Challenge Modernity and Identity

The Person who
Belongs Has a Face
The possibility of coexistence passes through respect for identities, conscious that the individual is not sufficient unto himself. The words of Martínez, Albacete, and Follo

by Riccardo Piol

Affirming with the Meeting that “reason is the need for the infinite…” means accepting direct dialogue with modernity, with the contemporary creed that denies any relationship between reason and Mystery and thrives on dogmas in which man is his own master, belongs to nothing, and has no identity. It means accepting dialogue and discussing these dogmas as well, to the point of confuting and rejecting them, as did Monsignor Albacete, theologian and columnist for the New York Times Magazine; Monsignor Francesco Follo, Permanent Observer of the Mission of the Holy See to UNESCO; and Archbishop Martínez of Granada. They addressed the principle according to which identity and modernity are irreconcilable. To listen to the overwhelming majority of thinkers today, the fact is unquestionable. It wouldn’t be of interest to common mortals, but for the fact that the somewhat abstract formulation conceals a theme that is decisive for anyone’s life, and the image of coexistence we’re offered by today’s society. To put the concept more simply, in modern society, there is no place for those who affirm an identity that implies the experience of belonging.

Against identity
Monsignor Albacete knows that the question of the incompatibility of modernity and identity fuels lively debate in the United States. In his country, perhaps more than anywhere else, the interrogative is felt to be decisive for the immediate future of the country. He drew the answer that most people have embraced from a little volume unequivocally entitled, Against Identity. “It is a powerful demonstration,” said Albacete, “of the impossibility of stopping the conflict between the experience of identity that implicates a belonging in which freedom takes on the form of an acceptance of what is given, and individualism, in which freedom is the capacity to go beyond the limits of what is given.” It is an impossibility, in short, that is based on a false and illusory conception of man that holds that the individual is sufficient unto himself, his reason is the measure of all things, and reality is relative.

Our experience
A society in which the substance of man culminates in the affirmation of his presumed omnipotent freedom inevitably runs into violence, for “a freedom of the kind already tends toward terrorism,” said Martínez. And he continued, “The ‘I’ wants to take the place of God” and accepts no identity outside itself, much less a definition of identity that is conceived of as the relationship with a truth that exists outside man. “Our experience teaches us that we did not give ourselves freedom; rather, it has been given to us.” Recovering this given fact is essential, and is the task of the Church. The Christians who, as Albacete said, “reduce faith to intellectual or moral need” commit a grave error “because the mystery of man finds no answer in man himself, but in the Incarnation.” For this reason, the task of the Church is to “be faithful to herself,” because with the certain affirmation of her identity she makes it possible for others as well to live their own identity in the world and not to hide it.

Polyphony of cultures
In the interview given in early August to some German journalists, Benedict XVI spoke of “a new polyphony of cultures.” For Monsignor Follo, this expression summarizes with an evocative image the trajectory along which modern society should be brought. “‘Polyphony of cultures’ means that each instrument remains itself and plays its score, but in reciprocal respect: the result is an orchestra that expresses itself in harmony.” This harmony is not the fruit of a technique of co-existence or tolerance as commonly understood. Instead, it comes from the rebirth of a subject who stops thinking of himself as autonomous in order to rediscover “what Heraclitus said, that is, that ‘the ethos of man is God,’ where ethos doesn’t only mean morality, but also dwelling place. Thus our fulfillment, as people who live a modern identity, is to rediscover that our home is God.”