In addition, Greene had written numerous short novels, plays and even works for children's audiences. He had first worked as a journalist in The Times, but he soon devoted himself entirely to literature while traveling the world on various missions as a spy in the service of the British MI6.

His personal life was always messy like many of the characters in his novels. A few years ago I reread what seems to me his best novel: Power and glory (1940). I had read and reviewed it in my youth, but when I reread it now I was even more impressed by the story of that renegade priest who gives his life for others in the midst of the Mexican revolt of the Cristeros.  

As Charles Moeller wrote, “from a faith standpoint, it's Greene's greatest book.” (20th century literature and Christianity, I, 370). 

“Catholic writer.”

Greene wrote two autobiographical books, both of which are worth reading for those with a penchant for writing: A kind of life (A Sort of Life, 1971) y Escape routes (Ways of Scape, 1980), in which literature and life are abundantly mixed. Perhaps the culminating anecdote of his life as a “Catholic writer” -which appears in both books- was that of the condemnation of Power and glory in 1950 and the conversation years later with Pope Paul VI about it: “The methods of censorship are always strangely inconsistent. In the 1950s I was summoned to Westminster Cathedral by Cardinal Griffin, and there I was told that my novel Power and glory, published a few years before, had been condemned by the Holy Office and that Cardinal Pizzardo demanded some changes which, naturally and I hope politely, I refused to make. [...] The interview ended abruptly and he gave me as a farewell a copy of a pastoral that had been read in the churches of his diocese and in which my work was implicitly condemned. Later, when Pope Paul VI told me that among the novels he had read of mine were Power and glory, I replied that the Holy Office had condemned the book. Then, much more liberal than Cardinal Pizzardo, he answered me: ‘Some parts of your book will always bother some Catholics, but don't worry about that’. Advice that was not difficult for me to follow.” (A kind of life, p. 70).

A kind of life

In this same book, after describing his 1926 conversion (pp. 141-146), he recounts that in the 1950s he gave up sacramental practice, but that he saw himself as a member of the Church's Foreign Legion fighting on its behalf, even though he did not feel entirely identified with it: “Later on we may become hardened to the formulas of confession and become skeptical about ourselves: perhaps we only try to keep half-heartedly the promises we made until continued failures and the circumstances of our private lives make it impossible to make any more promises; and many of us abandon confession and communion to enlist in the Foreign Legion of the Church and fight for a city of which we are no longer entirely citizens.” (pp. 145-146). 

It is known that in his last years Greene received the sacraments again from the hands of the Galician priest Leopoldo Durán, with whom he had established a deep friendship and with whom he made numerous trips around Spain between 1976 and 1989, which would give rise to Greene's book Monsignor Quixote 1982.

Vocational perspective

When Graham Greene in A kind of life recounts his baptism in 1926, after multiple conversations with Fr. Trollope, a Redemptorist priest - who had been an actor in his youth - whom he had befriended, seems to suggest that his conversion was due to his desire to accommodate his girlfriend who was Catholic. However, at the end of the chapter he adds a thought-provoking paragraph: 

“I remember clearly the nature of my emotion when I came out of the cathedral [after being baptized]: there was no joy in me, but only a dark apprehension. I had taken the step with a view to my future marriage, but now the ground was giving way before my feet and I was afraid of the direction in which the tide might carry me. What if I discovered in myself [...] the desire to become a priest? At that time it did not seem impossible. Only now, when more than forty years have passed, can I smile at the unreality of my fears and feel at the same time a sad nostalgia for them, for I lost more than I gained when fear became irrevocably part of the past.” (p. 146). The depth of his confession and the magnificent way of describing it are impressive: in Greene literature and life are intimately intertwined. Perhaps that is why it is worthwhile to continue reading him.

La entrada Graham Greene, en el centenario de su conversión (1926) se publicó primero en Omnes.

Jacques Maritain was born into a Protestant family in Paris in 1882, married Raïssa Oumansoff, a Jewish immigrant of Russian origin, in 1904, and was baptized with his wife in the church of St. John the Evangelist in Montmartre on June 11, 1906, acting as godfather the controversial Catholic writer, also a convert, Léon Bloy (1846-1917). 

Maritain's thought

In Raïssa's book The large friendships tells with great emotion their meeting with Charles Péguy, Henri Bergson, Pierre and Cristina Van der Meer, godchildren, like them, of Bloy. It will be Raïssa herself who will introduce her husband Jacques to the study of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Perhaps it should also be added that Maritain was not well received in post-war Spain because of his position in the Spanish civil war (1936-1939). Maritain was opposed to consider the civil war as a "crusade", not even to consider as worthy of being called Catholic the troops commanded by Francisco Franco because of the massacres of republicans.

Under the direction of Hubert Borde and Bernard Hubert, a thick volume of more than 850 pages was published last year by the Téqui publishing house in Paris under the general title of Actualité de Jacques Maritain which brings together 24 valuable contributions that delve into various aspects of his figure half a century after his death. "The thought of Maritain" -explain the editors in this volume- is part of a constellation that is easy to identify, that of a return to St. Thomas that is understood both as an attempt to reappropriate the work of the angelic doctor and to show how it can respond to the challenges of contemporary thought". Here is, in my opinion, the key to the interest of reading Maritain today, because precisely Catholic thought is in deep need of a powerful relaunching to face the pressing intellectual and vital problems that afflict our culture. Maritain, in spite of still being, "especially in Spain, a famous unknown" -In the words of Juan Manuel Burgos, it can be a decisive point of support for rethinking today's world within the framework of the Christian faith.

As is well known, Jacques Maritain participated in the drafting of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Maritain was the head of the official French delegation and in the face of the serious discrepancies that had arisen in the preparatory commission, he proposed to put aside theoretical disputes and assume a realistic and practical approach that defended cooperation among human beings because of their common nature. 

This approach made possible the drafting and adoption of the Universal Declaration that has been so influential. In fact, Jacques Maritain's thought was decisive for the configuration of Christian Democrat parties in many countries, particularly in South America: Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, etc.

Integral humanism

I asked an expert which book from Maritain's extensive oeuvre he would recommend to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death and he told me without hesitation Integral humanism, originally published in 1936 in both French and Spanish, which bears the significant subtitle Temporal and spiritual problems of a new Christianity. It is probably - says Burgos in the Spanish edition that I have read published by Palabra in 2015-. "of his masterpiece or, at least, the best known. [...] It is a serious and profound book, with very definite and well thought out theses, and it is precisely this intellectual force that provoked important controversies that have extended over time until very recently". (p. 10).

Today's reader of Integral humanism is impressed, first of all, by the mastery and fluency with which Maritain moves in the history of ideas: how well he describes the decline of medieval Christianity, its replacement by Renaissance and modern humanism up to the crisis of the first decades of the twentieth century in which Christianity -as it happens to us a century later- seems to lag behind the progress of the times. "Maritain" -Burgos adds (p. 10) ".wanted to build a new project of political and social action that would break once and for all with the paradigm of Medieval Christianity as a model of union between Christianity and society.".

John Paul II mentionedó Jacques Maritain in the Fides et ratio as one of those Christian thinkers who could serve as an example for us: "Paying attention to the spiritual itinerary of these masters will undoubtedly help progress in the search for truth and in the application of the results achieved in the service of man.". And he expressed his hope that this tradition "find today and in the future continuators and cultivators for the good of the Church and of humanity." (n. 74). Rereading today the Integral humanism Maritain's book invites us to rethink the action of Christians in the world in the year 2023.

La entrada Leer a Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) a los 50 años de su muerte se publicó primero en Omnes.

He studied mathematics, philosophy and oriental languages before finding his favorite subject of study: Kabbalah, the system of interpretation of the occult doctrines of the Jewish mystical tradition. He participated in Zionist groups from a young age. He claimed that for him Zionism was not only a political movement, in favor of the creation of the State of Israel, but a movement of profound renewal of Judaism.

For Scholem, Judaism was something particular, impossible to assimilate to any other culture without destroying itself; the search for that "true Judaism" was what moved him to study the Kabbalah and other historical movements, as well as to join Zionism and move to live in Jerusalem, where he died in 1982, after a prolific academic life at the Hebrew University. His interest in the spiritual renewal of the Jewish people led him to research on history, messianism and Jewish identity and historical mission.

His passion for the past was not merely a scholarly interest: what he hoped to find in history was the renewing force that would make it possible to build the present and thus give the Jewish people new reasons to struggle to exist. Thus he writes in Major trends in Jewish mysticism: "The stories are not yet finished, they have not yet become history, the secret life in them may emerge again in you or me today or tomorrow.".

Scholem considered that the irrefutable proof of the particularity of the Jewish people was their resilienceDespite the vicissitudes of history and the difficult circumstances through which it has had to pass, it has always known how to preserve itself and to preserve its meaning and its mission. "Ultimately this meaning was based on the particular relationship that the chosen people have with God and that tradition preserves and enriches according to historical circumstances."has written César Mora ("Gershom Scholem, rediscoverer of Jewish mysticism", El Ciervo., 2019). For Scholem, it is striking how, under very harsh social circumstances, capable of crushing him, the Jew has reconfigured and developed. He does not attribute this solely to the religious bond, for it seems to him that precisely the present era, marked by secularization, has not been able to make the common bond of the people obsolete.

For Scholem, the specificity of the Jewish people arises largely from God's choice and the message he revealed to them. This revelation is not understood as a single and final moment, but radiates and expresses itself in all of reality and throughout all of history.

Scholem understands revelation as something open-ended, pending its final configuration that will only be understood by looking back: "The word of God, if there is such a thing, represents an absolute, of which it can just as well be said to rest in itself as to move in itself. Its irradiations are present in everything that, everywhere, struggles to express and configure itself... and it is precisely in this difference between what is called the word of God and the human word that the key to revelation is found." (Scholem, There is a Mystery in the World: Tradition and Secularization, p. 18). 

Therefore, revelation is understood by Scholem as something open to interpretation, an encounter of man with the word of God that is infinitely interpretable, that is configured through historical experiences and with them is renewed. Historical experience thus becomes for Judaism something fundamental, where the Jewish people finds its identity and where it encounters revelation.

One of these fundamental moments that imprints identity on the Jewish people would be the revelation of Sinai and, even today, the question about the contents of the revelation and its confrontation with the times is still valid.

