Introduction

To close Earth Month, there is a 50-year-old essay that I want to reproduce in its entirety. The reason for this is that I think the text is a precursor to many of the contemplative and eco-spirituality themes of Pope Francis, and it is found in one of the authors he has remarked to have had a profound influence on him—but I have never seen anyone else make use of the connection.

Truth be told, what I reproduce here is not an essay, but a chapter in a book. Yet it reads distinctly enough to be treated as an essay. The essay—or chapter—can be found in Meditations on Saint Luke by Arturo Paoli.[1] Pope Francis knew this Little Brother of the Gospel personally and has cited him as one of the two main pathways by which he became familiar with the spirituality of Charles de Foucauld during his years of studying theology (1966–1969):

And I would also like to thank Saint Charles de Foucauld because his spirituality did me so much good when I was studying theology, a time of maturation and also of crisis. It came to me through Fr [Arturo] Paoli and through the books of [René] Voillaume which I read constantly. It helped me so much to overcome crises and to find a way of Christian life that was simpler, less Pelagian, closer to the Lord. I thank the Saint and bear witness to this, because it did me so much good.

Meditations on Saint Luke was originally published in Italian in 1972,[2] then in Spanish in Argentina in 1974,[3] and is chronologically one of the closest writings of Father Paoli to the time that Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the future pope, was studying theology. It is also a text written in the context of Argentina itself, as the opening reference to Suriyaco makes clear. But more importantly still, I think it is an as-yet-undiscovered “blueprint” text for Pope Francis’ papacy, at least as regards contemplation, the ecological crisis, and what we might identify as an anti-capitalist streak.

By far the single most important theme for understanding Pope Francis here is, I think, the pitting of an emerging aestheticism against genuine Christian contemplation of beauty. That is why I have titled this post as I have, even though Father Paoli’s essay itself is much more poetically named “Where the Road Ends.”

Phrases like “esthetic yet incapable of contemplating beauty” or “impotent estheticism that is a parody of contemplation” set up the fundamental purpose of this piece. Father Paoli is convinced that

The contemplative attitude is completely distinct from estheticism, bastard child of capitalism. Contemplation matures in communion with Brother Fire, with Sister Water, with Brother Wolf and discovers a loving and joyful brotherhood, whereas estheticism ends up in visual pleasure and estrangement, without getting us out of our loneliness. Contemplation provokes a reaction of “how good it is to be here. Let us erect three booths.” Estheticism demands succession, change. The contemplative design for the future is qualitative change, reconciliation with things.

The problem is that we don’t reject the unnatural socio-economic system, which is based on domination and violence towards God’s creation and our fellow human beings. As a result, we don’t want to pray, except in an aesthetic way:

God is not “economic,” God is gratuitous. When our prayer became “economic,” “capitalist,” pageantry and estheticism became a part of our prayer. Prayer, before it is put into words, is a state of being. Being religious is not the performance of acts or the return of things loaned to us by God; it is obedience to a historic destiny that is personal and, at the same time, communal. Beauty is the purpose of history; peace, harmony, unity, music are different words that express the same reality. To be religious is to give your life so that the world may be more beautiful, more just, more at peace; it is to prevent egotistical and self-serving ends from disrupting this harmony of the whole. Contemplatives are religious. Drawn toward the roots of being, they rediscover the meaning of things; and in the meaning of their names and of their existence among others in time, they discover the true meaning of history. “From my mother’s womb he gave me my name.” And revolutionaries are religious; they do not accept the existing order, they refuse to live a life without meaning, and they struggle to re-create a social reality whose thrust shall be toward living together in love and in the constant search for dignity in the other.

And in these two short passages, we have a programmatic text for the pontificate that we’re in now. It’s not the whole thing, of course. But when you think that this was written 40 years before Laudato Si’ by someone whom Jorge Bergoglio knew personally, admired, and probably later read assiduously, the parallels become hard to ignore.

Pope Francis himself has deplored an “aesthetic relativism which would downplay the inseparable bond between truth, goodness and beauty” (Evangelii Gaudium 166). He constantly has it out for what Paoli calls “pageantry and estheticism [that] became a part of our prayer.” For example, part of the recent apostolic letter on liturgical formation notes: “The continual rediscovery of the beauty of the Liturgy is not the search for a ritual aesthetic which is content by only a careful exterior observance of a rite or is satisfied by a scrupulous observance of the rubrics” (Desiderio Desideravi 22). Other examples abound.

It is precisely this struggle that has put the Holy Father on a collision course with certain right-wing elements that are bent on upholding the socio-economic order, who are also distinguishable, as a sociological grouping, for their attachment to liturgical aestheticism. But this “aestheticism” or “aesthetic relativism” is a backwards movement, a substitute, a pale imitation. It is at the antipodes of what Pope Francis really wants. He, like Father Paoli, is determined that we contemplate beauty.

For Pope Francis, what we contemplate is beauty. He has used the phrase “our God-given aesthetic and contemplative sense” in the singular (Querida Amazonia 55–56), indicating that appreciation of beauty and contemplation are rooted in the same human faculty. He offers a lengthy meditation on “the aesthetic experience… which contemplates other persons as ends in themselves” (Amoris Laetitia 127–129). And he asserts that we can “contemplate the beauty” of creation in gratitude to the Father (Laudato Si’ 97, 103, 112). The two words “contemplate” and “beauty” form a pair for the Pope, as they already did for Father Paoli.

