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Narrative economy/9 - The Logos that has taken our flesh loves to converse. And opens itself up to unpredictable cyrenees
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 08/12/2024
I  on the other hand, every day 
at some edge of a square,
at an outlet of streets. 
In the day, always, 
looking for bread for the hungry, 
to bring light 
in the night to the whole city.
Stranger to the same brothers 
only company a faith 
that is a mystery to myself.
Davide Maria Turoldo, ‘Sola Compagnia’, in Udii una voce, 1952
Don Camillo in his dialogues with the Crucified gives ‘thou’ to God, and reminds us that ‘thou’ is the only right pronoun of faith.
One of the radical novelties brought by Christianity is the good news of the Eternal One who has become one of us. There is nothing more humanistic and humanistic than the God of Jesus Christ, who gave ‘thou’ to women and men, and taught us how to give ‘thou’ to God. Yet Christianity itself soon unlearned this absolute closeness and applied to the deity the same (amplified) privileges of kings, of the powerful, of the great, making God ‘the King of kings’, the Most High above all rulers. We thus imagined him so far away in the high heavens that to reach him we needed the intercession of the saints and Our Lady, because they were close, so they understood us, as if the Christian God was not closer than all the saints and holy women put together. This was also the religious world of Guareschi, who instead invented and gave us a Don Camillo who spoke daily with God as one would speak with a friend. Like Moses, who, the Bible tells us, was the only man to speak to God face to face, ‘as one man speaks to another man’ (Ex 33:11). The only man Moses. ... together with Don Camillo, Guareschi's priest who often calls his God ‘you’ (and even when he uses ‘you’ with Jesus, it is always ‘you’). This tu-a-tu was also known by the poor who, not possessing enough syntax for ‘lei’ and ‘voi’, were and are forced to use the only truly Christian pronoun in prayer: ‘tu’. 

    [fulltext] => 
For our Catholic grandparents and parents (at least mine), Jesus, among the many deities he was approached with, had a special status. Jesus was considered a divine being, ‘but not God: God is something else’, they said. The focus of the people's pietas was certainly not Trinitarian theology nor Christology, matters too far removed from wheat and water, unclear even to the country parish priests who would have had the task of bridging the gap between true theology and the popular and magical religion of the ‘simple’. But, in that Olympus of divine beings, Jesus and Our Lady were nonetheless different and much loved. They were so for many things, but especially for their ‘great sorrows’. Jesus then almost always stood on the cross, in churches, shrines and homes. And not only because of the bizarre sorrow theology of the Counter-Reformation, but also because the peasants and the people identified much more easily with a Crucified than with a Risen One, in an existence that was much more reminiscent of Good Friday than of Resurrection Sunday. The stones of the tombs were not rolling to put an end to suffering and misery. Children did not return from wars, children died, hunger did not end. And that is why we loved the crucifix so much, why we filled it with words, with caresses and tears, until yesterday. We are not surprised, then, if don Camillo also speaks with his crucified Jesus, not the Risen One. And although the context of the stories is cheerful and often humorous, the dialogues between don Camillo and crucified Jesus are very serious, sometimes even dramatic, almost always beautiful. Like those in the Via Crucis episode.
Don Camillo had made trouble in the village with a certain Marasca, with whom they had come to blows: ‘Such a fuss ensued that the old bishop sent for don Camillo and told him: - Monterana is without a parish priest: leave for Monterana and come down when the old parish priest returns. Don Camillo stammered: - but the parish priest of Monterana is dead. - Exactly - replied the bishop' (G. Guareschi, Don Camillo e il suo gregge, 1953, p. 229). Monterana was a small village lost in the mountains, ‘the most wretched village in the universe’. Don Camillo arrived there first by coach and then on foot, up a stony gully: ‘He entered the parsonage and seemed to lose his breath. He then entered the church, knelt down on the altar step and ‘raised his eyes to the crucifix: - Jesus - he said. Then words failed him: the crucifix on the high altar was a black cross, made of cracked wood, bare and raw. All that remained of the plaster Christ were the hands and feet pierced by the large nails. He was almost afraid of it. And this simple prayer was born to him: ‘Jesus, what becomes of my faith if I feel alone today?’ (p. 230). This is don Camillo's loneliness, which is also that of many country parish priests of past centuries. A life spent in the midst of the people but, in the end, alone, because the sociological company of the mission almost never succeeded in filling the existential loneliness of home and night. But, as Guareschi reveals, those parish priests often had a different and true companionship in their dialogue with Jesus. Don Camillo is an image of those ancient parish priests, who may not always have been prophets or mirrors of virtue, but were friends of Jesus, and almost always of the poor and the people - I knew some of them, among them Don Isaia Picca, the parish priest of my youth.
After these words, don Camillo returned to the rectory, and found ‘on a napkin a piece of bread and a small piece of cheese’. He asked: ‘Where does this stuff come from? The old woman, the dead priest's housekeeper, brought him a jug of water, spread her arms wide, she didn't even know: ‘for years and annorum it had always been like this with the old priest. Now the miracle continued with the new priest’. The Lord makes the bed for the sick, recites the Psalm (41:4). The first experience don Camillo has, confined and alone in a different Barbiana, is abandonment by his God; but, immediately afterwards, he experiences his providence. The world is full of women and men who, while experiencing all forms of abandonment, loneliness and spiritual depression, are reached by a mysterious but real providence, which becomes that crumb of bread and glass of water that makes you feel loved and able to continue your journey. On earth there is much more providence than we can recognise and call by this sweet name.