For Scholem, revelation adapts itself to historical time and therefore at each moment of history this question must be asked anew and an answer must also be sought in history. Historical experiences necessarily lead the Jew to ask himself about his identity; unlike the Christian, to whom historical circumstances tell him - according to Scholem - nothing about his identity, since his configuring moment - the coming of the Messiah - has already occurred in the past. The present and the future are for the Jew open and radically related to his most intimate identity. Events such as the Shoah are fundamental to understanding Jewish identity today.

For Scholem, revelation is open to the novelty of human creativity. It is not something fixed and that should only be transmitted, but something alive, in a constant relationship with the believing conscience and open to spontaneity. Scholem sees in tradition the secret of the Jewish people, for it represents the union of the old with the new, the acceptance of novelty and its integration into what is already established.

Learning from our "elder brothers in the faith" - as John Paul II liked to call the Jewish people - is a challenge. In this direction, Gershom Scholem is an author who can help us, for he gives us much food for thought.

La entrada Gershom Scholem (1897-1982). La revelación y la tradición judías se publicó primero en Omnes.

The prologue (pp. 1-24) is subtitled. How washing dishes restored my intellectual life and in these pages she recounts her childhood, full of books and nature, her academic studies, her work as a professor of ancient philosophy until, at the age of 38, she joined a remote religious community called Madonna Houseeast of the forests of Ontario (Canada), and how from there he decided to return to the college of his youth to teach the classics.

Tour

In this prologue, he reviews his studies in St. John's and then at three different universities until she got a stable job at a university in the southern United States, focused entirely on American soccer. There she began working as a volunteer in hospice, refugee centers and literacy programs: "This person-to-person service was like a slow drip of water on a dry sponge." (p. 13). By this time, Zena Hitz decided that she must have a religion since she had grown up without one, despite belonging to a Jewish family. The various churches she looked at did not appeal to her, but one Sunday she attended Mass at the local Catholic parish and everything changed. She was baptized at the Easter liturgy in 2006.

Shortly thereafter he moved to another university in Baltimore and was struck by the suffering of the poor and needy, which contrasted so sharply with the superficiality of academic life at an elite American university. He taught classes on Plato, Aristotle and contemporary ethics to large groups of students and received a comfortable salary and excellent benefits, but that kind of life seemed very poor to him: "The teaching that constituted the central activity of my professional life was nothing like the lively, collaborative pursuit of ideas that had delighted me as a student." (p. 17). The academic organization made effective dialogue and communication between teachers and students almost impossible. In the face of this crisis, Zena Hitz sought help in discerning her vocation and decided to enter into Madonna House. She spent three years in the Canadian community, dedicated to the contemplative life and the manual tasks of the monastery, including washing dishes.

This biographical presentation helps to understand the strength of the book. "As I discovered." -writes Hitz (p. 22). "learning is a profession; [...] it begins by hiding: in the intimate thoughts of children and adults, in the quiet life of bookworms, in secret glances at the morning sky on the way to work, or in the casual study of birds from a deckchair. The hidden life of learning is its core, what matters about it. Intellectual activity nourishes an inner life, that human core that is a refuge from suffering as much as it is a resource for reflection itself. There are other ways to nurture the inner life: playing music, helping the weak and vulnerable, spending time in nature or prayer, but study is crucial."

As the book's publisher announces on the back cover: "Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought. Although the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political utility, Hitz argues that our intellectual lives are valuable not in spite of their practical uselessness, but precisely because of it."

Intellectual life

The central thesis of the book has captivated me because it invites us to rethink the role of universities and humanistic teachings in our society: "Good teaching has all but disappeared from our university campuses, surviving only because of resilient, dedicated and principled people doing beautiful work without recognition or adequate reward." (p. 199). "It is my hope that our institutions that support intellectual activity will regain their original purpose. We must reconnect and remind ourselves how important what we do is, so that this particularly human way of being, its joys and pains, its modes of excellence and its unique bonds of communion are not lost." (p. 200).

To give a graphic example, as opposed to the somewhat bombastic image of the School of Athens in Raphael's rooms towards which we aspiring intellectuals tend to look, Hitz argues "a much lesser known image of intellectual life, though much older and more common in European art, depicting a girl who loved to read." (p. 60). 

Hitz is referring to the Virgin Mary and in his beautiful description he goes through some of the most wonderful paintings of this artistic tradition: from Van Eyck's altarpiece in Ghent in which Mary appears crowned and jeweled as a queen, looking at a code in her hands, to the scene of the Annunciation in the paintings of Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico or Matthias Grunewald, in which the young Mary awaits the visit of the angel reading a book, perhaps even that passage from the prophet Isaiah in which it is said that a virgin will conceive a child (Is. 7, 14). According to Christian tradition, Mary was versed in the Hebrew scriptures; she had studied the law and meditated on the prophets. Mary knew the intellectual life, she enjoyed inner vitality.

La entrada Zena Hitz. Los placeres de la vida intelectual se publicó primero en Omnes.

Frankl acknowledges a long existential nihilism in his youth and having suffered heartbreaking declines within weeks of entering Auschwitz. He also had a strong anguish a few months after his liberation in April 1945: the concentration camps had made him lose his capacity for happiness. 

One of his most inspiring passages is the one in which he recounts, shortly after his liberation, a walk through a flowery field, a beautiful natural landscape and the freedom so longed for. A freedom undermined by the record of indignity and loss to which he was subjected, the death of his parents and his pregnant wife, the perverse destruction of his work in the Lager... Now, "there was no one to be seen for miles around, there was nothing but sky and earth and the joy of larks, the freedom of space. I stopped, looked around me, then at the sky, and fell to my knees. At that moment I knew very little of myself and the world, I had but a single sentence in my head: 'In anguish I cried out to the Lord and He answered me from space in freedom.' I do not remember." -concludes- "How long I remained there, repeating my prayer. But I am sure that on that day, in that instant, my life began again. I went forward, little by little, until I became a human being again". (p. 119).

Frankl's task in this impressive book is to show a way of salvation that is possible after having gone through the hell of the camps and having suffered extreme fatigue, hunger, dirt, disease, mistreatment of all kinds; in spite of everything, one can rise from hope towards a life that finds us again with a deep meaning to decipher; in opposition to the atheistic existentialism of Sartre, for whom man invents himself and creates his meaning, Frankl will express: "I affirm, on the other hand, that man does not invent the meaning of his life, but discovers it." (p. 128). It is perhaps for this reason that "man should not question himself about the meaning of life, but understand that he is the one whom life questions". (p. 137). Because the human being is animated by "a will to meaning"The same one that allowed Viktor Frankl to wander through the concentration camps without losing a shred of dignity.

We read in the Gospel of John: "Do you not know that I have authority to crucify you as well as to set you free? Then Jesus answered him, "You would have no authority over me, if God had not permitted you to do so." (Jn 19:10-11). These blessed words open up crucial questions about the presence of evil in people's lives.

We have found a trace of the path that leads to the truth in the words of Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Nobel Peace Prize winner (1980) and friend of Pope Francis, who in his work Resisting in hope (2011) recounts the discovery of a large bloodstain on the walls of the prison where he was subjected to aggression and torture; with that same blood the prisoner had written "God does not kill".. This expression filled him with grief when he realized that someone had had the capacity to write this with his own blood and in the midst of the purest desperation. Esquivel considers it as a cry of humanity: "God does not kill".in the context in which it was written, "it is one of the greatest acts of faith I know.".

The shocking presence of evil has shown its starkest face at crucial moments in history, such as wars or totalitarianisms that subjugated the dignity of human beings, curtailing their individual and collective freedoms. "History." -writes Frankl- "gave us the possibility of knowing human nature perhaps like no other generation. What, in fact, is man?" (p. 115), and will conclude the book with this impressive response: "Man is that being capable of inventing the gas chambers of Auschwitz, but he is also the being who has entered those same chambers with his head erect and the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Israel on his lips." (p. 160). 

The reading of Man in search of meaning continues to leave its mark on all those who approach this book because it radically shows us the depth of being human.

La entrada Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) “Papá, ¿por qué decimos ‘buen Dios’?” se publicó primero en Omnes.

December 10, 2020 will mark 75 years since the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American writer to receive this award (1945). Her works Desolation (1922), Tenderness (1923) y Tala (1938) are probably the ones that made her the winner of this award. Ibáñez Langlois writes: "Oblivious to fashions and manners, rooted in her own tradition - the biblical sentiment, Castilian poetry, the rural essences of the country - this little northern teacher wrote some of the most heartbreaking and tender stanzas in the language.". And, for his part, Neruda will affirm in 1954 about the Sonnets of death, published forty years earlier: "The magnitude of these short poems has not been surpassed in our language. It is necessary to walk centuries of poetry, to go back to the old Quevedo, disenchanted and rough, to see, touch and feel a poetic language of such dimensions and hardness.". We transcribe the first of these sonnets, which illustrates well the strength of the young Mistral's expression at the age of 25:

From the icy niche in which men put you,
I will bring you down to the humble and sunny earth.
That I should fall asleep in it men did not know,
and that we have to dream on the same pillow.

I'll lay you down on the sunny ground with a
a mother's sweetness for her sleeping child,
and the earth has to become softness of cradle
to receive your body as a child in pain.

Then I will sprinkle soil and rose dust,
and in the bluish and light moon dust,
the light offal will be imprisoned.

I'll walk away singing my beautiful revenge,
because in that hidden depths the hand of no one
will come down to dispute your handful of bones!

Gabriela Mistral was born in Vicuña, in the north of Chile, in a family of limited resources; she was educated very poorly, but she went far because of her talent, her persevering work and the help of people who noticed her worth. Mistral began teaching as a teacher's assistant at the age of 15 and did not stop doing so while she lived in Chile, at the same time she began to write. Her first writings date back to 1904 and she will obtain the Chilean National Poetry Prize in 1914 with her Sonnets of death. In 1922 he moved to Mexico to collaborate in the Mexican educational reform and later he will hold various consular representations of Chile in different countries of Europe and America. He died of pancreatic cancer in New York in 1957 at the age of 67. He donated the rights of his works to the promotion of the children of Montegrande, the village where he grew up.

Today's reader is impressed by Gabriela Mistral's poems not only for their sonorous musicality, but also for their deep religiosity. The poet had an intense experience of God. In the Poem from ChileFor example, as he travels through the long geography of his homeland, contemplating the desert north, he writes:

In thirsty white lands / abrasion items / the Christs called cactus / watch from the eternal.