This beauty that we contemplate, of course, propels us to action for the sake of that in which we are immersed in a relationship of loving knowledge. We don’t separate truth, goodness, and beauty, so when we rest in a contemplative gaze, it then deepens our commitment to pursue the good and the true within the history of creatures. Thus, we have all the social teaching of the present pontificate, which ties together contemplation of creation and the presence of God in our neighbour—“the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” (LS 49; QA 8).

In the present essay of Arturo Paoli, you’ll also find many other themes of the current pontificate. There are references to Brother Wind, Sister Water, and Brother Fire (LS 87); reconciliation with not just humans, but all of God’s creatures (LS 66, 218); the imperative to reconcile with someone who has something against us, insofar as we are in a relationship of oppression, before the Eucharist (AL 185–186); Eucharistic eco-spirituality (LS 226); unexpected references to grace before and after meals (LS 227); rootedness in Indigenous peoples (Paoli mentions the Ye’kuana under the name Makritar; for Pope Francis, see QA in its entirety); a socio-economic system that is unjust and violent at its root (EG 59); and the prophetic and contemplative lifestyle concomitant with living Christianity (LS 222). Individually, these components may seem like nothing of note. But the cumulative impression is remarkable.

When I say this essay is like a “blueprint,” I might be exaggerating slightly. But only slightly. Considering this document is over 50 years old—and bearing in mind the very rare moves like equating contemplative and aesthetic sense, then pitting them against an aestheticism that emerges from a violent socio-economic system of domination—I find it pretty hard to deny a formative influence.

But I leave that up to you. Whether or not this essay had a profound impact on the future pontiff, it is still well worth reading.

As when I published a chapter from another long-out-of-print, hard-to-find, 50-year-old work that had influenced Pope Francis (“The Second Call” by René Voillaume), the length, percentage of the book reproduced, and purpose of the publication seem to fit standards of fair use, as I understand them. At any rate, the entire book is already available at archive.org (although I have reproduced this myself from a hard copy that I have).

“Where the Road Ends”
Arturo Paoli
[ PDF ]

They were childless, for Elizabeth was sterile; moreover, both were advanced in years (Lk 1,7).

Human salvation occurs in an encounter: God and the desert; fullness and sterility. The barren land resounds with the voice of a woman. Sarah laughs inside the tent at the thought of her aged Abraham engendering a child (Gn 18, 9-19). Zechariah doubts the word of promise, and so becomes mute during the long months of waiting for John. The river of life, capable of irrigating the land, fertilizes the womb of a woman.

I am reading Luke’s pages in a desert, a rock-strewn desert bounded to the south by mountains whose seductive colors change with the changing light of the day. But it is impossible to yield to the temptation to explore, for we are separated from the mountains by a wild area of wadis and gulches apparently carved by waters long since swallowed up by the earth. To the north there is a small strip of vegetation, dying of thirst. A murmuring stream—the only sound in the total silence—flows uselessly through devastated vineyards and ruined orchards, eating away at the foundations of abandoned houses. Farther on, there is the stony bed of a river, but without any water. On the other bank the scorched earth begins. The few people who survive here must cross the sandy terrain and go upriver daily in search of water for themselves and their animals—water to drink, to wash in, and to break open the dark skin of the land.

Dazzled by the brightness, one’s eyes see what is at once an Eden and a desert. And they see people who live suspended between the promises of life and the active presence of death. To the west the road vanishes among the rocks, pointing to the only possibility of escape to the distant city before the remaining walls crumble and the doors, made by hands that knew of beauty, fall into the rubble. This is Suriyaco, my desert.

Here, in this setting, I think about my times, my culture, my struggling generation. I reflect upon our age—productive and yet sterile, esthetic yet incapable of contemplating beauty, violently bent on revolution and yet incapable of salvation, straining toward the future but threatened by the present. It is an age that seems without hope because it lacks grace. It is the epilogue of the “patriarchal” era, where “life” means reproduction and the ideal is to sow a seed in the womb of a woman, or in the womb of the earth, or in the womb of a bank, so that it will multiply. Life, growth, is a question of numbers, of quantitative multiplication.

The history of nature involves the history of the person, which is constituted by design for the future, choice, new creation. In the heart of the technological economy sterility appears. The contemplation of beauty that leads to adoration, the search for self-identity, communication that should issue in communion-it all ends in a desert of stone. Some of our young people find themselves in this hopeless desert and try to alert the rest. Insofar as we discover our meaning in the world, our being as part of things, our world begins to become strange and hostile for us. Every day we become increasingly aware that it is in a state of alienation. “Yes, we know that all creation groans and is in agony even until now” (Rom 8,22). This quotation from Romans is from a context where Paul is speaking of liberation from fear and the security of persons who feel they are on the right road. “You did not receive a spirit of slavery leading you back into fear, but a spirit of adoption through which we cry out, ‘Abba!’ (that is, ‘Father’)” (Rom 8,15). The fundamental projection of the person into the future coincides with a liberation from fear, and consequently from aggressiveness toward nature. The “economic” attitude is clearly the most violent; it is the immediate cause of violence among people and the sterility of nature.

Here in this valley there has been no war as such, there was no barbarian invasion; but the “capitalists” marched through. The beauty here has been destroyed by economic violence. The ravaged earth, instead of protecting the person, can only inspire fear.