But it is here that a thought creeps into Don Camillo. He spends a few days in bed with a fever, one morning he gets up and despite the bishop's ban (‘don't move for any reason’), he comes down from the mountain, gets on the bus and goes back to his village (Ponteratto, or Brescello in the films), precisely to the courtyard of Peppone's house. He asks him for his truck for an urgent service, and in the middle of the night they leave. First they stop at the village church. Peppone stays at the wheel, and Don Camillo does his job. They drive about thirty kilometres, and when they reach the crossroads for Monterana, don Camillo gets out, takes his load, ‘and when Peppone sees him appear under the light of the headlights, he blinked his eyes. The crucified Christ'. Don Camillo had come down from the mountain to take back his Jesus. ‘Can I give you a hand, Reverend?’ exclaimed Peppone. ‘Don't touch! Go away’. Bon voyage, Peppone replied. And, ‘in the night began don Camillo's Via Crucis’ (p. 234). 
The crucifix was enormous: ‘Christ carved out of hard, solid wood. The mule track was steep and the large stones wet and slippery'. He fell on a sharp stone, ‘felt the blood dripping from his knee, and did not stop. A branch took away his hat, and wounded his forehead, and he did not stop... And his face brushed against the face of the crucified Christ.’ After four hours, ‘by then he had no more strength and it was only his despair that kept him up. That desperation that comes from hope' (p. 235). Here Guareschi perhaps put into this via crucis the years he had spent in the prison camps during the war, where, like all prisoners of all wars, in order not to die he had had to discover a mysterious desperate hope - even this paradoxical hope is providence for the poor (‘come father of the poor’), the daily manna in the deserts. It was ‘a giant's struggle but, in the end, Christ Crucified was up there’ (p. 235). 
Don Camillo wanted his Jesus. Any Jesus was not enough for him, he wanted his own. To tell us, perhaps, and in spite of Guareschi's intentions, something important - let us not forget that Don Camillo is also Guareschi but he is not just Guareschi, and we must not lay the faults or limitations of their fathers on the children (the characters). Faith is not generic, it is not an abstract belief in God or theological truths and dogmas. No: faith is an encounter, it is a relationship, hence it is dialogue. It is not invoking the Most High, but giving ‘thou’ to a personal presence, close and friendly, very mysterious and yet at home. That is why when faith is lost, or we feel that it can be lost, we return to the places where we have met and dialogued with our Jesus, with our God.
Every faith is like that, but the Christian one is in a very special way, because that logos became flesh, within that flesh became dia-logos. Jesus was a dialoguing prophet-master, a dialogue so important that the gospels show him in dialogue with men even on the cross. And if faith is encounter and dialogue, then it is a personal, personalised, interpersonal affair: every believer has his Jesus, and he pronounces this name with a unique and unmistakable timbre and tone - who knows whether, in the end, we will be called by name because we recognise what we call Him? 
There were only two people in the church, and one was Peppone, who had not left (‘go away’), and ‘although he did not have the cross on his shoulders, he had participated in that immense effort as if the weight had also been on his shoulders’ (p. 235). Peppone had become another Cyrenian. For that pietas, still alive in that generation of Italians and Christians, who beyond or before the political and ideological struggles knew how to recognise in the face of every man, even in those of the soldiers of the enemy armies, the face of a brother, of a Christian. And so, when the adversary ran into misfortune, one would lay down one's arms and set the table at home for him, offer him a meal, accompany him, perhaps in silence, in his way of the cross. As long as people in a community are capable of accompanying the painful ways of adversaries, that community still has a soul - the one we are losing: forever? 
 
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    [text] => 
Narrative economy/9 - The Logos that has taken our flesh loves to converse. And opens itself up to unpredictable cyrenees
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 08/12/2024
I  on the other hand, every day 
at some edge of a square,
at an outlet of streets. 
In the day, always, 
looking for bread for the hungry, 
to bring light 
in the night to the whole city.
Stranger to the same brothers 
only company a faith 
that is a mystery to myself.
Davide Maria Turoldo, ‘Sola Compagnia’, in Udii una voce, 1952
Don Camillo in his dialogues with the Crucified gives ‘thou’ to God, and reminds us that ‘thou’ is the only right pronoun of faith.
One of the radical novelties brought by Christianity is the good news of the Eternal One who has become one of us. There is nothing more humanistic and humanistic than the God of Jesus Christ, who gave ‘thou’ to women and men, and taught us how to give ‘thou’ to God. Yet Christianity itself soon unlearned this absolute closeness and applied to the deity the same (amplified) privileges of kings, of the powerful, of the great, making God ‘the King of kings’, the Most High above all rulers. We thus imagined him so far away in the high heavens that to reach him we needed the intercession of the saints and Our Lady, because they were close, so they understood us, as if the Christian God was not closer than all the saints and holy women put together. This was also the religious world of Guareschi, who instead invented and gave us a Don Camillo who spoke daily with God as one would speak with a friend. Like Moses, who, the Bible tells us, was the only man to speak to God face to face, ‘as one man speaks to another man’ (Ex 33:11). The only man Moses. ... together with Don Camillo, Guareschi's priest who often calls his God ‘you’ (and even when he uses ‘you’ with Jesus, it is always ‘you’). This tu-a-tu was also known by the poor who, not possessing enough syntax for ‘lei’ and ‘voi’, were and are forced to use the only truly Christian pronoun in prayer: ‘tu’. 

