In honor of our now former Pope Benedict, I post the following Zenit piece.
God be with Benedict.
By Paul De Maeyer
ROME, FEB. 7, 2012 (Zenit.org).- G.K. Chesterton and
Benedict XVI have plenty in common, according to a professor of literature and
Catholicism from the Pontifical Lateran University.
Andrea Monda will
defend this perspective Saturday in Genoa at a conference titled "Common Sense
Day. The Paradoxical Beauty of the Everyday. A Day for G.K.
Chesterton."
Monda is set to close the event -- dedicated entirely to the
English writer and thinker -- with a talk on "Good Sense, Good Life and Good
Humor: G.K. Chesterton and Benedict XVI."
In the course of his
presentation, Professor Monda will provide some excerpts from his next book, on
the "Simple Virtues of Joseph Ratzinger," offering a "Chestertonian" reading of
Benedict XVI's pontificate (Lindau
Publishing House). The book is due out next
month.
ZENIT spoke with the professor about his vision of the author and
the Pontiff.
ZENIT: What relationship is there between Chesterton and
Joseph Ratzinger?
Monda: Young Joseph Ratzinger read and appreciated
several of Chesterton's books; in fact, here and there, whether before or after
the papal election, direct or indirect quotations emerge of the work of the
inventor of Father Brown. However, what I tried to do in the book, and what I
will do in Genoa, is not so much a philological reconstruction of these
quotations, but a little reasoning that develops from the two figures of the
English thinker and the Bavarian theologian and Pontiff, on subjects which cut
across the positions at the center of the attention of the congress' organizers:
good sense, good life and good humor.
ZENIT: In the collective and media
imagination, Pope Benedict XVI is not associated with humor, is this
true?
Monda: The truth is that Ratzinger, just as every man, is a
mystery, a complex reality often poorly rendered by the image that prevails in
the mass media; it is from here that the need arose in me to write a book that
gives greater weight and perspective to a picture that is otherwise trite,
two-dimensional: the Pope of "no's," the German Pope staunch defender of the
rigor of the moral norm. What is true in all of this is that Joseph Ratzinger is
a serious person. However, be careful, says Chesterton, when he recalls, with
his typical liking of paradoxes, that "serious is not the opposite of amusing,
the opposite of amusing is not amusing, boring." Hence the Pope is a serious
person, who takes seriously the Gospel and every man he meets, a serious person
and, hence, also amusing, who knows the value of good humor, of humor and of
smiling.
ZENIT: Is this liking for paradox the point of contact between
Chesterton and Benedict XVI?
Monda: Yes and no. Certainly yes: being two
persons of great acumen and intelligence, their reasoning is not trite but
sparkling, at times unsettling, which also calls for flexibility in the
intelligence of the interlocutor. In other words, they require appropriate
interlocutors, equal to them. At the same time, Chesterton and the Pope are not
two intellectuals merely content to give us paradoxical phrases, wit and puns.
Their reasoning is ordered to create a dialogue, it is not fireworks but the
desire to have a relationship with the other (even with the one who is distant,
who does not believe, who is an "enemy" of the faith) without betraying
adherence to their faith which, first of all, is lived, practiced and then
preached.
ZENIT: What is the relationship between the two and good sense,
good life and good humor?
Monda: This is what I will talk about at
Genoa's congress. Connected between them are the three aspects and in all three
one can almost see a similar behavior in the writer and the Pontiff. In regard
to good sense: for Chesterton it is verifiable in children's fables whose
"morals" are still valid today and he gives the example of Cinderella, which has
the same meaning of the Magnificat of Luke's Gospel: "He has exalted the lowly."
The English writer goes against the current in regard to modern and contemporary
Western tendencies, which are maybe nice and respectable, which consider good
sense as the overcoming of the world of childhood, full of unreal pleasant
fantasies, to enter into the world of reason and hopefully of experimental
science, seen as the only source of truth (but, unfortunately, not of meaning).
