I deal with religions
despite not having had a confessional
or even a religious upbringing
but, in fact, I mainly deal with them out of a personal interest,
and above all
because I have long been investigating the topic on a radio broadcast.
Of course it is always somewhat embarrassing -
and I have noticed it even these days, even last night
and then again this morning
to talk about religions to a vast and composite audience,
because among you there are for sure those whose faith is unquestioning
and whom I certainly do not wish to offend,
and also those who - with good cause -
believe that religions are a remnant of the past,
and I have no desire to contradict them,
and there are those who believe that religions are but useless foppery
and there is no point in taking an interest in them
as they are only capable of leading to violence and destruction,
and this too makes sense.
Then talking about religions
is complicated because in this category
we channel an endless series of stories and experiences.
There are religions that have gods and godless religions,
polytheistic religions and monotheistic religions,
there are religions which have disappeared and new faiths,
religions viewed as an entirely private matter
and religions as aspects of one’s identity.
Besides, every religion is organized into an infinite space of schools,
sects, churches, derivations, etc. etc.
and then again, what do we mean by religions?
Do we mean the leaders, as they say, of the major religions,
or are we speaking of,
I don't know, of a street priest,
of a monk seeking refuge in his hermitage,
of a curia cardinal or a fanatical fundamentalist?
In short, there are many things that can be said.
So, for this reason I would like to suggest two paths tonight,
because you could lose yourself,
just like in front of any other human experience,
think of scientific experience, literature, society, history.
But, exactly, religious matters belong to the time of man and,
as a result, we can find some trace, at least,
of ancient wisdom,
which may have a meaning, perhaps, for humanity as a whole.
The first step of this journey consists of the Veda,
a very ancient body of texts
of the Aryan peoples from the north of India,
written between 1500
and 1000 years the common era,
which gather, in fact, various forms of knowledge.
Look, I just want to read out a fragment,
‘"In the beginning there was neither non-existence nor existence.
There was no air then, nor yet the sky beyond.
What enveloped it? Where?
Who was it protecting?
Was there water, unfathomable and deep?
At that time there was neither death nor immortality,
there was no sign of night or day.
From where did this creation arise?
Whether he fashioned it or not,
he who watches over it in the highest of heavens, he alone knows,
or perhaps he does not know.’
Here, then, you see, this is how the thinking of man begins,
with questioning,
with a sense of wonder, a desire to know,
but also the awareness of not knowing.
I think that there is something impressive
in this questioning and in this doubting.
What moved and gave rise to the great religious traditions
is what moved and gave rise to all human knowledge,
up to space research or the web, the wireless and so on,
be it science, writing artistic representation,
or the measuring of the human being within the universe.
I therefore believe that we should treasure
the questions of ancient wisdom,
because they are the same ones that infuse every kind of research
the human being embarks on, even in our time.
We should treasure their appearance on the world scene with,
you heard, a sense of wonder at being alive,
at being something in this life.
These questions must then be treasured,
but not fossilized as they have often been by religious institutions,
not codified, but forced wide open,
allowing for a multiplicity of answers from which to choose,
as each of us will choose a path because we cannot take them all,
but knowing that instead there are many others.
Only by doing so will we allow air, wind, and breath
to flow through those questions,
without suffocating them
in the asphyxiating enclosure of sacristies,
sects, extremisms,
with intelligence, with a critical stance,
always refuting ideas which are too complete in themselves,
opening up new horizons and new freedoms.
Think of how humiliating it would be, as it is sometimes is humiliating,
in the history of human beings,
to reduce one's freedom,
to reduce even the free use of thought,
in the name of a creed, of a belief, of a principle.
This has happened very often in the history of religions,
but the foundation of faiths lies in something else,
it lies in openness.
The other path that I want to suggest moves instead from a different input,
from a different impulse that has contributed to creating,
forging, shaping, giving birth to religions,
that is the impulse to alleviate the suffering of human beings,
to give meaning to pain,
to extinguish it wherever possible,
to contain the destructive forces inhabiting it,
to try to create a community,
to build cities, to create society, to build coexistence.
It is true that in history religious traditions have caused wars,
sustained violence, encouraged abuses, instigated destruction,
but this has happened and always happens,
it continues to happen, when we stop questioning,
when we believe we own the truth and stop looking for it,
when instead of an ungraspable, an unknowable God,
we build, with our own hands, an endless series of idols,
an endless series of golden calves.
And we would be well-advised to remember
that it is not only idolaters who construct a false image of God,
but that our lives are peopled with idols:
suffice it to think of the idol of money, of possessions,
of the idol that each of us is to himself.
"Lord, deliver me from myself," runs a poem by Fernando Pessoa.
So, how can we avoid turning God into an idol?
‘The face of God cannot be seen,’ is written in the books of the Torah
and therefore it cannot be seen it means that we are not allowed to imagine God,
we are not allowed to make fetishes or figurines depicting Him,
to presume we know Him, to delude ourselves that He is on our side.
