Dr. Michael B. Ewbank

Thespian, Throw Away the Mask!

From the Fathers of the Church to Benedict XVI, the Christian critique of the society of the spectacle. The new risks of the digital age. How to exalt or destroy a person by image manipulation

by Sandro Magister

ROME, February 20, 2011 – Benedict XVI’s message for the world day of communications, published on the feast day of the patron saint of journalists, Saint Francis de Sales, has called attention back to a very timely question, made even more pressing by recent national and international events.

It is the question of respect for the “truth” of facts and of persons, in the flurry of communications. A truth already difficult to grasp in direct, face-to-face relationships among men – where the authentic is often masked by the representation of himself that each tends to give – but which is in even greater danger when it is filtered by the media and even more by the internet, where the possibility for anyone to mold one or more identities to his own pleasure is expanded to the extreme.

The popular uprising that for weeks has invaded the streets of various Muslim countries of northern Africa and of the Middle East was ignited and spread to a large extent over the internet. But this very fact makes comprehension of it more difficult, and its political outcome more uncertain. In the world of the virtual, the boundary between reality and artifice is more elusive than ever.

In Italy, a vicious power struggle has been underway for months that is also marked by these ambiguities. With its epicenter the libertine private life of a prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who is at the same time a television magnate. And with blunt instruments that are in turn part of a “reality show” – not televised, but played out in society itself – in which truth and lie, reality and fiction, public and private, real persons and “personae” in the Latin sense of disguise mix together in an inextricable tangle.

In commenting authoritatively last January 24 on these events, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, president of the Italian episcopal conference, expressed the “dismay” that overtakes someone who amid such mayhem “looks at the actors of the public stage.”

The metaphor of the theater is more appropriate than ever. Because the dangers of a “society of the spectacle” are not only of today, much less do they belong to the virtual world alone, but they accompany the entire history of man, whose life is always theater as well.

*

In fact, ancient Christianity also considered the theater a theme of strong critical reflection. And many Fathers of the Church, including Augustine, wrote significant things about it, which when reread today are startling for their timeliness.

A specialist on the literature of the Fathers, Professor Leonardo Lugaresi, who teaches in Bologna and Paris, published in “L’Osservatore Romano” last February 16 a systematic summary of the criticisms that ancient Christianity made against the society of the spectacle.

Lugaresi maintains that “the fundamental question is always the same: that of the authenticity of human experience, which is ultimately that of identity.”

Benedict XVI, in his message for the world day of communications, insists on the same concept, when he urges acceptance of “the challenge to be authentic and faithful, and not give in to the illusion of constructing an artificial public profile for oneself.”

A call that also applies against the diabolical temptation – of the devil as “simulator” – to fabricate false images not only of oneself but of others, whether to exalt or to destroy.

One glaring case of the destruction of a person through falsified images of him was the one that hit Dino Boffo two years ago, when he was the director of the newspaper of the Italian episcopal conference, “Avvenire.” He was not rehabilitated until many months later, with his appointment as program director of TV2000, the television channel owned by the CEI.

That attack was conducted by multiple actors, and on multiple terrains: media, political, ecclesiastical. Even the pope was wrongfully dragged onstage. The game of fabrication was such that even today some aspects of that episode remain obscure, while the substance was summarized by http://www.chiesa in this article:

> Italy, United States, Brazil. From the Vatican to the Conquest of the World (11.2.2010)

*

In recent days, in Italy but also abroad here and there, another festival of illusions were the demonstrations held in many squares “in defense of the dignity of women,” against the libertine private life of prime minister Berlusconi.

There the language reached exaggerated heights of mystification. To such an extent that the sincere and wise words that some personalities and segments of the Catholic world itself believed needed to be said in the street and to the street were also bent immediately in false directions.

“The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” as Erving Goffman entitled one of his famous books.

Benedict XVI, with his message for the world day of communications, is reminding everyone that the public “representation” of oneself and of others, real and virtual, should be faithful to the truth.

But here is the illuminating article published by Professor Lugaresi in “L’Osservatore Romano” of February 16, 2011.

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THE FATHERS OF THE CHURCH BETWEEN THEATER AND INTERNET

by Leonardo Lugaresi

Benedict XVI’s message for the world day of social communications, made public on January 24, draws our attention to the problems posed by certain “limits typical of digital communication: the one-sidedness of the interaction, the tendency to communicate only some parts of one’s interior world, the risk of constructing a false image of oneself, which can become a form of self-indulgence.” […]

It is interesting to note that the pope’s reminder, although it refers to a completely new phenomenon, presents significant similarities with an ancient question on which the critical reflection of the Fathers of the Church was exercised in a masterful way, and from which it could therefore be useful to take some cues, for a deeper understanding of this teaching of Benedict XVI.

