Perhaps the most serious aspect of this progressive mindset has been that it has robbed us of the identity of each era, as if the present had no value in itself, but only as preparation for an ideal future. Against this undefined horizon, cultures ceased to be understood as projects with their own meaning.

In light of this, I propose that we view our history as a vocation. Spain was never an accident or a simple accumulation of events. It was, and continues to be, a conscious project, a historical will that forges its path through uncertainty.

From its origins, Spain understood its existence as a mission. For centuries it was Islamic and Eastern, but a minority decided to keep it Christian and European. That decision was the beginning of a journey that would shape what we now call Hispanic culture.

When Charles I arrived in Spain in 1517, two visions of empire were being debated. Gattinara dreamed of a universal monarchy based on conquest. But Pedro Ruiz de la Mota proposed something else: a Christian empire, a universitas christiana based on harmony between peoples and the defense of justice. A few years later, one of the greatest contributions to our history would emerge from these roots: the School of Salamanca, whose 500th anniversary we are celebrating this year. This school would certainly continue its legacy through illustrious figures from the sister university of Coimbra, such as Luis de Molina, Francisco Suárez, and the unjustly forgotten Juan de Santo Tomás.

Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, Francisco Suárez, Luis de Molina... all of them were pioneers in affirming that man has an inalienable dignity simply because he is a person. Their reflections on natural rights, just law, and the equality of all before God gave rise to what we now call human rights and international law. Long before the Enlightenment, our universities were already debating whether it was lawful to dominate other peoples or strip them of their possessions. And from those debates emerged specific laws: those of Burgos, those of Valladolid, and the New Laws of 1542, which abolished the encomienda system.

It is fair to remember that the seed of human rights was sown there: in Salamanca, in the heart of Hispanic culture.

From the Black Legend to the identity crisis

However, that effort was distorted. Spain's enemies spread a false image: the so-called Black Legend. In it, Spain was presented as intolerant, fanatical, and backward, hiding its defense of human rights and dignity. This manipulation not only succeeded abroad, but also ended up taking root at home. From the 17th century onwards, many Spaniards began to see themselves through the eyes of foreigners, doubting their own identity.

The subsequent history was, in large part, a consequence of that fracture. The loss of Portugal in 1640 marked the beginning of the decline. The European Enlightenment, with figures such as Montesquieu and Voltaire, revived prejudices against Spain, presenting it as a symbol of irrationality. At the same time, our enlightened thinkers—Jovellanos, Moratín, Isla—who were reformists, moderates, and deeply Catholic, were unfairly identified with the excesses of the French Revolution. This confusion slowed down reforms and fueled a climate of mistrust and division.

Then came the Napoleonic invasion of 1808, and with it, a civil war between two Spains: the traditional and the liberal. When Ferdinand VII restored absolutism, the break was final. The American colonies, influenced by this conflict, gained their independence by renouncing their Spanish heritage. The Creoles, descendants of Spaniards, attempted to found new nations by denying three centuries of shared history. Thus began the crisis of Hispanic identity, the consequences of which we continue to experience on both sides of the Atlantic.

During the 19th century, religion went from being a shared faith to becoming an ideological trench: clericalism versus anticlericalism. Later, the disasters of 1898 and 1936—the loss of the last territories and the civil war—accentuated the disorientation. Spain isolated itself and took decades to rebuild. The democratic transition of 1978 restored freedom, but failed to completely liberate the mentality inherited from the Black Legend. We continue to view our history with complexes, without fully recognizing what we have contributed to the world.

The current mission of Hispanic culture: to renew the West

And yet, the West—that West that today seems to doubt itself—is unthinkable without the contribution of Hispanic culture. The West is based on three pillars: Greek reason, which taught us to interpret reality; Roman law, which gave us the concept of justice and legitimate authority; and the Judeo-Christian vision, which revealed to us that every human being is a child of God and a brother to all men. Spain, and with it Hispanic culture, was the point where these three roots came together. From that union arose a civilization capable of spreading a revolutionary idea throughout the world: that of man as a person.

At a time when Europe was beginning to slide toward materialism and the denial of the spirit, Spain insisted that human beings are not things, nor biological mechanisms, but free, responsible beings called to transcendence. That is why many contemporary thinkers—such as Charles Taylor, John Finnis, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Byung-Chul Han—directly or indirectly acknowledge the influence of the Hispanic legacy in their reflections on dignity and human rights.

Hispanic culture, more than a political concept, is a cultural, linguistic, and spiritual community. It is the awareness of sharing a history, a language, a way of looking at the world. It is the feeling of being at home in any Spanish-speaking country. And that community still has much to say to today's world, which is experiencing a profound crisis of morality and meaning.

Recovering the values of Hispanic culture—reason, justice, and the Christian view of the individual—is, in my opinion, an urgent task. Because if we want our civilization to survive, we must once again believe in man as a dignified, free, and responsible being, created out of love.

It has been precisely the Christian faith that, for two thousand years, has given millions of people a worldview in which truth, beauty, and justice have a place. And it was Spain, through its work in the Americas and Asia, that spread that vision across the globe. With mistakes, yes, but also with a greatness that changed the history of mankind.

Spain has always understood life as a mission. It has not been utilitarian, nor has it subordinated man to the state. It has viewed existence as an adventure and has felt sympathy for the defeated. Its literature, since Cervantes, bears witness to this deeply human and compassionate outlook.

If we prolong that spirit and adapt it to our times—free from prejudice, ideology, and inherited complexes—we will be able to offer the world an authentic renewal of the Hispanic project, a Hispanic culture that once again becomes the living heir to the West and defender of human rights. And hopefully Portugal will do something similar in the Lusitanian world. 

Menéndez Pelayo said that “the Catholic faith is the foundation, the essence, and the greatest part of our philosophy, our literature, and our art.” I would add: also of our view of humanity. That is why the Hispanic culture that was and the one that can be again coincide in essence: both are born from the recognition of the dignity of the person.

Our task, in these times of confusion, is simply to continue the historic mission of Hispanic culture without hesitation. To preserve the best of our civilization and, with humility, offer it to the world. Because only by remaining faithful to who we are can we look to the future with hope.

La entrada La Hispanidad, heredera de Occidente se publicó primero en Omnes.

On his journey from Constantinople to Italy, Nicholas of Cusa had an experience that was decisive for his philosophical conception. He saw how the horizon of the sea appears to extend in a straight line, yet that line is part of a circle with a very large radius, evidence of the spherical shape of the Earth. That experience influenced his work. “On learned ignorance.”. We know that because of our finitude we cannot attain truth in its fullness and precision. And the more aware we are of our ignorance, the more it becomes learned ignorance, wisdom, a wisdom that starts from doubt but presupposes the existence of truth that can only be founded on infinite, eternal, and creative intelligence.

The failure of the union between East and West

The union of the churches, proclaimed on July 6, 1439, in the church of Santa Maria dei Fiori in Florence, failed shortly thereafter. Metropolitan Isidore of Kiev proclaimed it upon his arrival in Moscow, but was arrested by order of Prince Vasili, who forbade the Russian Church from accepting any union with the Latins. In the Byzantine Empire, the Greek bishops, returning from Florence, found a hostile popular climate.

Although the union was promulgated in Hagia Sophia on December 12, 1452, in the presence of Emperor Constantine XI, the papal legate, and the Byzantine patriarch, the reaction was a violent riot, started by the clergy and monks, who shouted, joined by the masses: “Let the turban of the Turks reign over Constantinople, rather than the miter of the Latins!”.

Half a year later, that cry was sadly fulfilled: on May 29, 1453, the capital fell to the Turks, the last emperor died in battle, and the Byzantine Empire came to an end.

In Rome, Isidore of Kiev, who had fled Russia, and Bessarion of Nicaea, both of whom had become cardinals of the Church, were for years a living reminder of something that could have been but was not, because men did not want it to be.

Meditating on the fall of Constantinople, Nicholas of Cusa conceived his great vision of a future universal reconciliation: “On the peace of faith” on the peace of faith, completed before January 14, 1454.

Following Pius II to the Adriatic coast, where the Christian crusader fleet would gather to fight the Turkish invasion, Nicholas suffered the final attack of a chronic illness and died in Todi (Umbria) on August 11, 1464. Three days later, his friend Eneas Silvio, Pope Pius II, died in Ancona.

Nicaea: root and symbol of Christian unity

In this Jubilee Year dedicated to hope, a very significant anniversary stands out: it has been 1700 years since the first ecumenical council, the Council of Nicaea, was held. It is a «milestone,», as Pope Francis emphasizes in the Bull of Indiction for the Jubilee of 2025. For all Christians, it represents an event with which to identify and find unity.

It is one of the great chapters in the history of the Church. The Council was convened by Emperor Constantine in 325 with the task of preserving unity, «seriously threatened" -as Francis recalls in the document «Hope does not disappoint»– for denying the divinity of Jesus Christ and his equality with the Father. The Council of Nicaea, attended by some 300 bishops, including papal legates and representatives of the Eastern Church, condemned the heresy of Arius. From Nicaea comes an invitation that remains relevant today, addressed to all Churches and ecclesial communities: to continue on the path toward unity. The Council Fathers used the expression «We believe» for the first time.

The Council of Nicaea arose as a result of problems in some of the main episcopal sees of the East, including Alexandria and Antioch. Emperor Constantine's contribution was decisive, and he sought unity in his own way, a religious peace that could also guarantee peace for the people. It is also unity to see that the Council of Nicaea—today Iznik, a city of pilgrimage—is in some way related to this jubilee time of hope. 

For the Eastern Churches, the Council of Nicaea is the first ecumenical council. This event is commemorated in almost all the traditions of the various Eastern Churches in the liturgical year with a special feast. The declaration that «Christ is true man and true God.» responds to the heresy of Arianism. The expression Filioque added by the Latin Church to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, namely that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, has a specific connotation: it is intended to emphasize the divine nature of the Son.

The Filioque issue has been one of the causes of dissent between the Eastern and Western Churches. In the 20th century, thanks to ecumenical dialogues between Catholics and Orthodox Christians, it has become clear that this is not an issue that causes division. Some scholars suggest that the Latin Church should reflect on whether the Filioque can be removed and return to the older form.

A common Easter

The Council of Nicaea also debated the question of when Easter should be celebrated. As early as the fourth century, there had been a desire to «celebrate Easter together»: Emperor Constantine, according to Eusebius of Caesarea, wanted Christians to celebrate it on a single date. One of the decisions taken at the Council of Nicaea was not to celebrate Easter with the Jews.

In the 12th century, several Byzantine canonists also added «that Easter should not be celebrated before the Jews.» Today, in the Gregorian calendar, Easter may precede Passover. Scholars argue that this was not for reasons related to anti-Semitism, but due to the fact that, after several destructions of Jerusalem, even the Jews themselves had lost the ability to accurately calculate Passover. Now, on this anniversary marking 1,700 years since the Council of Nicaea, the advisability of arriving at «a single date for Easter» is being considered.

The presence today of Pope Leo XIV at an ecumenical prayer meeting near the archaeological excavations of the ancient Basilica of St. Neophytus in İznik (Nicaea) is a gateway to hope for unity.

La entrada Unión de los cristianos y aniversario de Nicea  se publicó primero en Omnes.

Newman adds that this promise of supernatural help did not expire with the disappearance of the Apostles, since Christ said “until the end of the world,” taking for granted that they would have successors and committing himself to be with those successors as he was with the Apostles. Revelation, Newman goes on to say, was given to the Twelve in its entirety and the Church only transmits it. He believes that the Church has the mission to teach faithfully the doctrine that the Apostles left us as an inheritance. By the teaching of the Church he understands not the teaching of this or that bishop but its unanimous voices and the Council is the form that the Church can adopt so that all recognize what she is teaching. In the same way, the Pope must present himself to us in a special way or with a special gesture, so that we understand that he is exercising his teaching office, that is, ex cathedra.

In his work on “The Development of Dogma” he affirms that the supremacy of conscience is the essence of natural religion and that supremacy in the conscience of the Christian is what is revealed to us in the New Testament and confirmed to us by the Church. He considers that the Catholic Church is the only one of all the Churches that dares to claim infallibility, as if a secret instinct and an involuntary suspicion restrained the other confessions.

In his book “Apologia pro vita sua” he says that he is compelled to speak of the infallibility of the Church as a disposition willed by the mercy of the Creator to preserve religion in the world and to restrain that freedom of thought - which is undoubtedly in itself one of our greatest natural gifts - in order to rescue it from its own self-destructive excesses.

In his book “Religious Assent” he states that he who believes in the depositum of Revelation, believes in all the doctrines of that depositum and, since he cannot know them all at once, he knows some doctrines and does not know others... but whether he knows little or much, he intends, if he truly believes in Revelation, to believe all that is to be believed whenever and as soon as it is presented to him.

He says that there is only one religion in the world that tends to satisfy the aspirations and prefigurations of natural faith and devotion, Christianity, and that it alone has a precise message addressed to all mankind.

Plank, Spaemann and Ratzinger

For his part, the German Nobel Prize winner Max Plank, author of quantum theory, said in a conference: «Wherever we look, as far as we look, we do not find anywhere the slightest contradiction between religion and natural science, on the contrary, we find perfect agreement on the decisive points. Religion and natural science do not exclude each other, as some fear or believe today, but complete and condition each other. The most immediate proof of the compatibility of religion and the science of nature, also of that built on critical observation, is offered by the historical fact that precisely the greatest natural scientists of all times, Kepler, Newton, Lebnitz, were men penetrated by deep religiosity».

And that same lecture by Plank ended with the following words: «It is the ever-sustained, never flagging struggle which religion and natural science lead together against unbelief and superstition, and in which the slogan which marks the direction, which marked it in the past and will mark it in the future, says: Towards God!» (“Christ and the Religions of the Earth”, Franz Köning).

It is true that there are intelligent people dedicated to philosophy and science and unbelievers. But I prefer to remember, once again, someone who has been able to reconcile reason and faith: Robert Spaemann.

The German philosopher was once asked whether he, an internationally renowned scientist, really believed that Jesus was born of a virgin and worked miracles, that he rose from the dead and that, with him, one receives eternal life. Such a faith, they told him, is typically childish.

The 83-year-old philosopher replied: “Well, if you like, that's the way it is. By the way, I believe more or less the same as I did when I was a child, only that I have reflected on it more in the meantime. In the end, reflection has always confirmed me in the faith.”. 

To this anecdote Benedict XVI added: «Why should God not be able to give birth to a virgin as well? Why should he not be able to resurrect Christ? Of course, if I myself establish what is allowed to be and what is not, if I and no one else determine the limits of what is possible, then such phenomena must be excluded... God wanted to enter this world. God wanted us not to be limited to sensing it only from afar through physics and mathematics. He wanted to show himself to us...» (“The Light of the World,” a conversation of Benedict XVI with journalist Peter Seewald).

La entrada La Iglesia defensora de la verdad: Newman, Plank, Spaemann y Ratzinger se publicó primero en Omnes.

At the age of 26 she converted to Christianity. Later she founded with some friends the first feminist movement in the Soviet Union, MARIA, from which she organized religious seminars and published two underground magazines. After several interrogations and imprisonments she was expelled from her country in 1980. For years she lived in exile in Paris. In her day she was able to meet personalities such as Heidegger, Sloterdijk and St. John Paul II.

In his books "Talking about God is dangerous. My experiences in Russia and in the West." (Herder, 1987); "The power of Christian madness. My experiences." (Herder, 1988) and "The strength of the weak". (Encounter, 1989), Dr. Goritchéva narrates how, as a communist youth leader and philosophy professor, she took refuge in a life of excess, enthusiasm for Western and Eastern philosophies and dedication to yoga. Until she meditated on the Lord's Prayer and found the faith that transformed her life.

Conversion

He understood "with all his being that God exists... a God who out of love became man.". He then rediscovered the Church in Russia, in spite of the persecution and gave a great testimony about the Russian people, about the sense of pain and persecution that, in spite of everything, cannot uproot the religious. This led him to make an appeal also to the people of the West to believe from the heart.

Goritchéva, in those now somewhat distant years, was convinced that only faith brings freedom: neither materialism nor communism nor even Eastern or Western-style cynicism provides it, but only what she called the "holy madness".

She was able to discover these madmen and fools in the midst of the uniformed masses of Russia and also in the consumer societies of the West. In these men and women Tatiana Goritchéva sees an opportunity for renewal for a Christianity that has adapted to the environment and seems to have lost its original strength. The Christian madmen are a sign of attention because they have the courage to live on the margins of society, at the very edge of existence.

Great humanity

Almost 30 years after those enlightening words, last year I had the good fortune to speak briefly with Tatiana Goritchéva again and I would have liked to talk with her about what it meant for a Russian emigrant to have to live in Europe. The longing for the warmth provided by human closeness and an intense spiritual life, as well as the difficult attempt to put down roots in the cold atmosphere of the West, revealed to her our shortcomings, which have become more acute in recent decades.

She told me that she did not want to diagnose or polemicize, but to move in the sphere of cordial conversation, in the sphere of God and Christian fraternity, that she tried to live intensely and daily from her hope. She was tired and ill and we could not exchange more than a few messages that I am transmitting here so that they are not lost in oblivion.

Three years ago, I wrote to her in Russian through social networks (advantages of modernity because I don't speak or write this beautiful language) showing interest in her and she replied: "Dear Santiago! Thank you for your interest in my personality. Now I am in St. Petersburg, but I am ill and will leave for Paris in a week. But I hope to return to St. Petersburg in one or two months. Then everything will be possible." And he gave me his telephone number. 

A month later I wrote to him again and he wrote back: "Dear friend! I am very glad of your interest in my modest person - and your love for Russia! But I am still undergoing treatment. And again they put me in the hospital (in Paris), where it is impossible to write, to give interviews... All my energy is spent on painful exercises and patient work on my body. Pray for me. I could give interviews in German, Russian, French... but everything has to happen in an atmosphere of creative openness and friendly understanding. Unfortunately, I won't be able to do that for a couple of months. In the hospital, I hope to be able to establish contact."

Love for animals

Already by whatsapp, to a photo I sent him of a student of mine making a presentation on Tatiana Goritchéva, he replied: Christ is risen! As I noticed that in his social networks he shared abundant photos of cats and other animals, including a nice picture of Benedict XVI already retired from the pontificate smiling at a kitten that grabbed him by his white cassock, it occurred to me to send him a video where you see a multitude of birds of all colors with the phrase "not even Solomon in all his glory could dress like that".

The next day he answered me: "Christ points directly to the supreme Beauty of birds and beasts. They have transmitted to us the harmony of heaven. They have preserved both Goodness and Truth".

One day she phoned me to tell me that we could not have the interview until she had recovered. She spoke Russian, French and German and I spoke Spanish and I was fluent in English. I thanked her for her call and assured her of my prayers. I would have liked to ask her how she is doing and what her life has been like since the 1990s when she was well known in Europe for her books. I would also like to know what Christianity brings her today.

Faith and today's society

Dostoevsky says in "The Idiot" that beauty will save the world and some people think that he was referring to moral beauty, to Jesus Christ, to the Good and to good people, in short. I would like to have asked him what Dostoevsky is still saying to people today. Also about his opinion on the role of Spain in history, his work in America, etc.

I was curious to know your opinion on how Christianity (itself humanly divided) can contribute to unity in our increasingly polarized societies, and how, if possible, Christianity can assume a leading role in the dialogue with a secularized society. And how it seemed to you that Christianity can assume - if possible - a leading role in the dialogue with a secularized society. Is this dialogue possible?

I remained without asking her what the Roman Church can contribute today to the Eastern "lung" of the Church; what authors had she read or was reading lately; what current Russian and foreign authors did she find of interest and why; did she read the novel "Laurus" by Evgenii Vodolazkin which was well received in Spain; how did Dr. Goritchéva see the role of intellectuals in building bridges between cultures and between people?How did Dr. Goritchéva see the role of intellectuals in building bridges between cultures and between people; and how did she see the situation of women in Europe and Russia today; how to avoid that a possible return to "traditional values" in Russia would result in a return to some of the sufferings endured by women in Soviet times?

I would have ended the possible interview by asking him about the current concern about the environmental issue and the role of a "integral ecology". (to be jointly concerned about the planet and people without seeing them as a dangerous threat). And I would also have asked him for his opinion on the role of the University today and how we can transmit hope to the new generations who seem to see only dark clouds on the horizon.

I was left wanting to hear her answers, but with the satisfaction of knowing that, despite the years and the difficulties, Tatiana Goritchéva has trusted to the end in Christ as Savior of the world and of each one of us.

La entrada Obituario: Tatiana Goritchéva, una mujer valiente se publicó primero en Omnes.

Anticommunism

In 1946, he published together with other authors in the Forward newspaper an open letter in which they asked that the Moscow trials of 1936-1938, in which the defendants (close collaborators of Lenin and Trostski) were held responsible for maintaining direct relations with the authorities of the Nazi Reich and the Gestapo; the German-Soviet friendship treaties; the murder of Polish civilians and soldiers in the Katyn forest at the hands of the Soviets, etc., be addressed in the Nuremberg trials. The letter had no repercussions because the British and American governments of the time were not interested in confronting the USSR. 

Until the last day of his life, Orwell kept jotting down in a notebook an expanding list of individuals in the West who, in his opinion, were either underground communists or agents of Soviet influence. His anti-communist sentiments grew more acute during his last months of life, eventually sending a list of 36 people to an old acquaintance who worked in the Information Research Department, whose aim was to combat communist propaganda in the British Empire.

Final disease

As D. J. Taylor wrote in an article in The GuardianEvery afternoon in January 1950, a small procession of visitors could be seen making their way, one by one, through the cheerful squares of North Bloomsbury to the University College London hospital where Eric Arthur Blair, known worldwide as George Orwell, was dying. 

The British writer had been at UCH and in the hospital for almost four months since the beginning of the previous year. Two decades of chronic lung problems had resulted in a diagnosis of tuberculosis. In a Gloucestershire sanatorium six months earlier, he had nearly died, but recovered sufficiently to be transferred to London and cared for by the distinguished chest specialist Andrew Morland. 

Fortunately, money, the absence of which had troubled Orwell for most of his adult life, was no longer an issue. 1984published the previous June, had been a great success on both sides of the Atlantic. Sixteen years younger than Orwell, with a string of previous mistresses, Sonia Brownell seemed an unlikely candidate for the role of second wife to the writer, widowed since the death of Eileen O'Shaughnessy in 1945. But the marriage was celebrated in the presence of the hospital chaplain, the Rev. WH Braine, in Orwell's room on October 13, 1949. Present were David Astor, Janetta Kee, Powell, a doctor and Malcolm Muggeridge, a left-wing writer friend of Orwell's who would eventually convert first to Christianity and almost at age 80 to Catholicism. 

In the early hours of Saturday, January 21, Orwell died of a massive pulmonary hemorrhage. The news spread throughout the weekend. "G. Orwell is dead and Mrs. Orwell, presumably, is a wealthy widow." noted Evelyn Waugh in a letter to Nancy Mitford. Muggeridge, then working at the Daily Telegraph, wrote a couple of commemorative paragraphs for the Peterborough column. "I thought of him, as of Graham [Greene], that popular writers always express in an intense way some romantic longing....".

Will

The deceased turned out to have made a will three days before his death, in the presence of Sonia and his first wife's sister, Gwen O'Shaughnessy. Materially, he was transferring his literary estate to Sonia. A substantial life insurance policy would take care of his adopted son, Richard, who was then in the care of his aunt, Orwell's sister Avril. Orwell, who during his lifetime considered himself an agnostic, although he recognized the importance of Christianity to Western civilization, arranged for him to be buried according to the rites of the Church of England and for his body to be interred (not cremated) in the nearest cemetery. The task of arranging all this fell to Powell and Muggeridge. 

Both friends attempted to engage the services of the Reverend Rose, vicar of Christ Church, Albany Street NWI. Astor's influence secured a plot in the graveyard of All Saints' Church, Sutton Courteney, Oxfordshire. Muggeridge noted in his diary the fact that Orwell died on Lenin's birthday and was buried by the Astors, "which seems to me to cover the whole range of his life."

Funeral

The funeral was set for Thursday, January 26. The evening before, Powell and his wife, visited the Muggeridge's after dinner, taking Sonia with them, "obviously in poor condition". At their last meeting, the day after Orwell's death, Sonia had been overcome with grief. Muggeridge decided that "I would always love her for her real tears....".

He left a detailed account of the next day's events: Fred Warburg greeting mourners at the door of the church, the cold atmosphere, the congregation "largely Jewish and almost entirely non-believer." who had difficulty following the Anglican liturgy. Powell chose the hymns: "All people that on earth do dwell," "Guide me, o thou great Redeemer," and "Ten thousand times ten thousand." "I do not remember why." Powell later wrote, "perhaps because Orwell himself had spoken of the hymn, or because he was, in his own way, a kind of saint, even if he was not one of shining robes."

Both Powell and Muggeridge found the occasion enormously distressing. Muggeridge, in particular, was deeply moved by Powell's chosen reading from the Book of Ecclesiastes: "Then the dust shall return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return to God who gave it." He returned to his home near Regent's Park to read the sheaf of obituaries written by, among others, Symons, VS Pritchett and Arthur Koestler, seeing in them already. "how the legend of a human being is created".

La entrada Los últimos días de Orwell se publicó primero en Omnes.

After World War II, a group of detectives, prosecutors and officers was formed with the intention of bringing to justice those who had played a role, however small, in the demonic machinery of the concentration camps. They were the Holocaust's shadow vigilantes: the Nazi hunters. Most of them have remained anonymous. Names such as William Denson, Rafi Eitan, Benjamin Ferencz, Efraim Zuroff, Fritz Bauer, Isser Harel, Elizabeth Holtzman, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, Eli Rosenbaum, Jan Sehn...

Nazi hunters

The veteran writer and correspondent Andrew Nagorski published in 2017 a documented essay in which he recovered the misadventures of this hidden legion born after the Holocaust: "Hunters of Nazis" (Turner, 2017). This book recalls the exploits of the persecutors and the barbarities of the persecuted, also narrating the difficulties that these vigilantes had to overcome to carry out their work. They were not few, as they ranged from confrontation with their companions to the benevolence of the West towards some of the hierarchs.

The motivation of these people was clear. Tuvia Friedman, one of the most effective Jewish Nazi persecutors of World War II, escaped from a concentration camp as a young man, and from then on his goal was to capture those murderers. "I kept thinking about the day when the Jews would give it back to the Nazis, an eye for an eye.", he used to say. After his release, he joined a group of partisans with whom he sought out prominent war criminals.

Perhaps the most famous of these was the architect Simon Wiesenthal, a prisoner in the Mauthausen camp until he was liberated on May 5, 1945. The brutalities he endured in that hell made him present himself to an American lieutenant shortly thereafter and offer his services. He dedicated himself to helping those affected by the war and, together with Friedman, was decisive in the 1960s in catching the man who had organized the Final Solution, the extermination of millions of Jews: Adolf Eichmann. The German officer had managed to escape from the Allied justice in Nuremberg and fled to Argentinabut he was captured and tried thanks to them.

Unfortunately, there have been many genocides perpetrated in history and the vast majority have gone unpunished, such as the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian genocide during Stalin's time, the Rwandan genocide, etc. One of the peculiarities of the Jewish Holocaust has been the determination of these people to achieve a minimum of justice in this life, often applying the law of talion (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth).

The case of ETA

On a much smaller scale and closer in time, in Spain members of the terrorist gang ETA (1959-2018) are guilty of 864 murders, more than 3,000 wounded, 86 kidnappings and 10,000 extortions of businessmen. Their goal was the creation of a socialist state in the Basque Country and independence from Spain and France. After 60 years of terror, on May 3, 2018 the terrorist gang announced its dissolution. At that time there remained 358 unsolved crimes and about 100 ETA members in hiding. The Spanish government of Mariano Rajoy assured then that there would be no advantages for ETA to stop killing or to bring its prisoners to the Basque Country.

Of the nearly 10,000 people charged for their relationship with ETA, there are currently only 142 prisoners left (136 in the Basque Country and Navarre and 6 in French prisons), while the Basque Government continues to accelerate the pace of permits and prisoner releases, with the connivance of the Socialist Government of Pedro Sanchez, who needs the votes of Bildu (heir party of ETA's political representatives) to govern.

Between 1975 and 1980, several groups related to Franco's dictatorship operated in order to combat ETA terrorism. In 1977, after the political amnesty granted by the Government of Adolfo Suarez, a group of 7 Army officers killed by means of a car bomb in France the ETA leader Argala, material author of the assassination of the President of the Government Luis Carrero Blanco in 1972.

During the socialist government of Felipe Gonzalez, between 1983 and 1987, the so-called "dirty war" against ETA took place, with the GAL being blamed for the murder of 27 people. These attacks and kidnappings were mostly perpetrated by French mercenaries hired by Spanish police officers, financed with reserved funds, and organized from the Ministry of the Interior itself, through those in charge of the fight against terrorism in the Basque Country. Some of those responsible for these State crimes were condemned by the Spanish Courts of Justice, some spent a short time in prison and then continued under house arrest and others were later pardoned.

Absence of revenge

But the relatives of the victims of ETA terrorism have never taken justice into their own hands, as the Nazi hunters did at the time. During the last few years, these victims have had to put up with the releases and tributes to the released ETA prisoners, as well as the unusual fact that the political party that has inherited the political project of the terrorist group has been incorporated into the governance of the State by the current president of the Spanish Government.

The absence of vengeance in the victims of ETA terrorism, together with their demand for justice exclusively by legal means, speaks volumes about the Christian roots of Spain, where fortunately justice and forgiveness have not been replaced in recent decades by the law of talion.

La entrada Caza nazis y víctimas de ETA se publicó primero en Omnes.

Assassination of Alexei Navalny

Navalni, who was 47 when he died, had led campaigns against corruption in Russia and led mass protests against the Kremlin. He was serving a 19-year prison sentence on charges of extremism in a remote prison. He went on a 24-day hunger strike in prison to protest against the mistreatment he suffered there. According to the Russian Penitentiary Service, he felt unwell after a walk, lost consciousness and efforts to revive him were unsuccessful.

According to Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Navalni's mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, said on Facebook that she had seen her son in prison on Feb. 12 and that he was "alive, healthy and happy.". Upon hearing the news, several European leaders lamented Navalni's death and blamed the Russian government for the tragedy. Among the leaders were the President of the European Council, Charles Michel; NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg; Joe Biden's National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan; and the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, among others. The UN expressed its outrage and demanded an end to persecution in Russia.

Thousands of people took to the streets around the world to protest Navalni's death, which added to the list of mysterious unsolved deaths in Russia. More than a year after his assassination, there has been silence about this new Putin crime.

