LANZA DEL VASTO'S STRUCTURAL PHILOSOPHY ON WAR AND PEACE Antonino Drago former at Naples, Pisa and Florence Universities As a biographical note on Lanza del Vasto (for short, LdV), I recall that he born in San Vito dei Normanni (Brindisi), South Italy 29-9-1901, from a rather high class family (the origin of the father was Sicily, the mother Belgium and the grand mother France). He graduated in Philosophy at Pisa University in 1928. Without accepting any social role and in opposition to the Italian Fascism, he cumulated experiences in pilgrimage, humble working, private teaching while he was a poet, painter, actor, sculptor, writer, musician. In a Fascist Italy, which ignored at all conscientious objection, at July 30th 1936 he wrote to his mother that, in the case he was appealed to the military Army, he will declare his refusal even at cost to be shot. He was distressed by the feeling that a second World war was coming. His mind was captured by the questions: Why mankind fall again and again in wars? Why wars rise from peace times as regularly as the tides do? Can human beings be able to survive without wars? He decided that in the World there was only one man capable to give an answer, Gandhi. In 1937 he went in India for “espiating Europe”, a society where each – honest or dishonest - person, by merely doing its duty, contributes to rush to a new disastrous World war. He was disciple of Gandhi, being called by him Shantidas (Peace servant). His “meeting with the truth” overcome his expectations: “I hoped much from my meeting with Gandhi, I found out much more. My thinking, as well as my dream, was surmounted: I saw an issue to the miseries, abuses, servitudes, revolts and wars; the justice as a mathematical and musical exactitude in the acts; the unity of life in the simplicity; the candour of the wise man at the inside as at the outside; the non-violence or the rejection of all which disturbs the harmonious order of the things….” Shortly, the achieved unity of a human life responding to the mankind questions. Also Gandhi’s teachings made clear to LdV that war is unavoidable when people’s life is aimed to the grievance and the exploitation. The every-day life of Gandhi was an example of how rather one can unite in his life the spiritual with the social at the highest degree. Also the life in the Gandhi’s community offered an impressive evidence of how a social group can live in peace although his participants differ at all in their religious beliefs, ethnic origins, ancient cultures and urgent needs dictated by the survival. His book on his Indian experience, Return to Source (1943), illustrates how such a kind of life unites peace and justice so that war is very unlikelihood; and hence the great social and historical value of the Gandhian non-violence, later conceived by him as “a revolutionary and innovative social power”. This deep experience led him to a total conversion in the body – which was obliged by him to conform to the material life of the poor Indians – and in the spirit – which re-discovered the basic of Christian faith, i.e. the conversion to love an enemy even in the struggle. A call received during a pilgrimage to the sources of the Gange river pushed him to come back in Europe to promote “a Peace Army”, i.e. to start inside the Western civilization Gandhian communities aimed to fight wars. However, once he came back in Paris, his ambitious programme met great difficulties. The further reflection on his project led him to overcome his previous anti- militarist attitude for accepting the implicit suggestion received by Gandhi’s life, to introduce non- violence in the basic structure of a society. He started from constituting a group of Gandhian followers. Encouraged by the ecumenical spirit of Gandhi, in particular his teaching to deepen each his own religious tradition, LdV together with his group re-visited Gospel; which was recognised to be in deep agreement with Gandhi’s non- violence. After few years, in 1948, he together with some of this group started in south France a first community of "Western Gandhians". He called it “Community of Ark” according to two meanings; Noah's Ark, built for saving some persons together with all animals from the scourge of the deluge caused by modern civilization; and the Ark of the new alliance between God and mankind, i.e. non-violence. Later this community promoted non-violent Campaigns against the French war in Algeria, against nuclear bombs and nuclear plants, for a loyal recognition of French conscientious objectors, against the expropriation of Larzac's plateau by Army. He died in a Spanish Ark Community (La Longuera, Murcia) 5-1-1981. After ten years of communitarian life he felt the need to give to his enterprise a theoretical basis which – in the spirit of Gandhian teachings - had to explain the negative social events – as wars are - by means of a chain of detailed causes originated from the personal evil; hence, it had to unite in a continuum the spiritual teachings with the political theories. He had conceived this extraordinary enterprise already in 1937 but he wrote his book Les quatre Fléaux (The Four Scourges) in 1959. It represents an unsurpassed effort for connecting together theology, anthropology, sociology, economics, politics, international relations and history. In agreement with the ecumenical spirit of Gandhi, he considered the basic teachings of all great religions as the most ancient, persistent and at the same time world-wide teachings on most wise attitudes. Through them he looked for a universal and adequate answer to wars and in general to modern times. LdV started by focussing the attention on what constitutes a central core of all religions believing in a creator God. All they have to answer to a basic problem (theodicy): Why the benevolent God created a world, and in particular the human nature, where the evil entered? This corresponds to a universal problem of the secular thinking too: How to explain the conflict between the Good and the Evil inside the mankind history? And moreover it is the basic problem of all people involved in the tiring work for peace: Why one more war? Why peace does not come without impediments? Several great religions offer stories about the fall of the first men from a privileged position to the present, painful position. In the Hebrew-Christian tradition this is the story of the Original Sin (Genesis 3). Also Gandhi shared this religious tenet (Hind Swaraj, beginnings of chp. X). LdV offered a new interpretation of this text on the Original Sin. In modern times someone suggested that the Original sin was a disobedience act which introduced men to the knowledge. Instead according to LdV, the fall is caused by a reduction of the original capability of a knowledge-contemplation, to a knowledge-calculation of his own advantage at the expenses of others and Nature. This Sin is that to divert the human mind from the direct knowledge of the intimate nature of every being – a first God and even animals -, to an interested calculation aimed to exploit all beings so that the good, which originarily is natural to men, in fact is no more spontaneous. As a consequence of this sin concernining relationships, the behaviour of a man is similar to that of an animal: "In the same way a wolf has teeth, a snake poison, so a man has his intelligence for making war to nature and to all other men". Spontaneous to a man/woman is rather to build a lot of conventions, laws and rules allowing the more clever men to prevail upon the naive persons. That introduces in every man an artificial level located between the natural level and the super-natural level, whereas in a society it introduces a lot of legal or conventional customs under which a man – conscious or not - in fact exploits in a regular way his environment. As a result, all men, both evil ones or benevolent ones contribute to the pyramidal structure of the society, where weaker men have to support the heaviest social weights. Notice that in the subsequent chapter 4 Genesis presents how the Evil pervaded the whole society of the primordial times: brothers, family, town. Maybe this text inspired LdV to illustrate t the growth of evil inside the more complex society of modern times. He achieved it by means of new interpretations of Apocalypse 8 (scourges) and 13 (two Beasts dominating mankind) as presenting an evil structured in social institutions. That anticipated Johan Galtung's suggestion to add to the notion of non-violence inside personal inter-relationships, the notion of a structural non- violence, that performed by social institutions. Truly, the above texts belong to the Christian Bible; however, they describe a historical situation that all religions consider as "an extreme evil"; i.e. a society founded and structured according to the evil; or, in sociological terms, a time in which the political power persecute religions and even the whole mankind. A similar view is in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909, end of chp. VI). In ‘30s a similar society was experienced by those European peoples which were subjugated by the Stalinist, Facist, Nazist and Franchist dictatorships How people can reach such an aberration? Through the interconnections of even more numerous social customs the original sin grows up till to constitute ever more social institutions which in the history, may persist as scourges – Misery, Servitude, War and Revolt - irrespectively of the populace’s will.