and historical processes that inform today's arguments. In his own terms, Eco is a man marked by a restless incredulity, not a closed skepticism.
Carlo Maria Martini is no more interested in refuting nonbelievers than Eco is in tripping up Christians. He is also a relentless searcher for common ground. I once heard him tell a large crowd of listeners that when he speaks about “believers” and “nonbelievers,” he does not have two different groups of people in mind. He says he means, rather, that in all of us there is something of the believer and something of the nonbeliever, and this, he added, “is true of this bishop as well.” It is unusual to find a prominent agnostic intellectual, like Eco, who is so open to the deepest questions of faith. It is also unusual to find a prince of the Church who is so open to the serious questions of a thoughtful agnostic.
Martini was born in Turin in 1927 and — like his correspondent — studied philosophy and theology. But then he traveled in a different direction. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1952 and became a member of the Society of Jesus. Beginning in 1978 he served as the Rettore Magnifico (rector) of the Gregorian University in Rome, the most prestigious Roman Catholic university in the world. For the past twenty years he has been the Archbishop of Milan. In December 1979 Pope John Paul II named him a cardinal. A broadly, humanely educated man, Martini is a respected scholar of the New Testament. His name appears as one of the editors of the most widely used critical edition of the Greek New Testament. In addition to his scholarly works he is a highly prolific writer of spiritual books for laypeople. He is also one of the leading ecumenical churchmen of Europe and takes special interest in the relations of Christians to Jews. Although he himself dismisses the possibility out of hand, Martini has been spoken of as a possible future pontiff.
A few years ago I learned from personal observation how genuine Martinis interest in frank and unfettered dialogue is. Martinis Milan is a city redolent with the memories of Saint Ambrose (who was its bishop) and Saint Augustine (who was baptized there), and remembered as the diocese headed by Giovanni Cardinal Montini before he became Pope Paul VI. Every year in this historic metropolis, Martini stages an open conversation in a huge downtown auditorium. He calls it the Cattedra dei Non Credenti (Lecture Series for Nonbelievers), and he invites both religious participants and nonbelievers to exchange views on a topic of pressing interest to both. It has come to be an immensely popular event, drawing tens of thousands of Milanese for several evenings away from their towering glass offices and throbbing nightclubs. Tickets are free but one must request them, and they are always in short supply. The year I participated priests and laypeople, nuns and fashion models, scholars, bankers, and politicians — including the mayors of the four largest cities in Italy — came together to discuss “The City: Blessing or Curse?” Cardinal Martini himself, in splendid vestments, presided over the meetings and offered his own comments. Milan is a busy hub; it is both the high-style and high-finance capital of Italy. The energetic Milanese work hard and play even harder. But despite the film openings, theatrical productions, concerts, and numerous art exhibits going on in the city at the same time, it was clear that Martini’s gathering was the event no one wanted to miss. More than two thousand crowded into a huge auditorium to attend. It was “the open church” at its best, a demonstration not only of what the church should be but what, at times, it already is. Its only limitation was that it took place in one city and in one country. But could what happened during those weeks in Milan become more general? Might it be a sign of things to come? Was it only exceptional, or does it represent the kind of format that could easily be multiplied a hundred-fold? Would it work, for example, in America?
I have frequently pondered these questions since my return from Milan. But I have still not arrived at an answer. On the one hand, sociologists assert that in terms of religiousness — as measured by standard criteria — the United States is far more pious than any country in Europe (with the possible exceptions of Ireland and Poland). Surveys show that church attendance is higher, and more people answer pollsters affirmatively on such questions as whether they believe in God or whether they think religion should play an important role in life. But is American religiosity like the famous lake that is a thousand miles wide and one inch deep? Would urban Americans in large numbers forgo an evening at the theater (or in front of a flickering blue screen) to listen to religious and secular practitioners, scholars and creative writers, exchanging views on a theme of common topical import? Is there an audience, or even a potential audience, for such a conversation in America?
We may have the opportunity to give at least a partial answer to this question. The test case is the volume the reader now holds in his or her hands. This exchange of letters between Martini and Eco is sophisticated, demanding, thorough, and engaging. When I first read it, it reminded me at times of Louis Malle’s film My Dinner With Andre, which was released in the early 1980s. That film boldly depicted nothing more than a fascinating conversation between two old friends over a pleasant meal, an evening during which they touch on a variety of topics for nearly two hours. There are no shootings, no sex scenes, and no car chases. It was reported that the producers wondered whether anyone would pay to see it. But people did, and in sufficiently large numbers to make it a reasonable success. It was both entertaining and thought provoking. It sent audiences home with a renewed faith in the sheer possibility of human conversation. The Eco-Martini correspondence is a little like that. It presupposes — in fact, demands — a reader who would not be satisfied with the snide thrusts and clever parries that characterize those “talking heads” television programs that present themselves as intellectual discussions. But the reward for reading these letters will be twofold: they demonstrate not only that conversation is still viable and valuable, but that respectful disagreement on very basic issues is still possible.