Before we can talk about peace among nations and people, it is necessary to talk about peace between people and things. Human violence against nature is “economic” violence, and today it is called capitalism, a term that means a freezing of our wealth so that it can be transformed from “beauty” and “communion” into “security” and “separation.” This aggressive violence generates, like offspring, fear and sterile and impotent estheticism that is a parody of contemplation. It is the one sign of a capacity for wonder that the culture of technology is able to produce, and it masks a fundamental inability really to enjoy beauty. It is in a void, without roots in the earth, quantitative, not qualitative, because the capitalist culture does not restore things. It restores only their form, the empty image, not the reality. Thus jet planes take people, in need of beauty to survive, from the Pyramids to the city of the Incas, from Chartres to Niagara Falls; but all these images flow past dazed eyes without these people getting to the heart of things. Things remain without heart for them—without essence, without life, alienated. For this reason people go from the Prado to the volcanoes of Japan and to the Neapolitan coast without experiencing the interior change connoting “love,” “project,” “communion.” Things become their enemies.

In Zabriskie Point, a film by Antonioni, nature is sought in the flight from the big capitalist metropolis; beautiful at first sight, it is changed into a dark valley where earthen creatures are coupling. All these worm-people are equal; they seem to reproduce themselves in a frightening and vertiginous way. The joy of birth, of life, is swallowed up by this awesome multiplication; each pair shows signs of lacking a design for communion and, as a result, the joy of existing. Before this creature who emerges from the desert, buildings become cardboard scenery, theatrical facades which, when an explosion takes place, sail through the air, multiplying themselves like the Creatures on the valley floor. People and pieces of wood and cardboard are blown to bits, like the grand finale of a fireworks display. Prior to this spectacular finale—more a theater of puppets than a human habitat—the cameras make a slow pass over the perfection of detail of a health spa built on a rock where they have reproduced artificially the most exquisite examples of feminine beauty.

The contemplative attitude is completely distinct from estheticism, bastard child of capitalism. Contemplation matures in communion with Brother Fire, with Sister Water, with Brother Wolf and discovers a loving and joyful brotherhood, whereas estheticism ends up in visual pleasure and estrangement, without getting us out of our loneliness. Contemplation provokes a reaction of “How good it is to be here. Let us erect three booths.” Estheticism demands succession, change. The contemplative design for the future is qualitative change, reconciliation with things. The universe is discovered to be liberated from slavery and weakness in order to take part in the “glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom 8,21).

Things welcome contemplatives as if they were coming home, reconciled. Esthetes do not ask to be accepted by things, they are not one with them, they dominate things violently from the outside; instead of brothers and sisters they are conquerors. Esthetes think they see beauty, but they fail to because they do not possess it, do not enter into it. They see it only with their eyes and not with their whole being. In order to enter into beauty, possess it, we must come unarmed; we must be peacemakers. We must stand before creation to be received by it; otherwise we will be shut off. And to be received, we must begin by acknowledging that we have lost the right to be in the Father’s house and to enjoy his things. Our generation has taken a forward step, with respect to the generation of estheticism. The form has been swallowed by the movement. We are in the Exodus; and when we remain still we find that we are in the desert. Youth searches for beauty but rejects the “beauty produced by the system.” In its anxious quest of beauty it rejects estheticism. Young people know intuitively that technology cannot lead us to the contemplation of beauty, it is an anticontemplative culture, and for this reason destructive of the beautiful. Loneliness has its roots here: We are loners, swimming in existence like fish, aware of being in the sea but not penetrated by the water. We are alone in the great sea of being because being does not touch us and we do not know how to relate to each other. We do not feel ourselves to be “with” others, but “above” and “against” them, and with a utilitarian finality.

Contemplatives find themselves contemplated, identified, with a look that explains their unique and unrepeatable existence; and at the same time they are among and with other beings. It is a look that liberates them from a careless and superficial curiosity and enables them to penetrate to the very roots of existence: “Hear me, O coastlands, listen, O distant peoples. The Lord called me from birth, from my mother’s womb he gave me my name” (Is 49,1). “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you, a prophet to the nations I appointed you” (Jer 1,5).

I know intuitively that nobody possesses more of beauty, nobody goes deeper into the meaning of creation, than those who discover that their personal life is painfully charged with meaning—meaning that has its roots in their personhood and at the same time outside it; in their era, yet outside their history and above it.

Those who discover their meaning—a meaning in themselves, in their own existence—do not ask it of things, either by violence or by stirring up piety. They are with things that have meaning before them and after them, a meaning that has the same origin and the same cause as they do. We should rediscover a meaning that is in us, whereas our culture has accustomed us to look for it outside us, in the esthetic and the economic. In a succession of havings and seeings, our motion is not in obedience to the meaning that is within us; it is not the historicization of a calling, but a displacing of ourselves to change the view, so that others can give us the feeling of existing.

Into this very same destiny enter the two dialogues essential to us: dialogue with God and dialogue with the person. Is dialogue with God possible without poverty? God is not “economic,” God is gratuitous. When our prayer became “economic,” “capitalist,” pageantry and estheticism became a part of our prayer. Prayer, before it is put into words, is a state of being. Being religious is not the performance of acts or the return of things loaned to us by God; it is obedience to a historic destiny that is personal and, at the same time, communal. Beauty is the purpose of history; peace, harmony, unity, music are different words that express the same reality. To be religious is to give your life so that the world may be more beautiful, more just, more at peace; it is to prevent egotistical and self-serving ends from disrupting this harmony of the whole. Contemplatives are religious. Drawn toward the roots of being, they rediscover the meaning of things; and in the meaning of their names and of their existence among others in time, they discover the true meaning of history. “From my mother’s womb he gave me my name.” And revolutionaries are religious; they do not accept the existing order, they refuse to live a life without meaning, and they struggle to re-create a social reality whose thrust shall be toward living together in love and in the constant search for dignity in the other.