God is present everywhere, perhaps as a counterpoint to the harshness of life, but also as the ultimate response to the beauty and sweetness found in nature. Like Pope Francis years later, Mistral was deeply captivated by the light and strength of St. Francis of Assisi. For example, in Motifs of St. Francis remembers his voice:

"How St. Francis would speak! Who would hear his words dripping like a fruit, of sweetness! Who would hear them when the air is full of dry resonances, like a dead thistle! That voice of St. Francis made the landscape turn towards him, like a countenance; it hastened the sap of love in the trees and made the rose loosen its sweetness. It was a quiet song, like the one that water has when it runs under the small sand"..

Gabriela Mistral had to face many difficulties in her life, including those of the "drynesses of which the Saint speaks". and of which it says they are "the hardest temptations" (The companions of St. Francis: Bernardo de Quintaval). Perhaps that is why his gaze was especially merciful and his attitude towards creation respectful like that of a bee: "I want, Francisco, to go through things like this, without bending a petal." (The delicacy). Devotee of il poverello of Assisi and an assiduous reader of his Little flowersbelonged to the Third Order of St. Francis. In fact, she bequeathed the medal and the parchment that accredit her Nobel Prize to the people of Chile and they are under the custody of the Franciscans in the same museum where the bible that she used to use, a rosary of ceramic beads and metal medals and a carved and polychrome wooden crucifix of hers from the XVIII century are kept. She was buried with the Franciscan habit by her express wish.

It has been 75 years since the Nobel Prize was awarded to this poet. Although in recent years there has been special interest in investigating other aspects of her personal life, it is a good opportunity to reread her texts in verse and prose, to be moved by her sensitivity and to learn from her religiousness fused "with a lacerating yearning for social justice".

La entrada Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957): 75 años después de recibir el Premio Nobel se publicó primero en Omnes.

"I knew Jutta Burggraf as a fellow doctoral student in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Navarra - she was noted for her intelligence - and as a resident at the Colegio Mayor itself. In spite of her German accent, she spoke perfect Spanish, but - half jokingly, half seriously - she said that she imagined hell as dinner time at the Colegio Mayor, because all the girls spoke at the same time and in Spanish!

I was struck by his personality: he was not moved by custom or common criteria, but he analyzed questions in depth, in conscience, and acted accordingly. Surely because of this, it was evident that he really prayed. When she was before the Blessed Sacrament, she "spoke with God"; she sat peacefully smiling and looking at the tabernacle, like someone enjoying a conversation with a friend.

He had a marked sensitivity towards people who -we would now say- are in a marginal situation. It was not in vain that he had studied special pedagogy before theology. For this reason, when a person had, for example, a disability, he felt a special esteem for him, more along the lines of friendship than compassion.

I had the opportunity to attend many of Jutta's classes or lectures. She broke the mold, as she completely captured the attention through a speech read - with emphasis and frequently raising her smiling gaze - sitting behind a table. Her speech was always profound and understandable: it seemed easy and almost self-evident what she was saying, even if it was not. Her words were always very attractive.

On a couple of occasions he asked me to review a text of his that he was preparing to publish. Although I dared to make some small formal suggestions, I can say that they were excellent texts both in writing and in their structure and content. She worked with great order. She was very conscientious in the work she scheduled in advance - as a good German - and she met the deadlines!

I would like to highlight his work in the field of Ecclesiology and, in particular, Ecumenism. Perhaps the fact of having lived in Germany with people from other Christian communities, led him to have this concern for the unity of the Church very much alive. He gave a very significant title to one of the books he published on ecumenism: Knowing and understanding each other (Rialp, 2003). I also remember that his publication and his lectures on forgiveness helped many people (Learning to forgive, 2008). Finally, I would like to mention his very generous collaboration -many hours of hidden and sacrificial work- in order to bring to light the Dictionary of Theology published by Ediciones Universidad de Navarra in 2006".

So much for the testimony of my sister Eulalia. On December 3, 2011, the Faculty of Theology of the University of Navarra paid a heartfelt tribute to the person who, on the occasion of her death, had been the subject of her testimony. "José Morales, an outstanding representative of the group of women who, after Vatican II, have made theology a central part of their dedication to God and to others in the Church". 

Jutta Burggraf has written more than twenty books, more than seventy articles in specialized journals and participated in numerous symposiums and congresses. In May 2009, I coincided with her at a table at the XX Symposium on Church History in Spain and America, held at the Real Alcázar of Seville, under the presidency of Cardinal Carlos Amigo and with the general theme of Identity, pluralism, freedom. I can assure you that the intelligent simplicity of his brilliant presentation and his cordial smile captivated all of us in attendance.

In his theological sketch, Professor Morales pointed out that Jutta Burggraf "He had the conviction that good theology is equivalent to an art of living. [...] He silently understood that theology is not an infused or charismatic science. It presupposes and demands a constant effort, like any truly human task in which body and mind come together to generate, sometimes painfully, an inner effort that transforms reality and the very person who thinks and feels. Theology was for Jutta a service and a necessary ministry that is carried out in the Church, for the Church and the whole of humanity".

In his works he addressed important issues of today's society: the vocation and mission of the laity, the meaning of freedom, the union of Christians, human sexuality, feminism, and many others. His direct reading is a very enriching experience: it is always thought-provoking as well as captivating in its clear-sighted simplicity. When I read his Freedom lived with the strength of faith (Rialp, 4th ed. 2008), I took these three notes that reflect well the personality of the author: "When I am with a loved one, I am happy." (p. 72); "It is better to be wrong than not to think." (p. 113), and "Truth breeds hatred when it hardens or petrifies." (p. 204).

Only ten years have passed since Jutta Burggraf's passing and her writings have as much strength and appeal as when she published them. Jutta, with her gentle smile, was a true frontier thinker who touches the hearts and minds of her readers.

La entrada Jutta Burggraff (1952-2010): una teóloga sonriente se publicó primero en Omnes.

A few months ago I had the opportunity to read the book by Duncan White Cold Warriors -whose subtitle is Writers who fought the literary cold war- which explains in detail the vicissitudes and difficulties of writers such as Orwell, Koestler, Greene, Hemingway and so many others who took part in the literary battle against communism from the 1930s, during the Spanish Civil War, until the 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Well, in this book on the Cold War, the trial of the writer Andrei Siniavski and his poet friend Yuli Daniel in Moscow in February 1966 is described in some detail. They were accused of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda for their novels published abroad under a pseudonym.

The trial - widely criticized in the Western press - lasted three days: Siniavksi was sentenced to seven years in a labor camp in Mordovia, near the Volga, and Daniel to five. Today that iniquitous trial is considered the beginning of the Soviet dissident movement. "At that time." -Coleman wrote. "they did not realize that they were starting a movement that would help end communist rule."

In fact, Siniavski served six years in various camps and after his release he emigrated with his wife and son to Paris. Reading in Cold Warriors of the details of the process made me look for what there was of Siniavski in Spanish. In the quarantine of the coronavirus I have been able to read slowly his book The voice of the choir (Plaza & Janés, 1978) -a mixture of diary and fine literary reflections- that has impacted me for its attentive eye for detail, for its powerful metaphors and for many other things. It has statements that reach to the depths of the soul."At all times art has been more or less an improvised prayer." (p. 24); or "Books incline us toward freedom, they invite us to set out on the road to it." (p. 38)-and dazzling metaphors. I copy only two fragments of the many that captivated me.

The first is a luminous memory of childhood: "The books resemble a window when at night the light is turned on and the room is softly illuminated, sparkling with intermittent golden patterns on the glass, curtains, tapestries and someone, invisible from the outside and hidden in the privacy of comfort, which is the secret of its dwellers. Especially when it is cold or there is snow on the street (better if there is snow), one has the impression that in the apartments melodious music sounds and intellectual fairies walk under the protection of colored screens. In my childhood, wandering at night in front of the secluded windows made my mother and I dream of a separate three-room apartment, about which she would talk to me enthusiastically, playing with me about that life in which I would be a man and could buy such an apartment [...]. We used to say: 'Let's go and see our apartment'. And before going to bed we would go for a walk through the snow-covered alleys, where we had three or four windows to choose from, varying according to their illumination." (p. 32).

In the second passage Siniavski compared his time in prison to a long train ride. He wrote it in October 1966 and gave light to me 54 years later, in the long quarantine of the coronavirus: "Psychologically, life in a prison camp resembles a carriage on a long-distance train. The train represents the passage of time, the passing of which gives the illusion that an empty existence has fullness and meaning. Regardless of what one does, the 'sentence passes'; that is, the days do not pass in vain, they act in one's favor and in the future, which gives them content. And, as in the train, travelers are very little predisposed to perform useful work, because their permanence in it depends on the inevitable, albeit slow, approach to the destination station. They can as far as possible live contentedly; play dominoes, loaf, lie back in their seats and chat without worrying about lost time. The serving of the sentence gives all things a good deal of usefulness." (p. 42).

I have finally been able to locate that quote that had moved me in my youth. It is found in a brief collection of thoughts published in French in 1968 (Impromptu ThoughtsBurgois, Paris, p. 76) and which has not seen the light of day in Spanish. I came to this booklet through a reference to this quotation made by Luigi Giussani in The religious sense: basic course on Christianity (p. 143). I add two more sentences from the same work: "Enough about man. It's time to think about God." [Much has been said about man. It is time to think of God.(p. 51), and this one: "God has chosen me." [Dieu m'a choisi] (p. 69). These are, undoubtedly, lapidary phrases that touch the heart and illuminate the head.

La entrada Andrei Siniavski: creer por la sencilla razón de que Dios existe se publicó primero en Omnes.

Elizabeth Anscombe studied at Sydenham School and graduated from St. Hugh's College, Oxford. In 1942 she met Wittgenstein at Cambridge and soon became one of his most faithful disciples. When, in 1946-47, Anscombe was appointed research fellow at Sommerville College in Oxford traveled every week to Cambridge to attend Wittgenstein's classes. In fact, a few years later, Wittgenstein, already ill with cancer, would move to live for several months at the home of Anscombe and Geach; it is to her that those famous words of his were addressed shortly before his death: "Eliza, I have always loved the truth!". Elizabeth Anscombe, faithful both to Wittgenstein and to her convictions, realized from her youth the philosophical ideal of orienting her whole life towards truth.

