The two authors were Saint Augustine and Friedrich Nietzsche. In an intuitive and reasoned way, Jericó and I, like iron unattached to a magnet, had headed for opposing thinkers. We wanted, more accurately, to learn to think on the basis of extremes. Our purpose was transparent to someone like Father Filopáter and his rapid attraction to an unoccupied center: for us and, in contrast to what we could imagine, for himself.
“It matters a great deal to you to think as you choose, doesn’t it?”
“And also to express freely what we think, Father.”
“Authority has no right to intervene?”
“Of course not.”
“Of course not when it’s a question of a religious institution? Or never?”
“We want it never to interfere if it’s a question of a secular state.”
“Why?”
“Because the state is secular in order to dispense justice, and justice is not a question of faith.”
“And charity?”
“It begins at home,” I allowed myself to joke, and Filopáter laughed along with me.
He began by situating our extremes. He clarified that Jericó and I chose two authors who would teach us to think, not two filiations who would oblige us to believe and defend what we believed. In this we agreed with him. It was the basis of our dialogues. We weren’t wedded to our philosophers except insofar as we read and discussed them. Was Filopáter tied to the dogmas of his Church? Thinking this was our initial advantage. We were mistaken. In any event, our thinking was opposed to faith and wagered on the clash of ideas. Our decision was that these ideas were diametrically opposed, and Filopáter situated them in a pellucid manner.
We read Saint Augustine: God creates all things and He alone sustains them. Evil is only the absence of a good we could have. When it fell, humanity lost its original values. Recovering them requires divine grace. Grace is inaccessible to human beings, fallen and in disgrace, on their own. The Church is the intermediary of grace. Without the Church, we remain joined to the dis-grace of the human mass, which is massa peccati.
Saint Augustine defended these ideas and fought without respite the heretic Pelagius, for whom salvation was possible without the Church: You can be saved by yourself.
At the other extreme of these youthful ideas, Nietzsche proposed freeing us from all metaphysical belief, abandoning any acquired truth, and accepting with bitterness a nihilism that rejects a Christian culture impoverished by the need for renunciation and yet masked by false values that consecrate appearances and hinder the impulse toward truth.
“What truth?”
“The recognition of the absence of any truth.”
Father Filopáter was not lacking in astuteness and I don’t believe he suspected, beyond a couple of peripeteias, that his religious investiture would lead him to instruct us in the virtues of faith and the error of our deviations. Today merely thinking that makes me ashamed, and I let that kind of suspicion fall useless to the sand where my decapitated head lies. Filopáter did not condemn Nietzsche or praise Saint Augustine. And he did not pull another Catholic theologian from his sleeve. We should not have been surprised, in short, that the lesson he set aside for us would bear the name and imprint of a thinker condemned as a heretic by both his original Hebrew community and eventual Christian one.
Therefore, before expounding the philosophy of Baruch (Benedetto, Benito, Benoît) Spinoza, Filopáter, as he placed on his head not a biretta or a cap but a black zucchetto, reminded us of the origin of the word “heretic,” which was the Greek eso theiros, which means “I choose.” The heretic is the one who chooses. Heresy is the act of choosing.
“Then heresy is freedom,” Jericó hastened to say.
“Which obliges us to think, what is freedom?” the priest shot back.
“Fine. What is it?” I came to my friend’s assistance.
To obtain an approximate answer, Filopáter asked us to retrace the path of the heretic Spinoza.
“You have just told me you believe in freedom of thought.”
“That’s true, Father.”
“Is the thought of believing in God free?”
We said it was.
“Then, can faith be free?”
“If it isn’t consumed in obedience,” said Jericó.
“If it affirms justice,” I added.
Filopáter adjusted the black calotte.
“If it doesn’t, if it doesn’t… Don’t be so negative. Do you believe in the will? Do you believe in intelligence?”
Again, we said we did.
“Do you believe in God?”
“Demonstrate it to us, Father,” Jericó said, arrogantly, brazenly.
“No, seriously, boys. If God exists, He is a God who does not demand obedience and offer justice, but a God positively intelligent and possessing will.”
“Our differences aside, I would say I agree,” I affirmed.
The priest playfully pulled my ear and placed the zucchetto on my head.
“Well, you’re mistaken. God is not intelligent. God has no will.”
I laughed. “You’re more of a heretic than we are!”
He removed the zucchetto.
“I am the most serious of orthodox believers.”
“Explain yourself,” said the very haughty Jericó.
“Believing that God has intelligence and will is to believe that God is human. And God is not human. I do not say with vulgarity ‘He is divine.’ Only that He is other. And we gain nothing by turning Him into a mirror of our virtues or a negation of our vices. God is God because He is not us.”
“Why?”
“Because God is infinitely creative.”
“Isn’t that what we humans are, individually, collectively, or traditionally?”
“No, because our creativity is free. God’s is necessary.”
“What do you mean?”
“That God is the cause of Himself and of the finite beings-you, me, everything that exists-derived from Him. God is active not because He is free but because all things necessarily originate in Him.”
“Then he isn’t the bearded man in the sky?”
“No, just as light isn’t the light of a candle or a lightbulb.”
“And Jesus, His son?”
“He is a human form among the infinite forms of God. A form. Just one. He could have chosen others.”
“Why?”
“To let us see Him.”
“And then return to nothing?”
“Or to everything, Jericó.”
“What do you mean?”
“That God is vast, not intelligent. God is infinite, not divisible.”
“But He can be human, material…” I apostrophized.
“Yes, because the body is one thing and matter another. We are only body, the stone is only matter. But God, who can be body-Jesus-can also be matter-creation, seas, mountains, animals, plants, etcetera, and also everything we don’t even know or perceive. What we do manage to see and know, touch and smell, imagine or desire, are for God only modalities of His own infinite extension.”
I believe he saw us looking somewhat perplexed because he smiled and asked:
“Do you subscribe to a theory of the creation of the universe? In reality, there are only three. The one of the divine fiat. The one of the original explosion, which derives from the theory of evolution. Or the one of the infinite universe, without beginning or end, without an act of creation or apocalypse. Pascal’s vast sidereal night. The infinite silence of the spheres. Earth as a passing accident whose origin and extinction are equally lacking in importance.”
I don’t know if Filopáter was proposing to us a kind of menu of the origin of the universe, and if he expected us to subscribe to one or the other of his three theories he was mistaken and knew it. He wanted only to force us to think on our own, and in the course of our talks we realized our initial error. Filopáter did not want to convert us to any orthodoxy, not even his own. And I confess I ended up wondering what, then, if not religious faith, the philosophical reasoning of our teacher could be.