In the book of memoirs edited by his family ("Patriot. Memoirs" Alexei Navalni, Peninsula 2024), the Russian dissident states from the prison where he spent the last 3 years of his life: "On my birthday, of course I would like to have breakfast with my family, have my children kiss me on the cheek, unwrap presents and say: 'Oh, that's just what I wanted,' instead of waking up in this infectious hole. But, as life works, social progress and a better future can only be achieved if a certain number of people are willing to pay a price for the right to have their own convictions. The more such people there are, the less everyone will have to pay. And the day will come when speaking the truth and advocating for justice will be the most normal thing in Russia and there will be nothing dangerous about it.".

Origins

Born on June 4, 1976 in Odintsovo (Moscow Oblast, RSFSR of Russia, Soviet Union), Navalni was a Russian lawyer, politician, activist and political prisoner, who in 2011 founded the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK). Amnesty International recognized him as a prisoner of conscience and he was awarded the Sakharov Prize for his human rights work. He suffered several convictions and imprisonments and a poisoning attempt in 2020, from which he was saved in a Berlin hospital. In the 2013 Moscow mayoral election, he won 27.24 % of the vote and was never allowed to run for election in Russia again.

Married since 2000 to Yulia Navalnya and with two children, Dasha, 24, and Zakhar, 18, Navalni could have chosen to go into exile from Russia with his family and lead a peaceful existence, but he chose in agreement with his wife to get into trouble and - aware of the danger he was running - to risk his life in his fight against injustice in his beloved country. Realizing that, when the USSR collapsed, power in Russia passed from some criminals to others, from Yeltsin to Putin, he decided to confront these criminals by denouncing their practices and conveying the truth to his compatriots.

In one of the multiple pseudo-legal proceedings against him, Navalni stated: "The fact is that I am a religious man, which constantly exposes me to ridicule at the Anti-Corruption Foundation and from the people around me, mostly atheists. I used to be one too, and quite militant. But now I am a believer and I find that it helps me a lot in my work. Everything is clearer to me... For the Bible says: 'Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied'.". For more than a month, the only book he was left with in prison was the Bible. At that time, Navalni decided to memorize the Sermon on the Mount in Russian, English, French and Latin. After doing so, one day the prisoners were offered to attend Mass and our hero was impressed that the Gospel they read there was precisely the Sermon on the Mount.

Alexei Navalny and the search for the Kingdom of God

Navalni ends his memoirs with the following sentences: "I have always thought, and I say it openly, that being a believer makes life easier for you and even easier to be a political dissident. Faith makes life easier... are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others and paid for their sins? Do you believe in the immortality of the soul and everything else? If you can honestly answer yes, what else do you have to worry about, why would you mutter a hundred times under your breath something you have read from a voluminous tome you keep on your bedside table? 'Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worry'. My job is to seek the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and let the good Jesus and the rest of his family take care of everything else. They will not let me down and will solve all my headaches. As they say here in prison, they'll take the hits for me.".

Alexei Navalny knew that he could be assassinated, but he was not crazy or reckless. He tried to minimize the risks for himself and his family, but in his inner self he thought he was doing what he had to do, the purpose of his life was never to live quietly and comfortably but to fight to the death for a Russia where people are not killed for their ideas, a prosperous and democratic country, where the law prevails and not the tyrant of the day to defend his privileges. For this he was assassinated and for this he offered his life in sacrifice.

La entrada Alexéi Navalni, mártir por la libertad en Rusia se publicó primero en Omnes.

On October 2, 1928, St. Josemaría saw in Madrid that God was asking him for a new foundation in the Church with the charism of living with peaceful radicalism the baptismal vocation in the midst of the world (sanctifying work, the family and all good human realities) in order to be instruments of God and transform it from within. To this end, the cooperation of priests and lay people who lived a healthy anticlericalism was essential.

One of the problems of the Church, since its legalization by Emperor Constantine and subsequent declaration as the official religion of the Roman Empire by Theodosius, has been the temptation of Caesaropapism and clericalism, the latter so opportunely denounced by the last Popes.

St. Josemaría Escrivá and the laity

Together with a great love for the priesthood and consecrated life, St. Josemaría Escrivá understood that God was asking him to found an institution that would have as one of its essential features the secularity of its members, following Christ's famous maxim "give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's"., precisely so that the Church could faithfully live its missionary vocation.

Perhaps it is this, together with the human errors involved in everything we men do, that has provoked so much antipathy against Escriva and Opus Dei since its inception on the part of the enemies of the Church (who are often more astute than the children of light in detecting who can be more dangerous in fighting evil) and on the part of some in the Church itself: their healthy anticlericalism.

The novel and scandalous for some "autonomy of temporal realities" proclaimed by the Second Vatican Council implies precisely, as I understand it, avoiding ecclesiastical politics and clerics falling into the temptation of bypassing civil and canon law, thinking that in a parish or diocese the pastor has absolute authority over what the lay faithful or laity do or do not do in their jobs, associations, in politics, the arts, etc. Each of us in the Church has our own mission. Perhaps the concept of synodality that is being used in recent years goes in this direction.

This message is reflected in many conciliar documents, as in Lumen Gentium, n. 33: "It belongs to the laity by their own vocation to seek the kingdom of God by dealing with and ordering, according to God, temporal affairs. They live in the world, that is, in each and every activity and profession, as well as in the ordinary conditions of family and social life with which their existence is interwoven. There they are called by God to fulfill their proper task, guided by the evangelical spirit, so that, like leaven, they may contribute from within to the sanctification of the world and thus discover Christ to others, shining forth, above all, by the witness of their life, faith, hope and charity.".

Love of freedom

Contrary to the caricature that some people try to maintain, the reality is that St. Josemaría tirelessly preached his love for freedom of opinion and, in particular, for religious freedom. He tended to take the side of the persecuted and abhorred the cessationist mentality, opposing those who elevated their opinion to dogma by trampling on others.

He did not like fundamentalism but coherence and asked not to confuse intransigence with intemperance (not to be a "hammer of heretics"). He knew how to distinguish the error of the person who is a fence-sitter and to give in to the opinionated in order to facilitate understanding and coexistence. He saw the danger of turning life into a crusade and seeing giants where there are only windmills, like the famous nobleman from La Mancha. A message that I see as very timely in these times of intransigent populism, of walls, repatriations and sanitary cordons against political options different from one's own.

He warned against pessimism because what is Christian is rather hope and optimism. He always encouraged the broadening of horizons and the deepening of the permanently living Catholic doctrine, following the successes of contemporary thought and avoiding its errors. All centuries have had good and bad things and ours is no exception. He encouraged a positive and open attitude towards the transformation of the world and social structures. He asked us to sow peace and joy everywhere, to be on the side of those who do not think as we do.

He saw good government as service to the common good of the earthly city and not as property. He encouraged Christians in politics not to live by politics alone, to share responsibilities, to surround themselves with valuable people and not with mediocre ones, to make decisions by listening to their collaborators. To not judge people and situations lightly without knowing, to learn from others, to elaborate fair laws that citizens could comply with, thinking especially of the weakest. Not to perpetuate oneself in power and to avoid right-wing and left-wing sectarianism.

Pursuits and courage

If Jesus and his followers have been persecuted from outside and from within the Church itself (in this case always with good intentions, as St. Josemaría used to say), the present era heralds good times for this charism, so necessary in the Church yesterday, today and always.

St. Josemaría Escrivá, with his defects, like all saints, was one of the greatest Spaniards in history (along with Isidro Labrador, Teresa of Jesus, Domingo de Guzmán, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier and so many others) and surely not the last. It seems to me that a proof of his greatness, which is of the God he let do within himself, is how little valued he has been so far in the field of worldly and ecclesiastical "triumphs".

The Aragonese priest who died in Rome half a century ago was a profoundly modern saint who never sought personal glory but rather to be faithful to the will of God and to serve the Church with his life and, if necessary, with his human honor. Now that we are accompanying with our prayer the first steps of Pope Leo XIV, with his courageous call to be good disciples of Christ in a world so in need of his light and to fearlessly proclaim the Gospel, we may find his teachings useful.

La entrada La actualidad de san Josemaría Escrivá se publicó primero en Omnes.

1. God honors our "childlike faith": "Yes, but he has the candid faith of a child" (the angel Franklin).
2. The underdogs matter: "Remember this, Mr. Potter: that rabble you speak of...works, pays, lives and dies in this community" (George Bailey).
3. Sometimes you just have to dance: "Remember my little sister Mary, could you dance with her?" (Marty Hatch).
4. The world cares about you: "It's funny, isn't it? Every man's life affects many other lives, and when he is gone it leaves a terrible void, doesn't it?" (Clarence).
5. Self-pity distorts our vision: "I wish I had never been born" (George Bailey).
6. Life's greatest adventures depend on people, not places or things: "Zuzu! Zuzu! My little doll!" (George Bailey).
7. You can't run away from your problems: "Don't look now, but there's something strange going on at the bank, George. Actually, I've never seen one, but it has all the hallmarks of a bank panic" (Ernie the cab driver).
8. To ask for advice is wise: "Sweet Caporal cigarette sign in Gower's store, which George notices as he ponders what to do when he notices that Mr. Gower, in his distress, has put poison in a bottle of capsules that he is to deliver".
9. Stop to give thanks for what you have: "Bread! That this house may never know hunger. Salt! That life may always have flavor" (Mary, at the opening of the Martini's new home in Bailey Park). "And wine! That joy and prosperity may reign forever" (George, joining Mary's blessing at the Martini house).
10.  No impact without contact: "If you're going to help a man, you need to know something about him, don't you think?" (Joseph).
11. When you are criticized, consider the source: "Then I guess I should give (the money) to miserable losers like you and that idiot brother of yours to squander" (Mr. Potter).
12.  Find your own Bedford Falls wherever you live: "Homesick? For Bedford Falls?" (George to Mary). "Yes" (Mary).
13.  There's no use trying to be no less than the neighbor: "Dad, our neighbors the Browns have a new car. You should see it" (Pete Bailey).
14.  Everything changes with perspective: "Oh, look at this wonderful old drafty house! Mary! Mary!" (George Bailey).
15.  Prayer changes everything: "I am the answer to your prayer. That is why I have been sent down here" (the angel Clarence, after George tells him, "I have been punched in the jaw in answer to my prayer").
16.  Delight in other people's achievements: "Very jealous. Very jealous. So jealous that he cannot contain his joy" (Billy to Henry Potter regarding George's reaction to the news that Harry has received the "Congressional Medal of Honor").
17.  Don't wait to tell someone you care about, "Dad, do you want to know something? I think you're an extraordinary guy" (George to his father over dinner).
18.  Every trip has a secret destination: "I'm going to see the world. Italy, Greece, the Parthenon..., the Colosseum. Then I'll come back here and go to college and see what they know... and then I'll build things..." (George Bailey).
19.  Don't look for what is, but what can be: "This old place is so romantic. I'd love to live here" (Mary, the night she and George throw stones and make wishes at the Granville's old mansion).
20.  It is by helping others that we help ourselves: "If I could accomplish this mission, could I perhaps earn my wings?" (Clarence to Franklin).
21.  Life is not a bed of roses: "Why have we had to live here in...this miserable, old, crummy town?" (George Bailey).
22.  It takes a whole village to raise a child: "They're not my children" (Mr. Potter). "But they are somebody's children" (Peter Bailey).
23.  Discreet lives can make a greater impact: "You know something, George? I think, in a modest way, we're doing something important. We are meeting a fundamental need. It's an ingrained aspiration in man to have his own roof, his own walls, and his own fireplace, and we're helping them get those things in our 'shabby little office'" (Peter Bailey).
24.  No man is an island: "We can get through this, but we have to stick together. We must have faith in each other" (George Bailey).
25.  God's greatest gift is life: "Tonight, at exactly ten forty-five o'clock, earth time, that man will be seriously thinking of spoiling God's greatest gift" (Franklin's voice). "Good heavens, his life!" (Clarence's voice).
26.  The greatest gift you can give is grace: "And you, Ed, remember when things weren't going so well for you and you couldn't make your payments? You didn't lose your house, did you? Do you think Potter would have let you keep it?" (George Bailey).
27.  There's a lot to be said for long-term commitments: "George Bailey, I'll love you till the day I die" (May Bailey as a child in the ice cream and soda store).
28.  Works are love, and not good reasons: "My office has given instructions to advance you up to twenty-five thousand dollars" (Telegram from Sam Wainwright).
29.  He looks for the best in people: "Here you go, you're broke, aren't you?" (George, as he reaches into his pocket for money to give to Violet Bick).
30.  Revenge is not our business, says the Lord: "What's the matter, Othello, are you jealous? Did you know there's a pool under this floor? And did you know that the button behind you makes the floor open? And did you know that George Bailey is dancing right where it opens? And that I have the key?" (Mickey to Freddie, at the high school dance, after George interrupts the latter's dance with Mary).
31.  Nobody's perfect..., which leads us to grace: "Harry Bailey, 1911-1919" (the inaccurate lifespan of Harry Bailey, on his tombstone, in Clarence's George-less world).
32.  The essence of life is relationships: "George, I'm an old man and most people hate me. But I don't like them either" (old Potter).
33.  What triggers real change is real humility: "Help me, Clarence. Give me back... Please, my God, let me live again" (George, after returning to the present).
34.  Fame does not equal success, nor does anonymity equal failure: "Unfit for service because of his hearing, George fought the battle of Bedford Falls... Anti-aircraft lookout... Picking up papers..., debris..., tires..." (Joseph describing George's prosaic duties during the war).
35.  Bitterness turns against the bitter person: "Frustrated and sick" (Description of Potter by Peter Bailey).
36.  The simple life helps us appreciate what is most meaningful: "Nobody ever changes here, you know that" (Uncle Billy to Harry when his nephew says to him at the train station, "Uncle Billy, you haven't changed a bit").
37.  High ideals are an honorable pursuit: "In my opinion he died a much richer man than you will ever be!" (George Bailey to Potter, regarding his father, Peter Bailey).
38.  Lost dreams can be found opportunities: "I wish I had a million dollars... Hot dog!" (George, as he tries the old-fashioned cigar lighter in Gower's store).
39.  All that glitters is not gold: "Oh, yes, George Bailey, whose ship has just arrived in port, assuming he's smart enough to come aboard" (Mr. Potter).
40.  People respond to honorable examples, "Why don't you go to the mob...and ask them for eight thousand dollars" (Mr. Potter to George, after the money disappeared).
41.  Helping others requires sacrifice: "That day George saved his brother's life. But he caught a bad cold that infected his left ear through which he would never hear again" (the angel Joseph).
42.  Search friends that bring out the best in you: "Mary is a good girl..., the kind of girl who will help you find the answers, George" (George's mother).
43.  Desperation can be a catalyst for great things: "How much do they want?" (newlywed Mary Bailey, offering a wad of bills from the wedding gift to desperate borrowing company clients).
44.  There are miracles: "George, it's a miracle! It's a miracle!" (Mary, as she prepares for the arrival of the citizens with their "offerings").
45.  Age is irrelevant; your way of living is not: "Oh, what a waste of youth!" (the man on the porch who thinks George should kiss Mary "instead of boring her to death with all that talk").
46.  The richest people in town might have little money: "A toast...to my older brother George. The richest man in town!" (Harry Bailey).
47.  The world needs more sentimental mumbo jumbo: "Sentimental mumbo jumbo!" (old Potter).
48.  Pay attention to the task at hand: "And did you put the envelope in your pocket?" (George) "Yes... yes... maybe... maybe" (Uncle Billy).
49.  People can change: "George Bailey? What does he want?" (Mary's irascible mother, Mrs. Hatch, upon learning that George has come to see her daughter).
50.  Entering a child's world expands your world: "Dad, will you fix my flower for me?" (Zuzu to her father, George).
51.  Some flowers are slow to bloom: "So affected that it borders on childish language" (a review in the New Yorker when the film was released).
52.  Life revisions strengthen the script: "Our Father who art in heaven..." (Uncle Billy, in the climactic final scene, as Capra originally wrote it).

La entrada 52 pequeñas lecciones de “¡Qué bello es vivir!” se publicó primero en Omnes.

For the Transcendentalists, the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world and contains what the world contains. They labored with the sense that the advent of a new age was at hand, were critical of their contemporary society for its reflexive nonconformity, and urged that each individual seek, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "an original relation to the universe."

The American transcendentalism proposed by Emerson is based on the transcendental foundation laid out by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. This foundation is that objects are not cognizable in themselves, but only through the spatial, temporal and categorical structure that the subject projects on the world. Based on this idea, Johann Gottlieb Fichte defined his metaphysics of the I and the Not-I as transcendental idealism. Friedrich Schelling elaborated the system of transcendental idealism and Arthur Schopenhauer called transcendental the reflection directed not to things but to the consciousness of them as mere representations.

The main figures of the movement were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott. Also associated with transcendentalism is Emerson's friend and member of the "Transcendental Club," Walt Whitman.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, Massachusetts, May 25, 1803-Concord, Massachusetts, April 27, 1882) was an American writer, philosopher and poet. A leader of the Transcendentalism movement in the early 19th century, on November 5, 1833 he gave a lecture in Boston in which he laid the foundation of his most important beliefs and ideas, later developed in his first published essay on Nature: "Nature is a language, and every new fact learned is a new word; but this is not a language taken apart and dead in a dictionary, but a language put together in a meaningful and universal sense. I wish to learn this language, not in order to know a new grammar, but in order to be able to read the great book written in that language."

Emerson's philosophy is typically liberal: it enhances the values of the individual and the self, it is affirmative, vitalistic and optimistic. Hence the praise he deserved from Friedrich Nietzsche. He was staunchly anti-slavery. Towards the end of his life he sometimes forgot his name and when someone asked him how he felt, he answered: "quite well; I lost my mental faculties, but I am perfect".

Henry David Thoreau

His friend Henry David Thoreau (Concord, July 12, 1817-Concord, May 6, 1862) was an American writer, poet and philosopher, of Puritan origin, author of "Walden" and "On Civil Disobedience". Thoreau was a surveyor, naturalist, lecturer and pencil maker. One of the founding fathers of American literature, he is also the conceptualizer of civil disobedience practices.

In his work Walden he writes: "I went to the woods because I wanted to live alone, deliberately, to face the essential facts of life and see if I could learn what I had to teach and not discover, at the hour of death, that I had not lived. He did not want to live what was not life, nor did he want to practice renunciation, unless it was necessary. I wanted to live deeply and to extract all the marrow from life, to live in such an intense and spartan way that I could do without everything that was not life...".

On July 24 or 25, 1846, Thoreau met with the local tax collector, Sam Staples, who asked him to pay six years of back taxes. Thoreau refused to pay because of his opposition to the U.S. Intervention in Mexico and slavery, and spent a night in jail for this refusal. The next day, Thoreau was released against his will when someone, probably his aunt, paid the tax, against his wishes.

The experience had a strong impact on Thoreau, and he would write: "under a government that unjustly imprisons anyone, the home of an honest man is prison"; "any man who is more right than his fellow man is already a majority of one"; "kindness is the only investment that never fails"; "make your life a brake to stop the machine". His essay on civil disobedience had a powerful influence on Lev Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi.

Walt Whitman

Finally, Walter "Walt" Whitman (West Hills, New York; May 31, 1819-Camden, New Jersey; March 26, 1892) was an American poet, volunteer nurse, essayist, journalist and humanist. His work falls within the transition between transcendentalism and philosophical realism, incorporating both movements into his work. He is considered among the most influential writers in the American canon and has been called the father of free verse. He was a deist and believed in the immortality of the soul.

Considered the father of modern American poetry, his influence has been extensive outside the United States as well. Among the writers who have been influenced by his work are Rubén Darío, Wallace Stevens, León Felipe, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Fernando Pessoa, Pablo de Rokha, Federico García Lorca, Hart Crane, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Ernesto Cardenal, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg and John Ashbery, among others.

In 1855 he published his most famous book, "Leaves of Grass", where his most famous poem appears:

Oh, my self! oh, life! of your returning questions,
From the endless parade of the disloyal, from the
cities full of fools,
Of myself, which I always reproach myself (as,
Who is more foolish than I, nor more disloyal),
Of the eyes that in vain yearn for light, of the objects
of the ever-renewed struggle,
Of the bad results of everything, of the crowds
and sordid that surround me,
From the empty and useless years of others, I
intertwined with the others,
The question, Oh, my self, the sad question that
back - what good is in the midst of all this?
things, Oh, my self, Oh, life?
Reply
That you are here - that there is life and identity,
That the mighty drama continues, and that
You can contribute with a verse.

In 1865 he wrote the famous poem "O Captain, My Captain!" in tribute to Abraham Lincoln after his assassination.

La entrada Los trascendentalistas: Emerson, Thoreau y Whitman se publicó primero en Omnes.

Albert Camus (Algeria 1913 - France 1960) looks through his characters into almost all the abysses of the contemporary world. The Patrice Mersault of "The Happy Death". is a transcript of the restless and audacious young man who explores the paths to happiness. The Sisyphus who descends to pick up the stone and the doctor Rieux who tries to relieve his hopeless patients of "The Plague". their deepest experiences and aspirations.

Agitated souls

The Jean-Baptiste Clamence of "The Fall". is a spontaneous prophet in the desert of the twentieth century because his creator was one too, even if he was not always understood or heeded. They are also children of the spiritual uncertainties of Albert Camus the Daru who sets the Arab of "The Guest" free. and the engineer D'Arrast who plays the role of the Cyrenian in "The Growing Stone"., and Kaliayev delaying the assassination of "The Righteous". to prevent the death of children.

Behind them, with their longings and their despairs and their nostalgia, they allow us to enter into the agitated and generous soul of their creator. They are all "exiles" of the Kingdom. All of them make plausible the possibility of a happy Camus.

Communist Party and anarchism

Camus became interested in the labor and social injustices of the French Algeria where he was born. He joined the Communist Party in 1935 and collaborated in the "Journal du Front Populaire", where he earned a reputation as an indomitable and committed intellectual. He was later accused of being a Trotskyist and preferred to leave the party due to serious disagreements before being expelled "in a scandalous manner".. The anarchist Andre Prudhommeaux introduced him in 1948 to the libertarian movement. In 1951 he published his essay "The Rebel Man"., which provoked the rejection of Marxist critics and others close to him such as Jean-Paul Sartre. At this time he began to support various anarchist movements, first in favor of the workers' uprising in Poznan, Poland, and then in the Hungarian Revolution. He was a member of the Fédération Anarchiste.

It is significant that many of Camus' reflections are acceptable to any Christian. Moreover, many of them offer suggestive stimuli to consider a better life, also from a Christian perspective.. "Please pray for the eternal happiness of Brand Blanshard and Albert Camus, two honest atheists who helped me become a better Catholic.", proposes in the dedication of "Forty Reasons I Am a Catholic"., the book by philosophy professor Peter Kreeft.

"Each generation believes it is destined to remake the world.", said Camus in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. And he added: "Mine knows, however, that it will not redo it. But its task is perhaps greater. It consists in preventing the world from falling apart.".

Christian thought

Charles Moeller deals with Camus in the first chapter of the first volume of his encyclopedic work "Twentieth Century Literature and Christianity.". He explains there that the writer creates characters, such as Tarrou in "The Plague"., that they are "desperate saints"., "faithful to the religion of the Beatitudes" even though they do not believe in Jesus, men capable of selfless love, open to transcendence, who practice honesty and speak of "tenderness" in order not to use the word "charity"..

When in December 1948 the Dominicans invited him to give a lecture in their Parisian convent of Tour-Maubourg, the still young writer explained that he did not feel "in possession of any absolute truth or any message"., so that it could "never" start from the principle that Christian truth is "illusory"., but only from the fact that he had not been able to enter it.

Atheism and ethical demands

The philosopher Reyes Mate has written that Camus "knew". that modern man is the result of the death of God, and that it is only possible to make sense of suffering -one of his most irreducible concerns- if one does not lose sight of the Christian tradition in whose bosom he himself was born. It is understandable then that in the "Letters to a German friend" try to make a Nazi pagan understand how the absence of faith does not lead to arbitrariness in the determination of moral right and wrong, and how his atheism is perfectly compatible with a high ethical requirement to give meaning to human existence. In the spring of 1943 he wrote that, in spite of the "certainty" of that "Everything is allowed". that he made famous Ivan KaramazovIt is possible to impose some renunciations on oneself: for example, that of not judging others.

This same philosopher is convinced that "the greatness" of Albert Camus derives from his way of facing the mystery of evil and the reality of suffering. In the tormented geography of the 20th century - the Marne, Warsaw, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Siberia, Algeria, Prague... - he manages to overcome what some authors have called "the silence of God." to propose a way of living and relating to the world and to others.

Consciousness of the sacred

In an interview he gave shortly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize, Albert Camus was asked about Christianity: "I am aware of the sacred, of the mystery in man, and I see no reason not to confess the emotion I feel before Christ and his teaching" (Albert Camus, p. 4)., he replied, although adding shortly thereafter that he did not believe in the resurrection.

Today it is known that in the last years of his life he frequented an American church in Paris and forged a deep and lasting friendship with Methodist pastor Howars Mumma, with whom he chatted extensively about God, religion, the Bible and the Church. "I have lost faith, I have lost hope. It is impossible to live a meaningless life.", confessed to him in one of their first meetings.

La entrada Albert Camus o la nostalgia de Dios se publicó primero en Omnes.

Kant's life spans almost the entire 18th century. His coming of age witnessed some of the most significant changes in the Western world-changes that still resonate today. It was the period during which the world we live in today originated. Kant's philosophy was very much an expression of and a response to those changes. His intellectual life reflected the most significant speculative, political and scientific developments of the time. His views are reactions to the cultural climate of his time. English and French philosophy, science, literature, politics and manners formed the fabric of his daily conversations. Even events as relatively distant as the American and French revolutions had a definite impact on Kant, and thus also on his work. His philosophy must be viewed in this global context.

Immanuel, who later changed his name to Immanuel, was the son of Johann Georg Kant (1683-1746), a master saddler in Königsberg, and Anna Regina Reuter (1697-1737), daughter of another saddler in the same city. Kant was the fourth child of the couple, although when he was born only a five-year-old sister survived. On the day he was baptized, his mother wrote in her prayer book, "May God keep him according to His Promise of Grace to the end of his days, for the love of Jesus Christ, Amen." The name imposed seemed to her to be a very good omen. This prayer was not only the expression of a pious longing, but it also responded to a real desire and expressed a very deep feeling. Of the five siblings born after Kant, only three survived early childhood.

Education received

The great philosopher always kept a deep appreciation for the education received from his parents, mainly through his life example. His family was affected by professional quarrels between different guilds: "... in spite of them, my parents treated their enemies with such respect and consideration and with such firm confidence in the future that the memory of this incident will never be erased from my memory, even though I was only a boy at the time".

Years later, his friend Kraus wrote: "Kant once remarked to me that when he looked more closely at the education in the house of a count not far from Königsberg... he often thought of the incomparably nobler training he had received at home from his parents. He was very grateful to them for that, adding that he had never heard or seen anything indecent in their house."

Kant had only good things to say about his parents. Thus, in a letter from later in his life he wrote: "Both my parents (who belonged to the artisan class) were perfectly honest, morally decent and disciplined. They did not bequeath me a fortune (but neither did they leave me debts). And, from the moral point of view, they gave me an absolutely superb education. Every time I think of this I am overcome with feelings of the most intense gratitude.".

His mother died at the age of forty, when the future philosopher was only 13 years old and was deeply affected. She died infected by the illness of a sick friend whom she cared for on her deathbed. Kant wrote years later that "her death was a sacrifice to friendship." When his father died in 1746, a nearly twenty-one-year-old Immanuel wrote in the family Bible: "On March 24 my dear father has left us with a peaceful death... May God, who did not bring him many joys in this life, allow him to share in eternal bliss.".

Kant and religion

Kant's parents were religious people strongly influenced by Pietism, a religious movement within the Protestant churches of Germany that was largely a reaction to the formalism of Protestant orthodoxy. Pietists stressed the importance of independent Bible study, personal devotion, the exercise of the priesthood among the laity, and a faith embodied in acts of charity. It usually involved insistence on a personal experience of radical conversion or rebirth and disregard for worldly success, which could often be precisely dated. The "old self" had to be overcome by the "new self" in a battle fought with the help of God's grace. Each believer was to form in his environment a small church of "true Christians.", different from the formal church that may have strayed from the true meaning of Christianity.

About the religious ideas of his parents, which would appear as the "demands of sanctity" in Kant's second "Critique," he also wrote: "Even if the religious ideas of that time... and the conceptions of what was called virtue and piety were not clear and sufficient, people were really virtuous and pious. One can say as many evils as one likes about pietism. But the people who took it seriously were characterized by a certain kind of dignity. They possessed the noblest qualities that a human being can have: that tranquility and gentleness, that inner peace which is undisturbed by any passion. No need, no quarrel could enrage them or make them anyone's enemy."

Education of children

In his "Lessons on Pedagogy" (1803) he will leave good ideas for the moral education of children, who must be taught the common duties towards oneself and towards others. Duties based on "a certain dignity that the human being possesses in his inner nature which dignifies him in comparison with all other creatures. It is his duty not to deny this dignity of humanity in his own person".

Drunkenness, unnatural sins and all kinds of excesses are for Kant examples of that loss of dignity by which we place ourselves below the level of animals. The action of "groveling"-drawing in compliments and begging for favors-also places us below human dignity. Lying should be avoided, for it "makes human beings the object of general contempt and tends to rob the child of his or her self-respect.", something that everyone should possess. And when a child avoids another child because he is poorer, when he pushes him or hits him, we should make him understand that such behavior contradicts the right of humanity.

In his "Metaphysics of morals". (1785) offers the example of a man who abandons his project of dedication to an activity that pleases him "immediately, though reluctantly, at the thought that if he were to pursue it he would have to omit one of his duties as a civil servant or neglect a sick father", and that in so behaving he was testing his freedom to the utmost degree.

Kant was horrified when he recalled his school years at the Collegium Fridericianum and, with some exception, said of his professors that "they would be incapable of lighting a fire with a possible spark of our mind about philosophy or mathematics, but would prove very good at putting them out.". Kant recognized that "it is very difficult for every individual to get out of that minority of age, which has almost become his nature... Principles and formulas, mechanical instruments of rational use - or rather abuse - of his natural endowments, are the shackles of a permanent minority of age"..

Faced with the rigorism of his teachers, he wrote in his lessons on anthropology that playing cards "cultivates us, tempers our spirits and teaches us to control our emotions. In this sense it can exert a beneficial influence on our morality.". Because of several unpleasant experiences with soldiers in his city, his concept of the military establishment was not very high.

In his work "The Only Possible Argument in a Demonstration of the Existence of God". (1763) Kant ends by stating that "it is absolutely necessary to be convinced that God exists; but that His existence has to be demonstrated, however, is not equally necessary.". And in his "Observations on the sentiment of the beautiful and the sublime". (1764) comments that "Men who act according to principles are very few, which is even very convenient, because these principles easily turn out to be wrong, and then the harm that results from this goes so much further the more general the principle is and the firmer the person who has adopted it" (1764).. Kant thought that at the age of forty the definitive character was acquired and he thought that the first and most relevant maxim to judge the character of a person is that of truthfulness with oneself and with others.