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    [title] => Feminine wisdom and humility guarantees custody of the sacred
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Narrative Economy/5 - The figures of women in the great novel that unveiled the peasant South show secrets of emotional relationships and religious memory
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 10/11/2024
“Give thanks I wish for the fact that I have a sister.”
Mariangela Gualtieri, Ringraziare desidero
Two episodes from Carlo Levi's Christ, the encounter with his sister and the child saved by Our Lady of Viggiano, introduce us to a world that still has much to tell us.
Christ Stopped at Eboli is, first of all, a book full of episodes written with beautiful prose, capable of giving us passages of a humanity as beautiful as it is now lost. In the first part of the novel, we find Luisa's visit to Carlo levi, her brother. She was a renowned child neuropsychiatrist, known for her pioneering studies on children's sex education. Luisa was four years older than Carlo (she was born in 1898), and her brother gives us a beautiful description of her in pages that are among the most intense in the novel. Upon her arrival, he sees her getting out of the car of Gagliano's 'taxi driver': "Her clear gestures, her simple dress, the frank tone of her voice, the open smile were those well known to me, which I had always known her: but after the long months of loneliness ... her arrival was that of an ambassador of another state in a foreign country" (p. 78). It is thanks to Luisa's account to her brother of her arrival by train in Matera that we have perhaps the best-known pages of Christ: "Of children there was an infinity... I saw children sitting on the doorways of houses, flies resting on their eyes, and those stood motionless... But most of them had big, swollen bellies, huge, and yellow faces, and suffered from malaria" (p. 82). A tremendous description that contrasts, and this time the contrast is all good, with today's stunning Matera, which has become one of Europe's most beautiful cities. Italy has also been capable of these civic metamorphoses, but they must never make us forget that Basilicata and the South are not just the bright one of Matera.

    [fulltext] => 
The account of Luisa's arrival in Gagliano is full of emotion, especially when Charles describes how the town welcomed and read about that sororal visit: "Until now I had been, for them, someone who had fallen from heaven: but I lacked something: I was alone. The discovery that I too had blood ties on this earth seemed to pleasantly fill, in their eyes, a gap. Seeing me with a sister moved one of their deepest feelings... When, towards evening, we strolled down the only street in the village, my sister and I, holding each other arm in arm, the peasants from the thresholds looked at us blissfully. The women would greet us, and cover us with blessings: - Blessed is the womb that bore you - ... - Blessed are the breasts that suckled you! - ... A bride is a beautiful thing: but a sister is so much more! - Friar and sister, core and core" (pp. 84-85). Words reminiscent of those of the women of Jerusalem as Jesus passed by (Lk. 11:27).
The Greek world knew more words for what we call 'love' today. Philadelphia and storgé were used to express that particular form of love that is typical of family ties. Paul, in his Letter to the Romans (12.10), uses the rare word philostorgos - composed by joining philos (friend) and storgé - to say, "Love one another with brotherly affection." Love between brothers and sisters is one of the strongest and deepest forms of love, different from marital love and even love for (and of) parents. It is made up of few words and much silent substance, of freedom, of quarrels that often recompose themselves the minute they arise. Love, then, between sisters is still different from that between brothers, but that between a brother and a sister is still different, and perhaps the most delicate and beautiful. It lives of grace, of sweetness, of very long hugs, of beauty, of much emotion. Because, unlike those between boys and between girls, the affection between a sister and a brother has a typical tenderness and complicity combined with delicacy, respect, confidence, modesty. Certain great intimate pains we males say more easily - and sometimes only - to a sister. It is not a chosen love as is that of friendship (philia); sisters (and brothers) happen to us, we find them inside the house before us or they come later, but this non-choice instead of reducing affection and freedom increases it, it is leaven of many other freedoms sought and conquered. The gift of having a sister changes and grows with us, the years unveil it, show all the treasures that remain hidden as children. Few sorrows are greater than those born of a sister gravely ill, or humiliated and offended, and the young death of a sister is perhaps, with that for the death of children, the greatest sorrow on earth. Today, in a time of fragile and short families and too many lonelinesses, sisterly love remains an anchor for our happiness. Fraternity is a beautiful word but it alone is not enough to express the emotion felt by the women in seeing Charles and Luisa arm in arm. It would take a different word, 'brother and sister' together, fraternity and sorority; a word that is not there, but one that we should never stop looking for and perhaps one day find.