The Fathers obviously did not know about the internet, but the “virtual world” with which they had to come to terms was for them was constituted – in a “society of the spectacle” as Greco-Roman society of the imperial age was to a large extent – by the dimension of the “ludus,” meaning scenic representation, and more broadly that theatricality which invaded so many aspects of civil life in late antiquity, even outside of the walls of the theaters, amphitheaters, and circuses, and of the numerous festivities of the calendar.

The condemnation of spectacles, so decisive and without ambiguity in the ancient Church, is not in fact motivated in the last instance by their idolatrous or immoral contents, as is so often repeated, but by deep concern about the threat that Tertullian, in his “De spectaculis,” calls the “ratio veritatis,” the criterion of truth.

The reality of spectacles, in fact, presented itself to the eyes of the Fathers as a profoundly ambivalent one, in which true and false were mixed up, to the point of bringing into crisis the very validity of such an opposition. Suffice it to think of the fact that the actor, in the act of interpreting a character, is “true” precisely in his being “false,” in that he is, and at the same time is not, the character he represents.

His ability to transform himself, surpassing all the “normal” limits posed by distinctions of age, gender, “status,” by which the same individual can be, depending on the moment, man or woman, king or slave, thus appears as a  dangerous threat to the natural identity of man: as if the pluriform shadow of Proteus had risen up to obscure the face of Adam.

The theme of the critique of the ambivalence of representation is of Platonic origin, but saw a decisive development in Christianity. The identity that is threatened, in fact, is felt as a creatural identity, in that in the nature of each human being is reflected the original image that God imprinted there.

Patristic thought therefore recognizes, in this overturning of natural reality performed by the “fictio” of spectacle and in the construction of pseudorealities more capable of raising passions and emotions in the spectators the more devoid they are of ontological  substance, the hand of the devil, meaning the one who by definition is the “evil imitator” of God, the “simia Dei” who, incapable of creating, can only adulterate the nature created by God. In this regard, Tertullian speaks explicitly of the devil as “aemulator” and “interpolator” of the divine work.

When the pope raises frankly the question of the authenticity of friendship in the virtual world one hears, in his words, the echo of a profound patristic reflection.

In a famous page of the “Confessions” (3,2), Augustine, recalling his youthful experience as an impassioned theatergoer, pointedly notes how the spectators like to suffer by contemplating on the stage painful and tragic events which should prompt compassion if they were encountered in real life, and asks himself, “But what kind of compassion is it that arises from viewing fictitious and unreal sufferings? The spectator is not expected to aid the sufferer but merely to grieve for him. And the more he grieves the more he applauds the actor of these fictions.”

This passage deserves extensive exegesis, but the essential point is very clear:  for Augustine, a truly human relationship is realized only where there is responsibility. The other, in the moment in which I encounter him, makes me in some way responsible, in the sense clarified perfectly by the parable of the good Samaritan with which Jesus responds to the same question that Benedict XVI, not by accident, proposes to us again in reference to the virtual world: “Who is my neighbor?”

The relationship of neighbor, which is the only truly human one, always implies the element of responsibility, in the sense that the other makes a claim on me with his very existence, he constitutes for me a challenge to which I must respond.

Augustine denies precisely that this could happen in the pseudo-relationship between the spectator and the actor, and of course we cannot help but agree with him if we apply his analysis to television, the medium par excellence that puts us in a position of “false closeness” with reality, where we see everything, but as completely passive and exonerated spectators.

The internet, it is said, is something else, and indeed it is precisely its accessible and widespread interaction, with the possibility for each user to be an active subject in the communications network into which he is inserted, that seems to be its most innovative and seductive characteristic.

There is, however, an indispensable condition for this to take place, and it is commitment to the truth and with the truth. “The truth of Christ,” the pope reminds us, “is the full and authentic response to that human desire for relationship, communion and meaning which is reflected in the immense popularity of social networks.”

But commitment with the truth demands continuity of attention, concreteness, concentration on what is essential. Here another factor of ambivalence typical of the virtual world enters into play.