Apart from these limits, religion is an expression of fear, a mask of self-interest, idolatry. Religion does not take us out of the desert; it seals us off in crystallized historical forms and prevents us from hearing the original and personal call of God. Religion has only one dimension: the encounter with God in the nakedness of being, at the root of existence. In that dimension I discover my own identity as well as those beings with whom I share creaturehood, producing in this way a loving, happy, wholesome encounter. And sinking roots into this wholesomeness demands the courage to accept the world as being in a process of constant creation in which things go on being liberated from human aggressiveness.

Religion cannot be reduced to models or schemata. When it is said: “The family is no longer…” “Youth is no longer…” “Nations are no longer…,” what is implied is “as before,” as in an ideal but nonexistent time. A model is chosen, the liberating power of God is crystallized in an imaginary stage, in a mold I have fabricated for myself. Faith and hope can only be transmitted when they truly animate my own life. We can teach prayer only when it is a part of our life, and then only in a dialogue of real and deep friendship. “Few things that I have been ordered to do under obedience have given me more difficulty than to speak now about prayer,” wrote Saint Teresa. Prayer as we find it today does not draw us out of the desert of our sterility, since it is the expression of people hardened in their economic and esthetic options that is to say, aggressive.

Nothing, or almost nothing, can be said about prayer because prayer, in itself, does not exist. Jesus, in the Gospel, speaks about a man of prayer who shut himself up in his room in order “to be seen” only by the Father. He does not say many words, because the Father is aware of his situation. He remains in an attitude of silence because he should not explain the meaning of events to someone who already knows their meaning; rather he himself should understand this meaning in its full depth. When the disciples insist that Jesus teach them to pray, he gives them three basic concepts to follow: the will of the Father, that is, to rediscover the meaning of life in its origin, in the root of their existence, as the reason for their being. They are not to expect this from outside themselves in the unfolding of events. To struggle so that the kingdom of God will come, so that beauty shall be discovered, so that harmony shall become greater harmony, peace greater peace, until the encounter with the One. Communion among people, to forgive those who hurt us, to accept the human condition in all its consequences.

The hippies search for contemplation apart from the surrounding culture, as an activity that is born and consummated within people themselves. Although this can be an escape, a denial of the revolutionary struggle to free the world—and it is difficult to dismiss this charge—in their approach is to be found the freshness of an original and authentic meaning of prayer.

Persons have meaning in themselves; events that happen, living among other people these help us to decipher the meaning. This meaning is not outside of history but very much within it. Jeremiah discovers that he is a sign of contradiction in the history of his people and involved in a terrible conflict: “Remember me, Lord, visit me, and avenge me on my persecutors; know that for you I have borne insult.” And in his profound depression he discovered the principle, the root, of his existence: “When I found your words, I devoured them; they became my joy and the happiness of my heart” (Jer 15,15-16). Our generation is incapable of being religious because it is incapable of this kind of wonder, incapable of experiencing the joy of just being; and for this reason our joys do not run deep and do not touch the heart of the person. It is naive to blame everything on distractions; these are nothing more than a projection of the one and only distraction. Nothing is more irreligious than to give to distracted people religious forms and expressions that are only an echo of their distraction; to treat them as children to whom you have to talk of “other things” while trying to get them to take their medicine. The most alienating kind of religion is that which permits people to fulfill their “religious duties” without abandoning their distractions. The religious act, in effect, becomes one more in a series of distractions. The very ones who arrange to give distracted people a religion energetically reject many projects that could liberate them and separate them from their great distraction. Underneath these efforts to make the fulfillment of religious duties easier for distracted people is the concept of an Egyptian god, installed on his throne and awaiting our worship.

The only sign of being “touched by God” is to be able to see yourself as “universal brother”—to use a favorite phrase of Father De Foucauld’s. And this means to be in communion with people and with all beings. Where this communion is not present, the mark of the Christian is to take on the fight and face death so that this communion will come about. The New Testament speaks of prayer as thanksgiving. The Christian liturgy is called the Eucharist, that is, gratitude, the pleasure of “being well.” In terms of the concept of the Egyptian god, the expression “thanks be to God” seems degrading to God and to ourselves. Our “God willing” is an expression of self-interest and fear more than of contemplation. But Eucharist is the very existential condition of those who know they are accepted by others and share in their destiny. “And now, brothers, I beg you through the mercy of God to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice holy and acceptable to God, your spiritual worship” (Rom 12,1).