But why should we have to be convinced that such a classic form of human communication is not only still attractive but possibly even desperately needed? How have we fallen into such noisy muteness? And why is religion such a daunting thing to talk about that we either tiptoe around it or resort to shrieking? I do not believe this dismal situation is all the fault of the media. The problem is also to be found in the nature of American religiousness itself. It is a problem that, paradoxically, is a result of the same quality that might well be the great strength of American religion, namely its dizzying variety. If we can make the distinction that Eco’s character in Foucault’s Pendulum does between skepticism and incredulity, there may not be much of a place for the total skeptic in one of our multitudinous American denominations. Yet there is certainly ample room for the incredulous. If Mormonism, Christian Science, Lubavitcher Judaism, and the various strains of Protestant fundamentalism require one to believe quite a list of things, there are always liberal Congregationalism, Reform Judaism, Ethical Culture, and, above all, Unitarianism to accommodate various degrees of incredulity. Furthermore, unlike in Europe where religion almost always took the side of the establishment in social conflicts, in America it has just as often been a progressive force. This is the land where Baptists and Congregationalists helped light the fires of the American Revolution, preachers took to the barricades for abolition, and clergy marched against segregation and the Vietnam War. Therefore, America never developed the rabid political anticlericalism of Europe, so it was hard, on this side of the Atlantic, for critics of religion to portray religion as the bulwark of reaction.
The result of all this is that the critics of American religion have never had enough opportunity to sharpen their lances. Take, for example, our bewildering plethora of religious possibilities. They provide an elusive target. Whenever the skeptics lunge, instead of clashing against a shield or receiving a sharp counterblow, their spears sink into a porous sponge of spiritual possibilities. Instead of a counterargument they may just as often be offered a membership application, a pledge card, and a cup of coffee. All this makes for a nice atmosphere, but it hardly raises the intellectual level of the conversation between believers and nonbelievers. Nor does it provide much for those who, like Martini and many of the rest of us, find ourselves divided or somewhere in between. One wonders occasionally whatever happened to the once audacious voices of American atheism like those of Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll. The best we have done in recent years was the late lamented Madalyn Murray O’Hair, that stalwart citizen who introduced the first successful legal complaint against school prayer. But O’Hair was hardly a credible tribune for nonbelievers. Her short, tumultuous public career succeeded mainly in demonstrating that in these matters stridency is no substitute for thoughtfulness.
Predictably, the weakness of serious questioning of religious faith in America has had the result of rendering religion’s intellectual defenders listless and sedentary. Our theologians spend more time sorting out the sometimes cordial but also sometimes troubled relations among our many faith groupings than in exploring the underlying issue of faith itself. Ms. O’Hair never really made a very good case against religion. She just did not want the government to make her children pray in school, something on which — ironically — many religious people agreed with her. Our newspapers become more exercised over whether Southern Baptists should try to convert Jews than on whether either Christianity or Judaism can make a plausible case to the postmodern mind. Do we need a rebirth of what theologians call “polemics” and “apologetics”? I think so, but if it ever comes, I hope and pray it will be of the elegant, informed, and truly empa-thetic quality demonstrated in this epistolary exchange.
Reading this book left me wanting more. Martini and Eco could easily have gone on to a whole range of other topics. Perhaps the success this collection has found will inspire them to do so. Also, it is largely the professor-novelist who is posing the questions and the scholarly bishop who is trying to understand and respond. Only in the latter part does the bishop suggest a question to the novelist, and it is a terribly important one. He asks with genuine curiosity how people who do not believe in God, or in some transcendent source of meaning and value, can escape falling into the kind of relativism that in recent years has teetered so close to nihilism. I believe the answer Eco gives is an excellent one, but I am still wondering how Martini would have responded. Instead, perhaps intentionally, the reader is left to sort this out without any help from the friendly protagonists.
Once, sitting in his garden, the young Augustine, who was eventually baptized in what is now Martinis Milan, and only much later became a saint, heard a voice that said, “Pick up, and read.” I leave the reader of this splendid volume with the same counsel.