In a famous passage from the "Critique of Practical Reason". (1788) Kant says: "Two things fill the mind with admiration and respect, ever new and growing the more frequently reflection deals with them: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.".

He was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution, which he saw as the first practical triumph of the philosophy that had helped to create a government based on the principles of an orderly and rationally constructed system. In his work "Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason." (1794) states that it may happen that "the person of the master of the only religion valid for all worlds is a mystery, that his appearance on earth and his disappearance from it, that his eventful life and his passion are pure miracles... that the very history of the life of the great master is itself a miracle (a supernatural revelation); we can give to all these miracles whatever value we wish, and honor even the envelope... which has set in motion a doctrine that is inscribed in our hearts...".

In 1799, when his weakness was not yet very evident, Kant affirmed to some of his acquaintances: "My lords, I am old and weak, and you must regard me as a child... I am not afraid of death; I shall know how to die. I swear to you before God that, if I feel death approaching during the night, I will join my hands and exclaim God be praised. But if an evil demon were to stand at my back and whisper in my ear: You have made human beings unhappy, then my reaction would be very different.". On February 12, 1804 Kant died at 11:00 a.m., two months short of his 80th birthday.

Being a man with errors, like everyone, St. John Paul II admired him for his defense of the dignity of the human person (never using the person as a means). He was an upright man and truly concerned about the foundations of morality. His most criticizable aspect is his gnoseology, which served as the basis for later subjectivism, although he himself was probably never a subjectivist, as is evident from some of his most famous sentences.

La entrada La formación moral de Kant se publicó primero en Omnes.

In it we delve into the exciting life of this German Jewish thinker (1906-1975) who lived in first person the hottest historical vicissitudes of the twentieth century: persecution of the Jews by the Nazis, World War II, flight to France and participation in Zionist movements, emigration to the United States, intervention in decisive intellectual controversies over the decades, intense university life, high-risk committed journalism, courageous criticism of the serious political errors that took place in her adopted homeland, constant philosophical reflection in personal dialogue -charged with emotion- with thinkers of the stature of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers?

Renewed interest in his thought

After decades of neglect, interest in Hannah Arendt has exploded in recent years and publications about her have multiplied. Many of her works and insights are astonishingly timely in illuminating some of today's major problems.

From his early doctoral thesis on love in St. Augustine, through his famous works "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (where he explains how totalitarian regimes take over worldviews and ideologies and can turn them, through terror, into new forms of state), "The Human Condition" (how human activities should be understood - labor, labor and action - throughout Western history), "On Revolution" (in which he compares the French, American and Russian revolutions), "Truth and Politics" (on whether it is always right to tell the truth and the consequences of lying in politics) and "Eichmann in Jerusalem" (with its courageous and politically incorrect discourse on the banality of evil and other issues).

The question of God

A topic little frequented so far in the bibliography on Arendt is her possible openness to transcendence. The little that can be found in her published work is compensated by the multiplicity and relevance of allusions to God and religion that can be found in personal writings such as her diaries, confidences to her intimates, the funeral of her husband Heinrich Blücher, etc. These allusions overcome the self-interested vision of a supposedly agnostic thinker and alien to Christianity.

Hannah Arendt's birth certificate specifically states, among the data of filiation, place and date of birth, that she was the offspring of parents of "Jewish faith". Her parents had had a close relationship with the rabbi of Königsberg, with whom they also shared an affiliation to social democratic ideas. Arendt's religious instruction was reduced to individual lessons from this rabbi and, in Parisian exile, to a succinct study of the Hebrew language.

In the difficult years of the paternal illness, her mother would note in the diary about the child that Hannah "prayed for him in the morning and at night, without anyone having taught her to do so". Also upon Blücher's death, his wife wanted to say a Kaddish, the traditional Hebrew funeral prayer, in that case initiated at the funeral of a non-Jew. 

Written testimonials

In an article on religion and intellectuals Arendt wrote: "As in all discussions of religion, the problem is that one cannot really escape the question of truth, and that the whole matter cannot therefore be treated as if God had been the idea of a certain particularly clever pragmatist who knew what the idea was good for and what it was good against. It happens, quite simply, that this is not so: either God exists and people believe in Him - and this then is a more important fact than all culture and all literature - or else He does not exist and people do not believe in Him - and there is no literary or any other imagination which, for the benefit of culture and for the sake of intellectuals, can change this situation." 

On another occasion, he had also written bitterly, noting the link between religion and Judaism: "The greatness of this people once consisted in the fact that they believed in God and believed in Him in such a way that their trust and love for Him was greater than their fear. And now this people only believe in themselves? What profit can be expected from this? Well, in this sense I neither love the Jews nor believe in them; I am simply part of them as something self-evident, which is beyond discussion."

Biblical knowledge

This "something evident" involved a Jewish cultural heritage, which at times was capable of marrying a transcendent God with an immanent approach, which would cause him multiple headaches. In a writing entitled "We Refugees" he would write: "Raised with the conviction that life is the supreme good and death the greatest affliction, we became witnesses and victims of terrors greater than death, without having been able to discover an ideal higher than life". 

That Jewish woman came to know perfectly not only the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible but also the Jesus of the Gospels. She frequently quoted words of the Jewish Prophet, represented in her writings scenes of his life and gestures of his language, as well as studied the novelties brought by his doctrine. She never concretized a proposition of faith in Jesus of Nazareth, although her teacher Jaspers and her husband Blücher did. Her Jewish heritage, her study of scripture, her familiarity with the work of St. Augustine, the lessons of Bultmann, Guardini and Heidegger, brought her face to face with Christianity.

The author of "The Human Condition" would state: "Undoubtedly the Christian emphasis on the sacredness of life is an integral part of the Hebrew heritage, which was already in striking contrast to the activities of antiquity: pagan contempt for the sufferings that life imposes on human beings in labor and childbirth, the envied image of the easy life of the gods, the custom of abandoning unwanted children, the conviction that life without health is not worth living (so that, for example, the attitude of the physician who prolongs a life whose health cannot be restored is considered a mistake) and that suicide is a noble gesture to escape from existence that has become burdensome."

In an opinion column he wrote: "The fact that Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christianity considers a savior, was a Jew can be for us as for the Christian people the symbol of our belonging to the Greek-Judeo-Christian culture".

God and life

In a portrait of Pope John XXIII, he said: "To tell the truth, the Church has preached the Imitatio Christi for almost two thousand years, and no one can say how many parish priests and monks there have been who, living in obscurity over the centuries, have said like the young Roncalli: This is my model: Jesus Christ, knowing perfectly well, already at the age of eighteen, that to resemble the good Jesus meant to be treated as a madman... Entire generations of modern intellectuals, insofar as they were not atheists - that is, fools, pretending to know what no human being can know - learned from Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and their countless followers, to consider religion and theological questions interesting. No doubt they will find it difficult to understand a man who at a very young age took a vow of fidelity not only to material poverty, but also to spiritual poverty... his promise was for him a clear sign of his vocation: I am of the same family as Christ, what more could I want?".

And in a letter to her husband on May 18, 1952, she told him after listening to Handel's Messiah played by the Munich Philharmonic OrchestraThe Alleluia can only be understood from the text: To us a child is born. The profound truth of this account of the legend about Christ: every beginning remains intact; for the beginning, for that salvation, God created man in the world. Each new birth is like a guarantee of the salvation of the world, like a promise of redemption for those who are no longer a beginning".

Many years later, Arendt would write in another of her notebooks: "On revealed religion: we are presented with the God who reveals himself and makes himself ostensible, because we cannot represent to ourselves that which does not manifest itself as presence, describing itself. If God is to be a living God, so we believe, he must necessarily reveal himself". And he added the following poem:

"The voice of God does not

saves us from abundance,

He only speaks to the miserable,

to the anxious, to the impatient,

O God, do not forget us."

La entrada Dios en Hannah Arendt se publicó primero en Omnes.

Michael Ende Biography

Michael Ende was the only son of the surrealist painter Edgar Ende (one of the "degenerate" artists according to the Nazis) and Luise Bartholomä, a physiotherapist. His childhood was marked by the artistic and bohemian environment in which his father moved. In his youth he participated in an anti-Nazi group called "Bavarian Free Front" while he was a student, but had to leave his studies to serve in the German army. Later, his family moved to an artists' area in Munich, which left a great influence on Ende.

After joining the anthroposophical school of the philosopher Rudolf Steiner and premiering his first play "Ya es la hora" (dedicated to the Hiroshima massacre), Ende studied acting at Otto Falckenburg's school in Munich and published his three most famous plays: "Jim Button and Luke the Machinist" (1960), "Momo" (1973, surreal and metaphysical in nature, banned in communist Germany for the harsh social criticism it represented) and "The Neverending Story" (1979). He married and lived in Rome for 26 years with the singer Ingeborg and, after his wife's death, he married for the second time with the Japanese Mariko Sato. Anecdotally, he was a great fan of turtles, which appear in several of his novels.

The cosmos is an amphitheater

In an interview at the end of 1983, Michael Ende stated that he was "convinced that outside our perceptible world, there is a real world from which man comes and towards which he is heading again. It is an idea I discussed at length with my father, to whom I owe what I am and the idea of the world as something mysterious. For me nature is not a mere sum of chemistry and physics", that he would have liked to have children, that he tended to depression, that he considered himself a Christian, that he believed "that we live in that promised world right now and that there is an infinite hierarchy of higher intelligences... such as the so-called angels and archangels". He also stated that "humanity is the navel of the world. For me, the cosmos is an immense amphitheater where gods and demons watch what we do here, otherwise I don't understand why we would have to live".

When asked why God permits evil, he answered: "Because it is necessary, evil is as necessary as good. In the story of Christ's salvation, Judas is completely necessary. Desdemona is as important as Iago. The historical and aesthetic point of view knows no morality." And he also affirmed that he was no longer interested in politics because he was one of those who "in 1968 followed the hopeful path of the student movement; however, the orthodox instated a psychological terror where I felt like the last child. I couldn't believe that all that stuff about Marx and long hair would lead to real solidarity."

The references of "The Neverending Story".

His novel "The Neverending Story" has obvious philosophical and literary references. In this apparently naive adventure story appears the idea of emptiness and the concept of "nothingness"; the journey of the warrior Atreyu; the swamp of sadness and the wisdom of the old turtle Morla, the luck of the dragon Falcor or Fujur; the power of believing and the sphinxes of the Southern Oracle; the childlike Empress; the theory of reflections, projection and the courage to confront your true self; the courage to leave fear behind, the power of dreams and the importance, in such superficial times, of imagination.

As in Greek, Jewish, Hindu and other philosophies, the concept of being or not being and the consequences of denying yourself are present in this novel. Ideas from Hegel, Kant, Heidegger and Sartre's existentialism are manifested in the story in different ways, but with the same message: nothingness is the opposite of being, of true being. In the Door of the Mirror, Atreyu faces one of the greatest challenges of the human being: the confrontation with the true self. There, where "kind people discover that they are cruel and the brave become cowards. Because when confronted with the true self, most people run away". This message is part of the thought of Jacques Lacan and his work on "the self". From the title of the book there are reminiscences of Nietzsche's eternal return.

Beliefs and the meaning of existence

Throughout the story, Atreyu is rescued at various times by a lucky white dragon: the beloved Fálcor or Fújur, present in the most difficult moments, supporting him and encouraging him to believe again. This "lucky companion" is present in several millenary civilizations, such as the Chinese, and is part of how unexpected and surprising the road can be. Another key moment in the story is Atreyu's encounter with Gmork, a mercenary wolf from "nowhere," who tells him about the power of dreams in human life and how fantasy has no boundaries. When humans stop believing, desiring and dreaming, existential absence grows and threatens our true selves. As Gmork says in the novel, "If people stop believing, their existence becomes meaningless and easy to control. And whoever is in control, has the power".

The Christian background of "The Neverending Story".

Knowing Michael Ende's background and life, it does not seem too adventurous to discover also a Christian background in this universal classic. Some examples could be: the importance of reading and books (the book of the story-the Holy Scripture), salvation comes from a child (Bastian-Christ), redemption through an apparent failure (Atreyu-Christ), the leading role in the story of a girl (the childlike Empress living in the Ivory Tower-the Virgin Mary), sadness and hopelessness as a weapon of the forces of evil (the sinking of the horse Artax in the swamp of sadness, the nihilism of the old turtle Morla, the advance of nothingness - the action of the devil on souls), the importance of naming (the name of "daughter of the moon" that Bastian gives to the infant Empress - the name that God gives to all his creatures and to the people he entrusts with special missions in the history of salvation), every new beginning when it seems that all is lost (the reconstruction of Fantasia by Bastian - the redemption of Jesus Christ who makes all things new after the destruction wrought by sin), etc.

I remember seeing the 1984 movie for the first time at the cinema when I was four years old and many times afterwards at the cinema and on television. Although logically at that time I did not understand everything I am writing in this article, I found its ideas fascinating and useful for my life. When in 1995 I decided to give myself completely to God, I remember having in mind the scene in the movie in which Atreyu overcomes his fear and crosses the dangerous passage between the sphinxes of the Southern Oracle to carry out the mission he received. May Michael Ende enjoy forever in the True Paradise.

La entrada Una lectura cristiana de “La Historia Interminable” se publicó primero en Omnes.

Abortion in legislation

In countries such as Argentina, Canada, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, Uruguay, the countries of the former Soviet Union, East Asia and almost all of Europe (except Malta, Poland, Andorra, Monaco, San Marino and Liechtenstein), abortion is legal at the request of the pregnant woman. In most countries in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, abortion is illegal and criminalized in some cases. There are also countries where abortion is not legal, but is in fact decriminalized under almost all circumstances and doctors who perform abortions are not prosecuted: Barbados, Finland, India, Israel, Japan, United Kingdom, Taiwan and Zambia.

Only six nations in the world prohibit abortion under any circumstances and establish prison sentences for any woman or person who performs, attempts to perform or facilitates the practice of abortion: Vatican City, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic.

About 56 million abortions are performed each year in the world, and in many places there are still debates about the moral, ethical and legal issues involved in abortion. Some countries legalized abortion, banned it and then legalized it again (such as some of the countries that made up the former Soviet Union). China completely liberalized it in 1970 but, due to a deep demographic crisis, in 2021 it established a ban on abortion not performed for medical reasons.

The French State has approved this year by a majority of 80 % the enshrinement of the right to abortion in its Constitution. With this legislative sanction, apart from political expediencies of a President Macron in low hours, it is intended to shield the alleged right of women to end the life of their children against possible limitations that could be established by future governments, more sensitive to the respect for human life and who want to follow the line taken on June 22, 2022 by the Supreme Court of the United States by declaring that abortion is not a constitutional right. Since then, the country on the other side of the Atlantic has been divided between states with legislation restricting abortion and favoring the right to life of the unborn and those seeking to protect access to abortion. On February 16, 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court declared in a controversial ruling that frozen embryos are human beings and deserve protection, jeopardizing the business of assisted reproduction clinics in that state.

Public opinion

As is well known, on this sensitive issue, Western public opinion is currently divided between those who defend a woman's right to decide whether to give birth to her child or end her life, and those who defend that not even a woman can decide on the life or death of the life she is carrying inside her. After decades of arguments about the danger to women posed by clandestine abortions, many people have come to the conviction that abortion is a woman's right and that it is preferable to guarantee it in the public health system than to have it performed with risks in the underground.

The conscientious objection of the majority of physicians in the public health system is presented as an obstacle to the exercise of this practice. Many have become convinced that the pregnant life in the woman's womb is not a human being but a collection of cells and even that ending its life can be a merciful act to spare that mother and child an insufferable life. It is the psychological process that allows a person to end the life of another without suffering an indelible feeling of guilt for the rest of his or her life.

It seems that, in this respect, we are coming to the end of the road begun in the Enlightenment toward total autonomy of the self. We are now totally free to do whatever we want with our bodies and our lives, including the right to end our own lives and those of the unborn presumably so that they do not "spoil" the future lives of their mothers. At the same time, mental health rates are worsening and more and more people are living and dying alone. A large majority of young people envision a bleak future for themselves and express their fear of being alone when they reach old age.

Respect for life

Jérôme Lejeune, whose death we are celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of, a great French scientist and geneticist, defender of human life from conception (a conviction that earned him the Nobel Prize for his work in the field of genetics). Nobel), once stated that "the quality of a civilization is measured by the respect it shows to the weakest of its members". It has become a cliché to say that we are at a change of epoch and at the end of a civilization. Perhaps the way in which we face the terrible reality of abortion is a kind of crossroads of civilization and the frontier that separates it from barbarism.

Let us not lose hope that, after having recognized in the West the right to total self-determination of the individual, we will come to the conclusion that the reality is rather that human beings are totally dependent and we need to sacrifice for each other -and not to each other- in order to get ahead and be truly happy.

As Hölderlin wrote in his famous poem Patmos, "where there is danger, there grows also that which saves".

La entrada El aborto como encrucijada de la civilización se publicó primero en Omnes.

At the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, we find that unfortunately totalitarian systems are not exclusive to the past 20th century, but continue in our century and it seems that they will continue to accompany us in the future. XX, but continue in our century and it seems that they will continue to accompany us in the future. Those sinister political regimes of the last century in which the State concentrated all powers in a single party (communist, fascist, national socialist or whatever it was called on each occasion) and controlled social relations under a single official ideology have not disappeared from the scene. Today we observe that about 40% of the world's population lives under dictatorial systems.

Apart from a long list of current dictatorships, there are democratic countries in which the politicians in power assume practices typical of totalitarian systems. One of them is to use history to fix an ideology and an official version of history that is the only accepted one and thus control all social relations and inspire the laws and customs of a country in a certain political direction.

There are two examples that are close to our cultural environment: the black legend (initially promoted by England and France to confront Spanish predominance in the 16th century but later assumed by Spaniards and Latin Americans with often spurious political and economic interests) and the Spanish democratic memory (understood as the articulation of public policies that claim to comply with the principles of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition for those who suffered persecution or violence during the civil war and Franco's dictatorship in the 20th century). 

It has become a cliché to talk about the paramount importance of storytelling in political communication. The story is nothing more than the will to convey a message using narrative structure. And when we talk about a message, we are really talking about our "point of view". Whenever a message is conveyed using the simple narrative structure (presentation, development and denouement) it is easier to understand, easier to remember and easier to pass on to others. If we apply this to the history of a country, so that we can establish a kind of "storytelling", it is easier to understand, easier to remember and easier to transmit to others. "official history" The "good guys" and the "bad guys" can be very effective in achieving ideological predominance and a prolonged stay in power.

There is no objection to everyone telling their country's history as they see fit, based on what they have read, heard or experienced. And it is understandable that political parties use political communication as best they know how to convey their messages. The problem arises when an individual or a political group uses public funds, institutions and the public education system to impose an official narrative that suits their political interests. 

In a true democracy, the political power should not establish a truth or an official history in which its political option appears as the only acceptable and healthy one for the life of the country, while at the same time it uses all public resources and all the power of the State to position the opposition parties and the citizens who support them as enemies of the good of the nation. This political Manichaeism goes directly against the ideological and political pluralism necessary to speak of a healthy democracy and not of a system that is installed in totalitarianism or is heading towards it.

The Spanish black legend continues to be used by various totalitarianisms -and not only by them- in Latin America (Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua) with the aim of identifying a culprit for the ills they suffer other than the current rulers. The so-called democratic memory is being used in Spain by the PSOE -with the excuse of the just reparation to the victims of the Franco dictatorship- to fix a compulsory historical narrative in which this party is the protagonist of all social advances while the opposition and anyone who opposes it is a fascist, heir of a bloody dictatorship that ended 50 years ago.

It seems that the anti-Spanish black legend has been and still is useful in Latin America as a "scapegoat" to blame for all the ills suffered by some of their countries without many people realizing that perhaps the current situation is due more to the work of the independence leaders of the 19th century and their heirs in the last two centuries than to the three centuries of Spanish viceroyalties that left societies far more advanced than those found when our ancestors arrived in America, which are also those of most of these Latin American leaders. Two centuries after the American independence processes, it seems at least suspicious to continue blaming Spain for the backwardness of their countries and the human rights abuses caused by their current satraps.  

Regarding the democratic memory, when a political party, which has ruled Spain for 6 years during the Second Republic and the Civil War and almost 30 years of the current democracy, arrogates to itself the exclusivity of the story of the history of Spain during the twentieth century, we can speak of political manipulation with spurious interests. History, let alone the history of a century as conflictive as the past in Spain, cannot be in the hands of any political party because it is difficult for it not to take advantage of the situation for totalitarian purposes. The pretension of being the only party in Spain with the right to judge the actions and deeds of other Spaniards during decades of the past is also totalitarian.

In a democracy there cannot be a party that says how to judge the history of the country or who are the good and who are the bad. That should be freely judged by historians and citizens, not by the political power. The interest in keeping alive the memory of a political regime that ended 50 years ago by a party with 145 years of history -and not a few blood crimes behind it and the current collaboration of one of its former presidents with the Venezuelan dictatorship- is truly suspicious and should not be admitted due to the serious risk of democratic deterioration it entails.

In a democracy, political power must limit itself to guaranteeing freedom of thought, information and expression, for if it engages in limiting these freedoms for political reasons, it is undermining the foundations of democracy and paving the way for totalitarianism. We cannot allow in our democratic societies any form of "ministries of truth".

La entrada Leyenda negra y Memoria democrática en España se publicó primero en Omnes.

According to legend, Tell was born in the canton of Uri and married a daughter of Furst of Altinghansen, who together with Arnold of Melchthal and Werner of Stauffacher had sworn on September 7, 1307 in Gruttli to free his homeland from the Austrian yoke.

The Habsburgs pretended to exercise sovereign rights over the Waldstetten and Herman Gessler of Brunoch, "dance" of those cantons on behalf of Emperor Albert, wanted to impose his authority with acts of real tyranny that irritated those rough mountain people.

He wanted to force all Swiss to unveil themselves in front of a hat, placed at the top of a pole on the Altdorf square, which, according to the conjecture of the historian Müller, must have been the ducal hat.

Tell, indignant, came down from the mountain to the square of Altdorf, wearing the characteristic costume of the shepherds of the Four Cantons, covered his head with a hood and wearing sandals with wooden soles reinforced with soles and bare legs. And he refused to submit to this humiliation.

The William Tell test

The "dance" ordered him to stop. And, knowing his skill in the handling of the crossbow, he threatened him with death if he did not succeed in knocking down with the arrow, from 120 steps away, an apple placed on the head of the youngest of Tell's sons. From this terrible ordeal, which legend has it that took place on November 18, 1307, the skillful crossbowman emerged victorious. When Gessler noticed that Tell was carrying a second hidden arrow, he asked him for what purpose he was carrying it. "It was for you, if I had had the misfortune to kill my son," was the reply. Gessler, incensed, ordered him to be put in chains, and to prevent his compatriots from freeing him, he wanted to lead him himself across Lake Lucerne to the castle of Kussmacht.

In the middle of the lake they were surprised by a violent storm, caused by an impetuous south wind, very frequent in that region, and, faced with the danger of capsizing and drowning, he ordered the prisoner's chains to be removed and to take the helm, for he was also a skilled navigator.

Tell managed to board next to a platform, known since then by the name of "Tell's Leap," located not far from Schwitz. He quickly jumped ashore and, giving the boat a push with his foot, left it again at the mercy of the waves. Nevertheless, Gessler managed to gain the shore and continued his march towards Kussnacht. But Tell went ahead and, stationing himself in a suitable place, waited for the tyrant to pass and mortally wounded him with an arrow.

This was the beginning of an uprising against Austria. Tell took part in the battle of Morgaten (1315) and, after a quiet life, died in Bingen in 1354, being a recipient of the Church.

History and legend

The story has been passed down through Swiss tradition. Contemporary chronicles of the Swiss revolution of 1307 do not mention Tell. But at the end of the 15th century Swiss historians began to speak of the hero, giving various versions of the legend.

Gessler's name does not appear in the complete list of the Altdorf "dances". None of them were killed after 1300. On the other hand, a governor of Kussnacht is found to have been killed when he jumped to earth by an arrow shot by a peasant whom he had molested in 1296, the event taking place on the shores of Lake Lowertz and not on Lake Schwitz. Probably the legend has taken as its origin this historical fact, prelude of the insurrection of 1307.

Tell is not a name, but a nickname; it comes, like the German word "tal", from the old German "tallen", to speak, not to know how to be silent, and means exalted madman, having been applied in contemporary chronicles to the uprising of the three conspirators of Gruttli, considered, before the triumph, mad and reckless.

Frendenberger wrote in 1760 a book entitled "William Tell, Danish Fable". The legend, in fact, is found in the Scandinavian countries before the Swiss story-legend. It is quoted, among others, by the Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus, in his "Danish History", written at the end of the 10th century, attributing it to a Gothic soldier named Tocho or Taeck.

It is probable that emigrants from the north, settled in Switzerland, imported the legend and even the name. Similar legends exist in Iceland, Holstein, on the Rhine and in England (William of Cloudesley).

In honor of William Tell

The plausible thing is, as it happens in analogous cases, that all these legends have been accumulated to a real personage, since the construction of chapels in honor of Tell, only thirty years after the date in which his death is situated, proves in an indisputable way that the legends were supported in a real fact. These chapels are still the object of veneration in Switzerland. One of them stands on the shores of Lake Schwitz, on the same platform on which the hero jumped ashore. It is said that, when it was built in 1384, its inauguration took place in the presence of 114 people who had known Tell personally.

Rossini wrote an opera on the theme and Schiller a drama. This, in 1804, is the last one he composed and is considered his masterpiece. A totally harmonious work," says Menéndez y Pelayo in his work Ideas Estéticas, "and preferred by many to the rest of the poet, is William Tell, in which one certainly does not admire the grandeur of Wallenstein or the pathos of Mary Stuart, but a perfect harmony between the action and the scenery, a no less perfect interpenetration of the individual drama and of the drama which we might call epic or of transcendental interest, and a torrent of lyrical poetry, as fresh, transparent and clean as the water that flows from the very Alpine peaks".

La entrada Guillermo Tell, símbolo de la libertad se publicó primero en Omnes.

With his work "Crisis of Western Philosophy" (Moscow 1874), he had initiated a struggle against positivism, then thriving in Europe and that was beginning to penetrate in Russia. In 1875 she brilliantly completed her studies in philosophy and devoted herself to teaching in Moscow from the age of 22 until 1880 when she moved to St. Petersburg to devote herself to teaching at the University of the city and to work at the Higher Institute for the education of women.

For his thoughtful ideas against Pan-Slavism and for his appreciation of Russian and Western values, he was in fact ostracized in the academic sphere. Between 1875 and 1876 he traveled to England, where he became acquainted with Cardinal Newman's efforts to unite the Anglican and Catholic Churches, to France, Italy and Egypt, where he studied Indian philosophy.

In 1881 he died Dostoevsky and Solovyov is one of the friends who carries the novelist's coffin on his shoulders. In that year the tsar was assassinated and 14 days later Solovyov asked for the pardon of the assassins from the death penalty to which they had been condemned. The Slavophiles succeeded in having him banned from speaking in public and deprived of teaching for having publicly defended the need to abolish capital punishment. He says about the death penalty that by applying it society declares that the offender is guilty in the past, wicked in the present and incorrigible in the future. But society cannot pronounce absolutely on the incorrigibility of the offender in the future.

Soloviov and harmony

An admirer of the Jewish people, at the age of thirty he began his study of the Hebrew language and years later initiated several campaigns against anti-Semitism. For Solovyov no people should live in itself, by itself or for itself, because the life of each people is a participation in the general life of humanity. In the division and isolation of human nuclei Solovyov finds the origin of all evils. The true social good is solidarity, justice and universal peace.

There is a threefold violation of this harmony: when one nation infringes upon the existence or freedom of another; when one social class oppresses another; and when the individual goes against the State or the State oppresses the individual. The true formula of justice is this: each particular being, individual or nation, must always have for himself a place in the universal organism of humanity.

From then on he lived in retirement, studying, writing and doing charitable works until 1900, the year of his death. He studied Church History and Theology, wrote "The Spiritual Foundations of Life" (1882-1884) and "The Dogmatic Evolution of the Church in Relation to the Question of the Union of the Churches" (1886).

In addition to being a philosopher Solovyov was a great poet of accentuated lyricism and, although his poetry is profound, some of his compositions are popular in Russia ("Morning Fog", "Resurrection", "O beloved"). In one of them, "Ex Oriente lux", he addresses Russia to ask: "Tell me, do you want to be Xerxes' East or Christ's East?".

The philosophy of Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyovyevich

Leaving aside his elevated poetic work, among his philosophical works should be considered as the most important: "Philosophical Principles of Unified Knowledge" (1877), "Lessons on the Humanity of God" (1878-81), "Critique of Abstract Principles" (doctoral dissertation in Philosophy, Moscow 1880), "History and Future of Theology" (Agram 1887), "Justification of the Good" (St. Petersburg 1897), "La Russie et l'Eglise Universelle" (Paris 1889 and in Russian St. Petersburg 1912).

Solovyov criticizes abstract philosophies, which are based on a priori thought or ideas, and also empiricism, which merely recognizes the value for knowledge of external phenomena. He affirms that the experience that leads to knowledge is not only the external but also the inner one through which it is possible to reach the absolute and, of course, the personal consciousness.

The object of knowledge can be presented: as that which exists absolutely (Entity) and is known through belief in its absolute existence; as essence or idea (Essence) and is known through speculative contemplation or imagination of such essence or idea; as phenomenon (Act) and is known through its embodiment, actual sensations or empirical data of our sensible natural consciousness.

Apart from Christ, God does not appear to us as a living reality. In Him is founded the common universal religion, says Solovyov. I dare to ask on my own: Have not the other religions, the non-Christian religions, in what they have of actuality and truth, adopted from Christ - without consciously knowing it - that which maintains them for their followers as beliefs that continue to bring comfort, hope and meaning to their lives? As examples of such a question, did not Christ nourish Gandhi and Tolstoy? Does not Christ, in Mother Teresa of Calcutta, continue to reveal himself today to people of different beliefs, including the agnostic ones that they limit themselves to saying that they do not know?

Modesty and the moral law

Solovyov in morality wants to understand man in his tragic situation of freely choosing between the ugliness of evil and the beauty of good. He sees in the feeling of modesty, in its truest meaning, how the moral is experimentally manifested in man. Such a feeling of modesty distinguishes man from all physical nature, not only from that external to him but also from his own, when he is ashamed of his lusts. He summarizes his thought thus: "I have heard the divine voice and have been afraid to appear naked in my animal nature. I am ashamed of my concupiscent nature, then I subsist and exist as a man". In the feeling of modesty the moral law is reflected in one of its manifestations, commanding us to subordinate the passions to the area of reason through asceticism.

