The OR has documented the lecture- discussions on Volume II of JESUS OF NAZARETH last Monday at the University of Turin. Here is the first of three essays they published. Ernesto Ferrero (born 1938) is a writer and literary critic who currently directs the Salone Internationale del Libro of Turin. He also psecializes in linguistics and history, and in his past career as editorial director at Einaudi, worked with authors like Italo Calvino, Norberto Bobbio and Natasha Ginzburg.
Joseph Ratzinger's JESUS OF NAZARETH:
A thriller that is both
physical and metaphysical
by Ernesto Ferrero
Translated from the 2/20-2/21 issue of
I wish to focus on the word in these notes on this book by Professor Ratzinger. Allow me to call him thus because in these pages, he is acting not as the head of a community of believers, but as a scholar who works with instruments and rationales and logic, as a historian, and even before that, as a philologist.
Philology is an activity that presupposes the verification and restoration of an order, of a course to be completed, the recomposition of pieces that are part of an organic design.
It is an activity that, like the exact sciences, is not done cold, as may be supposed commonly, or by those who do not really understand how it works. Yes, it requires 'cold' instruments, as are the cold and precise instruments with which surgeons or physicists work, or even cooks.
But those who manage words are persons who are impelled, one might say, by a
pneuma, a spirit, by strong cognitive and creative tensions.
There is a most beautiful thought in Professor Ratzinger's book that every writer - but even every true reader - will quickly subscribe to: "The word is more real and lasting than the entire material world".
It is a thought that is analogous to a famous statement by the Man of Nazareth: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words will never pass away".
On a more modest literary plane, this is also the rather ingenuous ambition, unconfessed and unconfessable, or every writer.
Words, of course, comprise the documents which Professor Ratzinger proceeds to weigh and evaluate with scientific scrupulousness to demonstrate that the historical Jesus and the Jesus of faith are one and the same, and that the Gospels represent reliable testimony on which the historian may work.
But precisely in order to arrive at this de facto observation, each word must be verified, analyzed under an electron microscope, as it were, compared with possible synonyms, immersed in the context of its time, but also unveiled with the patrimony of history that it carries within.
Every word is a miniature world, the way millions of digitalized information bytes can be kept on a silicon chip. For example, the word 'Adam" in Hebrew contains in it the concept of 'red earth', therefore, 'born of the earth", referring to the clay from which we were fashioned.
I was most struck by the calmness - I would say the humility - with which Prof. Ratzinger has carried out his preliminary investigation. Laden with his years of study and reading, he never avails of his
auctoritas, of the institutional role he embodies.
Rather, he presents himself as a researcher who, in the quiet of some remote university library, carries out his work, confronting documents, crosschecking proofs, seeking to give a solid equilibrium to the theses that he proposes and argues.
He treats scholars who sustain theses that are perhaps opposed and contrary to his with a rare respect, in scientific debate, even when those theses turn out to be scarcely founded even to readers who are not specialists in this area, among whom I count myself.
He does not hide, obscure or set aside such theses - rather, he excavates them one by one, but he does not seize them by the ears, as one might to with some pesky scholars, but rather with an almost fraternal sensitivity, a Franciscan
levitas (lightness). The voice that speaks to other scholars is gentle, but this gentleness simply reinforces its firmness.
The French writer Philippe Sollers wrote in
Le Monde rather original things about JESUS OF NAZARETH. He called it an extraordinary metaphysical detective story, a crasis (merger of forms) between the police thriller and a mystery.
Of course, that is a rather strong term, almost irreverent, but I imagine it is a description that the author himself would receive with a smile. As a writer, Sollers as acknowledging in the author of this thriller a true narrative talent, and he is right.
More than narrative talent, because this is no fiction, I would speak of expositional ability and elegant writing (but an elegance that is not smug about its effects). Were it not that he comes from a completely different background, one might almost say that Prof. Ratzinger belongs to the illustrious tradition of Italian essayism, perhaps superior to regular literary essayism, and which boasts of exemplars who are able to join profundity of thought with elevated writing qualities = from Benedetto Croce to Luigi Einaudi, Roberto LOnghi and Giovanni Macchia.