The enormous multiplicity of points of interest, of opportunities, of the attractions and the extraordinary facility of the connections that can be established with the most diverse camps of human experience – in a dimension that seems to nullify the obstacles posed by time and space in the real world – is indeed a great resource, but also a very powerful stimulus to distraction, even the dispersion of the ego from “inside” to “outside” of itself (according to a psychological dynamic that is very well known to every navigator of the web, when he realizes that he has lost precious hours going from link to link, but that perhaps was never as lucidly analyzed as it was by Augustine).

It is that illness of the spirit which ancient thought had diagnosed as “polypragmosyne,” “curiositas,” and on which – in the context of the controversy over spectacles – the Fathers also said memorable things. Suffice it to remember the pregnant formula with which Tertullian, in the “De praescriptione haereticorum” (7, 12), indicates the novelty of the Christian position: “Nobis curiositate opus non est post Christum Iesum nec inquisitione post evangelium.” After the encounter with the good news that is Christ Jesus, there is no more room for “curiositas,” nor do we need Google anymore to know who we are.

The ancient Christian condemnation of the theater certainly cannot be proposed again today, much less does the Church want to distance itself from the internet, at which it looks instead with sincere appreciation.

But some of the reasons with which the Fathers, with great power of thought, upheld that judgment deserve to be the object of our reflection even today, to help us to embody that “Christian style of presence also in the digital world” that the pope desires.

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The complete text of Benedict XVI’s message for the world day of communications of June 5, 2011:

> Truth, Proclamation and Authenticity of Life in the Digital Age

In regard to the demonstrations on January 14 in Italy, the different views of the editorialist of the CEI newspaper “Avvenire,” Marina Corradi, and of the director of the same newspaper, Marco Tarquinio, placed side-by-side on the front page of the edition of the day before:

> Corradi: Io non ci andrò, e rifletto

> Tarquinio: Io ci andrei, per poter dire

And Tarquinio’s response to the readers, after the demonstration:

> Ascoltare, capire, esser chiari

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English translation by Matthew Sherry, Ballwin, Missouri, U.S.A.

The New Polytheism and its Tempter Idols

Benedict XVI sounds the alarm. Forgetfulness of the one God clears the way for a world dominated by a plurality of new gods with seductive faces. A voyage among the devotees of modern paganism
by Sandro Magister

{ABYSSUM}

ROME, December 9, 2010 – “Polytheism”: this word echoed like thunder, last October, in a speech by Benedict XVI at the synod of the bishops of the Middle East, the very birthplace of the one God made man, Jesus, and of the most powerful forms of monotheism in history, Judaism and Islam.

“Credo in unum Deum” is the mighty chord that gives rise to Christian doctrine. But for Joseph Ratzinger, pope theologian, polytheism is anything but dead. It is the perennial challenge that still rises up today against faith in the one God.

“Let us remember all the great powers of the history of today,” the pope continued at the synod. Anonymous capital, terrorist violence, drugs, the tyranny of public opinion are the modern divinities that enslave man. They must fall. They must be made to fall. The downfall of the gods is the imperative of yesterday, today, and always for believers in the one true God.

But today’s polytheism is not made up only of dark powers. Its many gods also have friendly faces, and the ability to seduce.

It is the “gay science” prophesied by Nietzsche more than a century ago, which offers every single man “the greatest advantage”: that of “setting up his own ideal and deriving from it his law, his joys, and his rights.”

It is the triumph of the individual free will, without the yoke of a tablet of the law anymore, only one for everyone because it is written by just one intractable God.

That admiration for the “Genius of Christianity” which had inflamed Chateaubriand and the Romantics is today giving up ground to an enthusiastic rediscovery of the “Genius of paganism,” the title of a book by the French anthropologist Marc Augé.

In Italy, another anthropologist, Francesco Remotti, is lashing out against “L’ossessione identitaria,” the title of his latest book, and reproaches the pope, in another of his books in letter form, for his stubborn proceeding “against nature,” against a modernity that instead offers the delights of polytheism, so fluid, pluralist, tolerant, liberating.

THE “SPIRIT OF ASSISI”

Of course, the current revival of polytheism is not bringing the cults of Jupiter and Juno, Venus and Mars, back into vogue. But the philosophy of the learned pagans of the Roman empire is again blossoming intact in the reasoning of many modern proponents of “weak thought.” And not only of these. Those who today reread, sixteen centuries later, the dispute between the monotheist Ambrose, the holy patron of Milan, and the polytheist Symmachus, a senator of pagan Rome, are strongly tempted to agree with the latter, when he says: “What does it matter by what path each one seeks, according to his own judgment, the truth? It is not by one road alone that one may reach such a great mystery.”