Universal Christianity

Solovyov sees the only solution to the problems of Russia and the world in universal Christianity and sees, therefore, the urgency of the union of Christians, which is the way to prepare the unity of the human race. On Christ is founded the universal Church, the common religion of all men. But Christ-God-Man is to be sought not only in the past but also in the present, not only in our personal limitation but also in his social revelation. Hence his advice: take inner comfort in the living God-Man-Christ; recognize his real presence in the universal Church.

Solovyov thought that in the union with the Catholic Church should proceed gradually preparing the environment and remaining orthodox. But foreseeing his approaching end or trying to put his beliefs into practice, on February 18, 1896 he was received into the Universal Church by the Russian Catholic priest Nicolai Alekseevic Tolstoy in the Tolstoy chapel in Moscow dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes. He died at the estate of Prince Trubetzkoi in Moscow in 1900.

La entrada Vladímir Serguéyevich Soloviov se publicó primero en Omnes.

In 1958 he finished high school at the Pureza de María school. In the conservatory of Santa Cruz de Tenerife he studied music theory, aesthetics, music history and up to the 6th year of piano (he did not finish the 7th and 8th years because his father encouraged him to go abroad to learn languages). He spent the academic year 1959/1960 in France, studying French and French literature at the "Cours Albert le Grand" of the Dominican Sisters of Bordeaux. From 1960 to 1962 he studied Secretarial Studies at St. Godric's College (Hamstead, London). There he also obtained the "Lower Certificate in English" and the "London Chambers of Commerce".

For a year he worked in Tenerife in the shipping company Cory, a job he left to move to Madrid. Once in Madrid, he worked for a year in the English company Fertiberia. In 1964 he obtained the "Proficiency" in English at the British Institute and in 1966 he took a course at the Official School of Languages in Madrid. During those years she also studied international shorthand in English, French and Spanish at the Samper Academy in Madrid. From 1966 to 1968 she worked as a management secretary at the British-Dutch company Unilever.

Vocation

In 1966 she applied for admission as a supernumerary of Opus Dei to the Alcor Hall of Residence in Madrid, which she got to know thanks to a former neighbor from Tenerife who invited her to visit it on one occasion. During Holy Week of that year she went to Rome with other young women of her age and was able to meet personally St. Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, who received her and her friend Ana Rodríguez Corazón in a living room of Villa Tevere, the central headquarters of Opus Dei in Rome. These events would have a decisive importance in the deep Christian convictions that she transmitted to her entire family.

In March 1966 she met Ángel María Leyra Faraldo (Ferrol, 25-II-1938 - 27-VIII-2021) at a party. Ángel noticed her and asked for her phone number so he could call her. After two years of courtship, they would marry in the Pontifical Basilica of San Miguel on August 10, 1968 and would travel in her Seat 600 on their honeymoon to Catalonia. In the monastery of Montserrat they promised the Virgin that they would give that name to their first daughter, as they did a year later. Before having their first daughter, Montse, who would become a doctor in Classical and Semitic Philology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, taught English for a year at the Besana School. In 1970 his son Miguel Angel was born, who would become a philosopher, doctor in theology and ordained priest in 2000. In 1972 his daughter María José was born, a graduate in Business Administration and currently married with a daughter.

English Philology

In 1972 she moved to La Laguna because her husband was assigned to the Universidad Laboral de la Laguna. There her children Ana Isabel (1974, graduated in Teaching, currently married and with two children), María Luisa (1976-2014, graduated in Law, married and mother of four children) and Pablo (1976), who died a week after birth due to complications in childbirth, were born. In 1974 she passed the university entrance exams for those over 25 years of age at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of La Laguna to begin her first year of English Philology, studies that she had to interrupt because she could not combine them with the attention she wanted to give to her already large family. In 1978 the whole family moved to Madrid. In 1980 his last son, Santiago, doctor in Law and university professor, was born.

In 1985/1986 she took a course in English Literature at the British Institute and in 1987 she took a course in English Teaching Techniques at the British Council. For years she gave private English lessons to students between 13 and 18 years of age and worked as a translator and transcriber.

Tribute to the delivery

Nowadays it is difficult for many fathers or mothers -because of the way contemporary society has been configured- to allow themselves to give up their professional careers to devote themselves to the care and education of their children, those who decide to bet on life against the "generous" opinion of many that there are too many of us on this planet. There is now more talk of achieving the so-called "work-family balance", which does not seem to be going too well judging by family health indices at least in the West.  

At present, my mother is living in her usual house in Mirasierra as she enters old age, widowed, surrounded and cared for by her children, whom we love and admire very much. These simple lines want to be a well-deserved tribute to her and to the millions of women -more numerous than men, although there have also been men- who throughout history and also today have freely decided to sacrifice in part or totally their professional career and their possible personal brilliance to dedicate themselves to their children and their family, being truly happy living a true love: giving their lives for others and reaping the abundant fruits of their dedication, as Jesus Christ taught us from the luminous mystery of the Cross. Thank you very much, Mom.

La entrada María Luisa Curiá Martínez-Alayón se publicó primero en Omnes.

Modern culture is clearly marked by a choice between conservatism and progressivism. People are drawn in one direction or the other, but not both: two opposing cultural styles are offered that meet and clearly mark the kind of decisions people make, how they relate to each other and how they respond to ultimate questions. Which of the two best represents the profile of a Christian believer who tries to thank God for the gifts received or is it really possible and desirable to integrate them?

Conservatives

The designation of conservative and progressive is temperamental and personal. Some people want to hold on to what they have, to what has been handed down to them, to what comes from the past; they clearly prefer practical experience and wisdom. Perhaps they do so out of fear of losing what is good in exchange for acquiring what is promised to be better; or perhaps out of an attitude of recognition and gratitude for what is available to them through those who have gone before them. 

Conservatives are generally a bit fearful of losing what they have, perhaps lazy, not always generous with their possessions, although they tend to be satisfied and pleased with life as it is, are often nostalgic, more realistic than idealistic, inclined to lead others to adjust their priorities "for their own good", attached to the predictable, accepting and defending the collective, the status quo, the way things are. As a result, they can be perceived as authoritarian and, at times, pessimistic. On the other hand, most of the time they humbly thank God for what they have received and express their gratitude by using the created world as it was made and not abusing it. In brief terms, we could say that the conservative is a person of faith.

Progressives

Others, however, are convinced that what has been handed down to them, what they have received from the past and from others, is imperfect or even decadent and needs to be renewed or changed, not just received with unconditional gratitude. They feel free, entitled and able to challenge the status quo. "By definition," says Maurice Cranston, "a liberal is a man who believes in freedom. They are convinced that change and progress are possible and necessary, whether in law, structures or established ways of doing things. They are substantially pro-rights, impatient with the rigid and static, often willing to discard what they have received from others, from the past. They are often averse to tradition and sometimes give the impression of being ungrateful.

The progressive impulse is motivated by a sincere and generous desire to improve things and overcome evil in society or by an improper lack of appreciation for what has been received from others in the past. They may be overconfident in their ideas and projects, more idealistic and theoretical than realistic, less prepared to listen and learn from the past, to rectify or correct their ideas or vision as necessary, to be dissatisfied with their own identity; they may be impatient, restless and agitated, easily willing to allow "others" to change them, more individualistic than collectivist. They want to change things, they live for the future, impatiently dreaming of "the new heavens and the new earth" spoken of in Revelation (21:1-4). The progressive fundamentally waits.

Speaking of conservatives, Roger Scruton observes that "their position is correct but boring; that of their detractors, exciting, but false." For this reason, conservatives may have a kind of "rhetorical disadvantage" and as a result "conservatism has suffered philosophical neglect." As historian Robert Conquest used to say, "one is always right-wing on the issues one knows first hand" or Matthew Arnold who criticized progressivism by stating that "liberty is an excellent horse to ride, but to ride somewhere."

Religion, conservatives and progressives

Although many believers regard religion as a liberalizing force, for the most part religions are generally regarded as "conservative" elements within society: they help people hold on to things, to reality. However, the idea that religion is conservative cannot be applied univocally to all religions, and certainly not to Christianity. That is why we can ask ourselves: is true Christianity conservative or progressive? Christianity concerns all aspects of human life and society. Christian anthropology is essentially integrative, as is Christian life and spirituality. The only thing that Christians reject and flatly exclude in man is sin, which separates them from God, from others, from the world and from themselves, destroying life in the broadest sense of the word.

Christianity, affirmative synthesis

Since Christianity excludes nothing substantial from the human composite - neither body nor spirit, neither freedom nor determination, neither sociability nor individuality, neither the temporal nor the eternal, neither the feminine nor the masculine - it would seem that both the "conservative" and the "progressive" aspects of individual human life and of society as a whole should be held simultaneously, if possible, in an affirmative and overcoming synthesis. A Christian can be either conservative or progressive by temperament, but his true Christian identity must have something of both.

As Methodist (progressive) pastor Adam Hamilton once said, "When people ask me, 'Are you conservative or progressive,' my answer is always the same: Yes. But which? Both! Without a progressive spirit we become dull and stagnant. Without a conservative spirit, we are unanchored and adrift." What hinders this integration is precisely the divisive presence of sin in the heart of man.

Christians are and must be conservative, in the sense that they receive God's gifts through the Church of Jesus Christ, make them their own and transmit them with generosity and creativity to those who succeed them. At the same time, they are and must be progressive, because Christian revelation affirms the reality and value of time as a space in which God acts and man responds freely and personally to his grace and word. Fundamental concepts are time, freedom and the untouchable and irreplaceable dignity of every human person who lives with and for other people. In addition, Christianity gives particular weight to conversion (in Greek "metanoia") which literally implies "going beyond death" and evokes the need to overcome one's own conviction and present situation.

Christianity was originally an enormous novelty in the personal lives of millions of men and women who broke with their personal failures and sins, with the Judaism of their time, with the common lifestyle in society, with idolatry, establishing a profoundly renewed vision of the dignity of all people, especially women and children, of the value of marriage and sexuality, a new liturgy, a new approach. A new beginning, a progress, a projection into the future, into eternity. The power of God injected into the lives of sinful men produced an amazing transformation and liberation in personal and social life; it released previously unknown energies among men; it launched them out into a life of meaningful and passionate work and evangelization. It did it before, it does it now; it will continue to do so until the Lord comes in his glory.

La entrada Cristianos conservadores y progresistas se publicó primero en Omnes.

The exhibition has been selected by Pedro Javier González Rodríguez, professor of Art History at the UNED, friend of the artist as he was of his father, the Galician painter and intellectual José Leyra Domínguez (1912-1997). He is the one who has selected the paintings that can be enjoyed during these spring and summer weeks in Madrid, as well as the one who has named them and written the beautiful prologue that begins the catalog published for the occasion. 

By the way, I would like to take this opportunity to point out a small error that appears in the catalog due to an oversight of mine. And as one can learn from mistakes, I would like to take advantage of it to put it on record here: below the photo of each painting, the initials "Ca" appear, which in Latin abbreviates the word "Circa", which in Spanish means "Around, approximately" and which is usually used to date works whose exact date is unknown. Well, in the catalog, the acronym "Ca" appear in front of the measurements and not in front of the dates as it should be. This small confession is a tribute to my father and his friend Pedro Javier, who liked and still likes to do things well and take care of the small details. I have not inherited this virtue from my father and I tend to do things rather "in a hurry". 

The origin of this exhibition is, as you can imagine, in the great affection we all have for my father, a deeply good man. More specifically, on March 5, 2019, we presented with great joy at the beloved Casa de Galicia in Madrid an exhibition on his father's pictorial work (entitled "Paisajes gallegos de José Leyra Domínguez"). On that occasion, we suggested to him the idea of one day exhibiting his own watercolor work, unpublished to date, and, with a sense of humor, he encouraged us to do it rather after his death. My father was a reserved man and hated being the center of attention.

The life of Ángel María Leyra Faraldo

Born in Ferrol on February 25, 1938 and died in that city to which he always felt linked on August 27, 2021 -providentially both Xacobean years-, since his youth he lived in an environment close to art and culture, as his father was a Galician intellectual with a great fondness for painting and possessed an excellent library. He studied law at the University of Santiago de Compostela, where he frequented professors of the stature of Don Paulino Pedret, Don Ramón Otero Pedrayo, Don Álvaro D'Ors and Don Alfonso Otero. Also at that time he participated in Galician intellectual circles with Ramón Piñeiro, Juana Torres, María Auz and José Luis Franco Grande, as the latter wrote in his memoir Los años oscuros. The cultural resistance of a generation.

A deep believer, for him the first thing was his dealings with God, from where he drew strength to attend with care to his family and his work and to try to help with his characteristic cordiality anyone who approached him. On August 10, 1968, he married María Luisa Curiá Martínez-Alayón, the great love of his life, with whom he had 7 children and to whom he remained faithful until his death. 

He worked at the Universidad Laboral de La Laguna, at INSALUD and at the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo, where he retired in 2003 and which awarded him the medal for dedication and excellence in work. At that ceremony he said that he was retiring with the intention of following the advice received by Sancho from Don Quixote when he was about to begin the government of the island of Barataria: "Show, Sancho, the humility of your lineage". During his years of work, and more intensely after retirement, he kept alive his great love for the Humanities, especially History. As a result of those years of reading and research, he left three published works, the last two posthumously: Santiago el Mayor, tras las huellas del apóstol; El traslado del cuerpo de Santiago el Mayor and Breve historia del liberalismo; he also left numerous unpublished writings.

Along with the love he professed throughout his life for Galicia and Galician culture, I would like to point out that Ángel María Leyra Faraldo felt all his life as a Spaniard, a European and a citizen of the world. In short, he knew how to combine, like the vast majority of Galicians, his love for his small homeland and his appreciation for the mother country, respecting and admiring the good works of so many people from so many places and different countries. I can say without exaggeration that he was a universal Galician, not because he is known worldwide but because of his ability to appreciate and value the good things of the whole world.

As Professor González Rodríguez points out in the prologue to the catalog, Ángel María had a legal background, but, above all, he liked to look for beauty in his surroundings and, as a man of deep Christian convictions -a mystic, I believe- he was always aware of the presence of the supernatural. In a letter of 2020 (June 14) he told me: "On one occasion, while I was in the garden of the house of a son-in-law of mine, I saw some lilies from afar and I had the clumsiness to think that their beauty was not so great. But, after reacting, I approached them and contemplated, surprised and amazed, their extraordinary and mysterious beauty". That was how he was, always marveling at the beauty of creation. 

As a child, as he himself tells in an unpublished writing, entitled "Memories of my life" (2018), his parents gave him a box of watercolors and, since then, in the shelter of his father, while D. José Leyra never tired of painting oil paintings through the beautiful landscapes of the region of Ferrol, he used his watercolors to capture, in his own way, the beauty. In fact, the Galician landscape painter Felipe Bello Piñeiro advised him "to choose to paint wide panoramas, landscapes with wide horizons". Also, as we know, his father encouraged him in his slow and meticulous work. Watercolor, although employed by great masters such as Dürer, W. Blake and Turner, was not always considered a major technique. Recall that Evelyn Waugh, in his delightful "Return to Brideshead" has the protagonist's father say to him, "I suppose you are going to take up painting seriously and employ the oil technique."

Between the fifties and sixties approximately, he developed his not very extensive pictorial production, sometimes awarded. In his works, Ángel María, like his father, shows himself to be in love with the Galician landscape; an idealized landscape in which he tries to capture the beauty of the everyday that, perhaps, because it is always present, we do not see. The sea, the fields, the stones of Compostela..., the eternal Galicia is what his brushstrokes transmit to us. 

Taking him, in this case, the opposite of Rainer Maria Rilke, I think we can affirm that in the landscapes of Ángel María Leyra Faraldo beauty, when it emerges, does not lead to the terrible, but to peace".

La entrada Acuarelas de Ángel Mª Leyra Faraldo se publicó primero en Omnes.

Thinking about this figure led me to a vision of Spain as a big family, but not that utopian family, but a real family: with its history, with its successes and its mistakes, with its diversity of approaches to life, with its saints and its criminals, its miseries and its greatness, and also its life situations and crises. Like families, if they want to move forward and not to be blown up and end up slapped in the face or in court, people must try to think of the common good and see the positive in others, recognize their own mistakes and correct with affection and at the right time those of others.

Spain has a long history that sinks in the depths of time where there has been everything: this family has been Celtic and Iberian, Roman, Visigoth, Muslim, Sephardic and Mudejar and, already monarchic and Catholic, reaches west, south and east to America and the Philippines reaching its maximum influence, being the mother of the great Hispanic family. Meanwhile, in the north and east, the struggle for independence from the French neighbors (as they say, that united this family a lot) left us independent in the house and not so much in ideas; and so came the Enlightenment and the French revolution that here was rightly called "liberal", from whose echoes the family became two republics, in two short-lived experiences, with their attempt to "modernize Spain", interspersed between the dictatorships of Primo de Rivera and Franco. Those changes were not bloodless, kind or civilized, and there were many internal wars, the one that has left the biggest mark on the family we are today, the so-called civil war.

Already in peace since then (without forgetting the decades of ETA terrorism, although the current forgetfulness towards its victims) and with a transition that other families admired and admire, the family has lived in these last 45 years of democracy where culture and education has been designed by the so-called progressives, with the brief parentheses of governments of the so-called conservatives, the latter dedicated more to the family economy and assuming in practice the cultural leadership of those who sat down to eat on the left at the common table.

I think that all Spaniards could try to do, today and in the future, an exercise like the one I recommended at the beginning to the members of any family, trying to recognize our own mistakes and those of others, and try to correct them equally, seeing the positive in others and trying to seek the common good.

I will give it a try (not without risk and without the intention of being exhaustive):

We can recognize that in the centuries of Catholic monarchy there were great successes and errors. Among the successes, I would highlight the expansion of Christianity and the vision of human dignity proper to this religion throughout the world, as well as the creation of the university, the cathedrals and so many artistic marvels, the transmission of culture through the codices, the works of mercy, etc. Among the errors, clearly the mixture of politics and religion, the persecution and elimination of dissidents and heterodox, the wars for religious motives, clericalism, the cover-up of abuses to preserve the prestige of the institution, etc.

In the liberal progressiveness, among the successes I can see noble desires for social justice and equality and healthy secularism. Among the errors, their belief that the end justifies the means, the religious persecution of the Second Republic and the civil war, the consecration of the right to abortion of thousands of unborn people, suicide through euthanasia of the seriously ill and incurable, to the so-called gender self-determination (which is causing so much irreversible damage in young people and adolescents), the continuous decline in the quality and demands of our education, the coexistence and even complicity with terrorists of different eras, the colonization of public institutions, ideological sectarianism, the waste of everyone's money, etc.

On the liberal conservative side, among the successes I think that they have managed the economy with more austerity and understand better that income must be balanced with expenses for the sustainability of the system and since the Constitution they are more respectful with the religious freedom of the citizens, as well as they believe more in the rule of law and the laws. Among the mistakes, leaving behind the 36 years of Franco (with his executions, post-war exiles and persecution of dissidents), I think it is fundamentally not having been sufficiently firm in the defense of their rightful convictions (the defense of the life of the unborn and terminally ill, the quality of education, the equality of Spaniards without regional or economic privileges, etc.).

In the nationalists, I see among their successes the defense of their own language and culture. Among their mistakes, obviously their sympathy or equidistance with ETA terrorism and their lack of collaboration and sensitivity with the innocent victims (all of them) of so many years of assassinations, kidnappings and extortions, their insistence that former murderers have the right to participate in the political life of their people (something different from reinsertion), their erroneous exclusionary conviction of being superior to the rest of Spain and the world, their obtaining of unjust privileges from the different central governments (guilt shared by conservatives and progressives, of course), etc. We could also include here Spanish nationalism in what it shares of excluding the virtues of other countries.

In the Church, along with the immense good that so many pastors and lay faithful and so many religious institutions have done over so many centuries, we must recognize abuses and sometimes a deficient use of the great educational potential of so many schools and universities of the Church that have not known how or have not been able to fully transmit to their students a true Christian formation with the capacity to transform society for the better.

We could go on with the kings, the various governments, writers, artists, bishops and all those who are part or have been part of this "normal" family that is Spain. But it seems to me that this small summary is enough for the pretension of this modest article.

And now we find ourselves in the present, with a rather hopeless Spanish society, as indicated by our mental health indices, especially among young people (and this is something not only due to the pandemic but to a deeper cultural problem, it seems to me) and once again polarized into two very poorly matched halves.

Maybe we could try to see ourselves more as a real and big family, with its problems and its happy and hard moments, recognize our mistakes and try to see the virtues of the others. We could try to ally ourselves with all honest people of all ideologies to work together for a better Spain to leave to our successors, who do not seem too happy with the country we are leaving them. It is not a question of making laws of memory but of true concord.

I think of St. Augustine when he said in his very current "The City of God" that "among the pagans there are children of the Church and within the Church there are false Christians". It does not matter what labels we put on ourselves or others. The important thing is the union of all the honest people who live in Spain and want to make it truly better for everyone. We must not tire of doing good and fighting evil, in ourselves and in our society. We must ally ourselves with all those who still consider that pluralism is healthy as long as we share a common ethical minimum: we cannot kill, lie or steal.

La entrada España, ¿una familia normal? se publicó primero en Omnes.

From metaphysics it is possible to speak of God: as the foundation of all beings that do not have in themselves their total reason for being; as the incomprehensible truth that sustains the truths that we understand; the One whose existence we affirm without knowing His essence; the One who explains everything, without Himself having to be explained; The One who, not depending on anything, cannot be demonstrated, proved or known from anything; the Unidentifiable, the Indenominable, the Indelimitable, the Indescribable; the One whom we do not know like the things we know; the Mystery that we affirm without knowing it; the One who has to do with our reality but cannot be adequately understood from our reality.

But God has revealed himself through Jesus Christ to his Church: God has communicated himself and entered history at the end of a continuous line of communications to men:

"In a fragmentary way and in many ways God spoke in the past to our Fathers through the Prophets; In these last times he has spoken to us through the Son whom he instituted heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds, who being the radiance of his glory and the imprint of his essence, and he who upholds all things by his powerful word, after accomplishing the purification of sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, with a superiority over the angels all the greater as he surpasses them in the name which he has inherited" (Heb 1:1-4).

In the biblical story, condensed in this passage, God is primarily the One Who acts with His word and Who communicates in His action.

In the New Testament, Jesus and the Spirit reveal the Father; and the Father really communicates himself in the Son and the Spirit. The historical missions of the Son and the Spirit imply the eternal processes of the Son himself and of the Spirit with the Father: God could not express himself in the temporal order by sending the Father his Son and the Spirit, if he were not, in himself and in his eternity, Father, Son and Spirit.

The Son of the eternal Father has lived and acted in the world and in history for more than thirty years, after being incarnated in the womb of a young Israelite virgin.

Those of us who believe give faith to men who lived with Him and affirmed from a series of experiences - which culminated in the Resurrection of Jesus - that in the man Jesus of Nazareth God Himself was really and immediately communicated. To believe in the apostolic message is to believe that Jesus is the real and effective communication of God to mankind, that, in Jesus, God has entered and worked in history, has become visible (Image of the Father), has revealed Himself (Word or Word of God), has become bodily (Image of the Father), has become the Word of God (Word of God), has become the Word of God (Image of the Father), has become the Word of God.Encarnacion of God). Jesus Christ is not just another word about God or from God, He is the definitive Word of God.

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is the expression of how God has manifested and acted among us.

History is a succession of related events, interpreted and evaluated, in relation to a principle of intelligibility and meaning, by a subject capable of grasping, interpreting and evaluating these events in their succession. This definition presupposes that there is meaning in the events themselves. History studies these events and seeks their meaning.

It has sometimes been said that if God is the Lord of human history we can no longer speak of history: there would be nothing but the history of the Lord of history, who makes it at his will. But this is not so; God is not the Lord of history in the sense that he manipulates it as he pleases. The conception of the world as a puppet theater in which God entertains himself by pulling the strings is not Christian but pagan.

But God's communication can be rejected by man; the entire Bible bears witness to this dynamic of offer and rejection. The Word of God is never imposing but interpellative: it interpellates men and offers itself to them so that they can give meaning to history. It does not impose itself as a force but as an invitation; and this to the point that, when the Word makes itself present to men in human form, they can even crucify it... History is the time of man's resistance and submission in relation to God. When the possibility of resistance ends, the time of history will end and the time of God's absolute lordship will begin... God has entered history through his Spirit, who is capable of transforming men within their freedom, not annulling it, but empowering it. God and man make history... God, being communication in himself, being Father, Son and Holy Spirit, can also be communication outside himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Neither the pantheistic god, nor the deistic god could have given origin to history.

In addition to the above-mentioned writings of various saints on the existence and being of God, it is also worth reflecting on the holiness lived by the saints themselves, as a testimony or sign of the existence and being of God.

Holiness has attracted powerful attention not only from people who believe in the existence of God but even from thinkers who have considered themselves atheists.

La entrada El Dios cristiano según Josep Vives Solé se publicó primero en Omnes.

A good understanding of Christianity will help the human being to recover the sense of happiness. God does not demand unhappiness in this life as the price of happiness in the afterlife, in eternal life. In reality, human life is an unbroken line that begins at birth and never ends.

If the human being will be fully happy when he reaches Heaven, it will not be possible for him to attain happiness on earth unless he can anticipate in time the conditions of the eternally happy life.

Later, the scientist Albert Einstein, in a 1953 work, translated in Spain in 1980 under the title "My Ideas and Opinions", wrote, wrote that "in the laws of nature such a superior intelligence manifests itself, that in the face of it the most significant of human thinking and ordering is a completely futile flash.".

The French anthropologist and philosopher René Girard (1923-2015) published his book "La violence et le sacré" in 1972.. In it he confronts those who say: "But isn't the Bible full of violence? Isn't it God, the Lord of hosts, who orders the extermination of entire cities?

If that objection had been addressed to Jesus, He would probably have answered what He answered about divorce: "Because of the hardness of your hearts Moses has permitted you to put away your wives, but in the beginning it was not so" (Mt 19:8).

Indeed, the first chapter of Genesis presents us with a world in which violence is unthinkable either among humans or between humans and animals. But later, in the books of the Old Testament, the death penalty at least seeks to channel and contain violence so that it does not degenerate into individual caprice and men do not destroy each other (R. Girard, "Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde", 1978).

St. Paul spoke of a past time, characterized by the "forbearance of God." (Rom 3:25). Indeed, God tolerated violence, polygamy, divorce and so many other things, but he was educating the people toward a time when his original plan would be exalted once again. That time came with Jesus, who said: "You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you, resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, offer him the other also... Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." (Mt 5:38-39, 43-44). Jesus' sermon, which he delivered on a hill in Galilee, was consummated on Mount Calvary.

According to R. Girard ("La violence et le sacré", 1972, and "Il sacrificio", 2004), At the origin of all religion is the sacrifice that entails destruction and death. But Jesus broke the mechanism that sacralized violence, making himself an innocent victim. Christ did not make a sacrifice with the blood of another, but with his own. "On the tree he bore our sins in his body." (1 Pet 2:24).

Jesus has defeated unjust violence by laying bare all its injustice. It was seeing him the way he died, that the Roman centurion exclaimed, "Truly this man was the Son of God!" (Mk 15:39). The centurion, an expert in combat, recognized that the cry Jesus uttered at his death (Mk 15:37) was a cry of victory.

In the second century, Bishop Meliton of Sardis, in his work "On Easter", He recalled: "The old has been replaced by the new, the law by grace, the figure by reality, the lamb by the Son, man by God".

As early as 1968, the then Cardinal Ratzinger published his "Introduction to Christianity".. In this work, he starts from a truism, the fact that "God is essentially invisible.".

"In his seeing, hearing and understanding, man does not contemplate the totality of what concerns him.". To believe, to have faith from the human point of view, "is an option by which the One who is not seen (...) is not considered as unreal but as authentically real, as that which sustains and makes possible all the remaining reality (...).

Christian faith does not simply deal (...) with the Eternal (...) which remains outside the world and human time, but rather with God in history, with God as man. The peculiar note of the event of faith is the positive character of what comes to me and opens me to what I cannot give myself.

Christian faith is much more than a choice in favor of the spiritual foundation of the world. Its key statement does not say 'I believe in something', but 'I believe in You'.

God only wants to come to men through men (...); there are very few who can have an immediate religious experience. The intermediary, the founder, the witness or the prophet (...) capable of direct contact with the divine, are always an exception.

In God there is a we (...): 'Let us make man' (Gen. 1:26). But there is also an I and a you (...): 'The Lord said to my Lord' (Ps 110:1) and in the dialogue of Jesus with the Father (...): in the one and indivisible God there is the phenomenon of dialogue, of the relationship (...) between the three Persons in God.

In the same way, man is fully himself (...) when he is not closed in on himself (...) when he is pure openness to God (...) Man only comes to himself when he goes out of himself. He only reaches himself through others".

In the Encyclical Letter "Spe salvi", On November 30, 2007, Benedict XVI said: "In him, the Crucified One (...) God reveals his face precisely in the figure of (...) this innocent one who suffers (...).

God knows how to create justice in a way that we are not able to conceive. Yes, there is the resurrection of the flesh. There is justice. There is the 'reversal' of past suffering, the reparation that restores the right (...) the question of justice is the essential argument or, at any rate, the strongest argument in favor of faith in eternal life (...).

Protest against God in the name of justice is worthless. A world without God is a world without hope. Only God can create justice. And faith gives us this certainty (...). The image of the Last Judgment (...) is perhaps for us the decisive image of hope".

La entrada Leen, Einstein, Girard y Ratzinger se publicó primero en Omnes.

Martin Luther

Before Descartes and Pascal is the German Martin Luther (1483/1546), a native of Eisleben (Saxony).  

On July 2, 1505, surprised by a storm, after feeling how lightning struck very close to him, he made a promise to become a friar. Fifteen days later he entered an Augustinian convent.

In the convent she recalled, years later, "we paled at the name of Christ alone, because he had always presented himself to us as a severe, irritated judge against us all".

A Doctor of Theology, he was a great reader of the Bible, although, because of his markedly subjective way of being, he did not accept it in its entirety as the Word of God, rejecting entire books, such as the Epistle of James and the Apocalypse.

The dark features of his subjective vision of God induced him to a serious fear for his salvation. He wanted to take refuge in the reading of the New Testament, but he did not succeed, for he stumbled upon the text of the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans 1, 17; his reading at first irritated him, for he saw that, in the Gospel itself, a justice of God was manifested behind which Luther saw the choleric Judge who frightened him so much.  

After some time, in the middle of the academic year 1513-14, he calmed down and felt secure in understanding the righteousness of God as a righteousness that God gives to those who have faith, in which the righteous live.     