After Wittgenstein's death in 1951, Anscombe devoted many years of energy to bringing his master's philosophical legacy, written mostly in German, to light. In particular, mention should be made of his prodigious translation into English of the Philosophical research. In addition to her work as Wittgenstein's literary executor, Elizabeth Anscombe will be remembered among philosophers for her 1957 book Intentionwhich is considered to be the foundational document of contemporary philosophy of action, his 1959 monograph An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatusin which he masterfully studies Wittgenstein's first book, and by many of the articles compiled in his three volumes of Collected Philosophical Papers 1981, which had a singular impact on the philosophical community.

Among all those works, I particularly like to remember his article On transubstantiation (1974) which, with great affection and hard work, my good friend Jorge Vicente and I translated for publication in the magazine Scripta Theologica (1992). Subsequently, that work was compiled in the volume Analytical philosophy and man's spiritualitywhich José María Torralba and I would edit in 2005.

Elizabeth Anscombe was always an original thinker, lively and very often against the tide of majority or political expediency. For example, when the University of Oxford proposed to confer the Ph. honoris causa American President Harry S. Truman, strongly opposed it along with two other colleagues because of Truman's responsibility for the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means of achieving their ends is always murder."Anscombe argued strongly in this regard. Similarly, on multiple occasions he wrote courageously and brilliantly on sexuality, childbearing, protection of the unborn and many other topical issues, shocking many colleagues more accommodating to fashions.

Professor Anscombe traveled extensively, giving classes and lectures in many European and American countries. In Spain she was a frequent visitor during the seventies and eighties of the last century to the University of Navarra, which conferred on her the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. honoris causa in January 1989. Professor Alejandro Llano in his laudatio said of her: "His is a beautiful and implacable style, characterized by the ability to ask unusual questions and to answer them with as much finesse as rigor. Socratic irony is once again present at the origin of a philosophizing whose field of action is no longer an attic full of prejudices and habituations, but the free air of inciting enigmas. When Elizabeth Anscombe discusses with Descartes or Hume, when she interprets Aristotle or St. Thomas, what she does is to look with them towards an ever new and surprising reality. And her readers retain the intimate conviction that she has managed to see more.". On that solemn occasion Anscombe explained:"The University of Navarra is dedicated in its search for truth to the service of God. That God is truth is something that is not recognized everywhere today, not even in many, but this recognition is constantly implicit here in the School of Philosophy. That is why I am so grateful to be counted as a colleague in this Faculty.".

Professor Anscombe's life, full of academic results, is also studded with amusing anecdotes. In her obituary in The GuardianJane O'Grady recalled how on one occasion in Chicago, when she was mugged on the street by a robber, she rebuked him, saying that this was no way to treat a visitor. They immediately began to talk and the mugger escorted her to her hotel, reprimanding her for driving through such a dangerous part of the city. The anecdote is very significant, and shows not only the fine heart of a philosopher, but also her conviction - of Wittgensteinian affiliation - in the capacity of the word to achieve true communication.

La entrada Elisabeth Anscombe (1919-2001): una verdadera filósofa se publicó primero en Omnes.

The book is preceded by a Foreword by Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, and consists of a Preface by William E. Simon, an introduction (Why the parish? Why these parishes?Shared leadership; 2. Spiritual maturity and discipleship; 3. Sunday Celebration; and 4. "From these four practices" -explains Pons (pp. xv-xvi)- "the book is structured in eight chapters, dedicating two chapters to each one. The first chapter describes the corresponding practice and shows the various possibilities of carrying it out, exposing a great wealth of initiatives and variety of parishes. The second chapter highlights the problems that can arise, the difficulties and challenges that must be faced in the development of each practice.". Pons adds with finesse: "This double look gives the book a great sense of reality because it does not hide the problems involved in carrying out a major transformation in a parish, while showing the great variety of possibilities that open up according to the uniqueness of each parish." (p. xvi).

The book was born out of a suggestion by Bob Buford, a Protestant Texan businessman who sold his company to devote himself to "working for the Kingdom" and created an organization called Leadership Network to revitalize Protestant parishes. In a meeting with William Simon, he proposed to him to do something similar for Catholic parishes. Thus was born Parish Catalyst (www.parishcatalyst.org). The first step was to contact the most outstanding parishes and study the causes of their "success". They prepared a survey of 244 parish priests. The chapters of the book are based on the analysis of the results obtained.

– Supernatural Introduction (pp. 3-21) is very interesting. It briefly recounts the history of Catholicism in the United States and also the reason for the great social influence of the 17,000 Catholic parishes. "Right now millions of Americans are members of Catholic parishes, but this is not going to be the case forever. The current trend indicates that over the next few decades they are going to leave in moderate but steady numbers. They will only stay if they are given a reason to do so, if there is something vibrant and life-giving in their parish, something that focuses their attention on the living Christ, with such power that they cannot take their eyes off Him." (pp. 3-4).

Four pastoral practices:

–Shared leadership (pp. 25-73): it is the ability of the parish priests to lead the parish as a whole and for this it is decisive to count on the laity: there begins an organizational structure and the distribution of functions in each parish area. All this requires a special competence of these lay people and salaries accordingly. It also has its difficulties: team harmony is essential.

–Spiritual maturity and discipleship planning (pp. 77-128): This is the "process by which individuals or parishes deepen their faith, draw closer to Jesus and bring him closer to other people, as their own faith matures.". It also requires specialized personnel to give catechesis, promote activities, attend to the people, etc. Emphasis is placed on prayer, Eucharistic adoration and community unity.

-Sunday celebration (pp. 131-177): The center must be the Mass. It is intended to be the decisive moment of the week, a moment of hospitality, and one that will make both parishioners and those passing through faithful:"It should be noted that in Los Angeles one can find Masses in 42 different languages and dialects.". Moral and social sensitivity is also part of the welcome to fit everyone, and another important element is the attention of children in their different ages. Singing is fundamental. Many parishes have almost professional choirs. There must also be adequate public address systems. A lot of time, equipment and money must be invested to provide good liturgical music.interesting things are said about the homily: "Every minute of homily takes an hour of preparation." (p. 150).

-Evangelization (pp. 179-227): Supported by the words of the Pope Francis’ of "going out to the peripheries", it is clear that Catholics are not accustomed to evangelize: "We can no longer just leave the lights on for people, we have to bring the light to them.". You are invited to move from the maintenance to the mission. We have to change our attitude. It is a matter of involving everyone in this task. We must take advantage of every moment to evangelize: celebrations of the sacraments, events and social services.

This brief summary does not, of course, do justice to this volume which, although it is very American and very much in keeping with its own mentality, can make everyone in the Spanish-speaking world think about the need for a new evangelization and persuaded that, with God's help, parishes are one of the key places to carry it out.

La entrada Las grandes parroquias americanas y lo que quizá podemos aprender de ellas se publicó primero en Omnes.

The Church "is" mission

How right he is, I said to myself when I read the book written by the priest. James Mallonentitled A Divine Renewal. From a maintenance parish to a missionary parish (BAC, 2016). Mallon, pastor in Nova Scotia, Canada, has developed various programs and activities to promote faith and spiritual growth, such as the Alpha courses, a help to face the big questions together. Mallon argues that parishes need to remember who they are and what their mission is. That mission, he says, is not to take care of those who are already there to keep them happy and satisfied, but to make disciples. For parishes not to die, evangelization is needed, not self-preservation. It is not a matter of giving drink to those who are not thirsty, but rather of remembering that we Christians are by definition sent to spread the good news. The Church is designed to go, to walk. It is time to leave comfort behind, to get out of the usual. It is time to remember that - as Mallon affirms - the Church is mission.

And this mission, contrary to what one might think, does not correspond only to the parish priests or to the priests. It is up to all of us. They are not the only ones responsible for the fact that there are no new people in the parish and that those who are there do not seem to have the heart of celebration for having found God. Mallon's book succeeds in getting something inside us and shakes our souls. A task only for parish priests? Not a chance. The Church belongs to everyone and for everyone, and every person who claims to be Catholic should be engraved deep inside with the great light that this book presents. We cannot be satisfied with just surviving, with doing maintenance gymnastics. It is not enough that we pray sometimes, that we go to Mass. That may seem a lot in these times, but it is not enough when we remember the mission that Christ entrusted to all of us. Go into all the world and preach the Gospel. He did not say go to the parish priests. We have no excuse.

How can it be that our faith is sometimes so gray, so unwelcoming, so boring? How can it be that so many Catholic people are still content with the faith and arguments of when they were children? How can it be that we grow in so many aspects of life, in our knowledge, in our profession, in our affections, and yet we do not grow in the most important things? It is a serious cultural problem. Whoever does not grow, whoever does not have that plasticity is in many ways dead. And more than in any other area, this is true in the spiritual life: it is not enough to keep up. One must always be willing to go further, to give one's all for everything. To do otherwise is to die slowly.

Examples

James Mallon gives many concrete examples of things that can be done, from welcoming teams in parishes to family catechesis to a variety of non-sacramental events for the far away. Some examples have to do with North American culture and in the lands where I write are foreign to us, but they are only examples that spur us to creatively find our own ways to advance the mission. We cannot be passive spectators. We must learn that we have been given good news, understand it with our hearts and rejoice until we can do nothing else but share it. And good news is not transmitted with a long face. This is perhaps the easiest way to get going: change the face. "An evangelizer cannot permanently have a funeral face".writes Pope Francis (Evangelii Gaudium, 10). If Jesus is in your heart, please let him know it to your face, Mallon also writes. We cannot leave the heart at the door of the church. "The experience of God"he adds (p. 219).make us more loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind and generous.".

We have something to offer

It is not enough to believe or trust, we must also act. You have to be proactive and not just reactive. And that is not merely passing on information. Get moving. Don't live your faith "in bank mode". Each of us will know how to bear witness, whom we can help, with whom we can be hospitable, whom we can console, embrace and welcome unconditionally; each of us will know whom we can touch, how to show the face and the smile of God, his beauty. Each one will know how to transmit the interior joy of the good news and make it possible for other people to experience God.

In his book Mallon argues that in parishes everyone can find formation and companionship. It is a call to parish priests, but also to individual Catholics. We have something to offer. If only the world knew what has been made known to us! If you are devoured by zeal to tell, even if you realize that you are weak and foolish, Mallon concludes, then you are ready and God can use you to reach the ends of the earth.