The magnanimous equality among all religions and gods that these words seem to inspire also enchants many Christians. The “spirit of Assisi” born from the multi-religious gathering held in 1986 has so infected common opinion that in 2000 the Church of John Paul II and of then cardinal Ratzinger felt the duty to remind Catholics that there is only one savior of humanity, and it is the God made man in Jesus: a truth on which the entire New Testament stands or falls, a truth that over two millennia the Church had never felt the need to reiterate with an “ad hoc” pronouncement. And yet, that declaration of 2000, “Dominus Iesus,” was greeted with a firestorm of protests, inside the Church and outside, because of its exclusion of a plurality of paths of salvation all sufficient in themselves and full of grace and truth.

That these sentiments might conceal nostalgia for a plurality of gods is possible, but today’s polytheism, on a mass level, is more subtle.

The current idea is that the various religions are in their way all an expression of a “divine.” And nonetheless this supreme divinity, as the pagan Symmachus explained to Ambrose, is unknowable and far away, too far away to impassion men and take care of them.

From a Latin writer of the third century, Minucius Felix, another dialogue has come down to us, highly refined, in which the pagan Caecilius, walking along the beach of Ostia, after paying homage to a statue of Serapis, explains that “in human things everything is doubtful, uncertain, undecided,” but precisely for this reason it is good to follow the religion of the ancients and adore “those gods whom our father taught us to fear, rather than to know too closely.”

In a homily in Saint Peter’s Square last June 11, Benedict XVI said that “Oddly, this kind of thinking re-emerged during the Enlightenment.” And in effect, a champion of the age of the Enlightenment like the nonbeliever Voltaire ordered his relatives and servants to pay homage to Christianity and its precepts, for reasons of civic good manners. God exists, maybe. And maybe he’s the one who created the world. But then he became so disinterested as to disappear from the horizon. His goodness lies entirely in causing no disturbance whatsoever.

And so, under the heaven of this vague and remote divinity, the earth has been populated with new gods. In secular and pragmatic clothes.

POLYTHEISM OF VALUES

Already in the nineteenth century, in his “Three Essays on Religion,” the economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote that polytheism was much more functional than monotheism in describing that plurality of ethics that characterized the scenario of life in the first industrial society. And Max Weber, in the early twentieth century, coined the formula “Polytheismus der Werte,” polytheism of values, precisely to indicate the pantheon of modern society.

In a world that has become disenchanted, no longer with a single God who might proclaim commandments valid for all, each of the social spheres – from politics to the economy, from art to science to religion itself – is directed by its own god with his own oracles. Oracles often in conflict with each other, with man dramatically alone only in the hour of decision.

Weber, with the impeccable detachment of the scholar, did not say whether this modern polytheism was a good thing or a bad thing. But other thinkers who have come after him are no longer concealing where their sympathies lie.

In the second half of the twentieth century, to the “political theology of monotheism” promoted by Erik Peterson (one of the authors most read and admired by Joseph Ratzinger since he was a young professor), the German philosopher Odo Marquard counterposes a “political theology of polytheism,” and in the title of his essay praises this polytheism as “enlightened.” In his judgment, man always needs myths, and the important thing is that these myths be numerous and open to infinite variations, as in ancient mythology, unlike Judaism and Christianity, which rest on unique and incontrovertible historical events.

In Spain, the philosopher Maria Zambrano has criticized Christian spirituality’s asceticism of medieval origin, destructive of the sentiments. It is poetry, in her view, that can free man from “monolithism” and restore him to his joyous native polytheism.

In Italy, Salvatore Natoli is the philosopher who defends an “ethics of the finite,” meaning a collection of multiple “polytheistic” references that offer man points of support, never definitive but nonetheless always capable of saving him provisionally from the anarchy of his instincts.

Certainly, however, the work that has most instilled a reevaluation of polytheism in contemporary Italian culture is more literary than philosophical: it is “Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia” by Roberto Calasso, from 1988, with its glorious evocation of classical mythology.

FOR A REENCHANTMENT OF THE WORLD

In spite of the “disenchantment of the world” described by Weber, in fact, modern society does not appear immune from the opposite seduction of a newly enchanted world.

Alain de Benoist, a thinker of the French “nouvelle droite,” is the most passionate promoter of this return to neopagan sacrality.

