2020 Crossing the Divide This book contains transcripts, not reviewed by the authors, of talks given at the New York Encounter 2020 Crossroads Cultural Center Transcription Karen Kaffenberger Layout Joshua Stancil Publisher Human Adventure Books All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Crossing e Divide Proceedings of New York Encounter 2020 Crossroads Cultural Center is edition © 2020 Human Adventure Books Contents "We Climbed Up, He First And I Behind Him... To See Again The Stars" (Dante) 5 A Place For Life 17 Working In An Inclusive Economy 41 Crossing The Divide In The Most Unlikely Of Places 55 In Search Of The Other America 75 Ideals vs. Ideologies: A Lost Battle? 93 What Can Free Us From Ideology? 111 A Paper-Thin Distance 123 Our Tears Are The Same 143 Someone, Somewhere, Who Lived Fully 161 C ROSSING THE D IVIDE 4 “W E C LIMBED U P , H E F IRST A ND I B EHIND H IM ...T O S EE A GAIN T HE S TARS ” (D ANTE ) The Encounter opens with music from Molly Morkoski, pianist, and with staged readings from The Divine Comedy by Giuseppe Mazzotta, Sterling Professor of Humanities for Italian at Yale University, and welcoming remarks by Seán Cardinal Patrick O’Malley, OFM, Archbishop of Boston. Introduction In the late 1950s, Fr. Giussani was saying the following to his high school students: “First, we must open ourselves to ourselves. In other words, we must be acutely aware of our experiences and look on the humanity within us with sympathy; we must take into consideration who we really are. To take into consideration means to take seriously what we experience, everything we experience, to discover every aspect, to seek the complete meaning. “We must be very careful, because all too easily we do not start from our true experience; that is, from our experience in its entirety and authenticity. We often identify our experience with partial impressions, truncating it, as often happens with affective matters, when we fall in love or dream about the future. Even more often, we confuse, perhaps being unaware, our experience with the prejudices or schemes that we absorb from our environment. Therefore, instead of opening up to that attitude of expectation, sincere attention, and dependence that our experience suggests and fervently demands, we impose 5 C ROSSING THE D IVIDE categories and explanations that constrict and distress our experience, while presuming to resolve it. “The myth that ’scientific progress one day will solve all our needs’ is the modern formula of this presumption, a wild and repugnant presumption, because it does not consider or even know our real needs. It refuses to observe our experience clearly and to accept what it means to be human, with all the needs that this implies. For this reason, modern civilization causes us to move blindly between this desperate presumption and darkest despair…. “…When we discover ourselves helpless and alone, our humanity spurs us to come together. If we meet someone who better feels and understands our experience, suffering, needs, and expectations, we naturally are led to follow that person and become his or her disciple. In that sense, such persons naturally constitute authority for us even if they do not carry special rights or titles. Naturally, above all, it is one who most loyally lives or understands the human experience who becomes an authority. “Thus, authority is born as a wealth of experience that imposes itself on others. It generates freshness, wonder, and respect. Inevitably, it is attractive; it is evocative. … “The encounter with this natural authority develops our sensitivity and our conscience; it helps us to discover better our nature and what we aspire to from the depths of our present poverty.” (The Journey to Truth Is an Experience, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007, p. 54; 56-57. Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. It is so bitter that death is hardly more so. But, to treat of the good that I found in it, I will tell of the other things I saw there. 6 "W E C LIMBED U P , H E F IRST A ND I B EHIND H IM ..." I cannot rightly see how I entered it, I was so full of sleep at the moment I left the true way. But when I had reached the foot of a hill, there at the end of the valley that had pierced my heart with fear, I looked up and saw its shoulders already clad in the rays of the planet that leads men aright by every path. Then the fear was somewhat quieted that had continued in the lake of my heart through the night I had passed so piteously. And as he who with laboring breath has escaped from the deep to the shore, turns to look back on the dangerous waters, so my mind, which was still fleeing, turned back to gaze upon the pass that never left anyone alive. After I had rested my tired body a little, I again took up my way across the desert strand, so that the firm foot was always the lower. And behold, Near the beginning of the steep, a leopard light-footed and very fleet, covered with a spotted hide; And it did not depart from before my eyes, but did so impede my way, that more than once I turned round to go back. 7 C ROSSING THE D IVIDE It was the beginning of the morning, and the sun was mounting with the stars that were with it when Divine Love first set those beautiful things in motion, so that the hour of the day and the sweet season gave me cause for good hope of that beast with the dappled skin; yet not so much, that I didn’t feel afraid at the sight of a lion that appeared to me and seemed to be coming at me, head high and raging with hunger, so that the air seemed to tremble at it; and a she-wolf that in her leanness seemed laden with every craving, and had already caused many to live in sorrow. She put such heaviness upon me with the fear that came from sight of her, that I lost hope of the height. And like one who is eager in winning, but, when the time comes that makes him lose, weeps and is saddened in all his thoughts, such did that peaceless beast make me, as, coming on against me, she pushed me back, little by little, to where the sun is silent. 8 "W E C LIMBED U P , H E F IRST A ND I B EHIND H IM ..." While I was running down to the depth, there appeared before me one who seemed faint through long silence. When I saw him in that vast desert, I cried to him, “Have pity on me, whatever you are, shade or living man!” “No, not a living man, though once I was,” he answered me, “and my parents were Lombards, both Mantuans by birth. I was born sub Julio, although late, and I lived at Rome under the good Augustus, In the time of the false and lying gods. I was a poet, and I sang of that just son of Anchises, who came from Troy, after proud Ilion was burned. But you, why do you return to so much woe? Why do you not climb the delectable mountain, the source and cause of every happiness?” “Are you then that Virgil, that fount which pours forth so broad a stream of speech?” I answered him, my brow covered with shame. “Oh, glory and light of other poets, may the long study and the great love that have made me search your volume avail me! 9 C ROSSING THE D IVIDE You are my master and my author; you alone are he from whom I took the fair style that has done me honor. Giuseppe Mazzotta: Before jumping into the reading of the text, let me say that it’s my duty and privilege to express my gratitude for being a part of this historic event. I’ve been preparing for an event like this since last year, preparing for the memorial celebration of the seven centuries since Dante’s death. He died in 1321. Next year, 2021, will be devoted in many parts of the world, from Florence to the United States, from Latin America to Asia—to remembering Dante and to reflecting on how The Divine Comedy is, for all of us, a continuing source of inspiration. It was Fr. Giussani—I vividly recall him saying that, thanks to Dante’s prodigious imagination and sensibility, he laid the vital foundations of our modern world. Thanks to his creativity in thought and sensibility, we have inherited the legacy of the classical culture of Rome, which today is right here, in this wonderful place, New York City. My immediate role here now is to read something about Virgil, how he figures into The Divine Comedy. I decided to share with you a few facts about who Virgil was, historically. He is cast, we know, in The Divine Comedy as the moral guide of Dante. He is a distinct, central character at the very outset of the work. From the start, Virgil’s status in the poem is that of the trusted guide to Dante’s journey, a status which arises in large measure from the Aeneid, which he wrote, with its narrative of Aeneas’s historical journey from Troy, facing the challenges and battles along the routes while carrying his old father, Anchises, on his shoulders, and hand in hand with his son, to the shores of Italy and to Rome, which would be founded by his descendants.