A truly great book is a book that, to nourish our spirit, has no need of our agreement or disagreement. To find a great book we usually have to disturb the classics. But this is not always the case.
I read Giorgio Agamben’s works with a passion (including literary) that I rarely feel for a modern-day novel. Agamben is the most important Italian philosopher and, I would say, one of the most important in the world. He is not an interventionist, he does not make declarations on major issues, he does not seek visibility. His arguments might appear secondary to others. But more than what we talk about, it matters what we say.
I read and reread The Spirit and the Letter, which has just been released (Neri Pozza, 110 pages, 17 euros). The topic, the interpretation of the Scriptures, might seem for specialists. But this is not the case: it is rather a book on the profound meaning of that fundamental human activity which is reading. What does “reading” really mean?
The act of reading has a fascinating genealogy. The problem of understanding what an author really said becomes more urgent in proportion to the importance of the things written. If the Greek and Latin tradition entrusts the problem above all to the authority of the speaker – be it oracle or poet or historiographer – the Jewish and Christian tradition cannot consider the authority (rabbi) sufficient since it is a question of establishing with the greatest possible precision the words truly pronounced by God. The interpretation of the texts is thus enriched with the methods of philology, which examine the possible errors of the copyists and compare the different lessons received from the same text. We do not appear before the Mystery without having used all our knowledge. The reader is always asked to choose: how to behave when faced with a particularly dark passage? The commentator can decide to simplify, but it is also possible to welcome the darkness (lectio difficileor) and move with caution and humility within it, even accepting misunderstanding as a necessary part of the journey. But God speaks to us in enigmas and symbols, and once the best or least unlikely text has been established, it is necessary to access a second level of understanding. “God has spoken one word, I have heard two” says the psalm.
Twelve hundred years of Western tradition establish the number of four senses in which a sacred text (but also a poetic text) offers itself to us: literal, allegorical, moral and “anagogical” or “supersenso” as Dante calls it: that is, the spiritual sense . Henri De Lubac dedicated one of his most extraordinary works, Medieval Exegesis, to this theme. But, as mentioned, these are not topics for specialists: it is about what our civilization has transmitted to us on the meaning of a capital action such as reading. According to a commonplace, there are as many meanings of a text as there are readers: which is not true, were it not for the fact that every single reader can identify multiple meanings or reading levels, and so on. Against the temptation to see in a text (or in a work of art) what we like and like, Dante, and with him the Western tradition, always remembers that the literal meaning of a text is the fundamental one, and that everything must always lead back to it.
A text, in short, is a work of craftsmanship raised against chaos. But the different levels of reading beyond the literal one, Agamben observes, no longer concern the words of the text, but the things the text talks about. In other words, the multiplicity of a text, its ability to say multiple things, is not so much a textual problem, but rather an anthropological problem.
My old professor Gustavo Bontadini spoke of “anthropological differences”. There are men for whom words like “substance”, “essence”, “existence”, “symbol”, “appearance”, “becoming” have a meaning and others for whom they have none. One of Cormac McCarthy’s terrible characters says it clearly: “This is what brought you here, what will always bring you all here. People like you can’t tolerate the idea that the world is flat. That it contains nothing other than what you see in front of you (…) Your world teeters on a silent labyrinth of questions. And we will devour you” (City of the plain, Einaudi 1999).
With great clarity, Agamben also leads us along this path. Reading is not an act for specialists, or for addicts (we are wary of the Book as mythology). A written text, like our life, makes sense depending on the questions we ask it. Our days can be flat and say nothing else than what they say, but they can – as Mario Luzi wrote – become populated with alarms, shaking us from our cynical sleep.
Particularly acute, in this regard, is Agamben’s insistence on the concept of “figure”. Which is not a simile: the thing (re)figured may not coincide with what it represents: Jesus is defined as the “new Adam”, even if Adam resembles Jesus in nothing. The point, writes Agamben, is to “grasp the past what has not been experienced, somehow give it back possibilities. We are not just talking about generic and abstract possibilities here – the jobs we could have done and didn’t do, the people we could have known and didn’t know – but also and above all about what remained unlived while we lived it. If the present is by definition deciduous and elusive, in every experience there is a remainder that remains unfinished or not fully experienced.”
These are the “alarms” that Mario Luzi talks about. And this is the true meaning of reading, that is, giving life back its spiritual dimension, that is: its possibility of fullness. Because spirituality is not made up of dreams or fantasies or even religious images: it is the right to live life to its fullest.
But, on a personal note, I would like to add that this is what we are afraid of today.
Advertising presents us with a near future without thoughts (“even no thoughts”), tour operators sell us enjoyments (cruises, holiday packages) to which our conscience is not summoned, and even the book industry settles on the idea of books and reading as if they were values in themselves. The flat world that, according to McCarthy, will devour us is not bad at all, it just is what it is. It’s sad, but it’s not scary.