Pope Ratzinger also goes against the current: for him good sense is what emerges
from the Gospel and from the Christian faith and, also, in the paradox of giving
one's life out of love. All this seems like a discordant voice, because the
"tune" of modernity and of today's world has relegated Christianity to the same
room of children's fables, an old and dusty place in which perhaps it was
pleasing to be during childhood, but all together superfluous when one attains
maturity and autonomy. In this connection, religion seems like an old
superstition, an oppressive framework that constrains the free development of
the mature, adult and emancipated person.
ZENIT: And in regard to the
good life?
Monda: The above-mentioned depiction of Pope Ratzinger
presents him as a sullen custodian of the truth, it portrays him as obsessed
with the truth, as someone who uses truth as a club against freedom. Instead,
the dialectical relation that is at the heart of the Pope is not that of
truth/falsehood but that of joy/boredom. For Benedict XVI the good life, here as
well, as in the case of good sense, is that which flows from adherence to the
Gospel. And the same can be said of Chesterton. In both cases, the life that
flows is thus "good," but it is not in fact tranquil but rather something like a
battle. The good life is the profound desire that animates and stirs the heart
of every man." "No matter what type of man he is," writes Chesterton, "he is not
sufficient unto himself, whether in peace or in suffering. The whole movement of
life is that of a man who seeks to reach some place and who fights against
something." The Pope echoes him when he recalls that "only the infinite fills
man's heart," to live well does not mean to be a "respectable" person, but it
means to take up and receive life as an adventure. The good life is not an easy
compromise, it is not to have found the formula to have everything at the same
time in Western man's day, busy and marked by activism. No, the good life is to
surrender to Christ, sign of contradiction. Born from this surrender is the life
of faith as an adventure, as an encounter not with an idea, an ideological
formula (which would be pure idolatry, state-latria or ego-latria in the end
little changes) but an encounter with a person. Only an encounter with someone
greater can make many happy.
ZENIT: In short, good humor, perhaps the
humor of the Englishman Chesterton is the same as the German
Pope's?
Monda: Yes, from a certain point of view, because in both cases
humor thrusts its roots in humility. Is it not the case that also at the
etymological level the two words are born from humus, earth? He is
well-grounded, who does not raise himself in pride, at the same time is gifted
with humor, because he knows irony and self-irony, because he perceives, perhaps
in a confused way, that a larger world exists beyond his own "I" and, beyond
this world, Someone who is still greater. From this point of view, the modern
world offers disturbing signs because there is no longer good humor but anger,
there is no irony but sarcasm, there is no sentiment but resentment. However, a
society that loses the sense of humor, recalled Maritain, is preparing for its
funeral.
In different times and ways, Chesterton and Ratzinger cry out
however against this madness that envelops the life of Western men and remind
all that there is a possibility for joy, not for pleasure, which is always less
than man and under his control, but for joy, which is always a great mystery.
Joy, Chesterton wrote in the last page of his masterpiece Orthodoxy: "is the
gigantic secret of Christianity." And it is also the secret of Benedict XVI who,
with his timid and awkward but firm and patient smile, with the strength of an
ordered, clear, honest, quiet intelligence, and with the energy of a faith lived
without frills with the abandon of a child, challenges every day the temptations
of men, his contemporaries, towards laziness and short cuts, towards ideologies
and idolatries which are always renewed in a heart that lives in bad humor and
resentment. From this point of view Benedict XVI can be described as the Pope of
joy, perhaps the most recurrent word in his addresses since he was elected,
because, as he said in the recent book-interview Light of the World; "All my
life has been suffused by a guiding thread: Christianity gives joy, it widens
the horizons." Here, in one phrase is the whole of Ratzinger and, if we think
correctly, the whole of Chesterton. Faith, joy, reason. Good sense, good life,
good humor.
Thrilling Romance of Orthodoxy
5 months ago