In the course of his dispute over indulgences, which began in 1517, Luther went so far as to assert that the only norm of the faith is the sola scripturaHe also proclaimed the free examination of the Scriptures, apart from the Magisterium and Tradition of the Church, maintaining also that Christianity, as a congregation of the faithful, is not a visible gathering, nor does Christ have a Vicar on earth.

Immanuel Kant

A couple of centuries later, Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in the German town of Konigsberg, where he spent his life until his death in 1804.

From a modest pietist Lutheran family, when he became a young man, distancing himself from the faith of his parents, he began to orient himself towards secular ethics. From 1770 he was an ordinary professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of his hometown.

According to his thought, there is in man, in addition to his psycho-physical structure - linked to the laws of nature -, a rational spirit governed by the law of freedom: but the human being has a conscience of duty and this makes it possible to assure that man is a moral being, a being, in addition to being free, responsible.

In 1781 he published his Critique of pure reason where he affirms that we know things as our intelligence presents them to us, but not as they are in themselves. Consequently, the three great realities - the soul, the world and God - are presented to Kantian thought only as ideas, since there is no sensible experience of the soul, the world or God, and only this experience guarantees the effective existence of the objects of our thinking.

Subsequently, in its Critique of practical reason (1788), he wrote: "Two things fill my soul with an admiration and respect which are constantly renewed and increased the more assiduously the thought occupies itself with them: the starry sky above my head and the moral law within me... The first glance at this incalculable multitude of worlds destroys my importance as an animal creature, whose matter, of which it is formed, after having enjoyed for a short time a vital force, must be returned to the planet it inhabits which, in its turn, is but a point in the totality of the universe. The second look, on the contrary, enhances my value through my personality, and the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and of the whole sentient world..."

Kant also thought that the complete human good is composed of virtue and happiness; and, since in this world, complete happiness does not follow virtue, the voice of conscience demands the existence of someone who puts things in their place: that someone, for Kant, is God, who, in order to grant happiness to virtuous people, arranged eternal life for them.   

John Henry Newman

At the beginning of the 19th century, John Henry Newman was born in 1801 in London, the son of John, a British businessman, and Jemina, a descendant of a family of French Calvinists who had taken refuge in the United Kingdom.  

At the age of fifteen his first conversion took place in which he discovered the only two beings that, according to the young Newman, can be known in an evident way: oneself and the Creator (Apology, I).

In 1824 he was ordained a priest of the Anglican Church to which he belonged until the age of forty-four. At the end of his study of the Development of Christian doctrineHe came to the conclusion that it is in the Catholic Church that the faith of the first Christians is maintained. On October 9, 1845, he was received into the Catholic Church. 

Ordained a Catholic priest in 1847, he was appointed Rector of the newly constituted Catholic University of Dublin, a position he held for about ten years. In 1870 he published his work An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (trans. esp. Religious assent. Essay on the rational motives of faith).

In 1879 he was made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII, and Newman chose the motto Cor ad cor loquitur. He died on August 11, 1890. He was beatified in 2009, during the pontificate of Benedict XVI and canonized in 2019 by Pope Francis.                                                               

In his work Apology pro vita suaHe says that certainty is the consequence of the cumulative force of certain given reasons which, taken one by one, would be only probabilities. That he believed in God on the basis of probability, he believed in Christianity on the basis of probability, he believed in Catholicism on the basis of probability. He also believed that He who created us has willed that in mathematics we should reach certainty by rigorous demonstration, but that in religious inquiry we should reach certainty by means of accumulated probabilities; and that this certainty leads us, if our will cooperates with His, to a conviction which rises higher than the logical force of our conclusions.

In the same work he says: I am compelled to speak of the infallibility of the Church as a disposition willed by the mercy of the Creator to preserve religion in the world and to restrain that freedom of thought which is one of our greatest natural gifts, to rescue it from its own self-destructive excesses.

La entrada Lutero, Kant y san John Henry Newman  se publicó primero en Omnes.

A friend of Pope Eugene IV, the Pope of the union of Christians, he was a member of the papal delegation that accompanied Emperor John VIII and Patriarch Joseph on their journey from Constantinople to Italy, which resulted in the return and union of the Greek Orthodox Church to the Roman Catholic Church.

On that return voyage from his mission to Constantinople, on the high seas he had a decisive experience for his philosophical conception: how the horizon of the sea seems to be stretched out like a straight line; and yet what is seen is part of a circle with a very large radius due to the spherical shape of the Earth. This experience influenced the content of his work "De docta ignorantia": we know that our finitude can never reach the truth in all its fullness and precision; and the more we are aware of our ignorance the more it becomes a learned ignorance, a philosophical wisdom; this wisdom starts from doubt, but presupposes the existence of truth, which can only be founded on an infinite, eternal and creative intelligence.

The union of the Churches was proclaimed on 6-7-1439 in the church of Santa Maria dei Fiori, in Florence. But this union failed after a short time. Metropolitan Isidore of Kiev proclaimed the union upon his arrival in Moscow, but was soon arrested by Prince Vasili, who forbade the Russian church to accept any union with the Latins.

In the Byzantine Empire, the Greek bishops, returning from Florence, found an adverse popular climate; although the union was promulgated in the cathedral of St. Sophia on 12-12-1452, in the presence of Emperor Constantine XI, the papal legate and the Byzantine patriarch, a violent tumult was started by the clergy and monks who raised the cry, seconded by the masses: "Let the turban of the Turks reign over Constantinople rather than the mitre of the Latins!".

Half a year later, that cry would have its sad fulfillment: on May 29, 1453, the capital fell to the Turks, the last emperor of the Eastern Empire died in battle and the Byzantine Empire ended its days. In Rome, Isidore of Kiev, fled from Russia, and Bessarion of Nicaea, who became two cardinals of the universal Church, were for years like a living memory of something that could have been, but was not because men did not want it to be. Meditating on the fall of Constantinople, Nicholas of Cusa conceived his grandiose vision of a future universal conciliation, in his work "De pace fidei". (On the Peace of Faith), completed before 14-1-1454.

Following Pope Pius II to the Adriatic coast, where the fleet of the Christian crusade against the Turkish invasion would meet, Nicholas suffered the last attack of a chronic illness and died in Todi (Umbria) on 11-8-1464. Three days later his friend Aeneas Silvius, Pope Pius II, died in Ancona. The remains of Nicholas of Cusa were transferred to Rome and buried in the titular cardinal's church, St. Peter in Vinculis. His heart rests in Kues (Cusa), about 50 km northeast of Trier, in one of his foundations, the hospital of St. Nicholas, which for more than five centuries has housed the poor and sick and where valuable classical, patristic and medieval manuscripts that Nicholas had collected in his travels in the East and West are kept.

René Descartes, a native of The Hague (in Touraine, France), was born in 1596 and died in 1650. He was educated at the Jesuit school in La Fleche. In 1640 he went to Paris and there he felt a total skepticism. In order to see the world, he embraced military life in Holland, where he resided from 1629. From 1649 he resided in Stockholm at the invitation of Queen Christina, whose conversion to Catholicism was influenced by his conversations with Descartes himself, who had previously converted.

He thinks that thought does not deserve trust, because it often falls into error. On the other hand, mathematics and logic are not sciences that serve to know reality. And he will not admit in his philosophy a single truth that can be doubted. There is nothing certain but I, and I am nothing but a thing that thinks. This is the first indubitable, evident truth: the "cogito, ergo sum".

But, further on, Descartes says: I find in my mind the idea of God, of a most perfect, infinite, omnipotent entity, who knows everything. This idea cannot come from nothing, nor can it come from myself, who am imperfect, finite, weak, full of ignorance, because then the effect would be superior to the cause, and this is impossible. Therefore, the idea The idea of God must have been placed in me by a superior entity that reaches the perfection of that idea, that is to say, by God himself.

Born in 1623 in Clermont-Ferrand, France, to a family of jurists and financiers, he received a humanistic and scientific education. In 1647, in Paris, he became acquainted with Descartes' philosophy and with Descartes himself, from whom he distanced himself and whom he harshly criticized.

On November 23, 1654, he experienced a profound shock that radically transformed his life, which he recorded in his writing, the "Memorial".. In this writing he describes his encounter with the living God, "the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not the God of the wise men and philosophers: the God of Jesus Christ". He conceived the project of writing a broad apologia for Christianity and began to take notes and jottings, which were published, after his untimely death, on August 19, 1662, under the title of "Thoughts.".

To the incredulity of the "erudite libertines" and to the cold and self-confident reason, Descartes-like, which Pascal calls the "spirit of geometry"-, is contrasted with a "spirit of refinement," which opens itself to the totality of human experience, both lofty and dramatic. This spirit includes the heart, because "the heart has reasons that reason does not understand"..

Knowing oneself to be miserable and in need of regeneration is the initial step on the path that leads to recovering one's own original greatness. Pascalian wisdom is ordered, then, to conversion. One of the enemies of that conversion is divertimento, existential superficiality, the flight from the real by means of the surrender to diversions with which one tries to avoid any confrontation with the essential; another enemy is the self-sufficiency of the self that encloses itself in a cold and geometric reasoning that drowns the heart.

For Pascal, God is a Being, partly hidden and partly manifest: he manifests himself sufficiently so that we can perceive his reality; but he also hides himself, so that approaching him implies faith, surrender and merit. God reveals himself to us in Jesus Christ as the living God, a God who is accessed through a faith and a love that, starting from the recognition of sin, opens up to trust in his mercy.

La entrada Tres filósofos modernos y la existencia de Dios se publicó primero en Omnes.

Anselm of Canterbury

Anselmo of Canterbury was born in Aosta (northern Italy) in 1033 or 1034. Son of noble parents, descendants of a Germanic people, the Longobard; after the death of his pious mother he began a dissipated life and had a conflict with his father that caused him to leave his father's home. Attracted by the fame of Lancfranco, a teacher at a school in Normandy, he joined the school and, in 1060, entered the Norman abbey of Bec as a monk. In 1078 he was elected abbot of Bec, succeeding Lanfranc. In 1093 he was ordained to the archbishopric of Canterbury, where he died in 1109.

Following in the wake of Augustine, he defined Theology as faith that seeks to understand. He is known in good measure for his famous argument, which is at the beginning of his work Proslogion and which was qualified by Kant as ontological because it seeks to demonstrate the existence of God from the very idea of God, without resorting to creation, nor to Sacred Scripture, nor to the patristic tradition:

Therefore, O Lord, You who give the intelligence of faith, grant me, insofar as this knowledge may be useful to me, to understand that You exist, as we believe, and that You are what we believe.  

We believe that above You nothing can be conceived by thought. It is a question, therefore, of knowing whether such a being exists, for the fool has said in his heart, "There is no God." But when he hears it said that there is a being above whom nothing greater can be imagined, this same fool understands what he heard said; the thought is in his intelligence, even if he does not believe that the object of this thought exists. For it is one thing to have the idea of any object and another to believe in its existence. For, when the painter thinks beforehand of the picture he is going to make, he certainly possesses it in his intelligence, but he knows that it does not yet exist, since he has not yet executed it. When, on the contrary, he has painted it, he not only has it in his mind, but he also knows that he has done it. The fool must agree that he has in his spirit the idea of a being above which no greater thing can be imagined, for when he hears this thought enunciated he understands it, and all that is understood is in the intelligence: and no doubt this object above which nothing greater can be conceived does not exist only in the intelligence, for, if it did, it might at least be supposed that it also exists in reality, a new condition which would make a being greater than that which has no existence except in pure and simple thought.

Therefore, if this object above which there is nothing greater were only in the intelligence, it would nevertheless be such that there would be something above it, a conclusion that would not be legitimate. There exists, therefore, in a certain way, a being above which nothing can be imagined, neither in thought nor in reality.

Ricardo de San Victor

Richard of St. Victor was a native of Scotland and lived from 1110 to 1173. Incorporated in Paris to the Abbey of Saint Victor, he was elected vice prior in 1157, later succeeding his master Hugo as prior, a position he held until his death. Dante Alighiere, in his Divine Comedy, placed Richard in Paradise, in the fourth sphere, where he placed the wise men. In his tenth Canto Dante says:

Look also at the flaming spirit/ of Isidore, of Bede and of Richard/ who to consider was more than man.

Richard of St. Victor uses three ways to prove the existence of God:

First. - The temporality of perceived beings supports the need for an eternal Being.

Second. - In the beings that we perceive by the senses, an increase of perfection can be observed among one another, which makes necessary the existence of a Being that is all perfection.

Third. - Starting from the beings that are grasped by the senses, it is possible to deduce the essences that make them up and that find an exemplary model in the essence of God.

Augustine of Hippo, in his work De Trinitatesays: If you see Love, you see the Trinity. Richard of St. Victor, in his work De Trinitate, developed this vision of the divine Trinity proposed by St. Augustine. He tries to answer three great questions about the one and triune Christian God:

Why the divine unity implies at the same time plurality.

2ª.- Why this plurality is of three.

3rd: How these three Persons are to be understood.

In order to respond, it starts from Love as a fundamental category:

There is no true love without otherness. Love for oneself is not true love. If the only God is perfect love, he must be several Persons.

2º.- Three Persons and not two because perfect love does not close in duality, but is directed to a third: the Condilectus, the common Friend of the other two Persons.

Ricardo de San Víctor reviews the concept of Person, a category used for the understanding of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

a) Person is, above all, the subject of oneself. Only in the possession of oneself can the essence, that is to say, nature, be personalized (nature is the quid, what I am, and person is the quis, what I am): as a person, I possess myself and can act as the master of my own reality.

b) Person is what he is according to his origin. Being master of oneself, one must specify the way in which one is. The Father is master of his own divine nature as inborn. The Son is master of his own divine nature received from the Father. The Holy Spirit possesses the same nature that he receives from the Father and the Son.

c) Person is communion: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit possess their divine nature insofar as they give, receive and share it; they possess themselves insofar as they give themselves in love.

The Trinity, then, is one and the same divine nature that is realized in three Persons. The God revealed to us in the Gospel is a trinitarian God. A solitary and pretrinitarian God, without internal love, is inconceivable to the Christian eyes of Richard of St. Victor. According to the Gospel, God is Love and the process of realization of that Love is the Trinitarian mystery, Life as surrender, reception and encounter, shared existence.

Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas was born in Roccasecca, near Aquino, in the north of the Kingdom of Naples, around 1225. In 1244 he took the habit of St. Dominic in Naples. He studied with Alberto Magno in Paris and Cologne. In 1252 he returned to Paris where he became a master of theology. He died in Fossanova in 1274 before he was 50 years old. He was canonized in 1323. His most important work is the Summa theologica.

Thomas affirms that, just as theology is founded on divine revelation, philosophy is founded on human reason. Philosophy and theology must be true: God is the same truth and there can be no doubt about revelation; reason, used correctly, also leads us to the truth. Therefore, there can be no conflict between philosophy and theology. He demonstrates the existence of God in five ways, which are the famous five ways:

By movement: there is movement; everything that moves is moved by a motor; if this motor moves, it will in turn need another motor to move it, and so on, until it reaches the first motor, which is God.

2ª.- By the efficient cause (cause that has the power to achieve a certain effect): there is a series of efficient causes; there must be a first cause, because otherwise, there would be no effect, and that first cause is God.

3ª.- For the possible and the necessary: generation and corruption show that the entities we observe can be or not be, they are not necessary. There must be a necessary entity by itself, and it is called God.                                                                      

By the degrees of perfection: there are various degrees of all perfections, which approach more or less to the absolute perfections, and therefore are degrees of them; there is, therefore, an entity that is supremely perfect, and is the supreme entity; this entity is the cause of all perfection and of all being, and is called God.

By the government of the world: intelligent entities tend to an end and to an order, not by chance, but by the intelligence that directs them; there is an intelligent entity that orders nature and impels it to its end, and that entity is God.

The idea that animates the five ways is that God, invisible and infinite, is demonstrable by his visible and finite effects.

La entrada Tres sabios medievales y la existencia de Dios se publicó primero en Omnes.

The Creator, in the beginning, distinguished man, male and female, with His infinite love: He placed at their disposal the other creatures and the possibility of corresponding to their friendship with Him in freedom, loyalty, trust and intelligence. Man did not reciprocate, but misused the freedom, intelligence and trust placed in him, breaking his friendship with the Creator. Notwithstanding that disloyalty, God granted man the hope of a restoration of the old relationship and renewed his help through a series of alliances, of an ever widening scope, through righteous men:

a) Covenant with Noah, for all his family.

b) Alliance with Abrahamfor his entire clan.

c) Covenant with Moses, for all the people of Israel.

d) God offered the definitive Covenant, open to men and peoples of all times, revealing at the same time his own Being, his own intimacy: he did so by manifesting himself as Father and Son and Holy Spirit, through Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate Son of God.

Xenophanes, of Colophon (Asia Minor), who lived more than 90 years - between 550 and 450 B.C.E. -, according to Aristotle, was the first to teach the unity of the supreme principle among the ancient Greeks. He did so in these words: "One God, the greatest among gods and men, not like men either by form or by thought. He sees all, thinks all, hears all. Without work, he governs all by the power of his spirit.".

Aristotle, from Stagira, in the Greek Chalcidic peninsula (NE of the Balkan peninsula), lived between 384 and 322 B.C. For him, God is the highest entity, the entity par excellence, is a living being that is sufficient to itself, sees and discerns the being of the remaining entities in their totality; its proper activity is the supreme knowledge; only God has wisdom (sophia); men can only have a certain friendship with it (philosophy). God is the prime mover, who, without being moved, moves, that is, generates, promotes the passage of the other entities from potency to act. Aristotle's God is not the Creator, he is not part of nature (he is not like the natural entities, animals, plants... that are the object of study by Physics) but he is the key entity of nature and, therefore, his study corresponds to the first Philosophy or Metaphysics.

M.T. Cicero, from Arpinum (Italy), lived between 106 and 43 B.C. and studied the Greek philosophers in Athens. Between 45 and 44 B.C. he wrote the work "On the nature of the gods", in which he exposes the philosophical doctrines on the divine in force in his time (Epicureanism, Stoicism and New Academy) in the form of a dialogue between several characters. In this dialogue, one of the characters, the Stoic Balbo, asks the following questions:

Wouldn't it be surprising if there is someone convinced that certain particles of matter exist, dragged along by gravity and from whose collision such an elaborate and beautiful world is produced?

Who, seeing the regular movements of the seasons and the order of the stars, would be able to deny that these things had a rational plan and affirm that all this is the work of chance?

How can we doubt that all this is done for a reason and, moreover, for a reason that is transcendent and divine?

Can any sane person believe that the structure of all the stars and this enormous celestial decoration could have been created from a few atoms that run here and there in a fortuitous and random way? Can a being devoid of intelligence and reason have created these things?

Justin was a philosopher of the second century trained in Greek philosophy. After meeting and converting to Christianity and seeing in it the culmination of knowledge, he continued to practice the profession of philosopher. He saw that ancient Israel possessed a barbaric philosophy that God himself had used as a channel to make himself known. He thought that all men who had lived according to reason, before Christianity, had already been Christians: such were for him the cases of Socrates and Heraclitus. He also affirmed that Christianity, in his time, was hated and persecuted because it was badly known.

Augustine (354/430), reading in 372 a book by Cicero, acquired a great inclination to the search for wisdom. When he began to read the Bible he became disgusted, to the point of giving up reading it because he considered it hard and incomprehensible. He was initiated by then in the Manichean doctrine that promised him the truth and apparently gave him an explanation to the problem of evil. Hearing in Milan the sermons of St. Ambrose and his allegorical interpretation of the texts of the Old Testament, he verified the rationality of the Christian doctrine.

One afternoon, in the garden of his house, he heard a child saying, as part of a game or a song: "Take and read". Augustine then read the letter of St. Paul to the Romans, 13:13: "Let us behave decently, as in the daytime: no eating and drunkenness; no lust and debauchery; no rivalry and envy. Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ and do not concern yourselves with the flesh to gratify its lusts."

At the age of 32 (year 386), Augustine was converted; in his Confessions, he will say: "Late I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late I loved you! And You were within me and I was outside, and there I sought You; and, deformed, I burst into those beautiful things You did. You were with me and I was not with You. I was kept away from You by those very things that would not exist if they were not in You. You called, You cried out and broke my deafness. You shone, shimmered and ended my blindness. You diffused your fragrance and I sighed. I long for you. I tasted You and I hunger and thirst for You. You touched me and I was encouraged in your peace" (Conf. X, 26-36).

The central problem in Augustine's thought is that of happiness. For him, happiness is found in wisdom, in the knowledge of God. Faith seeks to understand; therefore, the conquest of wisdom requires a rigorous discipline, an advance in the moral, the intellectual and the spiritual. Having overcome his youthful presumption, Augustine understood divine authority and its mediations as a luminous guide to reason. His spirituality is based on the real Church (at the beginning, this universal and concrete community was made up of his mother Monica, Bishop Ambrose, his brother, his son and his friends). Over the years, he would become bishop of the universal Church in a diocese in Africa). Between the years 397 and 427 he wrote his work "Of Christian Doctrine", in which he indicates different ways of resolving the difficulties, derived from the letter of Scripture itself, of passages that are disconcerting for morality, in which case he points out the usefulness of exegesis or allegorical interpretation.

La entrada Los antiguos y la existencia de Dios se publicó primero en Omnes.

a) Man as he is.

b) Man as he could be if he were to realize his essential nature.

c) A set of ethical rules.

Ethical rules order the various virtues and prohibit their contrary vices by instructing us on how to realize our true nature and attain our true end.

These rules presuppose: a conception of the essence and purpose of man as a rational animal whose reason instructs us as to what our true purpose is and how to attain it.

For MacIntyre this scheme collapsed in the seventeenth century with the rise of the Protestant and Jansenist conception according to which original sin, by totally corrupting reason, deprived it of its capacity to understand the end of man. Since then, "strict limits are placed on the powers of reason. Reason is calculus; it can establish factual truths and mathematical relations, but nothing more. In the domain of practice, it can speak only of means. It must be silent about ends."

The philosophers of the Enlightenment, deprived of that normative and teleological conception of human nature, based their ethics on the categorical imperatives of practical reason (Kant) or on the maximization of pleasure (Hume). For MacIntyre, this failure, engendering Nietzsche and all modern irrationalism, leaves the current choice limited between the Aristotelian theory of virtues and irrationalist amoralism.

MacIntyre, after making a historical exposition of the valuation of human virtues (the supreme virtues in the heroic societies described by Homer: fortitude or loyalty; the virtues, such as love or humility, contributed by Christianity) opts for an ethics of virtues in accordance with the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, aware of the importance of rediscovering the value of human virtues.

The American philosopher Peter Kreeft (1937/-) attempts to show that natural science and philosophy are two distinct yet complementary orders of knowledge.

Science attempts to answer the question: what are the physical properties of things? Philosophy attempts to answer what is the ultimate nature of the real. Its most important questions:

-What is what it is, metaphysical question.

-What is this being who wonders about what he is, or, more simply, what is man, an anthropological question.

-What to do and what not to do, a question of an ethical nature.

-How do we know? is an epistemological question.

The answers to these questions depend on each other, they are intertwined. We cannot determine what conduct suits man if we do not know what man is, and what man is depends on what it is to be.

From Socrates until the beginning of the 20th century, the idea was maintained that the search for truth was one of man's noblest tasks and that reason was the main resource for that search.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, we have been witnessing the sowing of a Nietzschean way of thinking in which will prevails over reason: instead of trying to understand the real in order to better adapt ourselves, we are invited to create our own values and our own truths in order to impose them on the real. We are not to submit to the real, to what is, but rather to shape it according to our desires and ambitions using the powerful technologies that science puts at our disposal.

Human nature is conceived as a reality that can be modified according to the circumstances or preferences of each individual. Everything around us, including our body, is a raw material that can be manipulated at will.

The very notion of nature is abolished and replaced by the idea that it is up to each individual to define for himself what is natural and what is not, thus establishing a supreme cult of individual autonomy that finds one of its clearest expressions in the judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1992 in the case of "Planned Parenthood v. Casey" where the right of each individual to define his own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life was established.

This cult of human autonomy is at the origin of the rights to abortion and assisted suicide, which are recognized in many countries. According to one version of gender theory or ideology, in addition to denying that the human body has a nature, it affirms that we are male or female only to the extent that we consent to be so. The distinction between masculine and feminine in human beings would be purely arbitrary, a social construction resulting from power relations. This anthropology is dominated by the supremacy of subjectivity over objectivity.

Is it possible to perceive free will in human nature?

The idea that human beings lack free will finds its roots in the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. In both Melanchthon's "Loci communes" and Calvin's "Institution de la religion chrétienne," salvation has nothing to do with the practice of virtue, because it has nothing to do with human freedom. According to Melanchthon, virtuous conduct can contribute nothing to eternal salvation, because such conduct is nothing more than a happy consequence of salvation by faith in which God alone intervenes.

This Protestant interpretation has opened the way to scientific materialism, which points out that man is an integral part of the natural world and cannot free himself from the universal determinism that governs the world of nature. To admit the existence of free will would be tantamount to denying the universality of the principle of causality and, therefore, scientific laws.

For Kreeft, our choices, even if not determined, are influenced by numerous external factors (the social or physical environment), bodily (heredity) or spiritual (motivations). In any case, it is possible to resist these influences or temptations.

The social and human sciences help us to discover not only the causes that mechanically determine human behavior, but also the factors that condition or favor it.

La entrada Sobre el ser humano, su naturaleza y las virtudes se publicó primero en Omnes.

Polybius of Megalopolis

Polybius of Megalopolis observed a cyclical character in those political forms that the polis used to adopt: monarchy used to degenerate into tyranny; this was opposed by the aristocrats who, in turn, used to degenerate into oligarchy; this was opposed by the people with democracy which used to degenerate into demagogy and back to square one.

But Polybius saw that in Rome This did not happen because its constitution combined the monarchy (the consuls), the aristocracy (the senate) and the people (the elections).

Álvaro D'Ors, in his Introduction to Cicero's "The Laws", synthesizes the thought of this author as follows: "The constitution which Cicero judges perfect in his "De republica", and for which he comes to propose his leges, is, in reality, the same republican constitution of Rome, without the shadows cast upon it by the political reality of his time....".

"The virtue of that constitution lay, as Polybius had already pointed out - who, as an outsider, perhaps knew how to judge it better than the Romans themselves, and, in fact, the latter began to appreciate it in the footsteps of Polybius' praise - in its mixed character...".

Also remember that, "Within Roman juridical life a distinction was imposed between the lex, which contained a decision of the populus romanus gathered in the comitial assemblies, and the ius, which was that which was considered just according to the authority of the prudent (iuri consulti)".

Current political forms

These ideas help us to see that the ancients knew very useful things: for example, that the current political organizations, in the best cases, independently of their denomination - they define themselves as democracies and States of Law -, in reality, are mixed forms of government. As for their law, it is a mixture of the socially dominant legal consciousness of each period, of the interests of the elites of each society and of what remains of the virtues and values professed by relevant ancestors.

José Orlandis, in his work "On the origins of the Spanish nation", remembers that, with "the diocese of Spain", created by Diocletian, around the year 300, a certain higher organic unity had been initiated in which the Hispanic provinces of the Roman Empire were integrated.

But the decisive period for the formation of Spain was the VI and VII centuries and the agent that agglutinated the dispersed elements and gave them a unitary conscience of homeland and nation was a Germanic people..., the Visigothic people, as the Catalan historian Ramón de Abadal had already affirmed. It was that Spain to which St. Isidore dedicated his famous Lauds: "Thou art the fairest of all the lands that stretch from the West to India, O Spain, sacred and happy mother of princes and peoples!". This Isidorian Spain was the great western kingdom of the 7th century, the only Mediterranean power worthy of comparison with the Byzantine Empire.

The Visigothic monarchical system failed in practice because it lacked a widely recognized and respected dynastic kingship. The scriptural wisdom of the Hispanic ecclesiastical fathers, trying to give prestige to the Visigothic monarchy, found an ideal precedent in the biblical monarchs of the kingdom of Israel, in the figure of the anointed king of God.

The Visigoth monarchs were thus the first anointed kings of the West. But this sacral legitimacy did not prevent the struggle for power between political and family clans. The confrontation between the families of Chindasvinto and Wamba left its mark on the last four decades of the life of Visigothic Spain and ended up precipitating the destruction of that monarchy. The experience would advise for the future that the monarchic system should be hereditary and be endowed with a precise succession system and procedure.

Charles Louis de Secondat

Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689/1755) was educated in a Catholic school, studied law in Bordeaux and Paris and married a French Protestant woman. In 1728 he undertook travels in Austria, Hungary, Italy, southern Germany and Romania; and in 1729 he left for London where he stayed for about two years.

A great lover of history, he is a writer of clear language. Close to the mentality of the Enlightenment, he did not share with them the idea of constant human progress. He recognized great importance to the customs so his rationalist vision is very nuanced. In 1734 he published his "Considerations on the causes of the greatness and decadence of the Romans".

In 1748 he published in Geneva "The spirit of the laws".in which he wrote that "if the executive power were entrusted to a certain number of persons drawn from the legislative body there would no longer be liberty because the two powers would be united, since the same persons would sometimes have, and could always have, a part in each other".

In this book he also says that men can make history, which does not consist of an inexorable and fatal course, but becomes intelligible through laws. For Montesquieu, the ideal laws would be based on the natural equality of men and would promote solidarity among them.

In a state there are three powers: the legislative, the executive and the judiciary. These powers embody, respectively, as in the classical doctrine of the mixed form of government, the three social forces: people, monarchy and aristocracy. There is freedom when power contains power. Therefore, the three powers, legislative, executive and judicial, must not be concentrated in the same hands. No power should be unlimited.

Political forms in Montesquieu

Decentralization also occupies a prominent place in Montesquieu's thought: intermediate bodies, such as provinces, municipalities or the nobility, insofar as they possess their own - not delegated - powers, constitute a check on central power, especially in states with a monarchical form of government.

As for the forms of government, he established a correlation between the psychological conditions of each people and the different forms of government that he distinguished:

a) The republic exists where virtue prevails, especially disinterestedness and austerity, and in cold countries where passions are not very ardent. It is based on equality. It can be aristocratic if it governs with a certain number of people moved by moderation and it can be democratic if power is exercised by the citizens as a whole. This form of government can prosper in states of small territorial extension.

b) The monarchy is the government of only one according to fundamental laws that are exercised thanks to intermediate powers. It prevails where the feeling of honor or conscience of rights and duties abounds according to the rank of each one and the love to the social distinctions. It prevails in temperate countries. It is based on the differences and inequalities freely accepted. It is the most suitable form of government for states of average territorial extension.

c) The despotic government is the one in which only one rules capriciously, without abiding by the laws. Its principle is fear and implies the equality of all under the despot. It is the most suitable form of government for an empire of great territorial extension.

La entrada Lecciones políticas de los antiguos se publicó primero en Omnes.

St. Athanasius, his friend, called him on several occasions the great, the confessor of Christ, the venerable old man. The historian Eusebius of Caesarea says of him that Constantine considered him the most eminent Christian personage of his time.