Prayer is entreaty because it expresses our anguish, our dualism, our difficulty with relating to being, and therefore the temptation to get out from under our difficult position; but prayer tends to become gratitude. The economic, as a category apart, separate from the human, depersonalized, is the opposite of thanksgiving; it is anti-eucharistic. Whereas the Eucharist is the sign of integration among humans, of acceptance among the others, the economic is a sign of separateness, of the draining off, by an economic group, of the blood that circulates through the body of humanity in order to give it unity. Are we really “economic” beings, or should we act economically? To become enmeshed in the accumulation-distribution-consumption economy is this a phase of our identity, or is it a result of our being-with-others, an authentic sign of our identity? Here, I think, is the root of the problem posed by our culture: in other words, can a Christian be “economic” in the sense that our culture gives to the word? We should consider, from this very deep level, the incompatibility proclaimed in Matthew’s sixth chapter: “You cannot give yourself to God and money.” The meaning of persons does not come from their economic function but from their being with others, in a state of creative tension, with the end of bringing about a progressive perfectioning of this being-together, a fullness of communion. For this reason the Christian rite is called “Eucharist” and “Communion.” They are two moments of prayer, and at the same time, two moments of the rhythm of life in the person. “Sharing among humans,” writes Paul Ricoeur, “is not possible without an awareness of taking part in a creative theme that sets the tone and gives meaning to the community, conferring upon it a bond and an end; it is always an Idea that gives meaning to the growth of a ‘we’ and of ‘friendship’” (Finitude et culpabilité, p. 120). If accumulation, distribution, and consumption have as an end this growth and this friendship, then although I may be governed by economic laws and make use of technical know-how, I am not for this reason transformed into a homo oeconomicus. Moreover when consumption—which is our most violent act—is not destructive and violent, but rather a respectful communion with things, it is transformed into a eucharistic act, that is, thanksgiving. Grace before and after meals is a mockery if it does not express this profound communion.

Anti-eucharistic society posts sickening menus, as for the rich and rare dishes served overindulged jet travellers or the patrons of fashionable restaurants. These delicacies are the droppings of birds of prey. Eating such meals represents not an affectionate communion of people with things, a reciprocal acceptance; rather it means a violent incursion upon things that are good and beautiful. I was thinking about this while putting some notes in order after having dined with a tribe of Makiritar Indians in their community house. One of them gave me a piece of meat he had begun to chew on and a slice of cassava dipped in a sauce. This frugal meal of the poor, where communion, being together, far exceeded the menu in abundance, is projected in my mind against a background of other boring meals where the refined manners, the conventional behavior, attempted in vain to hide a total lack of human warmth.

We must rethink prayer in this richness of motive; there is nothing new about stating that we are as we pray and we pray as we are. The aggressiveness of people against people, the problem of war—these are not to be resolved with a psychological gesture, with a sentimental formalism adopted in the moment of prayer. We must consider with greater seriousness and at greater depth the phrase of the gospel: “If you bring your gift to the altar and there recall that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift at the altar, go first to be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift” (Mt 5,23-24). It does not say, “If you have anything against your brother,” but “If your brother has anything against you.” And we should understand by this not only a grudge, a feeling of hatred, but also a situation of violence that makes another suffer and for which I am responsible, a situation of oppression and injustice for which I am at least partially to blame. Prayer that does not embrace things is not Christian. Christian prayer is “in things.” “Praised be my Lord for my Sister Water, for my Brother Wind, for my Brother Fire.” Not only praised because God has given us water, fire, and wind but praised by means of water, in water, in fire, in wind. We cannot pray unless we are reconciled with all our brothers and sisters, and among them it is necessary to include all creatures: wind, fire, wheat, bread, copper, gold, oil.

Declarations in favor of peace sound hollow even when they are made with the best of intention. They refer to peace as though it were a psychological decision, a choice carried out by human beings behind the back of things and structures. Peace is the search for justice, and the primary form of justice is the recognition that we are creatures among creatures with a responsibility for creation. To many—especially to young people—religion has come to be regarded as an easy way to avoid the painful search for identity and the advent of a method of communicating that will not come about by itself but must be worked at. People today do not pray, because they feel that prayer without reconciliation among people is spurious. A relationship with God can be authentic only if a person is either a contemplative or a revolutionary. There is no incompatibility between these two forms of expression: The contemplative should be a revolutionary and the revolutionary should be a contemplative. Religious people cannot be led to contemplation unless they energetically reject our economic society. If they allow themselves to become entangled in its very subtle mesh, they are guilty of violence against things, they are not reconciled, they are not creatures amoing creatures; they are objects of consumption and not subjects of creation according to the plan of God. Revo lutionaries are those who do not accept the structure, who try to shatter a false image of the person, formed in an unjust society. They too, like the contemplatives, search along another way for an existentially ontological truth. They look for the real person that is, freed from alienations. Revo lutionaries will become fatally stranded in the desert of sterility if, in destroying structures, they do not see the “new person,” if they do not look for the liberated person, that is, the real person. Religion will become stranded in the desert of sterility if it offers “economic” people things, abetting their need for excitement, novelty, estheticism; if it leads them on to an extending of themselves rather than to a deepening.

There is a certain pseudo-progressive pastoral approach designed to provide workers travelling to their jobs with well-packaged food to save them the trouble of stopping for lunch; and, yes, the approach is ridiculed as cheap publicity in spite of the fact that it seems to fill the need of some groups who welcome the food. An unforeseen result is that religious people have felt themselves reduced to the status of travelling salesmen, displayers of industrial products. This crisis would not have happened without the advent of a search for religious authenticity that challenges an easy and comfortable religion not committed to people in history. Contemplatives have nothing to distribute, but they rediscover the meaning of the person in an intense destiny of love and risk, whose ultimate demand is to lay down your life for your friends. And this destiny is not tragic, because at the moment when we see ourselves as a project of love with others and for others, the existence of love is revealed to us.