Particularly sensitive, then, are also the pages about another woman, Margaret, who did chores for Charles: "An old woman, with a face full of goodness," who "was considered one of the most intelligent and educated women in the village"-the most beautiful pages of Christ are those that have women as protagonists. Marguerite had done "up to the fifth grade, and she remembered perfectly everything she had learned. In fact, when she came to my room, she would repeat to me the poems from those old school days of hers: the Expedition of Sapri, the Death of Ermengarda. She would repeat them standing in the middle of the room, standing upright, her arms stiffly hanging down her body, reciting them like chants" (p. 165). In that world, intelligence was something different from what it became later. It was also about goodness, because no person who was not good could be called intelligent. Something similar to what the Bible called wisdom. Schooling was also important for intelligence, although not essential, because there was little schooling and therefore as valuable as gold. In the peasant world, being able to go to school, especially for girls, was always a day of celebration, an oasis of beauty in a difficult everyday life of toil and pain. For the peasants of yesterday, the words they heard from the teacher in the multi-classrooms was the place of real news: history with its mysterious peoples, geography with its world capitals. Today they discovered the Assyrians, tomorrow the Babylonians, the day after tomorrow Madrid: all inhabitants of their own magical world. But above all they loved poetry. They didn't understand them, but they memorized them the way prayers were learned, because they were as beautiful as statues of the Madonna and saints, full of color and covered in gold. Those children knew that the school years were very few, two or maybe five, so they did not miss a word from the teacher. To get a sense of something of what the word was in the Bible, we would have to go back with our memory to the poor children's schools of yesterday, or to an African classroom of today: every word was a pledge of the promised land. In Margaret reciting the poems, I saw again those of my mother, who also only got as far as the fifth grade, who every August 10 recited to us (and still recites) from memory and with the same childlike pose, the poem 'San Lorenzo,' to which on special days were added 'Breus' and 'La cavallina Storna' - her beloved teacher Anna Filippini loved Pascoli very much.
One day Margaret told Charles, "amid tears," the story of her third child: "This child was the most beautiful of all... One winter day, Margaret had entrusted him to a godmother and neighbor, who had taken him with her to the country, while she went out to make wood. In the evening the neighbor came home alone, and in despair. She had left the child, who walked very little, for a few minutes, while she gathered, in the forest path, some branches: but, when she returned, the child was gone. She had gone around everywhere, of the child no trace... On the fourth day, in the morning, Margaret, who was wandering alone and disconsolate through the countryside, met at the turn of a path, a large and beautiful woman, with a black face. It was Our Lady of Viggiano. She said to her: - Margaret, do not cry. Your child is alive. He is down there in the woods, in a wolf pit. Go home, be accompanied, and you will find him - - Margaret ran, and, followed by the peasants and the carabinieri, she arrived at the place indicated by Our Lady. In the wolf-pit, in the middle of the snow, lay her child, quietly asleep, all pink and warm in the midst of that cold. The mother embraced him, woke him up. Everyone was crying, even the carabinieri. The child told that a woman with a black face had come, and that for four days she had kept him with her, and had given him milk, there in that pit, had kept him warm" (pp. 165-166). Then the child would die a few years later, falling from a ladder, but that milk he had received from the Virgin of Viggiano had made him special forever. We today to the 'big and beautiful, black-faced' women we meet along our paths, we close our ports, we reject them, we do not believe their life stories. But who knows how many children in our 'wolf pits' continue to be 'suckled' by 'Our Lady of Viggiano,' and do not die?!!!
In the world narrated by Levi, women were the primary stewards of the sacred, always intertwined with the magical. It was a shared stewardship among many people. In the Protestant world the popular sacred was fought over; in the institutional Catholic world it was concentrated in the priests, in a male monopoly. In the Catholic peasant world, on the other hand, it remained feminine, plural and popular, thus wild and untamed, and it survived, intertwined with magic but alive. In that mestizo field faith found fertile ground, natural humility nurtured the Christian humus. If Christianity, after this dark night, will still have a new season, it will be heralded by a popular, peasant, feminine, spurious dawn. Neither the Christianity of theologians nor the Christianity of the temple will be the garden where the stone can still roll.
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Narrative Economy/5 - The figures of women in the great novel that unveiled the peasant South show secrets of emotional relationships and religious memory
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 10/11/2024
“Give thanks I wish for the fact that I have a sister.”
Mariangela Gualtieri, Ringraziare desidero
Two episodes from Carlo Levi's Christ, the encounter with his sister and the child saved by Our Lady of Viggiano, introduce us to a world that still has much to tell us.
Christ Stopped at Eboli is, first of all, a book full of episodes written with beautiful prose, capable of giving us passages of a humanity as beautiful as it is now lost. In the first part of the novel, we find Luisa's visit to Carlo levi, her brother. She was a renowned child neuropsychiatrist, known for her pioneering studies on children's sex education. Luisa was four years older than Carlo (she was born in 1898), and her brother gives us a beautiful description of her in pages that are among the most intense in the novel. Upon her arrival, he sees her getting out of the car of Gagliano's 'taxi driver': "Her clear gestures, her simple dress, the frank tone of her voice, the open smile were those well known to me, which I had always known her: but after the long months of loneliness ... her arrival was that of an ambassador of another state in a foreign country" (p. 78). It is thanks to Luisa's account to her brother of her arrival by train in Matera that we have perhaps the best-known pages of Christ: "Of children there was an infinity... I saw children sitting on the doorways of houses, flies resting on their eyes, and those stood motionless... But most of them had big, swollen bellies, huge, and yellow faces, and suffered from malaria" (p. 82). A tremendous description that contrasts, and this time the contrast is all good, with today's stunning Matera, which has become one of Europe's most beautiful cities. Italy has also been capable of these civic metamorphoses, but they must never make us forget that Basilicata and the South are not just the bright one of Matera.