JESUS OF NAZARETH, Sollers went on for the benefit of the general public, is the opposite of a film because it is all internalized. The author works on exegesis, on interpretation. Of course, there is the political context of the times, but he deconstructs the theses that describe the execution of Jesus by the Gauleiter of Galilee as an episode in a guerrilla resistance to a brutal occupation force. a struggle we know was carried out by the Zealots. In the same way, he goes about addressing the accusation of deicide levelled against the Jews, in a way that goes beyond mere historiographic intention.
In this regard, I am pleased to cite Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, who observe that the attempt to define the 'real' Jesus is much more ambitious and demanding than simply to define the historical Jesus. Because, he writes, for every personage and even for each of us, that which is historiographically documentable, in an unexceptionabkle way, is much less than what each of us is, in reality.
In this respect, we can focus our attention on the polarity created between words which belong to a millenary tradition and the innovative and even revolutionary use of them in JESUS OF NAZARETH.
The revolution that Jesus represented is not a collective one, not a movement in the public squares, nor one that was delegated to anyone. It is one that each of us must complete in solitude within ourselves in order to bring about radically new behavior. A revolution carried out under the sign of the Word.
What Jesus instituted is a strong discontinuity that is rather daunting, because it not only abolishes the old codes of retaliation and vengeance, the practice of an eye for an eye, of returning blow for blow - in short, the entire code of tribal feuding - replacing it with love of neighbor and even of one's enemies, and placing man in the center of what we now call his 'plan' of salvation.
Jesus takes away from man his mechanical duties of sacrificing the best goats from his flock to an imaginary god, a megapower who is fabulously rich, and restores him to the mission of regenerating himself, transforming love of God into love for other men.
And the place of worship is no longer only the temple, not even the temple par excellence in Jerusalem. Every man is called on to be a temple himself, the temple for his own elevation.
And it is precisely because Prof. Ratzinger manages perfectly the instruments of philology that he is able to attribute metaphorical and figurative valences to the words that emerge from his 'laboratory'.
For instance, one sees his intuition, that of a true writer, which brings him to say that the words 'eternal life' do not mean, as the reader may well think, the life that follows after death, whereas the present life on earth is rightly fleeting and provisional.
For him. 'eternal life' is the same life that we are called on to live here and now, which does not conclude with physical death, if we are able to live it with the fullness we are asked to do, if we can activate within us that palingenesis which immerses us in a dimension that goes beyond simple temporal limits.
It is to look in life at the eternity of goodness. The true victory over death, which brings down the walls of time, is a worthy and full life, rich with human values, which continues in those who inherit them. Don't we in fact say that persons dear to us who have left us continue to live in us?
One can likewise see how the author is able - when he speaks of resurrection - because of his critical and philological abilities, to operate a subtle but acute distinction between the words in the evangelical texts and the profession of faith - expressed in precise formulation that imposes loyalty among believers - and those words that constitute the narrative modality of the apparitions of the Risen Christ which, he points out, come from various traditions (of expression, we might say) between Jerusalem and Galilee.
And it is this very variety of narrative canons which explains the diversity of the accounts of the Resurrection in the four Gospels. From which Prof Ratzinger offers us various pearls, as when, for example, he analyzes the metaphorical use of the word 'salt' in Mark and in Luke, writing in the Acts of the Apostles.
The word used by Luke,
sunalizòmenos, literally means "eating salt with them", referring to the custom then of distributing bread and salt at a banquet to symbolize the cement of solid community alliances. The practice of conserving material things against corruption and the putrefaction that threatens them in turn points to the conservation of non-material goods such as the pact of loyalty that binds a community together.
We are immersed in the darkness of a long night - the demon does flourishing business, and he does not waste opportunities. The Church herself, writes Pope Benedict, navigates against the headwinds of history through the agitated ocean of time, and often, one has the impression that it is about to sink.
But, as Sollers writes, it comforts us to know that somewhere in Rome, a small light burns during the night, and an old scholar, with white vestments and white hair, continues patiently to write out with a pencil a thriller that is both physical and metaphysical.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/02/2012 15:03]