Disagreeing with leading theologian

A committee has been appointed, certainly not too prematurely, to assist the city of Valletta (unless it turns out to be Gozo) to be ready to assume the role of European Capital of Culture. What does this magniloquent title really mean?

A quick answer would be to report briefly what Liverpool did when it was deemed by consensus to have successfully fulfilled the role. No doubt, there is a lot to learn from the astute example of our Lancashire cousins. But, for decades now, at least since Porter published his famous book on the subject, everybody knows that you get the best commercial or economic result when you exploit "comparative advantages". And Malta's are clearly different from Liverpool's.

So a quick answer to your question, which is trickier than it sounds on first hearing, is almost bound to be wrong. If you see me smiling as I say that, it is because of a curious thought that has just flitted through my mind.

Benedict XVI might have had a pat answer, if you were interviewing him, or someone of his acolytes scattered throughout the world. In fact, the former Professor Joseph Ratzinger has been answering such questions as "Which is the blood-pump or what is the animating central force of European Culture?" in the incessant flow of books that he has been authoring for practically his whole adult life.

I myself can only think of a good starting point to begin tackling the question in a way that is bound to be more roundabout. Some time ago, I heartily recommended a book published by some University students called Hide and Seek. It deals with the topic of culture, both Maltese and planetary, especially in relation to religion.

I focused attention on divorce, which together with abortion, the shadowy sides of marriage and family, is surely the point of highest tension (and dissension) in the field of Maltese/European cultural relations. But, on the occasion of the book launch, Fr René Camilleri, unlike me, chose to respond full square to the (by now) classic discussion of our topic by Tracy Rowland.

Can you explain who she is?

Cardinal George Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney, has written that her second major book, called Ratzinger's Faith, "marks progress towards her becoming Australia's leading theologian."

She is a lighthouse relatively to the review Communio, founded by Ratzinger and Balthasar as a counter-blast to Concilium, associated in many minds with Hans Kung and his progressive allies.

Her official position is Dean of the John Paul II Institute in Melbourne. That may come to seem a trifle paradoxical when one discovers that chunky bits of both her books are devoted to unfavourable comparison of John Paul to Benedict.

Of course, she stoutly maintains that both Popes agreed that the most significant issue of our age was the peculiar form taken by the timeless "battle of the giants", as Freud famously called it, between Eros and Thanatos. In our time, according to the popes, the "battle" has been transferred from the unconscious level of the individual psyche to the socio-political.

The "battle" has been consequently slightly relabelled by the Popes. They call it the conflict between "the civilisation of love" (which they identify mainly with Christianity) and "the culture of death".

Expression of this mortiferous culture is not only the legalisation of abortion and euthanasia, but also such phenomena as the use of excrement as art material, the cult of the fragmentary and other semiotic correlatives of demographic decline.

Despite this basic agreement between the two popes, Prof. Rowland says that Ratzinger has always sharply differed from Karol Woytila as regards the best strategy to be adopted on the side of Eros in the always ongoing battle against Thanatos.

According to her, Woytila was essentially a Thomist of the Maritain School. He thought that modernity as an eclectic conceptual system (including even Marxist elements) could be "baptised" as Aristotle's system had been by Aquinas in the Middle Ages.

Ratzinger, on the other hand, followed much more closely St Augustine's approach. He rejects outright the culture both of modernity and of post-modernism as conducive, because of their relativistic ethics, to the "culture of death".

Actually, Rowland's first book, Culture and the Thomist Tradition after Vatican II, published by Routledge in 2003 in the Radical Orthodoxy series, reads like a detective story in which the sleuth T.R. manages to identify the wicked twins responsible for a double crime.

It consists of the debacle of contemporary culture on one side and the complicity of the Church in it on the other. So, the collective villains are two. First, there are the over-accommodating authors of the chapter on Culture in the Council's document on The Church and the Modern World. Second, there are such neo-Thomists as the followers of Maritain who is stigmatised as being the originator of the tricky operation of embracing Modernity by Christians.

How is this relevant to the role of Valletta as European Capital of Culture?

The high assignment would not be optimally fulfilled by mere highlighting of our pan-European heritage and providing a pot-pourri of even top level artistic events from all over Europe.

Our ideal offering would be making available a context in which debate about the cultural identity of Europe in a globalised, pluralist world can be seriously and constructively pursued.

I am hopeful that a partial model will be made available to us by the Ulysses 2009 initiative being launched by the Ambassador of France and Mediterranean Parliamentarians.

People like Prof. Rowland believe that you can only have an authentic culture if it is framed by a "great narrative" such as is provided by salvation history.

Others like most Europeans, including myself, believe that the capital necessity of culture in general is the flourishing of creative dialogue - more specifically in our case, between the European and African shores of our metaphysically-laden sea.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.