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    [title] => Waiting for the Kingdom of Heaven is in the art of diminishment
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Narrative Economy/3 - The entire existence of a Christian, says Silone's Celestine V, has one purpose: to become simple
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 27/10/2024
“Truly precious are the gifts that life gives us; precious and strange, Marta replies. Those who want to enjoy them, and toil from morning till night to enjoy them, do not enjoy them at all, but burn and ash them soon. Strange gifts. He, on the other hand, who forgets them, and forgets himself, and devotes himself wholly, hopelessly, to someone and some thing, those receive a thousand times more than he gives, and at the end of life those gifts received from nature are still flourishing in him, like great roses in May.”
Ignazio Silone, Vino e Pane, 1937, p. 18

Ignazio Silone's The Adventure of a Poor Christian are a profound reflection on the nature of power, and a mediation on faith as a waiting for a Kingdom that cannot tarry.
Those who go through, carefully, the books of Ignazio Silone and are familiar with his biography, cannot fail to recognize something-sometimes a lot-of his author in Berardo Viola (Fontamara), Pietro Spina (The Seed Under the Snow), Don Paolo Spada (Wine and Bread), Luca Sabatini (The Secret of Luke), and finally Pope Celestine V (The Adventure of a Poor Christian). Because, "if a writer puts his whole self into the work (and what else can he put into it?) his work cannot but constitute a single book" (I. Silone, The Adventure of a Poor Christian, Oscar Mondadori, ed. 2017, p. 6).

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What else, in fact, can a writer put into his works if not 'all of himself'? Actually, a writer, especially a great one (and Silone is one), when creating the characters of his novels undoubtedly starts from 'all of himself' but then arrives elsewhere, in an unknown place where 'himself' is no longer there or there is very little. For writers reveal well that mysterious and beautiful phrase of Jacques Lacan: "Love consists in giving what one does not have" (Seminar VIII, 1960-1961). They begin with what they have, with their whole soul, but then they really love us when they give us what they do not have, when their characters become bigger and freer than their already great and very great authors, and they begin to live in a land of the not-yet, unknown in the first place to their creators. In this, too, literature is creation, it is the truly unseen, it is widening the horizon of the human to populate it with other living beings who enrich and improve the existential stories of their authors and the history of all. One also writes to try to inhabit, without ever bridging, the sidereal distance between reality and our desires, between earth and heaven. 'Come out' is not only the cry that every author whispers to his creatures: it is he, it is she, who is the first recipient of that cry, to try to resurrect in his characters-because the only true desire is to resurrect.
Pietro da Morrone, Pope Celestine V, the protagonist of The Adventure of a Poor Christian (1968), is the last installment of Silone's 'cycle of the vanquished'. It is also Silone's last book, written as a play, which closes his 40-year reflection on social justice, the peasants, the poor, utopia, the gospel, Christianity, and his Kingdom that is yet to come, and may indeed come. The setting of the book, Silone's most explicitly religious setting, is the Abruzzi mountains of the late thirteenth century, where hermits and small communities of cenobites lived in an eschatological and apocalyptic atmosphere, a spiritual environment made up of Franciscanism and the prophecy of Joachim of Fiore, in the expectation "of a third age of humankind, the age of the Spirit, without Church, without State, without coercion, in an egalitarian, sober, humble and benign society, entrusted to the spontaneous charity of men" (p. 23). At that time, in fact, not a few Franciscans (among them the most famous was Pietro Olivi, also known for his economic ideas) saw in Francis the prophet of the new Age of the Spirit heralded by Joachim, of the unvanquished and imminent expectation of the coming of the Kingdom. Angelo Clareno, a character featured in Silone's text, was a Franciscan who was condemned and imprisoned because he adhered to Joachinite ideas.
The Peter of Morrone of The Adventure of a Poor Christian is also a figure of a prophetic Christianity, of Francis and Joachim of Fiore together, spiritual and messianic, to whom the late Silone entrusts his hopes for a different Church and world. Narrating Friar Peter's failed and uncertain attempt to reconcile the institutional Church (the papacy) with the charismatic one, Silone announces to us his idea of the Church and the good life: "The myth of the Kingdom has never disappeared from southern Italy, this land of utopia's election" (p. 23). We do not understand Southern Italy without taking this utopian and messianic soul of it very seriously: the South is also the expectation of another world, an unfulfilled prophecy of another economy and another society (Tommaso Campanella), the hope still alive in the fulfillment of a promise. The South, all the Souths of the world along with its marginal lands, are first and foremost a collective waiting for a not-yet, a question about the Kingdom that is to come, which no promise of commodities and profits can ever truly satiate - lies in this thirst and hunger the South's not-vanishing salvation.