Consecrated bishop of Cordoba in 295, he attended the Council of Elvira in 300 and, three years later, was confessor of the faith during the persecution of Maximian.

At the court of Constantine

From 312-313 he was at the court of Constantine as an adviser on religious matters. Eusebius of Caesarea says that the vision that Constantine had in dreams before the victory of the Milvian Bridge, was the one that determined him to call to his side the priests of that God, in whose sign it had been manifested to him that he would win. Their influence in the conversion of Constantine and his doctrinal instruction must have been decisive.

Between 312-325 Osius constantly accompanied the emperor's court. He must have inspired the Edict of Milan (which granted Christians complete freedom and the return of the buildings that had been confiscated from them and the ecclesiastical immunity granted to the clergy), the repeal of the Roman decree against celibacy, the edict aimed at the manumission of slaves in the Church and the authorization for Christian communities to receive donations and legacies.

St. Augustine, in his work against the Donatist Parmenianus, reminded the survivors of the Donatist heresy that, thanks to the bishop of Cordoba, the penalties against them had been less severe than could have been foreseen at first. At the Councils of Rome in 313 and Arles in 314, the Donatists had been condemned and their theory that the validity of the sacraments depended on the dignity of the minister had been rejected (the schism had arisen from the challenge to the ordination of Caecilian under the pretext that his consecrator Felix was a traditor - an accusation that later proved false - and that he had therefore lost the power of order).

The Donatists did not accept the decisions of the two councils and therefore the emperor intervened and in 316 declared Cecilian innocent and ordered to confiscate the churches to the Donatists. These measures had to be moderated in 321. Osius must have advised the emperor in these measures.

A Greek school that excessively cultivated exegesis and dialectics without due depth and a series of erroneous deductions led the Alexandrian priest Arius -the most genuine representative of that school- to affirm that the Son begotten by the Father could not have the same substance nor be eternal like Him.

Osius and St. Athanasius

In 324, Osius was sent by Constantine to Alexandria and was hosted by the bishop of Alexandria, Alexander. At that time the friendship between Osius and Athanasius, then deacon, began.

Osius, impressed by the gravity of the situation, since it was nothing less than the denial of the Divinity of the Word, returns to the court of Constantine (then in Nicomedia), convinced of the orthodoxy of the teachings of Bishop Alexander. It is likely that he advised Constantine to convene a Council.

Osius attended the Council of Nicaea, whose sessions he presided over, probably in the name of the Pope, with the Roman priests Vitus and Valens. According to St. Athanasius, Osius was largely responsible for the proposal to include the term homousion, consubstantial, in the Nicene Symbol. And not only that; St. Athanasius, eyewitness, expressly affirms that the redactor of the Nicene Creed was Osius.

In 343 he presided over the Council of Sardica, in which an attempt was made to return to the unity broken by the Arians. But these did not accept the peace proposals, almost all of which were aimed at avoiding ecclesiastical ambitions, and they withdrew from the council and declared Osius and Pope Julius I deposed.

Defender of the faith before Constantius

Constantius, son of Constantine, when his brother Constantius died in 350, began to apply in his dominions the religious policy already followed in the East, of frank sympathy towards the Arians. Two Arian bishops - Ursacius and Valens - induced Constantius to banish Pope Liberius and to attack Osius.

Constantius wrote to Osius ordering him to appear before him (the emperor was in Milan). Osius appeared before Constantius, who pestered him to communicate with the Arians and write against the Orthodox. But, as Athanasius wrote, the elder... rebuked Constantius and dissuaded him from his attempt, immediately returning to his homeland and his Church.

Later the emperor wrote to him again with threats, to which Osius replied with a letter in which, among other things, he said to Constantius: "I confessed Christ once, when your grandfather Maximianus aroused persecution. And if you persecute me, I am ready to suffer everything rather than shed innocent blood and be a traitor to the truth... Believe me, Constantius, to me, who by age could have been your grandfather... Why do you suffer Valens and Ursacius, who in a moment of repentance confessed in writing the calumny they had raised?

Fear the day of judgment and keep yourself pure for it. Do not meddle in the affairs of the Church nor command us in matters in which you are to be instructed by us. To you God gave the empire; to us he entrusted the Church. It is written: 'Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's'. Therefore, it is not lawful for us to have dominion on earth, nor do you, O king, have power over holy things...".

Again the emperor intimated Osius to appear in his presence. The aged Osius set out on his journey and, about the summer of 356 or 357, arrived at Sirmium, where he met Constantius. Here Constantius confined him for a whole year, during which, according to the testimony of several Arians who composed Constantius' clique (Germinius, Ursacius, Valens, and Potamius, who were in Sirmium), Osius yielded to Arianism.

Death of Osio

St. Athanasius was then among the monks of Egypt and St. Hilary was exiled in the political diocese of Asia. In writings of these Fathers the idea, propagated by the Arians, is collected, which invites the suspicion that such writings were interpolated by Arians or their authors echoed what was said by the Arians who witnessed the events. In one of the writings of Athanasius, probably interpolated, it is said: "Constantius made so much force to the elder Osius and detained him so long at his side that, oppressed this one, he communicated with difficulty with the henchmen of Valensius and Ursacius, but he did not subscribe against Athanasius. But the old man did not forget this, for being about to die, he declared as in testament that he had been forced and anathematized the Arian heresy and exhorted that no one should receive it."

The name has been written in Latin, Hosius, derived, apparently, from the Greek Osios (saint), but the manuscript transmission gives Ossius, which leads to the Spanish form Osio.

Osius' whole life was concentrated on the defense of Catholic doctrine by word and action. This probably explains the scarcity of his literary production. We have preserved a beautiful letter full of integrity, addressed to Emperor Constantius in 354, of which some paragraphs have been reproduced above. According to St. Isidore, he also left an epistle to his sister in praise of virginity (De laude virginitatis) and a work on the interpretation of priestly vestments in the Old Testament (De interpretatione vestium sacerdotalium), which did not reach us.

His death must have taken place in the winter of 357/358. The Greek Church venerates him on August 27.

La entrada El obispo Osio y su relación con Constantino se publicó primero en Omnes.

The anguish suffered by the French because of the war was also experienced by her since, in her youth, in her hometown she suffered the terror of the Burgundians and various bandits.

As a peasant, she soon became accustomed to the hard work of her rural environment. With no more education than elementary Christianity, typical of those simple people, she knew how to weave and spin; she also knew how to ride a horse and rode it in the races of her village.

When she was twelve years old, she heard, next to the church, a voice accompanied by a radiance, which told her to frequent the house of God more, to be virtuous and to trust in the protection of Heaven.

When she was seventeen or eighteen, in 1428, those voices, which she attributed to the archangel St. Michael, accompanied by St. Catherine and St. Margaret, became more imperative ("Leave your village, daughter of God, and run to France! Take your banner and raise it bravely! You will lead the Dauphin to Reims, so that he may be worthily consecrated there! You will free France from the English!") and she decided to obey them, thus giving rise to her incredible adventure.

Saving the kingdom of France did not then seem to have any chance of being realized. The struggle between France and England had been going on for more than ninety years. Only five years earlier, the last two major armies in the Dauphin's service had been shattered. No human intervention seemed possible. Pope Martin V himself, besides being close to his death, was busy putting some order in the Church divided by the schism.

However, that poor young woman was able to attract to her mission, in the first place, a valiant royal officer, who had begun by laughing at the shepherdess, and ended by giving her his sword, his horse and his escort. When she reached Chinon, the locality where the Dauphin had taken refuge, she recognized the latter, who had concealed his condition, by slyly placing himself among his courtiers. And, after being examined in Poitiers by a commission of priests and doctors, she began her military epic: on May 8, 1429, she entered the besieged Orleans, and, after forcing the besiegers to lift the siege, she entered the city with troops hitherto accustomed to continuous defeats. Then, in a few weeks, the clearing of the Loire valley took place, the victory of Patay was achieved -on June 18- and the march on Reims took place, through a region controlled by the English. On July 17 took place, in the basilica of Reims, the consecration of the Dauphin that would make him king of France.

On May 24, 1430, it was captured in Compiègne by the Burgundians, who sold it to the English for 10,000 escudos of gold. The English chose as chief judge Peter Chaucon, Bishop of Beauvais, puppet man of the Burgundians and mortal enemy of the royal party. The prisoner was denied the services of a lawyer. As Joan's attitude won admiration and sympathy among those present, the trial was held behind closed doors inside the prison. She was condemned as a heretic and handed over to the civil power who condemned her to be burned alive.

In the process, which lasted from February to May 1430, there was a previous will to condemn the accused, showing that the voices she heard were diabolical, thus discrediting the new King Charles VII.

A Church historian -Daniel Rops-, values Joan of Arc's patriotism in this way: In God he loved France, as the saints loved the poor and sinners in God; and he loved her precisely because he saw her as miserable, torn, sinful, and he loved her with a love of redemption. There was nothing proud or aggressive in this love; he never spoke of going to conquer England, nor of imposing his domination on anyone. He never thought that, in doing what he was doing, he was filling his country with glory and that his exploits would give him the right to command others. He fought for God's reign of justice and for no other cause: Does God hate the English, they will ask him, setting a trap for him. Not at all. He loves them as much as any other people, but in their land, according to equity, and not when they infringe on the liberties of others. Joan was not so much fighting the English as she was fighting injustice. No heroine on the battlefield ever showed herself so tender and fraternal with her own enemies.

Another historian -Jose A. Dunney- said that, When she took up the sword, France was a defeated nation; but, before dying, a martyr of truth, Joan rescued her beloved country from the clutches of the invader and saved it from schism. Had the French been defeated, they would have joined the victor, England, and then the heretical House of Tudor would have found support in the French Huguenots to extirpate the influence of the Church.

When, on May 30, 1431, he went to the stake on the old market square in Rouen, he proclaimed to the end his fidelity to the Pope, to whom he addressed his last appeal.

Four years after Joan's martyrdom, France and Burgundy were reconciled by the Treaty of Arras; the following year, Paris fell into the hands of the Burgundians and, shortly after, the English crossed the Channel and returned to their homeland.

She was canonized in 1920, Pope Benedict XV.

La entrada Sobre Juana de Arco se publicó primero en Omnes.

One of the best known is that of David and Jonathan. This endearing friendship, probably the best example of friendship in the Old Testament, was confronted by Saul, Jonathan's father, who envied David to the point of ordering his assassination, so that David had to flee from the court. When he found out, Jonathan - Saul's eldest son and heir - sided with his friend David.

Saul, rejected by God and killed on the battlefield against the Philistines, lost the throne, which passed to David, the new king.

Another famous friendship is that of Pylades and Orestes. Clytemnestra, unfaithful wife of Agamemnonsent his son Orestes - so that he would not witness his infidelity - to the care of King Strophios of Phocis. Orestes grew up there in friendship with Pylades, son of the king. On his return from Troy, Agamemnon was killed by Aegisthus, his wife's lover.

Orestes, with the help of Pylades, killed Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, after which the two sailed to the borders of Scythia. Arriving in the country of Tauros, Orestes fell to the ground affected by his usual madness and lay on the ground; Pylades wiped off the foam and cared for his body.

Each of them offered to save the life of the other. In the end, both were saved, and Orestes reigned in Mycenae and Pylades in Electra.

Other close friendships were those between Roland and Oliveros and between Amis and Amilis, in the time of Charlemagne.

Closer to us, Ratzinger has left us some luminous ideas about faith, as a superior form of love, in many of his works, among others in his Introduction to Christianity. And I would like to recall here some of those ideas that have not lost their relevance.

In the leaden solitude of a world orphaned of God, in its inner boredom, the search for the divine has reemerged. In the face of the somber and devastating ecstasy of drugs, of asphyxiating rhythms, of noise and drunkenness, we find the diaphanous light and the admirable discovery of the sun of God.

The future is built where men meet each other with convictions capable of shaping life. And the good future grows where these convictions come from the truth and lead to it.

There are, however, some scandals for the life of faith today:

-The distance between the visible (what surrounds us, the palpable reality) and the invisible (God, faith).

- The distance between progress (that which drives toward the future) and tradition (faith as something of the past, even in the clothing of the religious).

Every human person has to take a stand in some way in the area of fundamental decisions, and this can only be done in the form of faith. There is an area in which there is no other response than that of faith, which no one can avoid. Every human being has to believe in some way.

But what is faith properly speaking?

Faith is a way of situating the human being in the face of reality.

Man does not only live on the bread of the feasible; he lives on the word, on love, on meaning. Meaning is the bread on which man feeds in his innermost being. Orphaned of word, of meaning and of love, he falls in the "life is no longer worth living", even if you live in extraordinary comfort.

Believing in Christ "It means trusting in meaning, which sustains me and the world, considered as the firm foundation on which I can stand without fear".

Therefore, it cannot be denied that the Christian faith constitutes a double affront to the predominant attitude in the world today... The primacy of the invisible over the visible and of receiving over doing, runs in the complete opposite direction to the predominant situation today.

But faith does not mean placing oneself blindly in the hands of the irrational. On the contrary, it means approaching the "logos", the ratio, the meaning and, therefore, the truth itself.

Christian faith is much more than an option in favor of the spiritual foundation of the world. Its key statement does not say I believe in something, but rather I believe in something. "I believe in you", in the immediate and vigorous character of his union... with the Father, in Jesus, the witness of God, through whom the intangible becomes tangible and the distant becomes near; he is not a pure and simple witness... he is the presence of the eternal in this world. In his life, in the unreserved surrender of his being to mankind, the meaning of the world is made present.

"Are you really...?". The honesty of thought compels us to ask ourselves these questions even though to very few the divine manifests itself in an evident way.

La entrada Amistades históricas y la fe según Ratzinger se publicó primero en Omnes.

C.S. Lewis and the Art of Love

Our imitation of God in this life has to be an imitation of the incarnate God: our model is Jesus. He of Calvary, of the workshop, of the roads, of the crowds, of the clamorous demands and harsh enmities, of the lack of peace and quiet, of the continually interrupted. All this, so strangely different from what we might think of as the divine life in itself, but so similar to what the life of the incarnate God was.

In the beauty of nature C.S. Lewis found a meaning to the words glory of God: "I do not see how the phrase "fear of God" could say anything to me if it had not been for the contemplation of certain imposing and inaccessible cliffs; and if nature had not awakened in me certain longings, immense areas of what is called "love of God" would not have existed in me". 

Those who do not love those who live in the same town, the neighbors they often see, will hardly come to love the people they have not come to see. It is not love to love one's children only if they are good, one's wife only if she is physically well preserved, one's husband only as long as he is successful. Every love has its art of loving.

As Ovid said, "if you want to be loved, be kind". C.S. Lewis says that some women are likely to have few suitors and some men are likely to have few friends, because they have nothing or little to offer them. But he says that almost anyone can become the object of affection because there need not be anything manifestly valuable between those whom affection unites.

Affection

Affection is the most humble love, it does not give itself importance; it lives in the realms of the private and the simple. The best affection does not wish to hurt or dominate or humiliate. The better the affection, the more it is right in tone and timing.

Affection, besides being a love in itself, can become part of other loves and color them completely. Without affection, the other loves might not fare so well.

Befriending someone is not the same as being affectionate with him, but when our friend has become an old friend, everything about him becomes familiar. Affection teaches us to observe the people who are there, then to put up with them, then to smile at them, then to like them, and finally to appreciate them.

God and his saints love what is unlovable. Affection can love what is unattractive, it does not expect too much, it turns a blind eye to the faults of others, it easily recovers after a quarrel, as it is kind, it forgives. It discovers the good that we might not have seen or that, without it, we might not have appreciated.

Affection produces happiness if there is, and only if there is, common sense, honesty and justice, that is, if something more is added to mere affection. Justice, honesty and common sense stimulate affection when it declines. As in all love, affection needs kindness, patience and self-denial, which can elevate the affection itself above itself.

Courtesy

There is a difference between courtesy that is required in public and domestic courtesy. The basic principle for both is the same: "that no one should give himself any kind of preference". In public, a code of behavior is followed. At home, one must live by what is expressed in that code, otherwise one will experience the overwhelming triumph of whoever is more selfish. Those who forget their manners when they come home after a social gathering do not really live a true courtesy here either, they only imitate those who live it.

The more familiar the meeting is, the less formality there is; but that does not mean that the need for education is less. At home, anything can be said in the right tone, at the right moment, a tone and moment that have been designed not to hurt and, in fact, do not hurt.                                                                         

Who has not found himself in the uncomfortable situation of being a guest at a family table where the father or mother has treated his or her grown-up child with a discourtesy that, if addressed to any other young person, would have meant simply ending all relations between them? Certain defects in the family politeness of adults provide an easy answer to the questions: why are they always away, why do they like any house better than their own home?

Friendship

Few value friendship because there are few who experience it. Indeed, we can live without friendship, without friends. Without conjugal love or eros, none of us who live would have been engendered and, without affection, we could not have grown and developed. But we can live and grow without friends.  

Friendship is the world of freely chosen relationships. Friendship is selective, it is the affair of a few. I have no obligation to be anyone's friend and no human being in the world has a duty to be mine. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like the artThe universe itself, because God did not need to create.

Each member of the circle of friends, in his intimacy, feels small before all the others. Sometimes he wonders what he is doing among them. He feels lucky, lucky to be in their company without merit. Although for some people today, behaviors that do not show an animal origin are suspicious, friendship is the least biological of all loves.

If lovers are usually face to face (love between a man and a woman is necessarily between two people), on the other hand, friends go side by side sharing a common interest and two, far from being the number required by friends, is not even the best. True friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends are happy when they are joined by a third... a fourth....

Beyond partnership

A forerunner of friendship is found in the companionship of clubs, gatherings, etc. But friendship arises outside the mere companionship, when two or more companions discover that they have in common some ideas or interests or, simply, some tastes that the others do not share and that until that moment each one thought that it was his own and only treasure or his cross. For that reason, the typical expression with which a friendship is usually initiated can be something like this: "What, you too? I thought I was the only one.

In friendship, it is not a matter of always acting solemnly. God, who made healthy laughter, forbids it. As someone said, "Man, please your Maker, may you be content and not give a damn about the world."

La entrada El amor en C. S. Lewis se publicó primero en Omnes.

Only the one who loves participates in love and drinks from its very source and, thus, "the absolutely Other" becomes close because in every true loving relationship God appears: true love is not a relationship between one person and another, but rather a person-God-person relationship; God is "the Common Denominator".

The book by the famous Danish author is divided into a first part, which deals with the origin of love, and a second part, which deals with the characteristics of love.

It begins with a prayer in which, among other things, it states:

"How could love be rightly spoken of if You were forgotten, O God, from whom all love in heaven and on earth proceeds, You who bargained nothing, but gave all for love... You who revealed what love is!"

In the first part he says that love springs from within man in the same way that a lake is nourished by a hidden spring. This spring is infinite because it is God himself.

Love in the world manifests itself temporarily, but its source is eternal. God is continually sustaining us with his loving action. If this love were to withdraw for a single instant, everything would return to chaos.

In the second part, he deepens the idea that lovingly keeping the memory of the deceased in memory constitutes the act of human love. "more selfless"the freest and most faithful of all.

That is why Kierkegaard advises: "Thus remember the deceased and you will learn to love the living with an unselfish, free and faithful love". 

Eternity and freedom

The works of love manifest the eternity of God and are proof of his existence. Out of love, God creates, incarnates himself and manifests himself to mankind.

Our love makes us similar to Him and makes us sharers in His life, for it is "the fountain of water springing up to eternal life".  

God has granted us freedom because only a free love is true love. To Him we owe a correspondence of absolute love. There is only one being whom man can love more than himself. This being is none other than God, whom one must love not as oneself, but with all one's heart, with all one's soul and with all one's mind.

As the origin of love is hidden "the secret life of love is known by its fruits", for the works.

We can only speak of true works of love when it is the love of God that moves us to act from the depths of our being. Although good works are not always a reflection of love, love is manifested in good works.

For Kierkegaard we can only be authentic Christians if we become singular persons and are willing to suffer for the truth.

Instead, mediocrity, worldly intelligence, "it is eternally excluded and abhorred in heaven, more than any vice and crime, for in its essence it belongs, more than anything else to this vile world and more than anything else it is estranged from heaven and the eternal!"

There is an enormous distance between Greek eros and the Christian agape that appears with the New Testament.

The first is a love of desire that tends to the possession of the beloved person; in agape, the other is loved as other, the lover rejoices in the existence of the beloved person and wants his or her good.

The person close to whom we love is not an abstract being but a concrete being whom the circumstances of life have placed close to us. We must love him or her as ourselves.  

Christian love and pagan love

Love has a double object: the good that is wanted and the subject for whom that good is wanted. 

True, Christian love is respectful of the loved one because it wants the good for him/her and has a divine foundation, it never grows old because it is not according to the flesh but according to the spirit, it is not finite but infinite.

To love truly is a duty, that duty makes abnegation the essential form of Christianity; to love is to obey the divine law that commands to love for love of God, not for love of duty, as in Kant.

Pagan love is selfish and possessive, it does not spring from the eternal spring nor is it bound to eternity, it is the child of temporality; it is a rebellious love against Love, it fights against all dependence, it recognizes neither renunciation nor abnegation nor duty. It is an outdated love.

If a person ceases to love, it is a very clear sign that he has never loved. Mediocrity and worldly intelligence are eternally excluded from heaven because they belong essentially to the world that is out of date.

The human person attains his self by self-realizing himself as unique before God. To despair consists in wanting to be what one is not and in not wanting to be what one is.

The aesthetic man is not yet an individual; the ethical man begins to present the characteristics of the singular individual and begins to be in a position to discover the truth.

The first condition of religiosity is to be a singular individual because it is impossible to build or be built up en masse, even more impossible than to be in love en masse. ("My point of view on my activity as a writer", 1848).

If we become unique people, willing to suffer for the truth, we can aspire to be authentic Christians.

La entrada El amor según Kierkegaard se publicó primero en Omnes.

He is already famous as a teacher of Latin and Greek, for Vives is excellent in both languages... Who teaches better, more effectively and more charmingly than he? Erasmus replied to More: I am pleased to see that your opinion of Vives coincides with mine. Vives is one of those who will eclipse the name of Erasmus...I appreciate you the more precisely because he likes you too. Vives is a powerful philosophical mind.

Another significant piece of writing by Vives during these years is his Aedes legum (1520), an eloquent testimony of his concern for the Philosophy of Law.

In the summer of 1520 Erasmus arrived in Bruges with Charles V's entourage and Thomas More was also there, as a member of Henry VIII's royal council, when an alliance with Charles V against Francis I of France was being prepared. It was then that Erasmus introduced Thomas More to Juan Luis Vives. Erasmus was preparing an edition of the works of St. Augustine and had asked Vives to revise the text and write the commentaries to the Civitas Deiof St. Augustine. Vives began in January 1521 the work with a great variety of codices, plagued with deletions, additions and changes, and indicated in many passages the most truthful version. In these CommentsVives surpassed all those who had gone before him and, in spite of his fatigue, had the satisfaction "of consecrating something of his studies to St. Augustine and indirectly to Christ".

In a eulogy that Moro would make to those comments, Moro's attunement with Vives is revealed: it is as if a common star wanted to unite our souls by means of a secret power".

After the death of De Croy in 1521, Vives sought the help of More to obtain the patronage of Queen Catherine and, in July of that year, Vives informed Erasmus that he had been taken under the protection of the Queen Consort of England.

In 1522 Vives, invited by the University of Alcalá to take the chair of Humanities, vacant after the death of Nebrija, did not accept. On October 12, 1522 he addressed a letter to Pope Adrian VI, to which this significant title is given: De Europae statu ac tumultibus. In it Vives expresses his concern for peace and his awareness of the historical reality of Europe.

In January 1523, Vives wrote to his friend Cranevelt: "It seems that my father is involved in a fierce trial involving our family property; I have three sisters, now orphaned and destitute... I am more and more worried with such news... I do not know whether it is wiser to go there or to remain here."

On 10-5-1523, Vives wrote to Cranevelt and Erasmus announcing his plan to travel to Spain via England, making it clear that he had arrived at such a decision with great doubts, only because he saw such a trip as an inexcusable obligation. Two days later he arrived in England in a pitiful state of mind: "everything is very dark and the night haunts me. I am trying to withdraw into an innocent silence". He never made the trip to Spain.

In that year 1523 Vives dedicated to Catalina his treatise De Institutione Feminae Christanae. In August he was promoted, by the chancellor of England Wolsey as professor of Latin, Greek and rhetoric in the Corpus Christi College, in Oxford, founded in 1516 as an Erasmist adaptation for England of the University of Alcalá. At that College, medieval theological authorities were replaced by patristic ones (especially Jerome, Augustine, John Chrysostom and Origen).  

In October 1523 the king and queen arrived in Oxford, visited Vives and invited him to spend the next Christmas at Windsor Castle. Vives had just finished writing his pedagogical treatise From Ratione studii pueriliVives' work, a study plan for the seven-year-old princess Maria, which he offered and dedicated to Queen Catherine. During that vacation, the queen found in Vives a good and loyal friend. From Oxford, on 25-1-1524, Vives wrote to Cranevelt: "the queen, one of the purest and most Christian souls I have ever seen. Lately, when we were sailing in a skiff to a monastery of virgins, the conversation fell on adversity and prosperity in life. The queen said, "If I could choose between the two, I would prefer a suitable mixture of both: neither total adversity nor complete prosperity. And if I were forced to choose between these extremes, I would rather have everything adverse to me than too prosperous, for people in misfortune need only some comfort while the prosperous too often lose their heads." His lessons at Oxford lasted until April 1524.

On April 24 Vives returned to Bruges and on May 26, the feast of Corpus Christi, Juan Luis Vives, 32, and Margarita Valdaura, 19, married and went to live in the house of Margarita's mother, the widow Clara Cervent, who needed constant care because of her health condition.

By order of Henry VIII Vives had to return to England in October, which he did on the 2nd of that month. He returned without Margarita, who stayed in Bruges taking care of her mother. In January 1525 he returned to his chair of Humanities. At the beginning of May Vives left Oxford, never to return, and from there he went to London, where he stayed for a week or two in the company of Thomas More. On May 10 he returned to Bruges, where Marguerite was suffering from an eye infection, from which she was cured shortly afterwards. Her mother-in-law's illness prevented her from returning to England in October, and she remained in Bruges until February 1526.

At the request of Charles V's ambassador to England, Vives began his social tract De subventione Pauperum, published in 1526. It is an investigation on the causes of social injustice and a manual on public welfare and the education of the poor and handicapped. It did not reach the Platonic idealization of Moro's Utopia, but it surpasses it in the pragmatism of the program. Vives sees in human miseries the result of the errors and vices of men, among them in a special way the madness of wars.

On October 8, Vives wrote to Henry VIII encouraging him about the reconciliation of all Christian princes. But, in the play of Wolsey's alliance with France against the emperor, Juan Luis Vives was beginning to be frowned upon at the English court, as Wolsey worked to isolate Catherine, alienate his pro-Hispanic courtiers from Henry, and remove Vives from his professorship at Oxford. In this dark period, Vives found a loyal supporter in T. More, whom Erasmus called the man of all seasons. At T. More's house, Vives befriended Thomas's sons-in-law and daughters and the elite of the London intelligentsia. There he met, among others, John Fisher. In More, Vives saw the ideal figure of the new times: a layman of deep Christian faith, respected head of a family, servant of his king and a brilliantly educated intellectual.

In May 1526, Vives was in Bruges writing the dialogue De Europae desidiis et beautiful Turkish. And he remained there until April 1527. At the end of April he sailed from Calais; but Marguerite's anxiety forced him to return to Bruges. The queen begged Vives to return to England to begin his task as Latin teacher to Princess Mary. King Henry had in turn asked Vives to send him a copy of the Adagia He was asked by Erasmus to prepare a reply to a letter from Luther dated September 1525, in which Henry was presented as a victim of the Roman episcopate of England. On July 13, from Bruges, John Louis wrote to Henry sending him the copy of the requested book and informing him that he had prepared an opuscule, in answer to Luther (opuscule that has not been found yet).

On July 4, 1527, Wolsey tried to convince John Fisher that a declaration of invalidity of the marriage between Henry and Catherine was feasible. The treaty of Amiens (4 -VIII- 1527), by which England allied with France against the emperor, meant the doom of Catherine and the beginning of the misfortunes of Vives in Great Britain. Nevertheless, at the beginning of October, fulfilling the promise given to Catherine, Vives returned to England to teach Latin to Princess Mary. In January 1528, Vives wrote to Cranevelt telling him that he was closely watched and, in early February, Wolsey dared to question Vives about his private conversations with Catherine and demanded a written statement from him explaining his part in the plan to inform the pope, through the Spanish ambassador Inigo de Mendoza, about the queen's situation.

Vives did so immediately. In noble and dignified style, he lamented that his human rights -humanum ius- were violated by forcing him to break the secrecy of his private conversations with the queen. It was true that the queen had found in him, her compatriot, a person to whom she could confide her problems. According to Vives, the queen was only complaining about the separation from Henry, a man she loved more than herself. And Vives said: Who can reproach me for listening to a sad and unfortunate woman, for speaking to her with sympathy, for consoling a queen of such noble ancestry whose parents were also my own natural sovereigns? Vives admitted that, at the request of the queen, sanctissima Matron, he himself asked the Spanish ambassador to write to Charles V and the Pope about His Majesty's case. This statement prompted Wolsey to confine Vives to the house of a counselor along with the Spanish ambassador, a confinement that lasted 38 days (from February 25 to April 1, 1528). Fearing reprisals from the emperor, Vives was released on condition that he never set foot in the royal palace again. The queen sent him a messenger recommending him to leave England.

Already in Bruges, in May, he wrote a letter to Erasmus asking him to try something for the cause of Catherine, to which the Dutchman reacted with this unpleasant and unfortunate annotation: Far be it from me to involve myself in the quarrel of Jupiter and Juno. I would rather give every Jupiter two Junos than tear one from him.

In November 1528, Henry VIII guaranteed Catherine the help of two lawyers from Flanders and one of his own choice to assist him in the examination of the process of her marriage by the special legate of Clement VII, Cardinal Campeggio. Catherine appointed Vives, the only Spaniard whom Henry had not explicitly excluded. On November 17, 1528, Vives crossed the channel again with Catherine's two Flemish lawyers and tried to convince the queen to desist from any defense, which he considered a waste of time and a continuation of Henry's sinister game. The queen was very discouraged at first, until she came to show her distance from Vives whose attitude she interpreted as resignation and cowardice. Vives commented it with his friend Juan Vergara: The queen was angry with me because I did not want to put myself immediately at her orders. A few days later, Vives left England forever, lonely, discouraged, bitter and, as an enemy of the king and disobedient to the queen, he was deprived by both of them of the royal pension.

