Philosophy for children of all ages

The book on Caravaggio for Children that you wrote with Arja Nukarinen Callus for the centenary of Caravaggio's Maltese sojourn has now been published. Is it not paradoxical to present such a morally unconventional artist as somehow a role model for children?

Actually the nature of the book is more like that of a textbook of philosophy for children. Doing philosophy with secondary school students has been a keen interest of mine ever since I was deeply involved with the preparation of Civics and other manuals at that level of education. I was very gratified when a former student of mine, John Peter Portelli, now Professor of the Philosophy of Education at Toronto, became one of the world's leading experts in philosophy for children.

I would, however, never have actually succeeded in writing the book were it not for the collaboration of Arja who had specialised in her native Finland in Art Pedagogy for the young. I kept being carried away in the process of writing to the extent that with the matter excised as inappropriate, another book could be compiled. In the end I managed enough self restraint not to revise Arja's last version of the text.

The book is mainly intended to provoke exploration of one's own identity. Its title is actually A Quest for kNIGHThood. The mix of lower case lettering and capitals is meant to suggest that the protagonist of the story is driven forward by a sort of death-wish: darkness, night, nothingness, but that this death-wish is sublimated, in conformity with Freudian theory, into the commitment to chivalry.

I am always surprised to find out that many people in Malta, despite the massive legacy inherited from the Knights, are not aware that it was not rare among the first Crusaders that their motivation was somewhat similar to that of the suicide bombers of today. They joined the chivalrous Orders with a strong hope of achieving martyrdom.

When reading the story of her life by Theresa of Avila, as Caravaggio himself might well have done in his youth, no episode impressed me more than when, on the news being spread that the Knights had surrendered Rhodes to the Turks, she ran out of her house with her brother towards Morocco, the nearest Muslim country, where she hoped to preach the Gospel and be martyred. She felt that it would be some slight contribution to make up for the failure of the Knights to hold on to Rhodes until death.

We do not present Caravaggio as a role model except in so far as he used art to sublimate creatively the aggressiveness that is closely related to the death-wish so widespread in our culture.

Do you mean to say that you chose Caravaggio's life and art as a pretext and stalking horse for a textbook in philosophy?

That would be true if philosophy is understood in its wider sense. There are no technical exercises or language, but the example of Caravaggio is used for the reader to ask questions about his or her own choices about how to live meaningfully.

The strategy used is to follow the stages of any life using an image of it painted by Caravaggio and adding to it a text that could plausibly be his own reflections on the event. For instance, we begin with birth, showing a picture of Baby Jesus by Caravaggio, and adding thoughts about beginning, life or anything at all, that are strung together from what is known or can be guessed of his character. Then, questions are informally framed to stimulate the reader to explore the various sorts of relative beginnings in his own experience.

We then pass on to consider relations with one's mother and then one's father (using Abraham and Isaac), then the narcissistic phase of psychological development (inevitably using Caravaggio's picture of Narcissus, but also the Malta-located painting of John the Baptist looking at the spring-water), and so on up to old age (Wignacourt) and death.

An essential dimension of teaching philosophy is that it should be fun. So, in one chapter, instead of Caravaggio talking, it is the horse, protested against for hogging most of the space in the picture of the Conversion of Paul, that defends his dominating presence. In another chapter, the donkey, whose head is placed alongside that of St Joseph, as if they were twin brothers, in the Flight to Egypt, speaks in parallel to the Patriarch.

You acknowledged in your book help from the Caravaggio Foundation. Last week the foundation also launched four Caravaggio-related publications. What do you think of them?

Each of these roughly 50-page booklets, with illustrations much more chromatically excellent than those in our book, are part of the process of the restoration of very significant paintings with controverted Caravaggio connections undertaken by the Foundation, since the process does not involve just the deployment of scientific and artistic skills, but also considerable scholarly and historic research. The erudition of the various local and foreign experts who contributed to the process has been filtered into the booklets that were presented by Fr Marius Zerafa and Prof. Roberta Lapucci at the Caravaggio Restaurant at Portomaso.

Lapucci is perhaps best known for the results of her further explorations of the Hockney hypothesis that Caravaggio used the camera oscura and other optical devices in the composition of his paintings, possibly also in Malta, but is also brilliant in all aspects of the restoration process of which she is one of the most distinguished teachers in Florence. Through the Caravaggio Foundation she has renewed academic collaboration between Malta and Florence in important sectors of the arts.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.