Nuccio Ordine: “To understand the present and predict the future, we must look to history”

In a few words, the world’s best-known Italian essayist, honorary doctorate and award winner in many countries and also in our country, was born in 1958 in Diamante, Calabria, where he found the solution to a cultural and historical puzzle. It reveals the difficult cultural and political relationship that dominated 16th-century Europe, where monarchs reigned, but featured a character that Ordine knew as if he had been with him or had taken him to his classes: Giordano Bruno.

He made this certainty about the “ordinariness of the world” because in the interview the journalist was interested in telling that past through the eyes of the present. So was the interview.

Professor, philosopher and writer Nuccio Ordine is in Madrid. ALBA VIGARAY

P. You reflect the obsession of some of these kings to prevent imperialism and mix politics and information. How does this relationship look today?

r. To understand a cultural phenomenon, you must have knowledge of literature, art, philosophy, and religion. Today there is the idea that specialization allows you to understand a field, and that is a lie. In the time of Giordano Bruno, culture was not a matter of the whole of Europe because Europe was not united. But philosophers and scientists had a relationship with each other. This was very interesting because every perception of Europe was through culture.

After the Second World War, there are two great philologists who wrote a book called Erich Auerbach. mimesisthe other is by Ernest Robert Curtius. European literature and the Latin Middle Ages. They emerged in 1946 and 1948 to try to unite a Europe completely destroyed by war. Auerbach discussed how literature, from Homer to Virginia Wolf, conceives of reality, and how Curtius can reconstruct a literary history from the classical world to the contemporary world. In a devastated world, literature can help us think about how to unite what has been completely torn by war. Today this is an example of telling our Europe that if there is no Europe of culture, Europe of business means nothing. When you talk about identity, political values… that’s not true. There is always an economic reason.

P. Today is a Russian who wants to hold a piece of Europe.

r. Yes, but I’m not convinced by today’s reading about this war: good is on one side, evil is on the other. Because we have not only Putin imperialism, but also US imperialism. For this reason, Europe does not have an autonomous policy to think differently against the imperialisms that dominate the world. I wonder: Does the United States have an interest in peace, or is it simply using it to wage war on one of its enemies? The Ukrainian people deserve all our solidarity, but there are people who study it and say that every aggression has a history to be understood. That’s why I say that there is not only good and only bad. To understand, we need to do a more critical analysis.

S. At the NATO summit, he held the world war conference in a museum: El Prado.

r. They will have seen that pictures teach peace. Because every war destroys culture. For example, how many important museums were destroyed by the USA in Iraq? Why would great powers mobilize to protect an oil well, but not to protect places where there are important monuments in human history? Because power has nothing to do with culture and art. Well, the idea of ​​going to the Prado is a good idea, but I don’t know if it has had a good result in terms of culture. Meeting there to make a deal on arms seems to me a great contradiction. Buying guns means getting money from culture, education and museums.

Q. In your book you describe Giordano Bruno traveling through the courts of Europe…

r. Giordano Bruno is a citizen of the world, or at least European. “Every land is a homeland,” he said. This means that Vatan is the place where I can work freely and interact with my colleagues. Bruno begins his career in Paris as a philosopher in a secular institution as opposed to the Sorbonne for theologians. So he has a relationship with power but his idea is to always say what he thinks. Then he leaves France as there are conflicts. He comes to England and there is a conflict. He arrives in Prague and there is a conflict. This always happens to him because in the end his ideas are not connected with power.

Bruno lives in a time of civil wars and understands that dialogue between fans is not possible. He knows that dialogue between moderates is easier. Henry III and the Queen of England understand and practice this. For example, they see religion in the service of peace and social harmony. Bruno made this very clear: religion as a unity. The gods did not create religion for themselves, but to allow people to live in peace with each other. Brother kills brother without religion. The problem today is that religion talks about science and no, religion is not science. Religion is a moral thing. What Bruno wanted was to reflect on fanaticism, on those who believed they had the truth.

Q. Will the church today again impeach Giordano Bruno?

r. The answer to this question is very complex. The Church today is very different. We have a revolutionary Pope. The church has always had a relationship with power, never with the poor. But today it has a reread, thanks to Pope Francis. For him, religion is concentrated in the Bible, according to St. Matthew, where Jesus said, “I was cold and they covered me up, I was hungry and they gave me food, I was thirsty and they gave me water”. Namely, the social behaviors that make one man be supportive of the other. These are concrete actions. And those who do have eternal life. This kind of Church can accept Bruno today. But it’s hard to be sure because the Church today is something else. The important thing is to live in harmony with our thoughts. And it seems to me that such is the life of Pope Francis. For example, he says you should live away from the luxury of the Vatican. And that’s Bruno’s idea.

After the talk, the philosopher didn’t want to fail to point out one aspect of what we were discussing over Skype, and emailed it to the journalist: “Bruno allows us to see that religious wars (and wars in general) are caused only by destruction and death, undoing the gains of civilization Civil and Economic disruption also drives down the corruption of knowledge, which is why in wars there are no winners: those who believe they win also lose. The ruler is seen as a doctor: the state needs to heal its wounds.

There are many poets and artists in my book who use this ruler-doctor metaphor with roots in Plato. It is no accident that the prince of Machiavelli was trained by the centaur Chiron: not only because the ruler must make good use of humanity and ferinity (the centaur’s dual nature), but also because Chiron was also the teacher of Aesculapius, the god of medicine. For Machiavelli, the art of government overlaps with the ability to heal wounds and dose necessary medicines… Bruno taught us another fundamental lesson: it is necessary to always have the courage to tell the truth, even if rulers don’t want it. to hear it. It’s not the courtier who always says “yes”. Quite the contrary: the role of today’s intellectual should be that of deviants. I think of Bertold Brecht’s nice quote: “We sat on the wrong side because all the other seats were taken.” So: we must always occupy the “wrong side”…

‘The use of the useless’.