by Stefano Zurlo

Running the risk
The journey can continue. “Experience indicates the position of someone crossing through reality, who submits to a trial.” This is a decisive point. How can I cross through reality, dealing with this other-than-me, putting myself to the test? Rigotti smiles, looking outside, beyond the windows of the restaurant perched among the clouds that dominate the lake of Lugano, and decides to give not one, but at least three answers. “You might think that the trial is not a toilsome one, that it’s tranquil, that of someone following a line of reasoning, a logical demonstration. No. Here we’re talking about the crossing of reality, one never taken for granted–in fact, one that is hazardous.” Hazardous? “Certainly, reality isn’t an icy film you can slide and skate over. The journey hides perils, periculum, a word that not by chance belongs to the same family as experience and derives from the same root “per.” Periculum is the putting to the test, thus the risk and therefore the danger. There’s no adventure without periculum; you don’t know how it will end up. Reality decides, not our own heads, but the risk must be run–it’s worth it. The expert is the person who has learned, who has come out of reality with a particular competence, who has changed in comparison with before, and has grown.” So then, experience truly is a trial, but not a banal stacking up, as often suggested to us by the contemporary mindset. In comparison with things, you can’t succeed just by accumulating sensations and emotions in some kind of warehouse. The engagement, the challenge to which we are called, is a different thing altogether. “Let’s tell the whole story. Experience is coming to terms with reality, taking reality upon yourself, shouldering it. Reality, as we have seen, hides perils and gives surprises. It is a great book that must be read, but the point is to have the glasses, to be equipped to understand it, to manage to come out on the other side with a full backpack. If your backpack is left empty, then there hasn’t been experience, only something much less noble.”

A hypothesis to verify
Rigotti breaks off again, waiting for his glass of Nocino liqueur to be served on the long wooden table that is reminiscent of a refectory. He grasps the glass and empties the contents, then takes another step. “It’s clear that you cannot travel unprepared. Every experience is fostered if one starts out with a hypothesis to verify. Formulating hypotheses is the task of reason–in fact, of our reasonability. Reason builds a grid based on the data available, and then we put it to the test during our itinerary. At the end, we evaluate the result. It can happen that our point of view stands, or that it is overcome, or that it needs some corrections. What matters is daring to push oneself to the place where things show themselves and speak to us. The important thing is being there, being there with our reason straining with the effort to understand, and being loyal to what happens, with what occurs, with what we encounter. Experience, if fulfilled deep down, fully, means taking on responsibility for destiny, the ultimate meaning of reality, of its ultimate transparence. But if I start out with my head low, without straightening my antennae, if I am not willing to learn, to risk, to run the danger of getting lost in unknown territory, then the result will be disappointing. Then I will not become an expert–the person who has completed the journey and has developed a certain competence, who, in some way, has attained the goal. I will only be a being that acts frenetically without growing, without my personality maturing, without truly encountering the ultimate reflection of things. Then I’ll only skim reality, without possessing it.”

Engaging our whole person
Rigotti now has in hand the Pope’s Regensburg discourse, in the original German, naturally. “You can’t approach Benedict XVI’s lesson without first entering into the virtuous cycle formed by these words: experience is the journey that brings us to know reality and its ultimate benevolence, its positivity. But in order to work at this level, we have to engage our whole personality and our reason in its entirety, without reductions or prejudices. Otherwise, you lose at the start.” Otherwise, you get bogged down in one of the infinite objections that for centuries have transformed this road into a nearly inaccessible path. Instead, according to the scholar, it is possible to make this crossing: “The Pope tells us that faith and reason live in the same house and are at the service of man so that he can reach the clear peaks to which his soul aspires. There is a lifetime to accomplish this undertaking, and there are many helps sown along our way. Let’s imagine them as highway gas stations. The first, and most important, is culture: the benevolent structure with which reality welcomes us. Each people has elaborated its own culture–at birth we are given a backpack full of information, suggestions, and codes for using things in the moment in which they come before us. We have to hoist that backpack onto our backs and go ahead, trustingly.” That little two-letter word, ex, indicates that at the end of the stage, of every stage, arriving at the station, we will be able serenely to take stock of that expedition. We will have taken a step forward, not just for ourselves, but also on the road of dialogue with others, with our neighbor, with the other peoples and religions.

Benedict XVI’s distances himself
from the criticism of Islam
Rigotti offered a final consideration before leaving the restaurant, that “hermitage” in the mountains, and descending to the city enveloped in a mantle of clouds. “Only those who engage in a true experience, only those who go deep down into themselves can initiate a dialogue. This is true for individuals, and it is so for religions and cultures as well. The Pope elucidated this clearly in the second part of his lesson at the University of Regensburg.” Curious, isn’t it, that this conference was the object of such controversy, so many battles and endless demands for apologies? “Allow me a little footnote,” Rigotti concludes. “When Benedict cites Manuel II’s question about Mohammed to the wise Persian, the Pope notes that Manuel II speaks surprisingly brusquely to his interlocutor. Let’s be careful here. ‘Brusque’ is a weak translation, not true to the original German schroff. In German it expresses much better how Benedict distances himself from the thought of the Byzantine emperor. That word has an idea of aggressiveness, of coarseness that isn’t captured by ‘brusque.’ I would translate schroff with ‘odiously off-putting.’ When I asked a German colleague to describe for me a figure whose way of acting can be defined schroff, he responded that the term is evocative of the behavior of SS officials as portrayed in films.