Agree to Differ

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The second mile

Prof. Alberto Melloni, Fondazione per le scienze religiose Giovanni XXIII

n these early years of the twenty-first century, every-

thing concerning interfaith relations and their intensity

is in flux; words and meaning, reasons and reasoning,

the journey and the goal, causes and effects, the real and

the fake. Hendiadys has become dichotomy and relations

become disputes. However, the reverse is also happening.

In an ever-changing scenario alternating between times of

turbulence and calm, immense suffering and unexpected

surprises have surfaced. Centuries of coexistence have sunk

into bitter hatreds and atavistic prejudices have given way

to unexpected encounters. This course of events produces

a cloud of foul-smelling fumes that rise from the surface of

the real world blurring our vision and critical thinking, and

the historian’s work is made even more gruelling as he or

she is called upon not so much to tame the wild horses of

ideology, but to strive to avoid the stagnant pool of clichés.

We stand on the brink of an age where our capacity for critical

thought is dulled as though we were debating the causes of

destiny or trying to trace the origins of an evil which goes so

far back aetiologically as to defy any attempt at explanation. In

the global context, communication techniques dominate the

way individual and collective emotions are brutally expressed,

without even feeling the need to doubt or to question. As a

result, objectively commonplace impressions and formulas

become part of a shared vocabulary.

With regard to interfaith differences and their consequent

impact on an understanding of the ‘religious non-self’, this all

has a profound effect. The thoughts and behaviour of the less

informed are driven by the mistaken impression that they are

faced with an unprecedented event. For those with painful first-

hand experience, the return of atrocities can only be defined

as barbaric, medieval, primitive, using the kind of language

typical of those who interpret our current era as ‘modern’ and

who refuse to see the reactionary and regressive force of faith,

or faiths, as they drive an insidious wedge into a ‘modern’ but

vulnerable freedom. On the other hand, for those attempting

dialogue in a context rife with centuries-old prejudice and ruth-

less repression, there is the undeniable dawning of a glimmer of

hope which was denied to their fathers and prophets.

Our consciousness and memory have been alerted and trained

to remember how the bloodiest violence tore worlds apart in

certain moments of history, but as they wane we become less

aware of how close those historical ties are something which bind

us to an era which purports to be in the remote past. However,

those times are not remote. They were times when extermination

governed both the relationship between exclusivist beliefs (or

non-beliefs) and the fragility of those peace agreements which,

in historical terms, have yet to prove fit for purpose.

The uncontrollable outpouring of violence, random in its

ferocity and fierce in its randomness, brings tears to the eyes

of its victims as they stand powerfully, in dignified silence,

before history.

Those explanations which resort to René Girard’s model of the

‘sacrificial crisis’ explain nothing except a desire to exorcise the

unbearable return of the murderer who kills in the name of God,

a God who is not dead but rather lives once again in the assassin.

There is, however, a part of public opinion which differs, stating

that the violence that has once again bloodied the great fault

lines of religious cultures (between Shi`ite and Sunni, Orthodox

and Latin Christians, etc.) is deep-rooted. Faced with the threat

posed to pluralistic society, they explain that this root, which

poisons the present, can and must be severed, and they think

that terrorist violence is the abuse of the name of God. As if this

could somehow solve the problem, without having to deal with

God himself and the victims of that very same violence.

Many religious authorities have made strong and commend-

able efforts to subtract any theological legitimacy from the

killers and from religiously motivated terrorism, acting often

out of sincere motivations and, on the rhetorical level, with

commitment. Yet for those theorists of the eternal ‘too little too

late’, these efforts may often be regarded with suspicion. They

gain currency in, and only in, those assemblies where dialogue,

inclusion theory and the principles of coexistence are practised

and have been circulating on many levels for over a century.

Those principles have borne fruit, fanned by a spirit of

convergence (the Latin

con-spiratio

) that gradually came to

accept the dialogic principles and paradigms of otherness

based on widely disparate philosophical bases. This

con-spira-

tio

has made the first mile possible, the first step on the long

road of peace meetings between men and women of different

or shifting communities, faith, ideology and nation.

That first mile has been a journey of astounding beauty, at

times faltering and at times picking up speed as it progressed

through history. I shall not list all the events here but it is

worth remembering that one of the most intense, defining

periods was between 1986 and 1993.

These were the years when Algerian militants were return-

ing from the war in Afghanistan and the outbreak of a bloody

civil war that saw the death of tens of thousands of help-

less Sunni and other Muslims. These were the years of the

Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the American-led international

coalition’s invasion of Iraq, which, according to an elderly

Christian monk who had only lived in the Middle East for 20

years, was the necessary enzyme that would enable Islamic

fundamentalism to become “rooted ideologically.”

This was also the period, even before the fall of the BerlinWall,

when the papacy and the Roman Catholic church entered a gath-

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