The liberation of history from the structures that reduce the person to homo oeconomicus has to be sustained by the certain hope that once the shell of technological civilization is cracked, we will come alive and exist as beings capable of love, since we are loved; that things, freed of the winding-sheet of technology, will exist as “created”—that is to say, “loved”—and capable, therefore, of receiving persons into their midst and giving them joy. This is essential joy that gives substance and tone to all the other joys we experience: the joy of existing and not being alone; of being “with,” of being “among,” and of being “for.” Contemplatives do not give formulas; they do not give things. They radiate a joy that needs no support from without; that is not conditioned by events to come, but rises from within like a fountain of living water: This is their marvelling at existence. Happiness is to feel loved; there is an indestructible link between “being” and “being loved.”

We have ended up in the desert: the desert of noncommunication with things, with God, and with the other. Economic culture could not have had any other epilogue than making a thing out of a person. The rhythm of the economic person is accumulation-distribution-consumption, whereas the rhythm of love is to give of oneself, to lose the self in order to grow and to rediscover the self. But the absence of love in economic persons fills them with such gnawing anxiety that they are pushed into making desperate decisions that can have the appearance of acts of love. Saint Paul unmasks this subterfuge of egoism and fear and sets if forth in a famous text: “If I give everything I have to feed the poor and hand over my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing’’ (1 Cor 13,3). Our economic culture has made us incapable of thinking beyond economic categories; everything is regarded as negotiable property, whereas love is outside these economic categories. The body is bought and sold, but not love. The lack of love reduces economic persons to desperation, but it doesn’t make them humble. Desperation because they lack the one essential good, the only one that gives substance and savor to all the other goods. They feel more miserable than the poor, the oppressed, who lack “worldly goods” but who more often than not have the “good.” “If I have not love, I am nothing.”

There is no remedy for their pain because they never manage to free themselves from the category of the economic. They see love as a right, on a par with their automobile, their house, and the services their employees render them. I have frequently heard the disillusioned rich cry out that they have been cheated—the kind of insolence you would never hear from the poor person. The rich people have paid for the full-course dinner, dessert and cover charge included—why are they not served love? Accustomed to the mathematical efficiency of money and its exactness, to the instant response they get when they order people about, they do not even suspect that they can be rejected or that all their offers of “love” can be spurned, leaving them all alone. The true aristocracy of the poor, their truly mighty power—greater than economic or military power—is the power to reject, to “close the doors.” “What I say to you is this,” we read in Luke’s gospel: “Make friends for yourselves through your use of this world’s goods, so that when they fail you, a lasting reception will be yours” (Lk 16,9). I don’t know of a counsel in all the gospel more risky and complicated than this one, although it seems so simple. Its riskiness is rooted in the fact that it is a saying that has the structure, simple in the extreme, of the economic mechanism of the offer to pay and the demand to receive: I pay and I demand; that which I pay for should be delivered to me without fail. We cannot isolate the problem of love and communication between two people from the larger problem of communion with people and things. We would not know where to begin; the new person must be born of the destruction of the economic person. We must be re-created through friendship and the love that it is not found within the framework of the economic person because it is incompatible with it. The first act of humility of the economic person, the sign of conversion, would be to admit this incompatibility.

It is true that love between two people, the love of friendship, is difficult on all social levels; the lack of love and the failure to love exist equally in the world of the rich and in the world of the poor. It is clear that the difficulty in loving is not a special sickness of the rich. The wealthy woman is just as boxed-in as the lower-class woman, in a different way but with the same results. This observation can bring us to the conclusion that it is useless to change structures, stamp out capitalist culture from the world, because the deeper evil resides in the person, in sin. Therefore the most urgent reform, and perhaps the only one really needed, would be the reform of the person, interior conversion, which in the end is the only reform about which the gospel speaks clearly. But can we be reformed if we continue to project our monstrous egoism in a social and political structure? And would not the sign of our conversion be a political and social creation inspired by communion instead of isolation? We are unable to think of persons divorced from the structures we project, our political and social profile. For this reason it seems to me idle to speak of priority or of antithesis: First let us change persons, and their social projections will come as a consequence. Nevertheless for many centuries “converted” persons have been appearing on the scene, persons supposedly in a state of grace, who have been responsible for ugly political and economic structures of oppression and lack of love. Paul Ricoeur asks himself this question:

Should we say that innocence in possessing is unthinkable, that to possess was wrong from the beginning and that human communion is possible only at the price of renouncing totally the right to possess? Certain historical forms of appropriation are undoubtedly incompatible with total reconciliation; the Socialist critique of the nineteenth century has great meaning in this respect (Finitude et culpabilité, p. 131).