La entrada Un libro para renovar las parroquias: James Mallon se publicó primero en Omnes.

The great poet Osip Mandelstam, born in Warsaw in 1891 in a Jewish-Polish family and educated in St. Petersburg, Paris and Heidelberg, would be arrested in May 1934 and sentenced to exile for writing a short Epigram against Stalin of only sixteen verses. Apparently, in Russian it is a most beautiful poem and in it Mandelstam mentions Stalin's thick fingers, greasy as worms, and his cockroach whiskers. "His example moves me and makes me reflect on the truth and the value of the word in a society where charlatans rule and information has become a spectacle. I too am not free from this kind of spectacle.l", wrote journalist Pedro G. Cuartango a few months ago. His wife Nadiezhda remembered what Mandelstam said about Russia: "This is the only country that respects poetry: they kill for it. Nowhere else does that happen".

Osip Mandelstam died in a transit camp near Vladivostok in May 1938. We owe to his wife Nadiezhda the preservation of many of his texts and the shocking book Against All Hope, in which she recounts the tragic experiences she lived with her husband during the years of terror. I only want to bring up here two passages from that book.

The first one -referring to 1934- is this: "Seventeen years of conscientious [communist] education had been to no avail. The people who collected money for us and those who gave it violated the whole code established in the country of relations with those repressed by the power. In periods of violence and terror people hide in their shells and hide their feelings, but those feelings are indestructible and no education can get rid of them. Even if you manage to uproot them in one generation - and in our country this has been achieved to a large extent - they resurface in the next. We have convinced ourselves of this more than once. The notion of good is probably inherent in the human being, and violators of humanitarian laws will sooner or later have to realize this for themselves or for their children." (p. 55). Eighty years have passed and the Soviet empire has fallen: communism has not succeeded in eliminating the human soul and its natural yearning for goodness and solidarity, although it has painfully crushed many spirits.

The second text of Nadiezhda -which expresses well the function of the poet- reads as follows: "At the beginning of the Second Notebook, Mandelstam wrote his poem The Mermaid. 'Why The Mermaid?' I asked. 'Maybe it's me', How could such a persecuted man, living in total isolation, in emptiness and darkness, feel that he was in the dark? 'the siren of the Soviet cities'? From his total non-existence, Mandelstam made it known that he was the voice that spreads through the Soviet cities. He felt, probably, that reason was on his side; without that feeling one cannot be a poet. The struggle for the social dignity of the poet, for his right to a voice and his position in life is, perhaps, the fundamental tendency that determined his life and his work." (p. 249). Many mornings, if I have the window slightly open, I hear the siren of a distant factory announcing at one o'clock the noon break or the change of shift. I always think of Osip Mandelstam and the function of the poet - or the philosopher - in our consumerist society: "Poetry" - Mandelstam wrote - "is the plow that unearths time, uncovering its deepest layers, its black soil".

The great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), a friend of Osip and Nadia, writes in the prologue to the Voronehz Notebooks (1935-37):"Mandelstam has no teacher. It is worth thinking about that. I do not know of such a fact in universal poetry.". In those notebooks -written in exile on the Ukrainian-Russian border- Mandelstam distilled his poems from his painful daily experience. It is a "anti-war poetry, defense of art against power, of the dignity of man and the value of life in the face of oppression and terror. In this sense, it is a tragic work, but not nihilistic, because it leaves a trace of greatness and hope."wrote the poet Luis Ramoneda.

Mandelstam's poetry is not easy to read, but as a sample of his work I have selected a poem from the second notebook dated January 15-16, 1937. Its initial title was The Beggar Woman and it referred to his wife, who accompanied him in the exile in which they find themselves in a situation of absolute misery, but it may also refer to poetry itself:

You are not dead yet. You are not alone yet.
With your friend the beggar
you enjoy the grandeur of the plains,
of fog, cold and snowfall.
Live in peace and comfort
in opulent poverty, in powerful misery.
Blessed are the days and nights
and the sweet and sonorous fatigue is innocent.

Unhappy he who, like his shadow,
fears the bark and curses the wind.
And miserable he who, half dead,
begs alms from his own shadow.

Upon completion of the centenary of the russian revolution It is worth remembering Osip Mandelstam, a frontier poet, who died in Siberia at the age of 47, victim of disease and deprivation. His poems - in the words of his Spanish translator Jesús García Gabaldón - constitute "...".one of the most powerful and complex creations of the Spirit of the twentieth century.".

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For his part, Zosima, the wise priest from The brothers KaramazovIn his youth he traveled through Russia with another monk, begging for alms for his monastery, and recalls how in his eyes God manifested Himself in beauty: "That young man and I were the only ones who did not sleep, talking about the beauty of the world and its mystery. Every grass, every beetle, an ant, a golden bee, all played their part admirably, by instinct, and bore witness to the divine mystery, for they were continually fulfilling it." Zosima and the young man speak of God's imprint on his creatures. The scene concludes, "How good and wonderful are all the works of God!".

In the complex and passionate spirit of Fyodor Dostoevsky, faith and unbelief struggle and confront each other; each of these two poles will be echoed in the personality of his literary creations, especially in The Brothers Karamazovwhich is a synthesis of Dostoevsky's perplexity and inner conflict and is very probably the peak of his maturity and creative work. "The most important question that I will examine in all the chapters of this book is precisely that which, consciously or unconsciously, has made me suffer all my life: the existence of God" (A. Gide, Dostoevsky through his Correspondence, 1908, p. 122).

This amazing writer, the great novelist of Tsarist Russia, who went through political conflicts, violent revolutions, inhospitable prisons, with an existence surrounded by material limitations, can nevertheless understand the peace that dwells in the pages of a text.

García Lorca remembered it this way in 1931: "When the famous Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky [...] was a prisoner in Siberia, far from the world, between four walls and surrounded by desolate plains of endless snow, and he asked for help in a letter to his distant family, he only said: 'Send me books, books, many books so that my soul does not die! He was cold and did not ask for fire, he was terribly thirsty and did not ask for water: he asked for books, that is, horizons, that is, ladders to climb to the summit of the spirit and of the heart".

In his life of passionate struggle and prolonged search in time, he tries to express one of the most painful questions of his existence: if God exists, how to prove it. "Dostoevsky will try in vain" - writes André Gide - "to reveal to the world a Russian Christ, which the world does not know," the Christ that has accompanied him since his childhood and the Christ that he has portrayed in his soul.

Dostoevsky's works are full of life. As Gide also points out, Dostoevsky is "hard and tenacious in his work, he works hard at corrections, dismantles his writings and tenaciously reconstructs them, page after page, until he infuses them all with the intensity of his soul". Dostoevsky has portrayed marginal and abject lives, he has entered the most complex labyrinths of the human condition and from there he has given us back a look of compassion.

The creator of marginal characters never condemns his characters, never judges them, but understands them in all their magnitude and misery, trying to give meaning to suffering in order to give meaning to life itself. "Dostoevsky wrote: I fear only one thing, not to be worthy of my suffering," Viktor Frankl recalled in Man in search of meaning (p. 96).

The silence of God, the restlessness to find Him, that point at which the spirit unravels in a permanent internal quarrel, like that cry of Kinlov's in The Brothers KaramazovThe words "All my life I have been tormented by God", which is nothing but the cry of Dostoevsky himself, to whom it escapes from the depths of his being. But just as God's silence does not oppose his Word, neither does absence oppose his Presence. As Dimitri Karamazov exclaims: "It is terrible that beauty is not only something dreadful, but also a mystery. Here the devil fights against God, and the battlefield is the heart of man".

In the present time of light and shadow, the reading of Dostoevsky leads to a better understanding of the anxieties that so often hover over the hearts of many human beings and perhaps to the conclusion that it is Beauty that will save the world. In the words of Cardinal Ratzinger in Rimini (2002): "Dostoevsky's famous question, 'Will Beauty save us?' is well known. But in most cases it is forgotten that Dostoevsky is referring here to the redeeming beauty of Christ. We must learn to see it. If we do not know him merely by word of mouth, but are pierced by the dart of his paradoxical beauty, then we begin to know him truly, and not only by hearsay. Then we will have encountered the beauty of Truth, of redeeming Truth. Nothing can bring us closer to the Beauty, which is Christ himself, than the world of beauty that faith has created and the light that shines on the faces of the saints, through which his own light becomes visible."

La entrada Fiódor Dostoievski (1821-1881): En busca de Dios y la belleza se publicó primero en Omnes.

The life of Thoreau, born in Concorde, Massachusetts, the son of a pencil maker, may seem unremarkable, but it is remarkable for its authenticity. He was a personal friend of prominent thinkers of his time, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson: both were members of the Transcendentalist Club. He devoted his whole life to thinking and writing, becoming a great essayist, poet and philosopher, author of numerous works in which he expounds his ideas on history, the relationship between nature and the human condition, the defense of abolitionism, and his critical stance against taxes or development.

Two of his works stand out for their important influence on today's world: the essay On the duty of civil disobedience (1849), in which he defends the right to insubordination in the face of an unjust state - which will profoundly influence Gandhi and Martin Luther King.- and the work Walden, or life in the woods (1854), a notable precedent of modern environmentalism, which helps to awaken today's concern for the relationship between human beings and the earth they inhabit.

In 1845 Thoreau moves to the shores of Walden Lake, a wooded lot owned by his friend Emerson, where he builds a small cabin where he lives for a little over two years, while he devotes himself to reading, writing and cultivating the land for his livelihood. It should be noted that he has no electricity or running water, although he is supported in his diet by his relatives and friends. Walden or life in the woods is the result of this personal challenge, of this experience of reflection and contemplation of nature. Thoreau himself puts it this way: "I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to face only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what I had to teach, lest when I was about to die I should discover that I had not lived. I did not want to live what was not life; it is so expensive to live; [...] and if it [life in the woods] were mean, to get then all its genuine meanness, and publish to the world its meanness, or if it were sublime, to know it by experience and be able to give a true summary of it on my next outing." (p. 90).

What are these essential facts of life? Thoreau devotes several chapters at the beginning of the book to analyze and describe everyday matters such as clothing, furniture (only three chairs to accommodate no more than two people), the making of bread, the construction of his house, the planting of a vegetable garden. But little by little, he turns his attention to other subjects of his interest: the readings that accompany him, the visits he receives, the sounds, the solitude, the animals, the lagoon...