In January 1529, in his treatise De officio maritipaid a warm tribute to Catherine's virtues: "Every time I think of such a woman, I feel ashamed of myself. Among all the examples of fortitude in the midst of adversity that history has offered us, not one can compare with Catherine's truly virile fortitude in the midst of the most adverse circumstances....

Finally, the opinion of Vives ended up prevailing. In May 1529 the trial of the royal marriage began in the presence of Campeggio, Wolsey and several English bishops. There, in June, Catherine proclaimed aloud before Henry her uncompromising love for him and asked him to go no further. Erasmus was blind to Henry's injustice. John Fisher, like Vives, showed unswerving loyalty to Catherine's cause.

In July 1529, Vives dedicated his magnificent treatise to Emperor Charles V. De Concordia et Discordia Generis Humania masterpiece, a profound meditation on the correlations between the disorder of human passions and international disasters.

A few weeks later, he offered a rehearsal, De Pacificationeto Alonso Manrique, Archbishop of Seville and General Inquisitor of Spain. There, Vives tells him: To be an inquisitor of heretics is a task so dangerous and elevated that, if you were ignorant of its true purpose and aim, you would sin gravely, especially because there the properties, reputations and existence of many people are involved. It is astonishing that the authority granted to the judge, who is not free from human passions, or to the accuser, who in many circumstances can be a cynical slanderer moved by hatred, is so wide....

On January 13, 1531 he wrote a brave message to Henry, in which, among other things, he said: Your Majesty asks me the opinion of the Universities on those words of Leviticus: "The brother shall not marry his brother's wife>>... I beg you to think for a moment what you are going to do in such an important matter... and where you are going... What is the purpose of this war? A wife? You have her already, and such as the one you covet neither in goodness nor in beauty, nor in lineage or nobility can compare with her... You have already a daughter, thank God, of magnificent disposition; you can choose at your pleasure your son-in-law such as you could never do with your own son.

At the end of 1531 he was in a position to invite Beatriz, his youngest sister, to move from Valencia to Bruges because the result of the inquisitorial process had turned her into a complete pauper. In August 1532 Vives told his friend Vergara that the emperor regularly assigned him 150 ducats, which, he added, covered more or less half of my expenses.

Moro resigned as chancellor in May 1532, following the dictates of his conscience. In June 1533, Catherine was humiliated with the coronation of Anne Boleyn; a few months later, Princess Mary, Vives' ward, was declared a bastard and excluded from the succession to the crown. Henry VIII was excommunicated by the Pope. In May 1534, Vives told Erasmus that Moro and Fisher were in prison. In July 1535, Fisher's head was replaced on London Bridge by that of Thomas More. In January 1536, Catherine died completely abandoned in poverty. In July 1536, Erasmus died in Basel and his disciples were persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition.

La entrada Vives, Moro y Catalina de Aragón se publicó primero en Omnes.

In 1964, Miguel de la Pinta, a specialist in the History of the Inquisition, and José Mª Palacio, a Valencian archivist, published, under the title "Procesos inquisitoriales contra la familia judía de Luis Vives" (C.S.I.C.) Madrid, some documents that prove, without any doubt, that:

Juan Luis Vives was Jewish, both paternally (his father, Luis Vives Valeriola) and maternally (his mother, Blanquina March y Almenara).

His mother became a Christian in 1491, a year before the expulsion decree. And she died in the plague of 1509, in a small town south of Valencia.

His father, probably the son of Jewish converts, had problems with the Valencian Inquisition at the age of 17. Between 1522 and 1524 a longer process took place that ended with the fatal sentence: "he was handed over to the secular arm", a grim expression that means he was executed, probably burned at the stake.

In 1525, the sisters of Juan Luis (Beatriz, Leonor and Ana) recovered in a legal process the property of their parents, which had been confiscated by the Inquisition.

In 1528, almost 20 years after her mother's death, a new trial was opened to clarify her conduct after her conversion. The testimony affirmed that she had visited the synagogue, being a Christian and, consequently, her remains were removed from the Christian cemetery and publicly burned. The sisters of Vives were then deprived of any right to inherit the paternal and maternal estates.

Remaining in Spain after the decree of 1492, his parents gave Juan Luis the only religious affiliation they could for a future life in a Christian society. In 1508, Vives entered the Estudi General of Valencia, a center founded in 1500 by the Spanish Pope Alexander VI. In 1505, the "Introductiones latinae", by Antonio de Nebrija, the only Spanish scholar that Vives always recommended and admired (when Nebrija made public his intention to print a grammar of the Bible, the Inquisitor General Fray Diego de Deza initiated, in 1504, a process against him. In 1507, Nebrija's "Apologia" was published, one of the most important documents of Spanish humanism).

In 1509 Vives changed Valencia for Paris where he stayed for three years. The University of Paris had been born as a corporation of teachers under the direction of the Chancellor of Notre Dame. Around the time Vives arrived in Paris, Erasmus made his last visit to that University and published his "In Praise of Insanity.

Although the Parisian university was then in decline, Vives lived in one of the most important centers - the College of Monteagudo - for moral and religious reform in France. In 1483 Jean Standonck had taken charge of Monteagudo, bringing to it the religious fervor of the Brothers of the Common Life (who worked, especially copying Christian texts, without vows, refusing begging for their support) - founded by Geert Groote (1340/1384), a Dutchman who preached - at the behest of his bishop - the conversion and salvation of souls and the denunciation of luxury, usury and simony, teachings that were in line with the doctrine of the Catholic Church. He also promoted the translation of the Bible into the vernacular language for the benefit of all. The Monteagudo College counted among its students men like Ignatius of Loyola, Erasmus, Rabelais and Calvin.

In Paris, Vives followed the program of the Faculty of Arts (the seven liberal arts of the trivium y quadrivium). But, as he had already studied grammar and rhetoric in Valencia, he devoted mainly the three years in Paris to the study of philosophy (a long course of logic, an abbreviated course of physics and rudiments of moral philosophy and metaphysics).

In 1512 he would take up residence in the Netherlands, living in Bruges since that year. In the city of Bruges lived an important colony of Spanish Jews, among them the Valdaura family from Valencia. The Valdaura mansion was Vives' first refuge in Bruges.

There he worked as a tutor for the children of the couple, among whom was Margarita, the future wife of Vives. In Bruges he became a good friend of Francisco Cranevelt, municipal proxy of the city, a devout Christian, with good literary taste and a doctorate in law from the University of Louvain.

Vives' first book, Christi Iesu Triumphus (1514) is a conversation on the triumph of Christ on the day of his Resurrection and an attack against the exaltation and glorification of wars and Caesarist heroism; one of the characters in this work says that Christ fought five wars: against the demons, against the world, against the flesh, against the Jews and against death. The second part of this work, entitled Virginis Dei Parentis Oratioapplies to Mary the central message of the book: true heroism consists in fighting and overcoming sin and evil.

In the summer of 1516 Vives and Erasmus met for the first time in Bruges. In March of that year, Erasmus had dedicated his Annotations to the New Testament to Leo X and in May his Institutio Principis Christiani. In December Thomas More published his Utopia.

In 1517, perhaps on the recommendation of Erasmus, Guillermo De Croy - a close friend of Erasmus - chose Vives as his private preceptor. Although he was 19 years old, William was already bishop of Cambray, cardinal and archbishop-elect of Toledo to succeed Cisneros. In the company of his pupil, Vives moved from Bruges to Louvain, where there was a trilingual College for the study of Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Among Vives' circle in Louvain was the Spanish Jew Mateo Adriano, one of the best Hebraists of the time.

The faculty at Louvain was divided into conservative theologians and humanists, the latter being more open-minded. Although Vives' sympathies were with the humanists, he tried to stay out of personal rivalries and moderate the position of the theologians.

In the four years (1517/1521, the year of the pupil's death) of De Croy's preceptorship, Vives' personal ideas began to take shape. During this time Vives wrote four works of religious content (Meditationes in septem Psalmos Poenitentiales, Genethiacon Iesu Christi, De tempore quo, id est, de pace in qua natus est Christus, Clypei Christi Descriptio), in which he expresses a type of piety that, like that of his close friends, had drawn from the sources of the Devotio Moderna and the writings of Erasmus. The message of those works of Vives was clear and orthodox: the destinies of Christianity are directed by providence, the supernatural should not be separated from the plane of nature and history; Vives follows - in the last two works cited - the Augustinian conception of history as a synthesis between free human decisions and divine providence. He also abounds in a praise of peace, characteristic of the Erasmian circle.

In 1519 Erasmus said that Vives, as a native Spaniard, speaks Castilian and, having lived for a long time in Paris, is well versed in French. He understands our language better than he speaks it. Vives knew enough Greek to use it in his private correspondence as a subterfuge for bold criticism. In the introduction to Vives' work Declamationes SyllanaeI hardly know anyone of this time comparable to Vives... and, finally, I do not know anyone in whom the torrent of eloquence is so supported by his much philosophical knowledge.

The last period of Vives' life brought with it a strong revival of his religious fervor. His first occupation after his departure from England was to write, at the request of an ecclesiastic of St. Donacian and on the occasion of the plague that infested Bruges in 1529, a prayer to the sweat of Christ's blood in Gethsemane (Sacrum Diurnum de sudore Domini Nostri Iesu Christi). In 1535 he wrote a collection of prayers under the title. Excitationes animi in DeumThe book includes norms for meditation, daily prayers, prayers for every occasion and a commentary on Sunday prayer.

Another masterpiece of Vives is the encyclopedic treatise De Disciplinis (1531) which, in Ortega y Gasset's opinion, is not only a revolutionary program of education but also the first reflection of Western man on his culture and an ambitious meditation on the purposes, corruption and reform of all human culture.

Vives' third great treatise was printed two years before his death, De anima et vita, with which he inaugurated the study of man based on observation and reflection. For this book Lange calls Vives the father of modern psychology.

In 1538 Vives published his Lingua Latinae Exercitatio, a brilliant collection of dialogues written with a basic Latin vocabulary text and grammar, dedicated to Philip, the son of Emperor Charles. Of this book Azorín said: Perhaps there is no book in our literature more intimate and pleasing. Open it; see how the small and prosaic existence of the people passes in a series of small pictures.

In the last two years of his life (1538/1540), Vives devoted himself to writing a comprehensive apologetic work that he intended to offer to the pope. Although he did not finish the book, after his death and at the request of his widow, his friend Cranevelt published it in January 1543 and it was dedicated to Paul III. This book, De Veritate Fidei Christianae, is the best document to appreciate how Vives contemplated the Christian life in his last years.

Overwork had more than once brought Vives to the verge of exhaustion. From his forties on, he was suffering from a malignant case of arthritis that almost crippled him. On May 6, 1540, Juan Luis Vives died in Bruges, probably of a gallstone. He was buried under the altar of St. Joseph in the church of St. Donacian, which no longer exists. His young wife accompanied him twelve years later.

Some works of Vives, who always wrote in Latin:

• Christi Iesu Triumphus, Paris, 1514.
• Adversus pseudodialecticos, Leuven, 1520.
• Preces et Meditationes genenerales, Louvain, 1520.
• Declamationes quinque Syllanae, Leuven, 1520.
• Commentaria in XXII libri De Civitate Dei Divini Aurelii Augustini, Louvain, 1521.
• Introductio ad Sapientiam, Leuven, 1524.
• De Institutione feminae christianae, Antwerp, 1524.
• De causas corruptarum artium, Antwerp, 1531.
• De tradentis disciplinis, 1531.
• De disciplinis libri XX, Antwerp, 1531.
• De officio mariti, Basel, 1538.
• Exercitatio linguae latinae, Basel, 1538.
• De Anima et Vita, Basel, 1538.
• De Aristoteles operibus censura, 1538.
• Satellitium animae sive Symbola, Frankfurt, 1540.
• De Veritate Fidei Christianae, Bruges, 1543.

La entrada Juan Luis Vives, el Erasmo español se publicó primero en Omnes.

In contrast to those who saw concordance between the initial postulates of the Renaissance and Protestantism, he affirmed that "the great storm of the Reformation had been born in the nominalist cloisters of Germany, not in the schools of human letters in Italy". And he confessed that he could not bring him closer to the peoples of northern Europe. "the Reformation, illegitimate child of Teutonic individualism". that had meant the end of European unity (History of the Spanish heterodox and The Spanish science).

In any case, he did not cease to admire "Schiller's marvelous Bell Song, the most religious, the most human and the most lyrical of German songs, and perhaps the masterpiece of modern lyric poetry." He also shuddered to read the letter in which Schiller told Goethe that. "Christianity is the manifestation of moral beauty, the embodiment of the holy and sacred in human nature, the only truly aesthetic religion." And, about Goethe himself, he recalled that he had been the introducer of the expression "universal literature, which he invented and by virtue of which we must call him a citizen of the world". Similarly, he stopped at the works of the most representative figures of the golden century of German literature, such as Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Fichte, the Humboldts and Hegel, "who teaches even when he errs... whose book (about Aesthetics) breathes and instills love for immaculate and spiritual beauty". How he would admire the literature of England, "one of the most poetic towns on earth". (History of aesthetic ideas in Spain, 1883/1891).

How did Menéndez Pelayo see Spain in that Europe? 

I considered that the Valencian Juan Luis Vives had been "the most brilliant and balanced thinker of the Renaissance.", "the most complete and encyclopedic writer of that time". And he saw in Vives the most committed to the Europe of his time, who "contemplated Christ as the Teacher of peace, for those who listen to him and for those who do not listen to him, by his action in the depths of consciences".to the one who, moved by "for the love of concord of all the peoples of Europe", seeing it so divided, had addressed the emperor and the kings Henry VIII and Francis I, to remind them that their division facilitated Barbarossa's piracies and Turkish raids (Anthology of Castilian lyric Poets).

He coincided with another Spaniard, Jaume Balmes, the author of "Protestantism compared with Catholicism in its relations with European civilization." where the Catalan writer had openly disagreed with Guizot, the author of the "General history of civilization in Europe". For Guizot, Catholicism and Protestantism were on an equal footing, for they had played a similar role in the shaping of Europe; from his Calvinist viewpoint, Guizot believed that the Protestant Reformation had brought to Europe an expansive movement of reason and human freedom.

For his part, Menéndez Pelayo considered it proven by Balmes that the Reformation, initiated with the ideas of free examination, servo arbitrio and faith without works, had meant a deviation from the majestic path of European civilization: "... he proved it... beginning by analyzing the notion of individualism and the feeling of personal dignity, which Guizot considered characteristic of the barbarians, as if it were not a legitimate result of the great establishment, transformation and dignification of human nature, brought by Christianity." (Two words on the centenary of Balmes). 

It was based on the assumption that "The ideal of a perfect and harmonious nationality is no more than a utopia... It is necessary to take nationalities as they have been made over the centuries, with unity in some things and variety in many others, and above all in the language". (Defense of the Spanish Literature Program). And of how the Spanish spirit, which had been emerging throughout the Reconquest, was "one in religious belief, divided in everything else, by race, by language, by customs, by privileges, by everything that can divide a people". (Entrance speech to the Royal Spanish Academy).

In his works on the history of Spanish culture, he did not limit himself to writings in the common Spanish language, the Castilian language, which he did not fail to consider "the only one among modern ones that has succeeded in expressing something of the supreme idea" and in which it was written "the comic epic of the human race, the eternal breviary of laughter and good sense".

Well, considering that Spain is a nation rich and varied in languages, I would see in the Mallorcan Ramon Llull, "to the first who made the vulgar language serve for pure ideas and abstractions, who separated the Catalan language from the Provençal language, making it grave, austere and religious". (Entrance speech to the RAE in 1881).

Having begun his university studies in Barcelona, he knew the Catalan language in which, years later, he would deliver a speech to the Queen Regent Maria Cristina. And, in his "Semblanza de Milá y Fontanals". I would remember that "it was the poets who, realizing that no one can achieve true poetry except in his own language, turned to cultivate it artistically for lofty aims and purposes".

Alfredo Brañas, in "Regionalism, recalls how in the literary order Catalonia had achieved the highest representation of Hispanic letters in the year 1887. In that year, the Catalan poet Federico Soler had won the prize of the Royal Spanish Academy for the best dramatic work performed in the theaters of Spain. Brañas comments that, before it was awarded, while some academicians were of the opinion that the prize should only be given to plays performed in the theaters of the Court, others, such as Menéndez Pelayo, considered that it should be open to playwrights from all Spanish regions.

In its "Antología de poetas líricos castellanos", Menendez Pelayo devoted considerable pages to medieval Galician poetry and judged, in two reports and with sound criteria, the "Galician-Spanish dictionary". by Marcial Valladares and the "Galician folk songbook". by José Pérez Ballesteros. In the same Anthology, he would praise Valencia because "She was predestined to be bilingual... because she never abandoned her native language". And, in a letter dated October 6, 1908, he would say to Carmelo Echegaray: "My library, which, thanks to you, is becoming one of the richest in this interesting branch (Basque books), so difficult to collect outside the Basque country...".

In another letter, addressed to the magazine "Cantabria" (28/11/1907), Menéndez Pelayo would write that "he cannot love his nation who does not love his native country and begins by affirming this love as the basis for a broader patriotism. Selfish regionalism is hateful and sterile, but benevolent and fraternal regionalism can be a great element of progress and perhaps the only salvation of Spain".

La entrada Europa y España en Menéndez Pelayo se publicó primero en Omnes.

In 1876, Giner de los Ríos and several of his colleagues founded the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, an association that, outside of public education, sought to renew the younger generations with a secular morality and ideas inspired by the German idealist Freemason K. Ch.F. Krause (1781/1832), whose philosophy had tried to harmonize pantheism and theism, and against the Hegelian exaltation of the idea of the State.Ch.F. Krause (1781/1832), whose philosophy had tried to harmonize pantheism and theism and, against the Hegelian exaltation of the idea of the State, had defended the ethical superiority of general purpose associations, such as the family or the nation. By promoting a voluntary federation among these associations, rapprochement and unity among human beings could be brought about.

A member of the Institution, Gumersindo de Azcárate, in an article published in the "Revista de España", stated that, "depending on whether the State protects or denies the freedom of science, the energy of a people will show more or less of its peculiar genius... and it may even be the case that its activity is almost completely stifled, as has happened in Spain for three centuries".

Menéndez Pelayo, after reading the aforementioned article and instructed by one of his teachers and friend, Gumersindo Laverde (18335/1890), published, in that same year 1876, his first work, "La ciencia española", with which he began his intellectual adventure, convinced that Spaniards could renew themselves by drawing inspiration from the ethical and cultural ideals of the highest moments of their history; and already then he endorsed the words of the Benedictine scholar B. J. Feijoo, who in one of his speeches had proclaimed himself "a free citizen in the Republic of Letters, neither a slave of Aristotle nor an ally of his enemies".J. Feijoo, who in one of his speeches had proclaimed himself "a free citizen in the Republic of Letters, neither a slave of Aristotle nor an ally of his enemies".

In 1892 he addressed a report to the Minister of Public Works in which he complained because "we see the separation of very worthy Professors from our Faculty..., representatives of very opposite doctrines, but equally worthy of respect for their zealous and disinterested consecration to the cult of truth...", "...ideal of life... aimed at scientific inquiry which can only be achieved with guarantees of independence similar to those enjoyed by all the great scientific institutions of other countries...; "...we wish to approach this ideal by all possible ways and claim for the university body all that freedom of action which, within its peculiar sphere, corresponds to it".

For his part, Cánovas del Castillo, historian, considered that such scourges as Spain's backwardness and lack of political unity were attributable to the legacy of the Inquisition and the House of Austria. And in the Constituent Assembly of 1868, Castelar bellowed: "There is nothing more dreadful, more abominable, than that great Spanish empire which was a shroud that extended over the planet... We lit the bonfires of the Inquisition; we threw our thinkers into them, we burned them and, afterwards, there was nothing more of science in Spain than a pile of ashes".

It is true that Spanish science had been interrupted for a long time, but that was after 1790, not coinciding with the Inquisition, but with the Volterian Court of Charles IV, the Cortes of Cadiz, the disentailment of Mendizabal, the burning of convents...

In this context, in 1881, when Don Marcelino was not yet 25 years old, a tribute was held in Madrid's Retiro Park for the second centenary of Calderón de la Barca's death. Foreign experts praised the merit of the writer, despite the retrograde era in which he lived. Already at the end, Menéndez Pelayo explodes... "Look, Enrique -he would confess later to his brother-, they already had me very loaded, they had said many barbarities and I could not but explode, and, in addition, they gave us such a bad champagne for dessert...".

In this famous toast, the Cantabrian polygraph emphasizes first of all the idea (or rather the fact) that it is the Catholic faith that has shaped us. From its loss or, at least, from its fading away, our decadence and eventual death is born...

Secondly, the vindication of the traditional monarchy, assumed and brought to its apogee by the House of Austria, which was neither absolute nor parliamentary, but Christian, and which, therefore, could be the guarantor of the Spanish municipality, where true freedom could flourish....

In defense of these principles (Catholic faith, traditional monarchy, municipal freedom) Calderón wrote. Liberals, both absolutists and revolutionaries, rise up against them, imposing their ideological freedom that destroys real freedom in the name of abstract and statist ideas.

I end with the transcription of the toast because I think it is worth it: "...I toast to what no one has toasted so far: to the great ideas that were the soul and inspiration of Calderon's poems. In the first place, to the Roman Catholic, apostolic faith, which in seven centuries of struggle made us reconquer our homeland, and which at the dawn of the Renaissance opened to the Castilians the virgin jungles of America, and to the Portuguese the fabulous sanctuaries of India.... I toast, in second place, to the ancient and traditional Spanish monarchy, Christian in essence and democratic in form... I toast to the Spanish nation, Amazon of the Latin race, of which it was a shield and a very firm fence against Germanic barbarism and the spirit of disintegration and heresy... I drink to the Spanish municipality, glorious son of the Roman municipality and expression of the true and legitimate and sacrosanct Spanish freedom... In short, I drink to all the ideas, to all the feelings that Calderón has brought to art...; those of us who feel and think like him, the only ones who with reason, and justice, and right, can exalt his memory.... and whom by no means can the more or less liberal parties count as his own, who, in the name of French-style centralist unity, have stifled and destroyed the ancient municipal and foral liberty of the Peninsula, assassinated first by the House of Bourbon and then by the revolutionary governments of this century. And I say and declare that I do not adhere to the centenary in what it has of a semi-pagan celebration, informed by principles... that would have little to please such a Christian poet as Calderón, if he would raise his head...".

La entrada Libertad y Verdad en Menéndez Pelayo se publicó primero en Omnes.

Menéndez Pelayo quotes from Schiller these words: "Live with your century (he says to the artist), but do not be its workmanship; work for your contemporaries, but do what they need, not what they praise. Do not venture into the dangerous company of the real, before you have secured in your own heart a circle of ideal nature. Go to the heart of your fellow men: do not directly combat their maxims, do not condemn their actions; but banish from their pleasures the capricious, the frivolous, the brutal, and thus you will insensibly banish them from their acts, and, finally, from their sentiments. Multiply around them the great, noble, ingenious forms, the symbols of the perfect, until appearance triumphs over reality, and art dominates nature".

His father, Juan Gaspar (1723-96), was a tireless worker, deeply religious and optimistic. His mother, Isabel Dorotea (1732-1802), daughter of an innkeeper and tahonero.

Schiller's first instruction he received from the parish priest of Loch, Moser, to whom the poet dedicated a remembrance in "The Bandits". From 1766 to 1773, he studied at the Latin school in Ludwigsburg. In 1773 he entered the military training school in Solitüde, transferred to Stuttgart in 1775 as the military academy of the duchy.

Schiller initially wanted to study theology, but gave it up after entering the Academy and opted for law, later embracing medicine.

The first inclination to poetry was born in Schiller with the reading of Klopstock's Messiah. He was also influenced by Klinger's dramas and Goethe's Gotz. But he was more influenced by Plutarch and J.J. Rousseau.

Initially a friend of the French Revolution, he left it with honor after the execution of Louis XVI. On August 23, 1794 he addressed a letter to Goethe in which he revealed great knowledge in matters of art and in September he visited him in his house.

On May 9, 1805, between five and six o'clock in the afternoon, a placid death put an end to the poet's life before he reached the age of 46. In 1826 Goethe wrote the poem "Im ernsten Beinhares war's wo ich erschante", testimony to the good memory he had of the noble friend.

The most outstanding feature of Schiller's spirit is the idealism of his conception of the world. "Everything is immoderate, enormous and monstrous" in his early works such as "The Thieves" and "Kabbalah and Love": idealism rules at ease (Menéndez y Pelayo). It is true literature of "assault and irruption" ("Storm und Drang"), as they call it in Germany (Menéndez y Pelayo).

Subsequently "Goethe gave Schiller the serenity and objectivity he lacked." "What a series of masterpieces illustrated this last period of Schiller's life (1798 to 1805): Wallenstein, Mary Stuart, Joan of Arc, The Bride of Messina, William Tell (1804), the Song of the Bell."

"Guillermo Tell is a work totally harmonious and preferred by many to the rest of the poet's works... in which there is a perfect harmony between action and landscape, a no less perfect interpenetration of the individual drama and the drama that we could call epic or of transcendental interest, and a torrent of lyrical poetry, as fresh, transparent and clean as the water that flows from the same wild peaks.

The Bell would be the first lyric poetry of the nineteenth century if it had not been written in the penultimate year of the eighteenth century and did not bear the spirit of that era, although in its most ideal and noble part, all the poetry of human life is condensed in those verses of such metallic sound, of such prodigious and flexible rhythm. Whoever wants to know the value of poetry as a civilizing work, should read Schiller's Campana (Menéndez y Pelayo).

Schiller is the poet of moral idealism, of which Kant was the philosopher... The Kantian imperative... is transformed by Schiller's spirit into immense tenderness and pity, into universal charity, which neither diminish nor weaken, but rather enhance the heroic temper of the soul, mistress of itself, obedient to the dictates of the moral law... to emerge triumphant from every conflict of passion".

In November 1785, Schiller composed The Ode to Joy ("An die Freude", in German), a lyrical poetic composition first published in 1786.

According to a 19th century legend, the ode was originally intended to be an "Ode an die Freiheit" (ode to freedom sung in the revolutionary period by students to the music of La Marseillaise), but then became the "Ode an die Freude"In short, to broaden its meaning: although freedom is fundamental, it is not an end in itself but only a means to happiness, which is the source of joy.

In 1793, when he was 23 years old, Ludwig van Beethoven knew the work and immediately wanted to set the text to music, thus giving rise to the idea that would become over the years his ninth and last symphony in D minor, Op. 125, whose final movement is for chorus and soloists on the final version of the "Ode to Joy." by Schiller. This piece of music has become the European Anthem.

La entrada Schiller, autor de la Oda a la Alegría se publicó primero en Omnes.

Years later, the essay "Don't think of an elephant"by the American cognitive linguist George Lakoff, explained the need to have a coherent language that allows you to define the issues at stake in the public sphere from your own values and feelings, if you want to advance your ideological and political agenda in a society. What Lakoff is saying is that his party (in this case, the U.S. Democrats) had not been able to construct a convincing framing of its way of seeing life. Or, at least, not as efficiently and effectively as the Republicans did.

Knowledge and language frameworks

Frames are mental structures that shape the way individuals view the world. When a word is heard, a frame or a collection of frames is activated in that individual's brain. Changing that frame also means changing the way people see the world. Therefore, Lakoff gives great importance, when framing events according to one's own values, not to use the language of the adversary (not to think of an elephant). This is because the language of the adversary will point to a frame that is not the desired frame.

This influential little book argues that both conservative and progressive policies have a basic moral consistency. They are grounded in different visions of family morality that extend into the world of politics. Progressives have a moral system that is rooted in a particular conception of family relationships. It is the model of protective parents, who believe that they should understand and support their children, listen to them and give them freedom and trust in others, with whom they should cooperate. The triumphant language of the conservatives would be based instead on the antagonistic model of the strict parent based on the idea of personal effort, distrust towards others and the impossibility of a true community life.

In this sense, the conservative advantage that Lakoff saw in the American politics of the first decade of our century is that the politics of that country habitually used his language and such words dragged the other politicians and parties (mainly the Democrats) towards the conservative worldview. And all this because, for Lakoff, framing is a process that consists precisely in choosing the language that fits the framer's worldview.

Conservative and progressive perspectives

Lakoff gives some examples from the conservative point of view: it is immoral to give people things they have not earned, because then they will fail to be disciplined and will become dependent and immoral. The conception of taxes as a disgrace and the need to lower them is framed very graphically in the phrase "tax relief." Progressives should not use that phrase and instead use "fiscal solidarity," "sustaining the welfare state," etc. On gays, he argues that in the U.S. and under the conservative lens the word gay at that time connoted an unrestrained and unhealthy lifestyle. Progressives changed that frame to "equal marriage", "the right to love whomever you want", etc.

The frameworks that scandalize progressives are those that conservatives consider, or used to consider, true or desirable (and vice versa). However, if the prevailing worldview is that agreement or consensus is not only possible (because human beings are, in essence, good) but desirable (and we have to do our bit to make it so), we must eradicate from the political arena the bitter struggle, disqualification, ignoring or discrediting the other.... And it is possible that the dominant party or ideology manages to impose its ideas and laws without its adversaries being able to contradict them or change them once imposed without being accused of being fascists.

Language in cultural battles

Obviously, the United States is not Europe and Spain is not the United States, but I think we are all aware of how the cultural and legislative victories of the last 20 years reflect a model in which language is decisive in winning those battles... The victory of what some people call Woke ideology (advocated by leftist political movements and perspectives that emphasize the identity politics of LGTBI people, the black community and women) in many of our laws and customs, has come about because some people have worked, thought and fought hard to make it so. And the use of language has played an important role in those victories.

Yes is just yes, death with dignity, the right to sexual and reproductive health, equal marriage, the right to define one's sexual identity, free public schooling for all, the fight against climate change, and so on. These are examples of cultural and legislative battles intelligently waged through language. There would be different examples in the other ideological sector: the right to life (with the recent legislative victory in the U.S. SC), conscientious objection, educational freedom, the right of parents to the moral education of their children, etc.

Tolerance and firmness in cultural battles

I think that it is convenient to preserve and promote pluralism, consensus, talk to everyone, do not label, flee from Manichaeism, learn from the different, respect opinions different from our own and these types of issues typical of democratic societies. But we cannot ignore that there are people, entities and interests bent on changing the social and legislative reality of our countries and not always those changes are in favor of human dignity, law and religious diversity, but sometimes those changes lead us to totalitarianism. I recommend reading the classic book by Victor Klemperer, "The language of the Third Reich, notes of a philologist" and "The manipulation of man through language" by Alfonso López Quintás.

In 1991, the American sociologist James Davison Hunter published a book called "Culture Wars", in which he pointed out that, although historically the political campaign issues had been health, security, education and economic growth, a new political-ideological paradigm was now emerging to undermine the foundations of traditional Western values. Language, the word, can be a means to subjugate societies or to liberate them. And one may like to argue more or less by temperament, but there are times when there is no choice but to do so - in a civilized and respectful manner with everyone - if one wants to defend oneself and the ideas and values that seem most valuable to one.