Because of my faith in the gospel I feel that the solution is contained, like a mineral in rock, in the phrase: “Make friends for yourselves so that a lasting reception will be yours.” If interpreted in the economic sense, this injunction can give rise to horrendous misapprehensions: little orphans attending Mass for the repose of the soul of the capitalist benefactor; solemn funerals that come at a high price; opulent foundations funded by money robbed from the poor—all this seems to be authorized by a phrase that has the sound of a banking transaction. Nevertheless it is enough to ponder the entire meaning of the phrase to see that it is as explosive as the Copernican revolution. It is the poor who are to accept you as friends and to open their doors to you. It is not said that they would do this for you because you offered them something that you believe to be a sign of friendship. To you, the rich, it seems obvious. That the president of the United States or the winner of the Nobel prize for chemistry would become my friend is not very probable. But a poor person, a beggar, a farmhand who cleans out the stables? That would be all I need. Nevertheless that’s what happens. You have managed to become friends of the U.S. president because you have invited him to tea on your yacht. But you have not been able to become a friend to that woman over there who is looking at you, half surprised and half terrified. It is the poor and the marginally poor who have power over that part of me where love resides, and therefore over my essential happiness that I cannot renounce without renouncing life itself. The gospel goes very deep, indicating, probably, the revolutionary attitude: Give the decision-making power to the poor, to the oppressed. They are the ones who should decide, who should give acceptance.

Economic persons have projected into the spiritual realm their very elemental plan, simple as a law of mathematics, in which things work out in heaven in the same way they do on earth; heaven is bought as if it were the earth. On earth government officials, municipal administrators, labor leaders are bought. In heaven the poor are bought. And also the orphans, the prisoners, the refugees enter into my history as the faceless consumers of oil, cotton, copper, allowing me to journey as a tourist to as many islands as there are in the Pacific.

The realignment of values that the gospel makes is truly revolutionary, and there is much irony in it. It strips from those who hold power unlawfully the most important decision, that which concerns the very center of one’s being. Faced with the power of the capitalist structure of a rich nation, we ask ourself how we are to escape from the net: the economy, public relations, politics—everything is rigidly controlled and ably directed. Nevertheless these executive directors are not able to produce the only values that are truly human, those of communication and of love. The “lasting reception” spoken of in the gospel is not a reward given to the worker on retiring, or a trip to the theater for the student who has gotten good grades; it is the discovery that we have hit upon what is real and permanent and essential and no one can take it away from us. The arrival point will be the clear revelation that we have been on the right road: “Now we see indistinctly as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. My knowledge is imperfect now; then I shall know even as I am known” (1 Cor 13,12).

The decision is in the hands of the poor, and it is a decision that is active, conscious, human: “Make friends for yourselves so that a lasting reception will be yours.” In this sphere the poor do not serve as an economic datum to be kept in mind when projecting the gross product and its reception by consumers: How many are there? Where are they? What kind of marketing psychology can we reach them with? No, anyone who does not love and is not loved in return is not received.

From this point of view the human condition seems even more complicated and dramatic, because the solution to the deepest problem facing us, that of communication, is not to be found in a kind of psychological determination, in a “movement of the soul,” in a decision made between God and myself; I must settle accounts with whoever has me at their disposal. The great power of wealth, which has at its disposal the world and all its activity and trafficking, finds itself paralyzed before this obstacle which it had not even considered. I can dispose of my goods and of my very self, but I cannot decide whether I will be a person or not, a person or a non-person. This decision is in the hands of the voiceless ones: They will decide whether to accept me as a friend or to reject me.

The words of the First Epistle to the Corinthians are seen in a new light: “If I speak with human tongues and angelic as well, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong, a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and, with full knowledge, comprehend all mysteries, if I have faith great enough to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give everything I have to feed the poor and hand over my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing” (1 Cor 13,1-3). The decision to love must be made by the others the poor, those I have offended, those I have treated unjustly. Thus a sense of limitation, which industrial society lacks, is introduced through this door in its structure. Spatial and temporal limitations are interiorized, made more human. I don’t know how we can resolve this problem, which is the historic theme of our generation; but not knowing how to solve it should not make us ignore it as if it were something that did not concern us.

The world in which we live seems like a scene from an Albee play. The couple who occupy a house in a rich neighborhood feel as if they have been suddenly thrown out. Who is the intruder who has entered their house and refuses to live with them? Nobody. They are both seized with a strange fear, bodiless and faceless. It is someone who is stronger than any homeowner, stronger than any conquering nation; it is someone who does not accept them who throws them out. It is the history of the world. We cannot help thinking of the gospel phrase “To his own he came, yet his own did not accept him” (Jn 1,11). They have not accepted the Friend because he is poor and trustworthy, and the economic persons are thrown out of their house by this strange and powerful master who is poor. Christ identified him when he said (Mt 25, 37): “I was hungry and you gave me to eat.” “When did we see you hungry?” Those who ask this question have certainly given alms, shared what they have; but they have not seen the person. “When did we see you?” It would seem as if proportionately with our economic growth and our conquest of the universe, our lack of communication and our isolation increase.

Seen from this perspective of the gospel, the world seems incurable because those in power are ready for anything, ready to strip themselves completely: The pain of loneliness is so unbearable that the cost of being set free from it never becomes high enough. They are prepared to do anything except to beg the poor to accept them or to let the poor make the decisions. Every cry for peace, for coexistence among people and nations, has a hollow sound because it appeals to the responsibility and good will of those in power. An effort is made to convince them, with threats or with flattery, that the problem of peace is a problem of good will. The powerful come out of conferences and summit meetings convinced that the ability to bring about peace in the world is in their hands. The United Nations, the churches, the law-makers have persuaded them that peaceful coexistence in the world depends on them and that it is up to them whether to be a good neighbor or not, whether to communicate or not with neighboring nations. Their situation worsens because they feel compelled to inflate their power and make it seem more astute, more circumspect, more technically efficient.