From the outset, Thoreau poses his back-to-nature experience not as a rejection of civilization, nor as a defense of wilderness, but as a search for an in-between territory that integrates nature and culture. He asks: "¿Would it not be possible to combine the robustness of savages with the intellectuality of civilized man?" (p. 24). For him, nature and the human being are closely related, in such a way that he goes so far as to affirm that he is part of nature and it is only in nature that he can discover himself. "This is a delightful sunset, when the whole body is one sense and absorbs delight from every pore. I come and go with strange freedom in Nature, being a part of herself." (p. 127), Thoreau beautifully describes. And he adds: "In the midst of a gentle rain, while prevailingían isI suddenly became aware of the existence of a sweet and beneficial society in Nature". (p. 128).

A thread of continuity can be seen between the first and the second. natural society of Thoreau, the ideas of Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) and those contained in the much more recent Laudato si' (2015). Leopold states in his masterpiece A Sand County Almanac (1949) that the earth is a community to which we belong. This concept - basic in ecology- implies a break with the idea of nature as something external to human beings, as something alien. On the contrary, Leopold proposes to consider the land as a community in which both the whole and each of the parts have value in its own right: the human being is nature that interprets and shapes the landscape.

As we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Thoreau's birth, the idea of the human being as a member of a biotic community helps us understand the role we must play in the conservation of nature. The teachings of the encyclical Laudato si' are a magnificent invitation to deepen our intimate community with the environment in which we live: "We forget that we ourselves are earth (cf. Gen 2:7). Our own body is made up of the elements of the planet, its air is what gives us breath and its water enlivens and restores us" (n. 2).

The invitation to a return to nature and its contemplation as a whole to which we belong turns the defense of the environment into a moral reflection on the meaning of life and a search for ourselves. This quest is capable of recovering the sacred meaning of nature and, simultaneously, of helping us to assume our responsibility as members of this community. The 200th anniversary of Henry D. Thoreau is an excellent occasion to think more deeply about this.

La entrada La vida en los bosques: 200 años de Henry D. Thoreau (1817-1868) se publicó primero en Omnes.

The center of his thinking

María Zambrano was born in Vélez-Málaga in 1904 and died in Madrid in 1991. She lived her beginnings and end in Spain; however, from 1939 to 1984, a long exile took her to sister countries in America and Europe. Rome will be fundamental, becoming the knot that binds one and the other, all of them well present in his work. The category exile is central to her thinking and helps to understand the epitaph she herself chose for her tombstone in the cemetery of the village in Malaga where she was born: Surge, amica mea, et veni ("Arise, my beloved, and come!"). This call of the Beloved to the beloved, coming from the Song of Songs, is surely the most accurate expression of his philosophical and vital enterprise.

For María Zambrano, exile, more than a political and social issue, is the consequence of a tearing, which entails a fall and demands redemption. As she shows in Philosophy and poetry (1939), it is about the tearing apart of the Logos divine and logos The human experience is already present in the origins of the personal experience of the human being -in the divine creation of beings- and is also reflected in the historical development of reason -in the human creation of knowledge-. Putting the logos in harmony with the Logos The divine is the founding concern of Zambrano's philosophical reflection, it is the expression of his mediating mission, of his poetic reason.

Fundamental rationalism

The first consequence of this tearing apart is the forgetfulness of the origin. Reason will forget that it is the fruit of a will and will be lost amidst delusions of sufficiency and autonomy. As he points out in Thought and poetry in Spanish life (1939), from Parmenides to Hegel, a rationalist horizon has been unfolding that infects everything and everyone: it is the passion to enclose everything in a definition or in an idea, leaving aside the sacred depth of reality that remains uncontrollable and that opposes this supposed self-sufficiency of the human being. It can be seen that even the attempt at amendment carried out by the vitalisms of the twentieth century, after the idealisms of the nineteenth, has the same deficiency: "Where it was said reasonis said later lifeand the situation remains substantially the same", writes Zambrano. 

Why does everything remain the same? Because of the reverie of believing to possess everything, while what one possesses is always a all cut out. It is not things that are being left out, but what is truly marginalized, thrown into the hell of irrationality, is reality itself, transcendence and the Transcendent itself. In this critique of modern discursive reason, Maria Zambrano will coincide with Benedict XVI to the point that it seems that words and thought are lent to each other: where Zambrano says that "reason affirmed itself by closing". (Philosophy and poetry1939), Benedict XVI will speak about "a kind of pride of reason [...] that considers itself sufficient and closes itself to contemplation and to the search for a Truth that surpasses it." (Speech to the Pontifical Council for Culture, 2008). In this same sense, María Zambrano shows the ineffectiveness of this cut-out reason. We need only refer to the prologue of the first edition of Man and the divine (1955), which is the work of his that best corresponds to his fundamental philosophical interest. There he writes that "Man does not free himself from certain things when they have disappeared, let alone when it is he himself who has succeeded in making them disappear. Thus, that which is hidden in the word, almost unpronounceable today, God".. God is a mysterious reality that, even if denied, will always be in absolute and intact relationship with human beings.

Put the logos in the Logos

The existence of the human being depends on his relationship with the sacred and absolutely transcendent reality; hence, in the midst of the nostalgia for the origin, the human being goes through the path of anguish or through the path of meaning. Maria Zambrano's philosophical mission consists entirely in giving back the logos at Logos. For this it is necessary that reason be true reason and not the substitutes derived from rationalism. Human reason, capable of rediscovering its origin, cannot be superficial, external, belligerent, acid, sad. On the contrary, it must be, "something that is reason, but wider".Zambrano will write to the poet Rafael Dieste (1944). Or as the invitation of Benedict XVI in the Regensburg speech (2006), "broaden our concept of reason and its use.".

At the core of this reason -which in Zambrano's terminology is "like a drop of oil" o "like a drop of happiness"- a new articulation of knowledge will have to take place. Of all knowledge and, in a very special way, of those that are considered as knowledge of meaning: philosophy, poetry, religion. All three are genuine expressions of the activity and passivity of human knowledge. All three are born of the same placenta which is the sacred and in the recognition of their mutual and many debts they will find -we will find- the clarity and the light of the original unity. For this reason also, twenty-five years after her death, the thought of María Zambrano is more current and necessary than ever.

La entrada La actualidad de María Zambrano (1904-1991) se publicó primero en Omnes.

"I started reading Letters to a young poet I was engrossed, underlining page by page what touched my heart. It is a book to reread when life pulls at more than one part of ourselves, when we are in despair, when we feel an anguished loneliness or when we need good advice that delves into the depths of the soul". That is what I admire most about this book by Rilke: that what could help the young poet with those letters reaches the depths of a reader today.

Rilke with his letters manages to awaken the restlessness of the future writer not by persuasion, but by teaching. He is a master at awakening the passion of Kappus's literary vocation, showing him the pleasure of seeing beyond what many see, that is, discovering the beauty of the ordinary. "If you find your daily life poor, do not accuse it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to extract its riches. For the true creator there is no poverty and no platitudes." (p. 24). With his letters Rilke guides the young man's attention to what is truly important. And, in a way, he also guided my discovery of what is truly valuable. 

The great poem may not please everyone, but our souls are not very different from one another. We have all suffered similar pains, for we all, in one way or another, wear the same skin. It is the poet who knows how to describe the sensations he perceives, describes his appearance, his scent, his reactions to his environment, his wounds and scars... He is the one who is in charge of making a real jewel out of the ordinary in the rough; the poet is like a polisher of reality.

The polisher's job is to erase all the marks that have been left on the jewel during its processing. He must be attentive to concentrate on treating the jewelry entrusted to him with the utmost delicacy. Patience is also a necessary quality in this work, as the finishing of the jewelry can be very time consuming. Therefore, in addition to the skill and precision needed to carry it out, what you need above all is a great desire to turn your work into a work of art.

Simone Weil has written that intelligence can only be moved by desire, and I believe that this is how Rilke understands the work of the poet. The true poet writes not because he is born with a pen in his hand, but because what is really born in him is a great desire to write and a deep need to do so. The work of an artist arises because he really wants to create his work, because it is born from the depths of his being to give life to give life to those who contemplate it. 

As I read those pages I felt that my great illusion was -like Kappus- that of being a great poet. However, how could I know then whether poetry was mine? "Ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night: have I got the need of writing? Dive into your innermost being to get an answer. And if it is affirmative, if you are able to answer this serious question with a simple and resounding 'Yes, I must,' then build your whole life around that need." (p. 23). Even the famous singer Lady Gaga has this phrase tattooed on her left arm in the original German. It comes from the first of the letters and shows, in particular detail, the point I am getting at. My writings may not be better than those of the great writers, but they are a piece and voice of my own life. Therefore, I had to ask myself whether it was my duty to raise my voice so that it could be heard, because no one else could say what I had to tell the world. My words were and will remain unique and unrepeatable.

Faced with this discovery, the soul of a restless writer is not indifferent. This book has enlivened my illusions to show the richness of the ordinary, to tell the world the great stories that have not yet been told because no one has yet discovered them. Those stories that have long belonged to us and that by bringing them to life can come to belong to others. In short, I discovered that my vocation was writing, because the beauty was not only in my writings, but above all in their purpose, that is, in what they provoke in those who read them. I understood that this effect is born in each singular soul: the success of the writer resides in the authenticity of his soul and in how he manages to show it to the world in a transparent way, without shadows or contrasts. The great poet does not succeed because he writes excellent things, but because he transmits his own belief to those who have the capacity to believe what he believes. Beliefs and deep looks, unique and unrepeatable, that embellish the world: that is what the young poet works on".

So much for what the young poet Ana Gil de Pareja wrote to me. For this beautiful testimony -and for so many others that I have accumulated over the years- it seems to me that it is worthwhile to continue recommending the reading of this book today.

La entrada Rilke y la joven poeta se publicó primero en Omnes.

These words of the Pope led me to read his 1952 autobiography, The long lonelinessthe magnificent biography of Jim Forest All is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day (Orbis, 2011), and several of his writings, among them the recent translation of My conversion. From Union Square to Rome, 1938. It seems to me that, in this age of secularization, Dorothy Day is a fascinating character because of her intimate union with God and her commitment to those most in need. Day's life reveals a deep mystical experience that led her to conversion, to the highest levels of spirituality, and to discover the face of Jesus Christ in those most in need.