The book is punctuated by Silone's auto-biographical reflections, particularly on the decisive event of his life, his youthful adherence to the Communist Party of which he was a founder in 1921, which later became a disappointment and finally an exit - Silone wrote his novels also to grieve the death of the great dream of his youth. A crucial existential event that as the years went by also became a 'theory' on the dynamics of ideal and ideological movements, which he would discuss in several writings (Uscita di sicurezza) and interviews (L'avventura di un uomo libero), still of great interest: "The founders are usually eagles, the followers generally hens" (p. 65). And again in The Adventure, on this he wrote: "Experience shows that the great community spontaneously generates aspirations for power, a will never entirely satisfied for successes and triumphs... As a community grows larger, it therefore becomes fatal that it resembles the society that surrounds it [and which it contested]. So what? Where does the salvation of the flock go?" Because of these dynamics, "even Joachim of Fiore resigned as head of his order. So did St. Francis. A large community demands compromises that, I am not saying a saint, but a simple honest man cannot accept" (p. 69).
Themes that will gradually become central to the book when, once elected pope, Brother Peter, who became Celestine V, will experience on his own soul and skin the difficulties of saving his Christian conscience along with the exercise of power. The inner conflict will be resolved by his famous resignation and the (likely) Dantean 'great refusal.' After abdicating, he will say, "I learned to my cost that it is not easy to be pope and remain a good Christian... The exercise of command enslaves, beginning with those who exercise it" (p. 130). Indeed, the book is also a profound and beautiful reflection on the nature of power and its logic: "The cursed 'for good'. My children, do not forget: there is only good, pure is simple; there is no 'for the sake of good'... Using power? What a pernicious illusion. It is power that makes use of us. Power is a difficult horse to ride: it goes where it must go, or rather it goes where it can go or where it is natural for it to go... The aspiration to command, the obsession with power is, at all levels, a form of madness. It eats away at the soul, distorts it, makes it false. Even if one aspires to power 'for good,' especially if one aspires to power 'for good'" (pp. 157-158). Power is a master who enslaves first and foremost those who command, even those who have sought it 'for good'; it is a ruthless ruler who feeds first on the leaders he has enchanted and only indirectly on their subjects. This is the curse of all wanted and obtained power, which because of this dimension of it really borders on the demonic: "The temptation of power is the most diabolical temptation that can be laid upon man, if Satan dared to propose it even to Christ" (p. 158). Very beautiful and prophetic are the pages on another 'great refusal' of Silone's Celestine V, that of blessing weapons: "With the sign of the Cross and the names of the Trinity, you can bless bread, soup, oil, water, wine, if you want even work tools, the plow, the farmer's hoe, the carpenter's planer, and so on, but not weapons. If you have an absolute need for a propitiatory rite, look for someone to do it in the name of Satan. It was he who invented weapons" (p. 123).
But The Adventure of a Poor Christian is above all a reflection on the nature of faith and the possibility of making the gospel the magna carta for a new society, for a different Kingdom here and now, and not just a sacred text of one religion like many. Hence the crucial question: can the Kingdom of Christ become something historical, or is life on this earth just the waiting room for heaven? An essential dimension of the evangelical spirit of this awaited Kingdom of Heaven is, for Silone, simplicity. In a dialogue, set in Naples, between the now Celestine V and some rhetoricians and court preachers, the new pope says: "I must first of all say to you: in preaching, if it is possible for you, try to be simple... True simplicity is a very difficult achievement." And he concludes with a phrase of great beauty: "The whole existence of a Christian, it can be said, has precisely this purpose: to become simple" (p. 100). An insight that is at once all human and all biblical. There is a deep soul in the Bible, that of the prophets, which sees the development of faith as a diminution, a reduction toward a progressive simplicity and essentiality, as an exercise in the arte del levare. The people's walk with their different God began on the slopes of Sinai where 'there was only a voice,' a bare voice that later became tabernacle, then ark, tent, finally Temple and palace of Solomon. The prophets went on to repeat, in various forms and much force, that that growth and increase had not been good, because salvation Israel would find it in the reduction and journey back from the palace to the bare voice, which happened through the Babylonian exile: "Perhaps, in order to rise again, the Church will first have to fully rot" (p. 159).
But even the good development of human life is a first growth from childhood to adulthood, which is followed by a second part of gradual and increasing decrease to the essentials, the part that from adulthood leads to its fulfillment, where there will be 'only one voice' that will speak only our naked name. The dowry we will bring will be the meekness we would have learned during this good decrease, to become so small as to be able to pass through the eye of the needle of the angel of death.
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Narrative Economy/3 - The entire existence of a Christian, says Silone's Celestine V, has one purpose: to become simple
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 27/10/2024
“Truly precious are the gifts that life gives us; precious and strange, Marta replies. Those who want to enjoy them, and toil from morning till night to enjoy them, do not enjoy them at all, but burn and ash them soon. Strange gifts. He, on the other hand, who forgets them, and forgets himself, and devotes himself wholly, hopelessly, to someone and some thing, those receive a thousand times more than he gives, and at the end of life those gifts received from nature are still flourishing in him, like great roses in May.”
Ignazio Silone, Vino e Pane, 1937, p. 18

Ignazio Silone's The Adventure of a Poor Christian are a profound reflection on the nature of power, and a mediation on faith as a waiting for a Kingdom that cannot tarry.