Mind you, this is a commandment,
it is the second of the commandments,
after "I am the Lord thy God",
which means that there is a God - provided He exists naturally -
and a God alone for all of mankind.
Then there is the third commandment,
‘You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain,’
and so, strictly speaking,
since man nothing true can know about God,
better never to pronounce His name
and in fact the name of God is unknowable,
it is contained in four unpronounceable letters
and think that even in the Islamic tradition there are 99 names of God,
but they are not nouns, they are adjectives, that is attributes;
then there is a hundredth name that nobody knows,
because only God knows it.
Let us consider what this means:
a God whose face cannot be seen,
whose name cannot be pronounced
is a God whose borders are open wide,
he is a God who lives in the depths of human hearts,
but also in the abyss of the universes.
However, of that God or of that something
to which we have given and we give the name of God,
there is a trace in the quests of human beings,
there is a written trace in human history,
in the strategies used to build a city of men,
where conflicts can be mediated, elaborated,
where the freedoms of the ones interlaces with the freedoms of others,
where a life of humanity and not of bestiality is possible.
Another text,
another statement, ‘No one has ever seen God’.
This is written in the Prologue to the Gospel of John
and yet another letter from John reads,
‘No one has ever seen God’ and continues immediately afterwards,
"If we love one another,
God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us...".
So let's try to understand this implication here too.
No one has ever seen God.
Full stop.
If we love one another,
God remains in us and his love is perfected in us.
So what matters is not imagining God, what God is,
but that word which is defined as "love",
the love we know how to exchange,
the love we know how to build, the love we are capable of feeling.
But, let’s be honest, what an embarrassing word,
what an abused and debased word.
Sometimes, personally, just hearing the word makes me sick:
it is an abstract word, uttered rather than put into practice.
And let’s have no illusions about the human creature.
We know what we are made of,
we know that we are a mixture of tensions, love and hatred.
I like to recall the words of Pascal.
“What a chimera then is man.
What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos,
what a contradiction, what a prodigy!
Judge of all things, an imbecile worm;
depository of truth and sewer of error and doubt;
the glory and the scum of the Universe".
But the human being is also capable of that love,
of that attention to the other, of that care,
of that responsibility for the other
that makes him human and that is what counts.
This is what also counts for the God of the Bible,
who says, through the mouths of his prophets,
"I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me.
Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them.
Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a stream that never fails!”.
Honesty, justice, non-harming, the building of good things,
are part of the human life described in the Scriptures.
For this reason, I believe,
they should be read, studied, understood,
interpreted in a comment that never ends,
because it grows with us,
with each human being who approaches them,
just as we grow
with the frequentation of those words
and that continuous interpretation.
We will realize, then,
how there is a thread that unites the Scriptures and the traditions
of all times and all places and it is,
precisely, the attention to the human being.
You can see it in the Synoptic Gospels,
when someone asks Jesus what the greatest commandment is,
he puts together, in the story,
two propositions from the Old Testament,
"Love the one God" and "You shall love your neighbour as yourself".
He says this is a single commandment.
Which means that if one loves God, if someone says he loves God,
it is not true if he does not also love his neighbour
and if he loves his neighbour this is enough to love God too.
If we widen our gaze beyond the Jewish and Christian scriptures,
we see that in all, but really in all -
in all wisdom, not only the Scriptures - we find similar statements,
for example in the great Indian poems and in the discourses of the Buddha,
in the thoughts of Confucius, in the maxims of the Tao, in Jainism,
in Zoroastrianism, in the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad,
in Latin wisdom,
up to the Declaration of Human Rights,
“All men endowed with reason and with conscience
shall assume responsibilities in a spirit of solidarity
towards each other and all, families, communities, nations and religions.
What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.”
This is, ultimately, the program of any religion
and it does not seem to be a trifling program,
it does not seem to be negligible.
This is why I believe that it is worth, today,
to still question the traces of the faiths,
I do not believe that we should get rid of religions;
I believe we should get rid of any dumb reading of religions,
of any opaque listening, with an ear obstructed by nettle,
as poetess Nelly Sachs says.
In other words, I believe that everyone should feel responsible
for the heritage of tradition he has inherited;
indeed, each of us should become that tradition
and take the risk of interpreting ancient texts
that is up to our present,
with respect but without subjection;
with awareness but also with audacity.
Regenerate, revive ancient words, reread them in the light of the present.
I want to close by reading to you a verse from Deuteronomy which says,
"This command I give you today is not too high for you,
nor beyond your reach;
it is not in the sky, so you can say how can I reach it;
nor is it beyond the sea,
so that you can say but whoever can ever bring it to me;
indeed, this word is very close to you,
it is in your mouth and in your heart that you may put it into practice.
See, today I place life and good before you,
death and evil, blessing and curse:
therefore choose life, so that you and your descendants may live.”
So it is, I think, also up to us to choose a life or at least to try.
I hope I have moved your beliefs at least marginally. Thank you.
(Applause)