education

Getting to Know Tradition to Prepare for the Future
Professor Nikolaus Lobkowicz speaks on the first factor of The Risk of Education: “Knowledge of the past is a help for understanding and tackling the present rationally”

edited by Sebastian Hügel and Alberto Savorana

What value has the past in the educative course that schools and universities should provide?
Education does not consist only in “socialization,” though it implies it, since it is integration into the culture one is born in and lives in. If this socialization were just conforming to the present, it would be blind, and would remain wholly superficial. This is even more the case today, when everything is lived in a rush, because we live in a pluralistic society; consequently, the young are bombarded with principles, ideals and convictions that are irreconcilable and are often contradictory. Alasdair MacIntyre described this phenomenon strikingly in his book After Virtue. Knowledge of the past is an indispensable help for reflection and therefore for tackling the present rationally. If we deepen our knowledge of the past, we begin to understand and therefore quite soon to distinguish. Little by little, we begin to discover criteria by which to judge the present–and in this way we discover the most reasonable way to act.

In an age in which adults seem to live the immediate present without any memory, from where can we begin so as to communicate a tradition to the young?
I don’t think what you say of adults is quite true: interest for history has never been as alive as it is now. The problem is that knowledge of the past is inevitably selective (to avoid this, we would have to live the past all over again), and that we have to select the criteria for “right” choices. To this end, I have to have a kind of “perspective” that is first and foremost not abstract, but “existential,” a perspective that allows me to recognize what really concerns me. So it is not a matter of handing on any old tradition, but of looking for the one that makes most sense, the one that allows me to understand history for what it is, to look at it from the point of view of history itself. In order to find this we have to understand man who, despite all the cultural changes, always remains the same because he is characterized by what we call “being.” I think that the best way for handing on a tradition to young people is to arouse in them the need to understand, the need to understand themselves in the present. You accept and deepen a tradition only if you find in it a so-called “spiritual fatherland.”

In the so-called “globalized” world, and with no points of reference, what does it mean for a young person that he has to be helped to know and verify the tradition he is born into?

I consider all this talk about globalization useless chatter; apart from in the economic field, we are very far from living in a “globalized world.” What is happening is rather that, compared with our parents and grandparents, we know more things, and more details of cultures different from our own. Superficial though it may be, tourism and frequent travel have given a fundamental contribution to this phenomenon. For sure, we have not yet reached the point where we teach a European history in our schools; we still teach history from the point of view of the different countries: German history, French history, Italian history–these are the heritage of that unhappy phenomenon of nationalism, which I believe to be the sin of the 19th century. I know only one book–a tremendous work–that tries to present European history in a unitary way, from Gibraltar to Moscow, from Iceland to Malta, from the dawn down to German reunification. It’s a book published in Oxford in 1996, Europe, A History, by the English historian, Norman Davies, who, incidentally, is a Catholic.
Now, as for your question, it is not possible to frame someone in a culture. A child grows up Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or even atheist, not just in a given country, but in a given region and a given town. For cultural socialization, you need a point of departure, even though it will later be abandoned; you will always feel a certain gratitude for having known it and measured yourself with it. The point of departure will always remain your “original fatherland,” however much you may later abandon it or learn to hate it; however mistaken or misleading it might be, it has become part of you. I like to think of Edith Stein who, even as a Carmelite, had not stopped being a Jew, and, going to the chapel every morning and seeing the image of Jesus and Our Lady on the altar, reflected joyfully that they were “of her own blood.” Without a perception of our origins, the future cannot be positive.

In his book The Risk of Education, Fr Giussani writes that we have to present the past “adequately.” What conditions do you believe an educator–a parent or teacher–must respect in order to be “adequate” in his relationship with his children?
To my mind, the only practicable way is to live what is promising in that past–in other words, to live it in such a way that the children or the young people enjoy being part of it. From the time of the Greeks, our culture has been essentially based on oral and written expression, so it has always neglected the fact that traditions are perpetuated not by teaching and learning, but through examples. Naturally, this does not exclude, but rather includes the fact that father, mother or teacher “give account to those who ask the reasons for the hope that is in them,” as we read in the first letter of Peter (1Pet 3:15). This can also mean that if we fail as regards our own traditions and our own convictions, we admit it openly instead of embracing new opinions, as often happens these days. One of the tragedies of our political culture lies in the fact that politicians are never ready to admit openly to having done something wrong, an action that would win the hearts of the young who, instead, turn their backs in horror on politics, except those who will one day turn out to be liars themselves.

In the preface to Italian edition of The Risk of Education, you speak of a “faded” Christianity, which “moves on tracks that are rich in ‘tradition,’ but at the same time ‘traditional,’ and are to some extent perceivably restrictive.” If you were to indicate briefly the elements that define our tradition, that which began two thousand years ago, what would you stress?