Those who go through, carefully, the books of Ignazio Silone and are familiar with his biography, cannot fail to recognize something-sometimes a lot-of his author in Berardo Viola (Fontamara), Pietro Spina (The Seed Under the Snow), Don Paolo Spada (Wine and Bread), Luca Sabatini (The Secret of Luke), and finally Pope Celestine V (The Adventure of a Poor Christian). Because, "if a writer puts his whole self into the work (and what else can he put into it?) his work cannot but constitute a single book" (I. Silone, The Adventure of a Poor Christian, Oscar Mondadori, ed. 2017, p. 6).

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    [title] => On the side of the cafoni of Fontamara, poverty is neither guilt nor shame
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Narrative Economics/1 - With the Abruzzo writer's literary masterpiece, a new journey begins through stories (and words) guardians of a world
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 13/10/2024
«By order of the mayor all reasoning is prohibited»
Ignazio Silone, Fontamara, p. 89
Start with Fontamara a new series through some literary masterpieces, in search of new words for the economy and for our difficult times.
If reality were enough for us, there would be no need for literature. We are infinity, novels shorten the distance between us and eternity; we are desire, writers increase desirable things because closed-eyed dreams are too little. Joy also feeds on the worlds created by literature, our righteousness grows as we become indignant while reading a novel, we learned pietas from parents and friends but also from fairy tales and writers' stories. We would not have been able to imagine the promised land of democracy, freedom and rights if we had not encountered it in myths and novels, glimpsed it in a poem. We have known God because the Bible taught us through stories, and human words have held another Word. All faiths will come to an end on the sad day when we stop writing stories, and telling them to each other.

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"Ignazio Silone has today his maturity crowned and sovereignly fixed in works of art that are at the same time his 'song of creatures' and his apocalyptic vision of the new democratic spirituality... We think we are doing something most timely by giving here as an appendix to our weekly, the first novel of his that gave the international world the acute sensation of the suffering of the Italian people under fascist regime" (March 7, 1945). So wrote Ernesto Buonaiuti introducing the publication of the first chapters of Fontamara in the first issue of his weekly "Il Risveglio." Buoaniuti, the great and beloved professor of the history of Christianity at La Sapienza in Rome, among the twelve academics who did not swear an oath to the Fascist regime, a priest excommunicated from the Catholic Church for his modernist theses-we are still waiting for his rehabilitation, perhaps at Jubilee time.
Fontamara was written by Ignazio Silone (Secondino Tranquilli) in the early 1930s during his Swiss exile. It was first published in German (Zurich, Oprecth & Helbing, April 1933, translation by Nettie Sutro), which was followed by a first Italian-language edition (Zurich-Paris, November 1933) reprinted in London in 1943 (J. Cape, dated 1933). The first edition in Italy came only in 1947 thanks to the small Roman publisher 'Faro,' and finally in 1949 with Mondadori. Its international success was considerable, but it had to wait until the collapse of fascism to be printed in Italy.
In 1930 Silone had been in Switzerland for two years, between Zurich and Davos, for his clandestine commitment to the Communist Party he had helped found at the Livorno congress in 1921. It was also during his Swiss sojourn that his disagreements with Togliatti over his anti-Stalinist positions began, to be followed by his expulsion from the party in 1931. In the sanatorium to treat a respiratory illness (apparent tuberculosis), depressed, distressed about the situation of his brother Romolo, the only one of his family who had been saved with him in 1915 under the rubble of the Pescina earthquake, who had been put in prison by the fascist regime, tortured and then killed in 1932 - Silone dedicates Fontamara to his brother and to Gabriella Seidenfeld, his companion he had met in 1920 from whom he was separating romantically.
Fontamara is thus the distillation of terrible years, the fruit of a very painful metamorphosis. A very deep existential crisis that generated the masterpiece. Fontamara is not only a novel that revealed to Italy and the world the deep soul of the southern peasant world, nor is it only a classic of anti-fascism. Fontamara is above all a literary masterpiece, a stupendous novel, one of those works that perhaps only great pain can generate. Silone, he would later say, found his salvation in literature, overcame that very dark night by becoming a writer-and what a writer! There are many ways to try to save oneself from the black holes of life, writing and art being among the most powerful and common, because one gets out of the hole by learning to fly.
To understand and enjoy it, however, there is a need to perform some essential ethical-spiritual exercises. The first is the most difficult one, perhaps impossible but really necessary: try to forget our comforts, the worship of commodities, offices and incentives, and go with our souls to the world of Fontamara: "First came the sowing, then the sulfur, then the reaping, then the harvest. Then what? Then all over again. The sowing, the weeding, the pruning, the sulfurring, the reaping, the harvest. Always the same song, the same refrain. Always. The years went by, the years accumulated, the young became old, the old died, and the sowing was done, the weeding was done, the insulphation was done, the harvest was done. And then again? All over again. Each year like the previous year, each season like the previous season. Each generation like the previous generation" (1951, p. 9). It is the reign of Sisyphus, but unlike A. Camus's Sisyphus, Silone's Sisyphus is not happy: "To those who look at Fontamara from afar, from the Feudo del Fucino, the settlement ... seems like a village like so many others; but to those who are born and grow up there, the cosmos. The whole universal history takes place there: births, deaths, loves, hates, envies, struggles, despairs" (p. 8). In the first edition of 'The Awakening,' at the end of this paragraph Silone had added, "The spectacle of life is there more meager, more visible and comprehensible, and nothing essential is missing," a phrase that then disappeared in later editions.