He writes, for example, in a passage of The long loneliness: "If you lack time, sow time and you will reap time. Go to church and spend an hour in quiet prayer. You will have more time than ever and you will get your work done. Sow time with the poor. Sit and listen to them, waste your time with them. You will receive a hundredfold of that time. Sow kindness and you will reap kindness. Sow love and you will reap love. And, once again, he would say with St. John of the Cross: 'Where there is no love, put love and you will get love.'" (p. 268) What practical wisdom is contained in these brief lines!

A significant biography
Dorothy Day was born in 1897 in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of a sports journalist. With her family she moved to San Francisco and then to Chicago; from her early years she worked taking care of her siblings and in multiple jobs outside the home. She studied on scholarship at the University of Illinois and after two years she dropped out. He moved to New York where he led a bohemian life and developed his social activism in contact with anarchist groups: "I oscillated between loyalty to socialism, syndicalism and anarchism. When I was reading Tolstoy I was an anarchist; Ferrer with his schools, Kropotkin with his agrarian communes, the men of Industrial Workers of the World with their solidarity and their unions: all of them attracted me." (p. 71). In his obituary published in the magazine Time in 1980, it was recalled that to her admirers, such as historian David J. O'Brien, Dorothy Day had been "the most significant, interesting and influential person in American Catholicism." And it was so, because in the movement of the Catholic Worker combined her zeal for reforming society as a whole with her practical concern for helping individual poor people. She was arrested a dozen times, the first as a suffragist in 1917, the last on the occasion of a demonstration in California in 1973, and took part in many, many labor and anti-war protests.

Benedict XVI said of her on February 13, 2013: "In her autobiography, she openly confesses to having fallen into the temptation to solve everything with politics, adhering to the Marxist proposal: 'I wanted to go with the demonstrators, go to prison, write, influence others and leave my dream to the world. How much ambition and how much search for myself there was in all this!'. The path to faith in such a secularized environment was particularly difficult, but Grace acts just the same, as she herself stressed: 'It is true that I felt more often the need to go to church, to kneel, to bow my head in prayer. A blind instinct, one might say, because I was not conscious of praying. But I would go, I would get into the atmosphere of prayer...'. God led her to a conscious adherence to the Church, to a life dedicated to the disinherited.".

Following the birth of her daughter, she converted to Catholicism in December 1927. She leaves her partner, the anarchist Forster Batterham, who did not want to marry, and concentrates on the child's education. She went to Mexico to get away from Forster, but when her daughter fell ill with malaria, she returned to New York. In 1933 she meets the radical Catholic Peter Maurin, with whom she founds the newspaper Catholic Worker which would henceforth be the dynamic axis of his life, together with the centers for the poor in cities and rural farms. The newspaper was widely distributed for decades. There are now more than 200 Catholic Worker in the United States and another 30 in various countries.

Newsroom
The Spanish reader is struck by Day's admiration for Ferrer Guardia, the anarchist founder of the Modern School, condemned and executed in 1909 for his alleged participation in the Tragic Week of Barcelona. It is surprising that Ferrer's pedagogical ideals had a notable impact in the United States, although some of his texts are crudely anti-religious. "Where were they?" -Dorothy Day writes in her autobiography (p. 162). "the priests who should have gone out in search of men like the Spanish anarchist Francesc Ferrer i Guardia, acting with them as the Good Shepherd had acted with the lost sheep, leaving the ninety-nine - the good parishioners - to go in search of the one that was lost, to heal the one that was wounded? No wonder that in my mind and in my heart there was a very acute conflict.". Also noteworthy is his active pacifism in the Catholic Worker during the Spanish Civil War in the face of the support of the American Church for the national side as a result of the martyrdom of so many priests and nuns and in the face of the support of the official authorities for the Republican side.

In this Year of Mercy, the figure and thought of Dorothy Day take on new relevance, even with some controversy: "Among the works of mercy are: teaching the unlearned, rebuking the sinner, comforting the afflicted, and patiently bearing with the unjust; to these we have always added: picketing and distributing propaganda."he writes, for example, in his autobiography (p. 235).

It is worthwhile to close this brief review of the book with a few beautiful lines from the epilogue: "The final word is love. [We cannot love God if we do not love one another, and to love we must know one another. We know Him in the act of breaking bread, and we know one another in the act of breaking bread and we are never alone. Heaven is a banquet and life is also a banquet, even with a crust of bread, where there is community. We have all known the long loneliness and we have all learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community."  (p. 303).

To learn more

The long loneliness, Dorothy Day. 312 pages. Editorial Sal Terrae, 2000.

My conversionDorothy Day. 176 pages. Ediciones Rialp, 2014.

Dorothy Day: a journalist committed to the social equity  on the road to sainthood, Rome Reports (2013).

Dorothy Day, a saint of our time, Ron Rolheiser. Round City. 7-IX-2015

The strength of an angel (movie) . Original title: Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story (1996).

La entrada Dorothy Day. La larga soledad se publicó primero en Omnes.

From the early daysSeveral authors have detected the presence of the thought and texts of Romano Guardini (1885-1968) in the preaching of Pope Francis and, in particular, in his recent encyclical Laudato si' May 2015. It is known that already in the novitiate the young Bergoglio was a reader of The Lord of Guardini and that in 1986 he spent a year in Germany working on a doctoral project on the dynamics of disagreement and encounter in Guardini.

In a certain sense, something of that project now surfaces in this luminous encyclical when the Pope reminds us that there is a tendency to believe that "that every increase of power constitutes without more a progress, an increase of security, of utility, of well-being, of vital energy, of fullness of values", although "modern man is not prepared to use power wisely." (n. 105). The words of The decline of the modern age are cited on at least eight occasions (notes 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 92, 144 and 154): "Each epoch tends to develop little self-awareness of its own limits. This is why it is possible that humanity today does not realize the seriousness of the challenges it faces, and 'the possibility of man's misuse of power is constantly growing' when he is not 'subject to any norm regulating freedom, but only to the supposed imperatives of utility and security'" (n. 105). And a little further on he adds: "Technique has an inclination to seek to ensure that nothing remains outside its iron logic, and 'the man who possesses technique knows that, at bottom, this is aimed neither at utility nor at well-being, but at mastery; mastery, in the most extreme sense of the word'." (n. 108). It is worth a careful reading of The decline of the modern age (1950) because it sheds much light on how to interpret the encyclical and the present time.

However, it seems to me that there is a second key to the encyclical which refers to a very different source and which has been overlooked. I am referring to the futurist novel by Robert Hugh Benson (1871-1914) Lord of the world [The Lord of the Worldoriginally published in 1907 and mentioned at least twice by Pope Francis in his preaching in recent years. The figure of Julian Felsenburgh, who in the novel becomes the effective master of the world, seems to resonate in the background of the denunciation of the abuse of technocratic power that formulates the Laudato si': "It becomes indispensable to create a normative system that includes insurmountable limits and ensures the protection of ecosystems, before the new forms of power derived from the techno-economic paradigm end up sweeping away not only politics but also freedom and justice." (n. 53).

Lord of the world gives much food for thought, as so often happens with good works of science fiction. No doubt about it, "deserves a place" -wrote Joseph Pearce. "next to Brave New World (Huxley) and 1984 (Orwell) among the classics of dystopian fiction." It is the story of how, around the year 2000, the worst nightmare -a dystopia is an anti-utopia - has taken over the world and is preparing for the final elimination of religion.

To learn more:

Confessions of a convertR. H. Benson. Ed. Rialp, 1998. Personal testimony in which Benson describes the arduous path that led him to the Catholic Church.

Converted writersJoseph Pearce. Ed. Palabra, 2006. Anglo-Saxon intellectuals and artists who manifest the creative force of Christianity.

Lord of the world, R. H. Benson. Ed. Palabra, 2015. A book that gives much food for thought, as so often happens with good works of science fiction.

As explained by Jesuit Cyril Martindale, Benson's biographer, the American Felsenburgh, the main character in Lord of the world who represents the Antichrist, is not so much an incarnation of Satan, but rather the quintessence of human perfection, the peacemaking politician on a world scale who embodies Man par excellence, the Spirit of the World. In contrast, the priest Percy Franklin who represents Christianity is a modest person who, when he is elected Pope after the fall of Rome at the hands of Felsenburgh, lives in poverty and anonymity in Nazareth awaiting the terrible end. For today's reader this behavior cannot but evoke the personal style of Pope Francis.

Two quotations suffice to demonstrate the timeliness of this book. One, the argumentation of Oliver Brand, an official of the new order, to his wife Mabel, who still retains traces of religiosity: "Deep in your heart you know that euthanasia administrators are the real priests.". And this one: "'Underneath every Catholic is a murderer,' said one of the articles featured in Pueblo Nuevo". When euthanasia is administered as if it were the Anointing of the Sick or when advocates of atheism such as Sam Harris argue that a religious person is a potential terrorist, it becomes quite clear that this work written more than a hundred years ago is very much up to date.

Benson himself warned of the sensationalist nature of his novel in an introductory note. With exquisite British phlegm he points out: "I am fully aware that this is a tremendously sensationalist book, open therefore to innumerable criticisms for that reason, as well as for many others. Yet I have had no other way of expressing the principles I wished to convey (and in whose truth I passionately believe) except by carrying the argument to a sensational extreme. I have, however, endeavored not to flare up in an improper manner.". It seems to me that the Pope in the Laudato si' does the same when it warns that "the earth, our home, seems to become more and more an immense deposit of filth." (n. 21) and that we are immersing ourselves in "a spiral of self-destruction" (n. 163). Truly, it seems to me, there is a deep harmony between Pope Francis and the Lord of the world by Robert Benson.

It is a good thing that Ediciones Palabra has published a new edition of the 1988 translation by Rafael Gómez López-Egea with a beautiful illustration on the cover. The master of the world was translated into Spanish very soon by the priest Juan Mateos de Diego and published in  first published in Spain in 1909 by the Gustavo Gili publishing house in Barcelona, and would see up to six successive editions in this publishing house throughout the last century. We do not know if the young Bergoglio would read this translation or the one made by the polemic Leonardo Castellani in Argentina (Itinerarium, 1958). In recent years other translations into Spanish have seen the light of day: that of Miguel Martínez-Lage (Homo Legens, 2006), and those of San Román (2011) and Stella Maris (2015). Castellani's has also been republished with a preface by Ralph McInerny and an introduction by C. John McCloskey, III (Cristiandad, 2013).