This tradition is so vast and so rich that it is difficult to describe it in a phrase or two without the risk of distorting it or limiting it. Moreover, it’s a question of something more than a mere tradition: it is the road that God chose so as to let us be part of Him. The two elements that are absolutely the most important in this tradition are the becoming man of the Logos and the presence of Jesus Christ and of the Spirit of God that is perpetuated in His Church. Today, the Church carries a particular importance, an aspect that is only rarely understood, for it is frequently considered certainly an important work, yet always something purely human. For sure, part of many Church traditions are culture, therefore created by men, but this is just an ulterior dimension of a “disposition that is divine in its very nature.” For sure, God’s activity in history is not limited to the visible Church, but God has evidently decided to operate in history through His Church.

Since a large part of tradition has been lost, the intermediation of the faith seems today to have to stand once again on the elementary aspects of Christianity. The Holy Father recently stressed this (“The original pedagogical intuition of your Movement lies precisely here: proposing in a fascinating way, and in harmony with contemporary culture, the Christian event, perceived as a source of new values, capable of directing the whole of existence” (cf. Letter to Fr Giussani in February 2004). What are the consequences for our relationship with tradition and what cultural task is required of the Christian people in the present moment?

In my view, the announcement today must base itself on even more elementary aspects of Christianity. At present, our situation as regards the announcement seems more difficult than that of the Apostle of the Gentiles. Paul preached in a culture for which it was natural to be “religious.” So he tried to link in with the Hebrew and pagan traditions that he already knew or learned to know. Think, for example, how, as soon as he followed the call of the Macedonian who appeared to him in a dream, he began, in his letter to the Philippians (Phil 4:8), to use concepts that came not from the Hebrew tradition, but from the language of educated Greeks: “noble, virtuous, praiseworthy.” On the contrary, we are dealing with a culture that lost the sense of what is religious a long time ago, a culture that lives only in the immediate. So we find ourselves obliged as a first step to reawaken the religious sense. In his book, The Religious Sense, Fr Giussani showed in a marvelous way how we can go about it. It is, in effect, possible to announce the Good News in such a way as to respond to the concerns and the hopes, I would say even the most profound expectations, of men today. All this requires great openness toward what ultimately gets man moving, even though at first sight it could seem misleading. Instead of being irritated and complaining about all this, about all that is going wrong in today’s world, as Christian conservatives do all too willingly, we have to try to show them the ways that reawaken hope, give courage, and lead to interior peace. If we are not convinced that our faith and the traditions it has created are the answer men are longing for, we shall not find a hearing. Although the pedagogical rule often applied today, which says that we have to look for man where he is to be found, is undoubtedly true, all too often we neglect the fact that we have to lead him to a goal. “The inculturation of Christianity,” of which John Paul II has repeatedly spoken since his encyclical Slavorum Apostoli, means reconnecting with all that is “noble, virtuous and praiseworthy” in a culture, and there is no culture so corrupt as to lack such concepts.

A short time ago, Fr Giussani recommended that, provoked by personal experience of salvation in Christ, each of us study the history of mankind so as to be able to thank God better for the goodness of his own encounter with Christ. In what sense has your assessment of history reinforced your gratitude for being a Christian?

Firstly, I have to say that your question puts me to shame, because I think all to rarely that I should be grateful for being Christian. Perhaps this is because I grew up in a family and an atmosphere where we took for granted the fact of being “a courageous Catholic in an anti-Catholic environment,” or at least this is how I lived my early years in Bohemia. Then, it’s not very easy to answer your question from the methodological point of view. For sure, if you reflect on history as a Christian, you have to look at the history of mankind in a particular light so as to be able to see how God led the Hebrews to the Incarnation and, after becoming man, led the Church step by step. There is no doubt that Hegel was too simplistic when he affirmed that the genuine and empirically understandable history of the world lies in the last judgment, in the end, or this would have forced him to interpret the holocaust as a dialectically necessary step for a deeper understanding of human rights (even in the Church today, human rights are spoken of in quite a different way than in the period following the First World War). T. G. Masaryk, the first President of Czechoslovakia, formulated this concept in an even keener way: “Pravda víte¹zí”–“The truth prevails.” Augustine saw it even more precisely: In the foreground, on the stage, is the true history of the world, but at the same time, in the background, another history is developing, the history of Grace, in which the apparent victories in the foreground are defeats, and the defeats are victories, or could be. The earthly defeat of Christ is “the victory of God in history.” Perhaps I can answer your question in this way: As I reflect on history, my Christian faith has given me a perspective that has always found confirmation in the analysis of historical connections. This has given me a way of seeing that, in my opinion, makes me immune to ideologies.