For the cultural current that he represents, the great enemy is precisely the Judeo-Christian perspective with its “desacralizing” idea of creation. If there is no other God apart from the one God, in fact, creatures no longer have anything divine about them, and even the stars, as the first page of Genesis says, are mere “lights” hung by the Creator from the vault of heaven to mark the day and the night. The world is definitively relegated to is profanity.

Leonardo Lugaresi, a professor in Bologna and Paris and a specialist on ancient Christianity, observes: “In the  accusation today that Christianity is responsible for the desacralization of the world, what is coming back into play, under new forms, is nothing other than the old accusation of atheism lodged against the Christians of the first centuries.”

And he adds: “As back then, so also for a certain neopagan mentality of today Christianity is harmful because it has taken away from the earth its enchantment, its gods, and has deprived man of a religious relationship with nature. As a result, the new paganism wants to heal the world of the ‘monotheistic rupture’, which means restoring to it the sacrality and divinity that Christianity has taken away.”

NOT JUST ANY SORT OF GOD

The formula “monotheistic rupture” refers back to the studies of a great Egyptologist, the German Jan Assmann, who studied in depth the revolutionary innovation introduced by the one God of the religion of Moses with respect to the polytheism of Egypt at the time. It is no surprise, therefore, that the publishing house il Mulino, in publishing this year ten essays assigned to as many authors on the ten commandments of the Mosaic decalogue, assigned to Assmann the commentary on “You shall have no other God.”

Assmann is not an apologist for polytheism. But he sees in Mosaic monotheism, since its emergence, an exclusive and intolerant opposition to the other religions. All of the forms of monotheism that have come to light in history, from Judaism to Christianity to Islam, bear within themselves, in his view, the poison of violence. And so he asks monotheism to move beyond its absolutes and “reach the transcendental point thanks to which true tolerance becomes possible,” which means elevating itself to the superior form of “religious wisdom” or of “deep religion” embodied by wise men like Albert Schweitzer, Mahatma Gandhi, and Rabindranath Tagore –  in short, elevating itself “to the eighteenth-century ideal of tolerance expressed by the Mason Lessing in the parable of the three rings, in the story of Nathan the wise.”

And what is this if not the religion without norms or dogmas of the Enlightenment, with its remote God? And for what can it make room, this vague religion, if not for a new and arbitrary polytheism?

Last September 13, in receiving the new German ambassador to the Holy See, Walter Jürgen Schmid, Benedict XVI raised his eyes from the written text and continued: “Generally many people show an inclination for more permissive religious concepts, also for themselves. A supreme, mysterious and indeterminate being who only has a hazy relationship with the personal life of the human person is succeeding the personal God of Christianity who reveals himself in the Bible. These conceptions are increasingly stimulating discussion in society, especially in the area of justice and legislation. Yet, if someone abandons the faith in a personal God, the alternative arises of a “god” that does not know, does not hear and does not speak; and, especially, of one that has no will. If God has no will of his own, in the end good and evil are no longer distinguishable; good and evil are no longer in contradiction but in an opposition in which the one would be a complement to the other. In this way human beings lose their moral and spiritual strength which is essential for the person’s overall development. Social action is increasingly dominated by private interests or the calculations of power, to the detriment of society.”

From these words it is even more clear why today, for Pope Benedict, “the supreme and fundamental priority” is that of reopening access to God for a disoriented humanity.

And “not just to any god, but the God who spoke on Sinai; to that God whose face we recognize in a love driven to the very end, in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.”

(From “L’espresso” no. 50 of 2010).

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It is against this background that one must interpret Benedict XVI’s decisions to institute a new dicastery in the curia “for the new evangelization” and to dedicate to this same theme the synod of bishops in 2012, as also the initiative for dialogue with nonbelievers that he has called “court of the gentiles” and entrusted to his minister of culture, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi.

Among the recent speeches by Pope Benedict on God and polytheism, see in particular the meditation delivered at the synod of bishops for the Middle East on October 11, 2010:

> “It is the faith of the simple that knocks down false gods”

The speech addressed on September 13, 2010 to the new German ambassador to the Holy See:

> “Mr Ambassador…”

The homily of June 11, 2010, at the closing of the Year for Priests:

> “The Year of the Priest which…”

And the “lectio divina” given to the seminarians of Rome on February 12, 2010:

> “Every year it is a great joy to me…”

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English translation by Matthew Sherry, Ballwin, Missouri, U.S.A.