The second exercise of spiritual imagination concerns the peasant world. Silone's, like Carlo Levi's (whom we shall see), is a world I also knew, touching on it through my relationship with my grandparents who worked the land in Ascoli. It is very likely, if not certain, that my generation is the last moral heir to millennia of peasant history, made up of Christianity, magic, lots of living and dead children, lots of folk love and lots of pain of everyone, of women most of all. That world, always the same in its essential features, was the world of my childhood. I was still a boy, but I too saw that peasant Sisyphus, little myth and all flesh. It is an essential part of my soul, where I jealously guard it. Fontamara is my country.
That was an Italian world but one where other languages were spoken: "Let it not occur to anyone that the Fontamaresi speak Italian... The Italian language is for us a foreign language, a dead language" (p. 15). When I remember or dream of my grandparents, to try to tune into their hearts again, I have to tune into the dialect, because only in that language could and can they tell me the right and perfect words, tell the most beautiful stories with an eloquence and richness that immediately became awkwardness and discomfort as soon as we had to switch to Italian (the Italianization of the peasants was also violence): "However, if the language is borrowed, the way of telling, it seems to me, is ours. It is a fundamental art. It is the same one learned as a boy, sitting on the doorstep, or by the fireplace, on long waking nights" (p. 16). Perhaps my love for words also came from listening to the stories of my aunts, or the very long ones of 'Old Catherine' who stayed with us little brothers on long winter evenings. So this series of articles that begins today is also a contribution to the preservation of the memory of a world that I knew and that is ending along with its stories: who knows if our children will still be able to understand and be moved by Silone or Levi?
Finally, the third exercise is semantic, and concerns the key-word of Fontamara: boor. In parentheses, Silone writes: "(I know well that the name cafone, in the current language of my country, both of the country and of the city, is now a term of offense and derision; but I adopt it in this book in the certainty that when in my country pain will no longer be a disgrace, it will become a name of respect, perhaps even of honor)" (p. 10).
We enter Fontamara if we can reach now that country of tomorrow where 'pain is no longer shameful'; there we pitch our tent and with Silone we use the name boor as a 'name of respect and honor.' And so we deny all the meritocratic ideologies that are driving away that country of tomorrow, introducing every day new arguments to convince us that the poor man must be ashamed of his poverty because he is guilty of his own misfortune -- and while convincing us of this lie, capitalism frees itself from all responsibility.
Fontamara is not a 'village,' a word that has entered the crevices of our mundane time that has lost touch with the soul of real places. In Fontamara "peasants do not sing ... least of all (and it is understood) going to work. Instead of singing, they gladly blaspheme. To express great emotion, joy, anger and even religious devotion, they blaspheme. But even in blaspheming they do not carry much imagination, and they always take it out on two or three saints of their acquaintance, they always mangle them with the same crude swear words" (p. 14). One does not enter the world of the poor if one is afraid of blasphemies and curses, because they are, often, paradoxical words of love.
In Fontamara, economics is a constant note, declined as land, labor, obsession with 'paying,' misery, taxes, power. Social injustice, central to the novel, is also and above all an economic injustice, that of the latifundium and the 'impresario' supported by institutions, smallholders and the clergy (Don Abbacchio). And it goes all the way to Berardo's death, in perhaps the most intense pages of the novel.
Fontamara is a story of failed social redemption, of failed liberation. The peasants cheated by the detour of the stream to bring water to the impresario remain poor and cheated from the beginning to the end of the novel. Fontamara seems like an eternal Good Friday, with a few glimpses of Saturday, no Sunday. And in this it resembles so many other great novels, where Fantine sells and her teeth and dies without resurrection, or the Bible where the exodus and exile continue beyond the Red Sea and after the edict of Cyrus, because the wandering Aramean has never stopped wandering. The only resurrection that saves is the one that begins on Golgotha. And so, the more Silone leads us into the depths of the boors' pain, the more we glimpse there a strange beauty and bright light -- we will not be able to lift the many 'boors' out of their miseries until we learn the beauty hidden within poverty, and to look upon the poor with honor and respect.
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                            [title] => Economia narrativa
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    [slug] => 19828:on-the-side-of-the-cafoni-of-fontamara-poverty-is-neither-guilt-nor-shame
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Narrative Economics/1 - With the Abruzzo writer's literary masterpiece, a new journey begins through stories (and words) guardians of a world
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 13/10/2024
«By order of the mayor all reasoning is prohibited»
Ignazio Silone, Fontamara, p. 89
Start with Fontamara a new series through some literary masterpieces, in search of new words for the economy and for our difficult times.
If reality were enough for us, there would be no need for literature. We are infinity, novels shorten the distance between us and eternity; we are desire, writers increase desirable things because closed-eyed dreams are too little. Joy also feeds on the worlds created by literature, our righteousness grows as we become indignant while reading a novel, we learned pietas from parents and friends but also from fairy tales and writers' stories. We would not have been able to imagine the promised land of democracy, freedom and rights if we had not encountered it in myths and novels, glimpsed it in a poem. We have known God because the Bible taught us through stories, and human words have held another Word. All faiths will come to an end on the sad day when we stop writing stories, and telling them to each other.

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