La entrada Robert H. Benson: “Señor del mundo” se publicó primero en Omnes.

Born in Chicago in 1926, he studied mathematics and philosophy in Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in 1951 from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a thesis on the justification of induction and the meaning of probability. These were central themes in the work of his dissertation director Hans Reichenbach, a leading member of the Vienna Circle and an emigrant to the United States in the wake of World War II. Among Reichenbach's students was Ruth Anna, also a philosopher, whom Hilary Putnam would marry in 1962. In 1965 Putnam joined the prestigious Department of Philosophy at Harvard University, where he held the Walter Beverly Pearson Chair of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic until his retirement in May 2000. Before joining Harvard he had taught at Northwestern, Princeton and MIT.

Cutting-edge thinker

Undoubtedly, it can be stated emphatically that Putnam was an avant-garde thinker. As Stegmüller wrote, it can be said of him that in his intellectual evolution he has summed up most of the philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century.

His philosophical production focused for decades on the great topics of contemporary discussion in philosophy of science and philosophy of language. His articles are written with extraordinary rigor, in conversation - or rather, in discussion - with Rudolf Carnap, Willard Quine and his colleagues in Anglo-American academic philosophy. In addition to the quality of his writing, he is impressive for the delicate discrimination to which he subjects the most difficult problems in order to gain understanding. By his way of working, Putnam teaches that philosophy is difficult, that is, that philosophical reflection - just as in other areas of knowledge when it comes to the most basic questions - has considerable technical complexity. Of course Putnam knew that many philosophical problems are ultimately unsolvable, but he liked to repeat the words of his friend Stanley Cavell: "There are better and worse ways to think about them.".

Among his vast philosophical production, I would like to highlight his book Renewing Philosophyin which it brings together the Gifford Lectures taught at the University of St Andrews in 1990, perhaps because in the summer of 1992 I was at Harvard with him and he let me read the galley proofs. As the title suggests, those pages are written with the conviction that the sorry state of philosophy today calls for a revitalization, a thematic renewal. Putnam conceived that book as a diagnosis of the situation of philosophy and suggested the directions that such a renewal might take. Putnam was not writing a manifesto, but rather a style of doing philosophy, of bringing together rigor and human relevance, which are the properties that have been seen as distinguishing two radically opposed modes of doing philosophy, Anglo-American analytic philosophy and European philosophy.

Hilary Putnam has never been carried away by the winds of intellectual fashions and - which is rare among philosophers - has time and again rectified his views as he has refined his understanding of the problems he addressed. That has led some to accuse him of philosophical fickleness, but it seems to me that the ability to rectify is really the hallmark of the love of truth. "I used to think this..., whereas now I think that". Just as we all do in our ordinary lives, changing our minds when we receive new data and understand better reasons, why should it be any different when doing philosophy?

In this regard, it is worth transcribing what he wrote in the prologue to his recent Philosophy in an Age of Science (2012): "I long ago abandoned Carnap's and Reichenbach's (different) versions of logical empiricism, but I continue to draw inspiration from Reichenbach's conviction that philosophical examination of the best contemporary and past science is of great philosophical importance, and from Carnap's example in his continual re-examination and critique of his own earlier views, as well as from the political and moral commitment of both Carnap and Reichenbach.".

However, what perhaps some people have not forgiven him for was his conversion to the religion of his grandparents, Judaism. In the last decades of his life he began to dedicate twenty minutes a day to traditional Jewish prayers and little by little reflection on ethics and religion appeared more and more frequently in his texts: "As a practicing Jew." -explained in How to renew the philosophy-, "I am someone for whom the religious dimension of life is increasingly important, even though it is a dimension about which I do not know how to philosophize, except indirectly. When I began teaching philosophy in the early 1950s, I considered myself a philosopher of science (although in a generous interpretation of the expression 'philosophy of science' I included philosophy of language and philosophy of mind). Those who know my writings of that stage may wonder how I reconciled my religious streak, which even then was to some extent behind, with my general materialist-scientific worldview at that time. The answer is that I did not reconcile them: I was a conscientious atheist and I was a believer; I simply kept those two parts of myself separate.".

This "double life", these two divided parts of himself, was not satisfactory to him in his last stage: "I am both a religious person and a natural philosopher, but not a reductionist."In this regard, he wrote in his very recent autobiography, which opens the thick volume dedicated to him in the Library of Living Philosophers. I remember now that Putnam called me sometimes "the catholic pragmatist"thanks to him I had discovered the pragmatist philosophy and the thought of Charles S. Peirce to which I have devoted myself since 1992. I pray now for his eternal rest and hope one day to be able to continue the kindly conversations with this giant of philosophy who was not afraid to openly acknowledge his religiosity in a paganized academic world.

La entrada Hilary Putnam (1926-2016): un filósofo americano se publicó primero en Omnes.

Perhaps this is what moves and excites us when we contemplate the paintings of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), who knew how to capture the soul of the simple and everyday things in order to be able to express them in his work: "Art is sublime when it is simple."she writes to her brother Théo. When we read her letters - which are the best self-portrait of her soul - we discover the history of a passion, the inescapable call to the place where beauty allows no distractions: "How many times in London, coming home in the evening from Southampton Street."writes to him on October 12, 1883, "I stopped to sketch on the docks of the Thames."or the wheat fields under the sky of Arles, which were taking away his heart: "...".They are vast expanses of wheat under overcast skies, and I was not hard pressed to try to express the sadness, the extreme loneliness." (10-VII-1890).

If we were to try to decipher the story of Vincent van Gogh's life, his material limitations and miseries would undoubtedly overwhelm us with their marked sadness: "It was too long and too great a misery that had disheartened me to such an extent that I could no longer do anything." (SEPTEMBER 24, 1880). However, his soul was nourished by a happiness incomprehensible to most, a privilege of exquisite and lucid spirits; in the same letter he will add: "I couldn't tell you how happy I am to have taken up drawing again." (24-IX-1880). The passion for his art allows him to continue producing beauty, even from the abyss of a devastating illness: "I got sick." -he wrote on April 29, 1890. "at the time I was making almond blossoms. If I could have kept working, I would have made other flowering trees, as you can guess. Now the flowering trees are almost over.". The privilege that the present enjoys over the past allows us to know that the trees he painted, those almond blossoms, had already entered the history of works full of beauty; but despondency had also reached his heart, the academic world had turned its back on him and loneliness had unhinged him.

Van Gogh had a deep desire to know himself, to make clear what things troubled his soul, what uncontrollable passions cornered him: "I am a passionate man, capable and subject to do more or less foolish things that I sometimes regret." (VII-1880); this would explain why he wrote to his brother Théo some 650 letters and why he painted 27 self-portraits: "It is said, and I willingly believe it, that it is difficult to know oneself; but it is not easy to paint oneself either. That's why I'm working on two self-portraits at the moment, also for lack of another model." (October 5 or 6, 1889). In his letters he sketched a self-portrait as eloquent in his descriptions as are his paintings: "I want to say that even if I encounter relatively great difficulties, even if for me there are gloomy days, I would not want, it would not seem fair to me that someone should count me among the unfortunate.".

Van Gogh was a great reader, in love with books and knowledge."I have an irresistible passion for books. Need to instruct myself as to eat my bread." (VII-1880)-, with a desire for self-improvement that never left him: "I spent more on colors and fabrics than on me." (5-IV-1888). The work gives him an overflowing joy: "I feel in me a force that I would like to develop, a fire that I cannot let extinguish, that I must stoke." (DECEMBER 10, 1882). And the eagerness to perfect his art even made it possible for him to reflect on his work: "Life goes by like this, time doesn't come back, but I work hard at my job, precisely because I know that the opportunities to work don't come back". (10-IX-1889). As if to support his conviction, he quotes a phrase from the American painter Whistler: "Yes, I did it in two hours, but to do it in two hours I had to work for years." (2-III-1883).

Reminiscing a Goethe's poem of 1810: "If sight were not like a sun, I could never look upon it; if in us were not found the power of God Himself, how could the divine enrapture us?"It is shocking to recall the candor of Van Gogh's soul in his early years, when the love of God was his protection and his refuge. In 1875, from Paris, Vincent told Théo that he had rented a room and had put paintings on the wall, among them Bible Reading by Rembrandt. In the letter he describes and interprets the scene of the painting: "It is a scene that brings to mind the words, 'Truly I tell you, when two or three beings are gathered in my name, I am in the midst of them'" (JULY 6, 1975). It is a moment in which dreams squeeze his soul and in which love for Christ rejoices his heart in search of that light that will shine later in his work: "You know that one of the fundamental truths of the Gospel is. let the light shine in the darkness. Through the darkness into the light." (NOVEMBER 15, 1975). Vincent's heart was steeped in love for God. He had wanted to be a pastor and missionary in his youth and only devoted himself fervently to painting in the last ten years of his life.

From the diaphanousness of a mind and heart that had not yet suffered the ravages of illness, Vincent, the artist who loved books, the one who preferred to buy brushes and colors rather than food, could assure with moving conviction, the presence of God in all that is beautiful and good: "In the same way it happens that everything that is truly beautiful and good, of inner, moral, spiritual and sublime beauty in men and in their works, I think that this comes from God and that everything that is evil and wicked in the works of men and in men themselves, is not from God and neither does it seem good to God." (VII-1880). Half a century later, Simone Weil in Waiting for God will write in the same vein: "In everything that arouses in us the pure and authentic feeling of beauty there is really the presence of God.".

The Argentine writer Roberto Espinosa recently visited the church of Auvers-Sur-Oise, "that gothic church where his religious heart has been moved". and where the remains of the artist rest: "After wandering aimlessly in search of the 'monument', on a wall and between two mausoleums, two tombstones stare unblinkingly at the midday sun: Ici repose Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) and at his side, Théodore van Gogh (1857-1891). A tapestry of ivy shelters the pain of fraternal graves".. Neither of them had reached the age of forty. Their souls united, between missives and brushes, in search of eternity, of the colors and the light of God.

La entrada Van Gogh, buscando los colores de Dios se publicó primero en Omnes.