Let us use words intelligently so that they may be at the service of peace, human dignity, freedom and all human rights. And let us be vigilant so that we can unmask the abuses of these rights when they come disguised in fine words.

La entrada El uso del lenguaje en las batallas culturales se publicó primero en Omnes.

At a time when the cult of reason prevailed, Schopenhauer already intuited some of the features that shape our present: irrationalism, tragic pessimism, the primacy of will, instincts and desire, as well as the importance of art to understand the nature of the human being. It is a pity that such an intelligent man lacked the humility of one who knows God".

In the wonderful biography dedicated to him by Rüdiger Safranski, it is stated that it is often forgotten that we are dealing with a philosopher of the early nineteenth century, although of late influence, especially through his disciple Nietszche.

For him, the will is both the source of life and the substratum in which all misfortune nests: death, the corruption of the existing and the background of the universal struggle. Schopenhauer swims against the current of his time: he is not animated by the pleasure of action, but by the art of abandonment.

In addition to his famous pessimism, his work has some useful elements such as his philosophy of inner strength and the invitation to silence.

Towards the end of his life he once said to an interlocutor, "A philosophy between whose pages one does not hear the tears, the howling and gnashing of teeth, as well as the dreadful din of the universal crime of all against all, is not a philosophy."

His father, a rich merchant, wanted to make him a merchant too (a man of the world and of fine manners). But Arthur, favored at this point by the early suicide of his father (from whom he would learn courage, pride, sobriety and a firm and hurtful arrogance) and helped by his mother, with whom he would later become enemies, became a philosopher. His passion for philosophy arose from amazement at the world and, since he had inherited fortune, he was able to live for philosophy and did not need to live from it.

His main work, The world as will and representationwas for him the real task of his existence and was not successful when it was published. He then retired from the stage without ever having performed, and he dedicated himself to contemplating the sometimes cruel carnival of life from the sidelines.

Being a man of prodigious self-esteem, he knew how to think and outline the three great humiliations of human megalomania: the cosmological humiliation (our world is but one of the innumerable spheres that populate infinite space and on which a layer of mold with living and cognizant beings moves); the biological humiliation (man is an animal in which intelligence serves him exclusively to compensate for the lack of instincts and inadequate adaptation to the environment); and the psychological humiliation (our conscious self does not rule its own house).

In the work of the philosopher from Danzing as well as in his biography, we can discover that Schopenhauer was a child without sufficient love (his mother did not love his father and some say that he took care of Arthur only out of obligation), which left wounds covered later by pride. In his Metaphysics of Manners he will say that the human being "will carry out all sorts of frustrated attempts and do violence to his character in the details; but on the whole he will have to bend to it" and that "if we want to grasp and possess anything in life we have to leave innumerable things to the right and left, renouncing them. But if we are incapable of making up our minds in this way and we throw ourselves on everything that attracts us in a provisional way, as children do at the annual fair, we run in this way in zigzag and get nowhere. He who wants to be everything can become nothing".

Influenced by the reading of Voltaire's Candide and overwhelmed by the desolation of life as he contemplated illness, old age, pain and death, he lost what little faith he had at the age of 17, at the age of 17 he lost what little faith he had and affirmed that "the clear and evident truth that the world expressed soon overlapped with the Judaic dogmas that had been inculcated in me and I came to the conclusion that this world could not be the work of a benevolent being but, in any case, the creation of a devil who had called it into existence to recreate himself in the contemplation of its pain". At the same time and paradoxically he will attack materialism saying that "the materialist will be comparable to the baron of Münchausen, who, swimming on horseback in the water, tried to pull the horse with his legs and to drag himself pulled his own pigtail forward".

And it is precisely his renunciation of Christian truths that will turn him into an individual of unbearable treatment and unhappy existence: he will end his days alone, angry for years with his mother and his only sister, without having managed to commit himself to any of the women he took advantage of, denounced by a neighbor who claimed that he threw her down the stairs in an argument because of the noise she made when talking, and found dead by his housekeeper on the sofa of his house.

When his mother took Schopenhauer's dissertation The quadruple rootArthur replied: "it will be read when not a single one of your writings is left in the back room" and his mother replied: "of yours, the whole edition will be about to be released".

However, throughout his life he would have moments of lucidity as when he gave importance to compassion in the lives of men (he himself left his inheritance to a charitable organization) or when he liked to climb the mountains and contemplate the beauty of the landscape from above. In his diary he wrote: "If we take away from life the brief moments of religion, art and pure love, what is left but a succession of trivial thoughts? And in a letter to his mother he will come to say: "the pulsations of divine music have not ceased to sound through the centuries of barbarism, and an immediate echo of the eternal has remained in us, intelligible to all the senses and even above vice and virtue".

In the political field, patriotism is strange to him, war events are "thunder and smoke", an extraordinarily foolish game. He was "fully convinced that I was not born to serve mankind with my fist but with my head, and that my fatherland is greater than Germany. For him, the state is a necessary evil, a social machine which, at best, couples collective egoism with the collective interest of survival and which has no moral competence. He does not want a State with a soul which, as soon as it can, tries to possess the souls of its subjects. Schopenhauer uncompromisingly defends freedom of thought.

In 1850 he finished his last work, the Parerga and Paralipomena, secondary writings, scattered but systematically ordered thoughts on various subjects. Among them are the Aphorisms on the wisdom of living, which later became so famous (together with The Art of Being Right: Exposed in 38 Stratagems). They do not lack the sense of humor of their author, who affirmed that taking ourselves too seriously in the present turns us into laughable people and that only a few great spirits managed to leave that situation to become laughable people. Shortly before his death he said: "Humanity has learned from me things it will never forget". Let us learn from his virtues and his mistakes.

La entrada El drama de Arthur Schopenhauer se publicó primero en Omnes.

More than thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and while we are witnessing the war of invasion of Ukraine by Russia, it seems appropriate to recall the theory of the denial of the extremely unjust right elaborated by the German jurist Gustav Radbruch after his unfortunate experience with the years of National Socialism, the Second World War and the subsequent division of Europe into two blocs with the beginning of the Cold War.

Radbruch was Professor of Philosophy of Law and Criminal Law at the Universities of Kiel and Heidelberg, Minister of Justice in the ill-fated Weimar Republic (1921-1923) and one of the main authors of its constitutional charter. Initially, like so many others, he belonged to the Nazi party, but during the Nazi regime he was purged and stripped of his chair of Philosophy of Law in 1933 - the year in which Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany - and was forbidden to exercise any public, political or teaching function. With the collapse of that regime, he regained his chair in 1945 and was dean in Heidelberg until his death.

The suffering of the horrors of World War II and the helplessness caused by the legal relativism of the previous decades changed his way of thinking and, as opposed to the positivist vision of the Law of his compatriot Hans Kelsen, he came to conceive the world in two spheres, the natural and the cultural. The juridical phenomenon would be within the second, marked by the search for Justice, a value inherent to it. From this construction he would elaborate his concept of Law as a cultural reality referring to values.

Already as a moderate iusnaturalist, in his famous work "Arbitrariedad Legal y Derecho Supralegal", he introduced his great contribution to legal thought, the formula that bears his name, according to which the validity of extremely unjust laws can be denied, because extreme injustice is not law. It is significant that the year of his return to Germany from exile also saw the famous Nuremberg trials, in which Nazi leaders were tried and convicted for their genocidal crimes committed in Germany and occupied countries during the war, and in which true atrocities were revealed. These trials would undoubtedly influence his reasoning.

In Arbitrariedad Legal y Derecho Supralegal, the general obligation to always apply positive law is established, unless it is extremely unjust to the point of denaturalizing the law itself. It is understood that this is not a formula applicable to any type of injustice in the law, since its generalization could lead to legal chaos.

We wonder if these ideas from the legal field will not be of interest nowadays, at a time when the media and public opinion in general tend to approach major ethical debates in a bipolar way, establishing a framework of "good guys and bad guys" that does not always respect the elementary principles of Justice when the truth endangers the status quo and the solidity of one's own convictions.

According to the Democracy Index 2021, only Canada, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Uruguay, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are full democracies. In these countries there are laws in force that allow to kill the unborn at an advanced stage of gestation, to execute people condemned to death, to eliminate terminally or mentally ill people thanks to euthanasia laws, to impose through educational laws some ideologically controversial approaches such as the postulates of gender ideology, seriously violating the freedom of teaching and thought, to take away the right of some people to be adopted by a father and a mother through adoption laws, to prohibit religious symbols to public officials in violation of religious freedom, not to give asylum to people fleeing authoritarian and extremely unjust regimes leaving them defenseless and at the mercy of satraps thanks to certain laws on foreigners, etc.

Can the aforementioned laws be considered seriously unjust, so much so that the application of the Radbruch formula that could declare them unlawful could be considered at some point? This is the opinion of many citizens, governments and communicators in various countries.

It will be said that these are very complex issues in which the different moral conceptions of citizens clash, and that is undoubtedly true. But it is also true that the fact that these legislations have prospered in recent decades in various nations that enjoy prestige as full democracies - supported by a social or at least legislative majority - does not automatically confer on them the status of just.

The claim of correctness of the law that Alexy speaks of is none other than the claim of Justice. A legal system that aspires to be correct, that is to say, to fulfill its function well, must aspire to be just or at least -if we follow Radbruch's doctrine- not to be extremely unjust. And the principles of Law that guarantee Justice are, as the Roman jurist Ulpian taught us many centuries ago: honeste vivere, alterum non laedere, suum cuique tribuere (to live honestly, to give to each his own and not to harm others).    

To give two topical examples, a national poll conducted by Harvard University and the Harris polling firm confirms that 75% of Americans support the Supreme Court overturning the June 24, 2022 Roe v. Wade ruling affirming that there is no constitutional right to abortion. We could also talk, on the other ideological spectrum, about the injustice of the immigration veto imposed by President Donald Trump on citizens of 5 Muslim countries who were banned from entering the United States and subsequently endorsed by the Supreme Court of that nation. Or the death penalty in force in that same country.

Could an American citizen who survived an attempted abortion claim in court under the Radbruch clause for compensation for the after-effects of an attempted murder, or a citizen of Iraq or Somalia who was banned from entering the United States, thereby causing serious personal injury? Or the family of a person sentenced to death for the irreparable harm caused by that person's execution?

Is Justice the patrimony of a specific ideological group or is it rather a value that all human beings and all political institutions and communication groups should aspire to discover and practice? Are human rights like "witches and unicorns", as the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre maintains, or something invented by political parties according to the social aspirations of each moment in history, or rather something objective that can be discovered if specific cases are studied honestly and objectively?

La entrada La fórmula Radbruch en un mundo bipolar se publicó primero en Omnes.

Book

TitleFrom the White House to the Holy See

AuthorRafael Navarro-Valls

Pages: 240

Editorial: Almuzara

City: Cordoba

Year: 2022

New and exciting book by Rafael Navarro-Valls. As an expert in American political history and the Catholic Church, he has already written three books analyzing the presidencies from F. D. Roosevelt to Obama and the popes from St. John Paul II to the beginnings of Francis' pontificate.

In this new work, he analyzes President J. F. Kennedy and his brothers Bob and Ted from the perspective of the attacks and scandals they lived through; he refers to new data on Nixon (Watergate); Obama's visits to Cuba and Spain during his last year in power; the failed candidacy of Hillary R. Clinton and her duels with Obama and Trump; Trump's four years in the White House, including his remarkable clinging to power and the dramatic duel with the blond president that marked the election of Joe Biden, until his inauguration.

On the other hand, Navarro-Valls analyzes new and interesting data on St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, as well as the pontificate of Pope Francis so far. Finally, the author adds some historical anecdotes about his brother Joaquín, the first lay spokesman of the Holy See. In short, a book that reads with great pleasure and provides relevant novelties.

La entrada De la Casa Blanca a la Santa Sede  se publicó primero en Omnes.

As I have nothing to do with the publication, I feel free to recommend its reading to our educational authorities, as well as to today's parents and educators, as it seems to me that they could extract interesting ideas to succeed in the important task of educating the new generations, in which our future is at stake.

It is a book published in the United States in 2018 by psychologist Jonathan Haidt and free speech expert Greg Lukianoff, which now appears in Spanish. The phenomena they describe are already perfectly detectable in Europe and, more specifically, in Spain.

Throughout its more than four hundred pages, which are a pleasure to read, they try to answer the question: are we adequately preparing young people to face adult life or are we protecting them too much? And they answer it by shedding some interesting light for all those interested in the education of the young.

The authors tell how some strange things started happening on campuses in the United States around 2015. Students claiming to defend progressive ideas booed politicians and lecturers at their university and prevented them from speaking. Does this situation ring any bells? I suppose it does to Pablo Iglesias and Rosa Díez, yes, since the former starred years ago in a boycott of a lecture given by the latter at a Spanish public university.

In increasing numbers, also in Spain, many students are reluctant to show their opinions and discuss them frankly. For some time now, what should be the "gymnasium of the mind" is full of people who shy away from debate and critical thinking, a curious phenomenon for a university.

As the authors describe in this book, the reason for this distressing situation is due to three misconceptions that have entered the subconscious of many young and not-so-young people who believe they are defending a generous and inclusive vision of education.

The first: what does not kill you makes you weaker (you must flee at all costs from any difficulty). The second: you must always trust your feelings (and therefore be extremely susceptible). And finally: life is a struggle between good and bad people (and you belong to the good ones).

As this courageous and rigorous book demonstrates, these notions, which at first glance may seem beneficial because they protect the individual and flatter his or her own instincts, actually contradict the most basic psychological principles about well-being.

Accepting these falsehoods, and thereby promoting a safety culture in which no one wants to listen to arguments they don't like, interferes with the social, emotional and intellectual development of young people. And it makes it more difficult for them to navigate the often complex and difficult path to adulthood.

Or, in Haidt's own words: "Many young people born after 1995, those who have been arriving at universities since 2013, are fragile, hypersusceptible and Manichean. They are not prepared to face life, which is conflict, nor democracy, which is debate. They are headed for failure.

This is coupled with the well-known general increase in anxiety and depression in adolescents that began around 2011, more prevalent in girls and young women than in boys and young men. This increase is manifested in rising rates of both hospital admissions for self-harm and suicides.

But fortunately the book does not limit itself to making an accurate and somber diagnosis of the difficulties present in our young people. It also provides valuable advice for us older people to help them overcome them successfully.

Like muscles or bones, children are "antifragile," meaning that they need stress and challenges to learn, adapt and grow. If we protect them from all kinds of potentially disruptive experiences - such as failing a subject - we will make them unable to cope with such events when they are older.

On the other hand, it is advisable to warn them against the most frequent cognitive distortions, so that they are not so easily deceived by the falsehoods of emotional reasoning (I am no good, my world is bleak and there is no hope for my future).

Finally, we should combat the culture of public accusation and the "us versus them" mentality, which makes us forget that, as Solzhenitsyn said, "the line that divides good and evil runs through the heart of every human being. Or as Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks says, "human life is not radically divided between irredeemably good and irredeemably evil people".

Finally, the authors reaffirm with data the negative influence of the early availability of smartphones and social networks, the decline of "unsupervised free play" and "curriculum arms races" on the mental health of our young people. Significantly, they dedicate the book to their mothers, who did all they could to prepare them for the road.

La entrada Buenas intenciones y malas ideas se publicó primero en Omnes.

The book is a reflection of his personal life, under the identity of a painter who has lost his inspiration after the death of his wife and muse. He then takes refuge in drink with great nostalgia (mostly because it makes him have moments when he thinks he can see his wife again). It transmits the rich personality of Ángeles de Castro and a concrete sample of how the feminine vital reason is. She was a determined woman, with a harmonious figure -which the 7 pregnancies did not spoil-, with her eyes wide open to reality and the capacity to improve the world around her.

Someone who liked to give surprises and receive them, with a natural elegance and a "selective intuition". innate. A woman "of complicit gaze", which had "an admirable ability to create ambience" and that it was "enemy of spreading bad news". But this necessarily had to have its counterpart: "When she faded away, everything languished around", "her joy was missing".A person who had "an admirable ability to create ambience" and that in her travels she was able to go beyond the stuffy academic environments (which Delibes did not like). He recalls how she had played castanets at a faculty meeting at Yale University and had enlivened the gathering.

She had great personal charm and people skills. At a certain point in the book, it is said: "Aesthetics count too." The protagonist of the story tells his daughter that "your mother's power of seduction was rapturous." and in another fragment, "his faith made me fertile because the creative energy was somehow transmissible". She was a woman of enormous kindness and ability to inhabit the lives of others: "He had the ability to intrude in other people's homes, even to interrupt his neighbor's sleep, without irritating him, perhaps because deep down everyone owed him something". Someone who disliked vulgarity and bureaucracy, as she was impervious to their charms. A woman with an innate talent for interpersonal relationships and for receiving confidences. In this sense, the writer highlights her "his tact for coexistence, his original criteria about things, his delicate taste, his sensitivity".. One of his tips in times of low creativity was to "Don't be dazed; let yourself live.".

A woman with a fine musical ear, who could make herself understood within a few days of staying in a foreign country and who was able to have rhythmHis was an intuitive ear that sometimes allowed him to capture the unexpressed". A woman who hated routine and knew how to make every day a unique event. She was a woman who knew how to be happy. When she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, her expression was: Today these things are fixable," he said. At worst, I've been happy for 48 years; some people can't be happy for forty-eight hours in a lifetime." Someone who did not mind accumulating years (and experience), because not only do the years go by, but they stay: "Every morning, when she opened her eyes, she would ask herself: Why am I happy? And immediately, she would smile to herself and say: 'I have a granddaughter.

Delibes leaves us in this work fascinating reflections on life, on true knowledge, on beauty, describing his wife as a person with the gift of discovering it in the most precarious places and even creating it: "From whom did he learn then that a rose in a vase could be more beautiful than a bouquet of roses or that beauty could be hidden in a gutted old wall clock filled with books?" As it could not be otherwise, the book is a profound reflection on death, but not so much in the biological sense, but biographically, as the loss of a shared life. And this, with delicately achieved moments, as when, on the eve of the operation, the sick woman reads a poem by the Italian writer Giuseppe Ungaretti, entitled "Agony":  To die like the thirsty larks/ in the mirage. / Or, like the quail/ once across the sea/ in the first bushes.../ But not to live on lamentation/ like a blinded goldfinch.

Undoubtedly, it is a reflection on the complementarity that exists between men and women, and how we balance each other. In this sense, he highlights his woman's "vivid imagination and a delicate sensibility. She was balanced, different; exactly the renewal that my blood needed". In another passage, he states concisely but accurately: "Ours was a company of two, one produced and the other managed."

This particular work is an in-depth reflection on daily happiness, on how the key to it lies in continued coexistence: "We were together and it was enough. When she left, I saw it even more clearly: those conversations without words, those glances without a plan, without expecting great things from life, were simply happiness".

The book is also a reflection of a daily religiosity, lived by Ángeles de Castro: "Your mother always kept her belief alive. Before the operation she confessed and received communion. Her faith was simple but stable. She never based her faith on mystical accesses or theological problems. She was not a devout woman, but she was loyal to her principles: she loved and knew how to put herself in the place of the other. She was a Christian and accepted the mystery. Her image of God was Jesus Christ. She needed a human image of the Almighty with whom she could understand herself".

The work also speaks -indirectly- of the vicissitudes of Spanish society at the time (1970s): student strikes, arrests, revolts, torture in prisons. In this sense, the writer refers to the arrest of the couple's two children, Léo and Ana, who is the painter's interlocutor. A mention of Franco appears at a moment when the painter and his wife visit their children in prison. In this sense, the artist's wife says: ' "That man is not going to be eternal"., as if taking him down from the pedestal'. It is also, certainly, a work that carries an implicit criticism of uniform and standardized education, which does not allow the development of the personality: "He was irritated by the structure of the career, by the indoctrinated professors, by the imposed ideas. His head was moving too fast, he was ahead of his mentors'."

Other themes that were always in Delibes' mind: The combination of the rural and the modern: "It was necessary to insert the modern into the rural without resorting to violence." The loneliness of the elderly, as when he recounts his wife's ability to give company to the elderly: "These crazy, lonely old men were never absent from your mother's life: [...] They were all irreparable old men, caught unawares by the lack of solidarity of modern life. They felt lost in the maelstrom of lights and noises, and it seemed as if she, like a good fairy, was taking them by the hand, one by one, to transfer them to the other shore". Communication between generations: "He was attentive to everyone, both to the old, with their cominías, and to the adolescents with their equivocal intimacies. He did not bargain for his devotion".

All in all, a book worth reading.

La entrada Señora de rojo sobre fondo gris se publicó primero en Omnes.

Book

TitleFour theories of artistic expression and other writings on cultural relativism.

AuthorErnest H. Gombrich

EditorialRialp : Rialp

City: Madrid

Year: 2021

Delicious booklet that collects several texts donated by the great art historian Ernest Hans Josef Gombrich to the publishing house Rialp, which were published in his magazine Atlántida.

We could say that the first of the four theories of the title would be the one that considers artistic expression as a symptom (frowning or blushing are symptoms of anger or inner turmoil), the second would consider it as a signal (the sound that hens emit to call their chicks to eat or warn them of some danger) and the third would be the symbolic function, which understands art as a symbol (a writer describes a scene and conveys the feelings of the hero). The fourth theory, complementary to the previous ones, would be the one that understands art as an expression of the artist's own feelings.

Also appearing in this volume is a lecture delivered by the Austrian on cultural relativism in the sciences of the spirit, which has not lost its relevance.

La entrada Cuatro teorías sobre la expresión artística y otros escritos sobre el relativismo cultural se publicó primero en Omnes.

Book

TitleA liberal education

AuthorJosé María Torralba

Pages: 174

Editorial: Encounter

City: Madrid

Year: 2022

Suggestive and entertaining book by Professor José María Torralba. Throughout its pages, he explains the keys of the intellectual movement that both in Europe and America has proposed to repair the academic, cultural and institutional damage suffered by humanistic education at the University.

Without being paralyzed by sterile laments about the fate of the humanities in our time, the author conveys his experience of how it is possible and desirable to implement concrete and non-utopian measures to fill the educational gaps of the new generations. In this sense, the Great Books programs are a key part of this movement.

Humanities subjects for all students and not for a select and dwindling minority: this is the objective of the Core Curriculum projects. The author includes an interesting mention to the fact that it has been precisely Universities of Christian inspiration (in fact, every University is one in origin) that are recovering the humanist tradition of education in order to prevent it from becoming a mere issuer of technical degrees.

La entrada Una educación liberal se publicó primero en Omnes.

Today, his figure is still present in the streets and buildings of Moscow and in cities all over Russia. Thousands of tourists, driven by curiosity or admiration, continue to flock to the mausoleum in Red Square that houses his mummy. Nearby you can also see the Rolls Royce he used when he came to power. Today's Russia, the homeland of Dostoevsky and of so many other illustrious Russians of history to honor, does not find the time to bury the old Bolshevik definitively and seems to continue now under his sinister influence. 

Only a misunderstood Russian patriotism, which cannot ignore the historical importance of the character, can allow such a tribute to the person directly and indirectly responsible for so many millions of deaths. The communist propaganda has managed to cover with a heroic halo the man who, perhaps initially resentful of the execution of his brother by order of the Czar, shed and caused to be shed so much blood in his land and in half the world.

It is well known that Lenin could not support himself before 1917. He was supported by his mother who periodically sent him money. He failed as a lawyer in St. Petersburg and refused to work in the countryside. His mother and sister spoiled him, and he treated them with contempt afterwards, in a profoundly chauvinistic manner. He maintained a regrettable love triangle between his wife Nadezhda and his French mistress, Inessa Armand, thanks to the apartment Lenin rented in Paris with money lent by his mother. 

It was a "petty bourgeois"like many historical revolutionaries, from Marx to Che Guevara. A man without scruples who based his control over the people on terror. The selective extermination, the liquidation of monarchists, Christians, Jews, bourgeois, democrats, social democrats and anyone who did not obey the only leader, began with Lenin. He used the Russian civil war to liquidate his "class enemies" and political adversaries, between the coup d'état of January 1918, when he dissolved the Constituent Assembly after an election that he lost, and the end of 1922. 

He created the political police (the one in which a young Putin would come to work years later), the concentration, labor and extermination camps later copied by the National Socialists, and initiated terror as a form of government. In a telegram, dated August 10, 1918, although unfortunately not out of date, Lenin ordered: "It is necessary to give a lesson. Hang (and I say hang in such a way that people will see it) at least a hundred kulaks, rich and known bloodsuckers (...). Do this in such a way that for hundreds of leagues around people will see, tremble, know and say: they kill and will continue to kill". By the way, at that time his cook was the grandfather of the current President Putin.

Although so many years have passed since his death, even today in Spain his life is not completely alien to us. Since the beginning of his revolution, to which he devoted his entire life at the beginning of the last century, there has been no lack of admirers of the dictator in our country. His influence is evident in various phases of our history.  

It is famous the anecdote of the trip made in 1920 by the socialist deputy for Granada Fernando de los Ríos to the Soviet Union commissioned by the PSOE. Together with Daniel Anguiano, the purpose of the trip was to see the possibilities of the party joining the Third International. During his interview with Lenin, De los Ríos asked him when his government would allow the freedom of citizens. According to De los Ríos' account, Lenin would have finished off a lengthy answer by questioning "Freedom for what?".

The later Minister of Justice of the Second Spanish Republic would have deduced from this answer that a totalitarian drift of the Soviet Revolution would take place, as it did. For this reason, at the next extraordinary congress of the PSOE, De los Ríos opposed the party's entry into the aforementioned International. This would provoke the subsequent split of a small sector of the party that would found the Communist Party of Spain.

Perhaps less well known is Lenin's idea that Spain was the country in Europe where the communist revolution could triumph first after Russia. The well-known socialist politician Francisco Largo Caballero, who became President of the Government and who has a statue in the Nuevos Ministerios in Madrid, openly preached the need for revolution in Spain and was soon known as the "Spanish Lenin". His dream was to create the Union of Iberian Socialist Republics. 

Of course, the leaders of the Soviet Union spared no resources of all kinds since then so that Spain would become a communist Republic as so many countries east of the Iron Curtain became years later. The defeat of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War would frustrate the well-known project of implanting the dictatorship of the proletariat in our country, giving way to the Franco regime.

Today, the 2nd Vice-President of the Government, Yolanda Díaz, has expressed on several occasions her pride in belonging to the Communist Party of Spain. May she read and reflect on Lenin's influence on the history of our country and follow the example of other left-wing politicians of a more peaceful and constructive disposition, such as Julián Besteiro. And let us hope that Russia manages to get rid once and for all of that already too long tradition of "strong" and bloodthirsty leaders.

La entrada Lenin en España se publicó primero en Omnes.

In recent decades we have witnessed the emergence of various political programs in countries as diverse as the United States, Russia, Brazil, Hungary and Poland, which have a number of aspects in common. Along with economic liberalism in most of them, a certain nationalist vision clearly opposed to illegal immigration, as well as a markedly anti-communist ideology (with some logical peculiarities - these days dramatically present - in the case of Russia), we can discover a "cultural" Christianity that leads them to reject some "dogmas" of Western secularized society (abortion, euthanasia, gender ideology or the "new prophecies" of climate change), while they seem to downplay the importance of other Christian values (peace, non-violence, justice, the poor and care for creation).

It seems to us that it might be of interest to focus for a moment on a specific aspect of the current complex situation, specifically on the religious factor of these illiberal democracies that seem to be on the rise in various countries of the Western world. Those who approach this phenomenon from a Manichean and simplistic view run the risk of not understanding what is really happening in countries of the importance of the United States, Russia, Brazil or Eastern Europe and, here among us, the political project of Vox.

Like it or not, the reality is that the vast majority of the earth's inhabitants are people with a religious sense of life. The secularist or anti-religious minorities in Europe and America may have confused the process of Western secularization of recent decades with the gradual disappearance of religious sentiment in the modern world. By attempting to implement a model of society and democracy that is alien, if not completely contrary to the religious sentiments of many millions of people, we believe that they have unwittingly provoked a reaction of religious and political affirmation that they were not counting on and that is not without risk.

Alexis de Tocqueville was convinced that democracy could not survive the loss of Christian faith. "If a democratic nation loses its religion -wrote the preeminent French thinker, falls prey to fierce individualism and materialism and democratic despotism and inevitably prepares its citizens for slavery." We believe that the illiberal politicians to whom we are referring are situated and act along the same lines.

In view of the voices of alarm raised by some regarding the advance of what they have called the "far-right"In Europe and America, it is worth asking whether it would not be wiser to continue advancing towards societies that are more respectful of all people and their ways of thinking. The problem arises when ideological proposals appear to be incompatible with each other. If one tries to impose itself on the other, there is a risk that the other will then try to impose itself on it. We believe that the solution lies in understanding real freedom in our democratic societies. 

It may be time to stop trying to monopolize one type of society and impose it on others, one way or the other. While religious people in the West have understood for many years that there are people who do not share their beliefs and ideals, non-religious people must respect those who do. We believe that goods such as freedom of religion, freedom of education and freedom of expression, as well as the possibility of not financing through taxes activities sanctioned by laws that seriously repulse the conscience of many people (such as abortion, euthanasia or everything related to gender ideology), as well as the duty to respect just laws and those who do not think as we do, should be especially protected in our societies. 

If this is not understood, many people may feel attacked and therefore feel the need to defend themselves. It is important for bigots of all stripes to take this into account if we are not to repeat some of the more famous mistakes of the past. 

On the other hand, there is a risk that politicians may use religion as an excuse to make politics and bring to it the polarization of the "political arena". In this case, it would be necessary to distinguish between the defense of religious freedom and the ideas that represent a majority of citizens and the partisan use of religious beliefs by political leaders who may be tempted to set themselves up as their interpreters, a role that we believe does not correspond to them. In a phrase attributed to Unamuno, "a possible crisis of politics and religion can be found in the practice of religion as politics and politics as religion."

There is a film entitled "Hidden Life", by the American Terrence Malick, which tells the true story of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer beatified a few years ago by the Catholic Church who refused to swear an oath to Hitler during the Second World War, sacrificing everything, including his life. The story he tells can illustrate the strength of some believers' convictions, which should never be violated. 

As Benedict XVI once said "He who bows before Jesus cannot and must not prostrate himself before any earthly power, no matter how strong it may be. We Christians kneel only before God, before the Blessed Sacrament". We end with this sentence because it seems to us that the understanding of the religious phenomenon, especially in the West, has become a necessity if we want to achieve societies where diverse mentalities and ways of life can coexist in peace, without trying to impose one on the other, as has unfortunately happened in the past.

La entrada Religión y democracias iliberales se publicó primero en Omnes.