Interview with Nuccio Ordine | Nuccio Ordine: “It is necessary to look at history to understand the present and foresee the future”

Together with Acantilado, the Italian professor, philosopher and writer presents his new essay, a manifesto in which the usefulness of humanistic disciplines is claimed to warn against the banality of the world

We had been talking about his latest book for days, Three crowns for a king. The company of Henry III and its mysteriespublished by Cliff, like almost all of his, including his mythical The usefulness of the uselesswhen Nuccio Ordine sent this message to the mail: “You have to be careful when updating the past because you run the risk of falling into triviality. But you need to look at history to understand the present and foresee the future.”

In a few words, the best-known Italian essayist in the world, winner of an honorary doctorate and award in many countries, and also in ours, born in Diamante, Calabria, in 1958, found the solution to a cultural and historical puzzle in which reveals the difficult cultural and political relationship that dominated 16th century Europe, in which monarchs reigned but in which a character stood out that Ordine knows as if he had been with him or had taken him to his classes: Giordano Bruno.

He had made that precision about “the banality of the world” because, in the interview, the journalist was interested in talking about that past with today’s eyes. So was the interview.

P. You reflect the obsession of some of those kings to prevent imperialism and to mix politics and knowledge. How does that relationship look today?R. To understand a cultural phenomenon you have to know about literature, art, philosophy and religion. Today there is the idea that specialization allows you to understand a field and that is a lie. At the time of Giordano Bruno, culture was not a matter for all of Europe because Europe was not united. But philosophers and scientists did have a relationship with each other. That was very interesting because every perception of Europe passed through culture.

After the Second World War there are two great philologists, Erich Auerbach, who writes a book called mimesisand the other is Ernest Robert Curtius, who wrote European literature and the Latin Middle Ages. They appeared in 1946 and 1948 to try to unite a Europe totally destroyed by the war. Auerbach dealt with how literature conceives reality, from Homer to Virginia Wolf, and Curtius with how a history of literature can be reconstructed from the classical world to the contemporary world. In a destroyed world, literature can help us reflect on how to connect things that the war has completely disconnected. Today that is an example to tell our Europe that a Europe of trade makes no sense if there is no Europe of culture. When talking about identity, political values… is not true. There is always an economic reason.

P. Today a Russian who wants to keep a part of Europe.R. Yes. But I am not convinced of the reading that is being done today about this war: good is in one part and evil is in all the other part. Because we not only have the imperialism of Putin, there is also the imperialism of the United States. That is why Europe does not have an autonomous policy to think differently in relation to the imperialisms that are dominating the world. I wonder: Does the United States have an interest in peace or is it just using this situation to wage war against one of its enemies? The people of Ukraine deserve all our solidarity, but there are people who are studying this and say that every aggression has a history that must be understood. That is why I say that there is not someone who is only good and there is someone who is only bad. We have to do a more critical analysis to understand.

Q. At the NATO summit, the world held its war conference in a museum: El Prado.R. They will have seen that the paintings teach peace. Because every war destroys culture. How many important museums have been destroyed by the United States in Iraq, for example? Why do the great powers mobilize to protect an oil well and do not mobilize to protect places with important monuments in the history of mankind? Because power has no interest in culture and art. Well, the idea of ​​going to the Prado is a good idea, but I don’t know if it has had a good result for culture. Meeting there to make an agreement that has to do with weapons seems to me to be a huge contradiction. Buying weapons means taking money away from culture and education and from museums.

Q. In your book you portray Giordano Bruno traveling through the European courts…R. Giordano Bruno is a citizen of the world, or European at least. He used to say: “every land is a homeland”. That means that the Homeland is the place where one can work freely, where I can interact with colleagues. Bruno begins his career as a philosopher in Paris, in a secular institution, as opposed to the Sorbonne, intended for theologians. That’s why he has a relationship with power, but his idea is always to say what he thinks. Then he leaves France because there are conflicts. He arrives in England and there is a conflict. He arrives in Prague and there is a conflict. This always happens to him because in the end his ideas do not connect with power.

Bruno lives in the time of civil wars and understands that dialogue between fans is not possible. He knows that dialogue between moderates is easier. Henry III and the Queen of England understand it and carry it out. They see, for example, religion at the service of peace and social cohesion. Bruno made that very clear: religion as a union. The gods have not created religion for themselves, but to allow men to live in peace with each other. Without religion, brother kills brother. The problem today is that religion talks about science and no, religion is not science. Religion is a moral thing. What Bruno wanted was to reflect on fanaticism, on those who believe they have the truth.

Q. Would the Church condemn Giordano Bruno to the stake again today?R. The answer to this question is very complex. Today the Church is very different. We have a Pope who is revolutionary. The Church has always had a relationship with power, it has never been with the poor. But today there is a rereading of that thanks to Pope Francis. For him, religion is concentrated in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, where Christ says: “I was cold and they covered me, I was hungry and they gave me food, I was thirsty and they gave me water”. That is to say: social behaviors that make a man be supportive of another. They are concrete acts. And the people who do that have eternal life. Well, that kind of Church might admit Bruno today. But it is difficult to be sure because the Church today is something else. The important thing is to live in coherence with our thinking. And it seems to me that the life of Pope Francis is like that. He says: you have to live far from the luxury of the Vatican, for example. And that’s Bruno’s idea.

After the conversation, the philosopher did not want to fail to specify an aspect of what we had discussed through Skype, and this he sent to the journalist by email: “Bruno makes us see that religious wars (and wars in general) only they cause destruction and death, rolling back the achievements of civilization. Civil and economic degradation also drags down the degradation of knowledge. That is why in wars there are no winners: those who believe they have won also lose. In the years of religious wars, the monarch is seen as a doctor: he must heal the lacerations of the State.

In my book there are many poets and artists who use this metaphor of the ruler-doctor, which has its roots already in Plato. It is no coincidence that Machiavelli’s prince should be instructed by the centaur Chiron: not only because he who rules needs to make good use of humanity and ferinity (the dual nature of the centaur), but because Chiron was also the teacher of Aesculapius, the god of Medicine. For Machiavelli, the art of government coincides with the ability to heal wounds and dose the necessary medicines… Bruno left us with another fundamental lesson: one must always have the courage to tell the truth to rulers, even when they don’t want to hear it. Not the courtier who always says “yes.” On the contrary: the role of today’s intellectual must be that of the heretic. I think of Bertold Brecht’s beautiful phrase: “We sat on the wrong side, since all the other seats were taken.” That is: we must always occupy the “wrong side”…