In every meeting of the bourgeoisie that I have ever attended, the deep thinkers, urged on by an analysis of a world without peace and without communication, have asked themselves the question “What to do?” Indeed, one group has actually named itself “What To Do?” Another: “And Now?” Bourgeois Christians expect me, as the speaker, to stir up within them the anguish of thinking that “we Christians are the reason the world is badly off.” To be honest, I should really say to them: You can do nothing. This is not the place where decisions of peace and coexistence are made. This is not a deliberative organ. You lack power and authority. We have all made a big mistake. We thought that “historic groups”—that is, groups with a capacity to move, to transform the world, to go forward—were the same as power groups. The training given by religious people is responsible for this mistake, and now the consequences are taking their toll. The answers that come out of these meetings stutter, stumble, and slip in the night. The surer we seem to be of the answers, the more we sink into the swamp of loneliness and noncommunication. Open up a leprosarium in the Congo, a school in Matto Grosso. Send a plane loaded with chocolate to Biafra…

It never occurs to anyone to bring together the deliberative organ that really has the power to make decisions. Certainly it is much easier to round up a group of “aware” people who are ready to help others. But these people have the power to “give,” not to “receive,” whereas the gospel speaks inexorably of receiving.

“Make friends so that they will receive you.” It is fitting that those who are not welcome in the office of the first-rate dentist, or in the study of the distinguished lawyer, or in hospitals run by the Blue Nuns or the Grey Nuns, no longer wish to be welcomed. The condition of the world is incurable because we neither understand nor accept the import of this passage in the gospel. Artists like Pasolini try to make the theme contemporary, clothing it in violence and eroticism, but the economic generation sees nothing more in that than obscenity. Revolutionary groups try to turn the situation around, giving to the poor and the outcasts of the world not more of something but the power to decide; and then those who lament their loneliness and weep over the tragic destiny of humankind oppose the change with all their resources. They condemn as subversive any movement designed to turn things around.

But we must make up our minds; either we accept things as they are—stoically putting up with war, fear, noncommunication, rejection and admit that history is a matter of power, a search for the balance of power among nations; or we refuse to accept the established order and struggle for power to be given to the poor. We are not talking about a mechanical upheaval, of an automatic changing of the guard, which would obviously leave things as bad as before, if not worse. We are talking about a cultural change, one in which wealth would no longer be a symbol of fear and of power, but a symbol of friendship.

The church proclaimed prophetically, in Populorum Progressio, the need to discover new techniques and to bring about a thorough renewal. The only hope for the world is to be sought in those who no longer expect solutions from those who consider themselves the protagonists in the human drama because they hold power in their hands. It is necessary to engage in this search with humility and courage. It is necessary to have the courage of one facing the uncharted, the unknown; and this courage will come to our generation partly because it believes that the risen Christ is mysteriously guiding our history and partly because the sicknesses—loneliness, noncommunication, rejection—which extend to all sectors have become unbearable.

The generations bearing blood and holiness, heroism and cowardice, faith and unfaithfulness, come to a term in the sterile womb of Elizabeth. The lineage that God had promised to multiply “like grains of sand and like the stars of heaven” is brought together in order to die in the womb of that old woman. The “chosen” people, responsible for preserving the thread of hope through history, has been deeply contaminated by the capitalist, “economic” culture. They do not know how to accept sterility, death, failure. They do not wish to recognize their impotence against a culture, and they propose an impossible way out: reject the culture in order to take refuge in a culture of the past. They have lost the secret of making sterility fecund and bringing life out of death through faith, humility, poverty, and hope. The accents of tragic and desperate presumption, the claim to know “how to work things out” which implies the conviction that power is in our hands, fatally provokes the nihilist reaction of artists and young people. The drug culture is the logical response to a movement that appears effective but conceals an actual impotence. But a decision that is lucidly reasoned, intelligent and, above all, coherent is still capable of arousing admiration, enthusiasm and decision. The only answer that can help our culture—a culture that looks heroic but is in fact mean-spirited, that seems to carry action to the outer limits of endurance but is in fact lazy, that sounds lucid but is in fact disoriented—is to let itself die.

Religion is powerless to promote a clear-eyed commitment because it has moved away from the radicalism of the gospel and is proposing an apparent renewal, with moralistic and Philistine variations. Political considerations control and stifle attempts at real renewal, which degenerate into quantitative programs that defer piously to the centers of power. We are in the desert of sterility, and only when we come to recognize this will we be able to hope for fruitfulness.

The desert of Luke is not the sand-and-rock desert of the prophets. It is the sterile womb of a woman from which no life emerges. It is very similar to our own desert, which is empty of all that is human; it is the loneliness of the person, noncommunication; and for this reason it is anti-eucharistic. The person who is not received, not accepted, is a person incapable of giving thanks. We can only be grateful for living, and not for what we have and what can be taken away. “The man who lives will praise you, Lord.” We can give thanks only for that which is permanent, which lasts, and which therefore is immune to the fear of corrosion, destruction, and loss; and that is simply to be rooted in the earth, in existence. Those who are not received, and are therefore excommunicated, search for reasons outside of themselves to love life. They look for them outside and beyond life, and their “thanks” are illusory.

This is the hour for prophets, the urgent hour for recognizing and forcefully denouncing the sterility of the world. If industrial society will accept its failure and death, it will be saved. It will be saved “through fire,” as Paul says. It is urgent that economic persons, the super-producers, should see clearly that there is no difference between them and young drug addicts. All are in the desert of sterility. The drug addicts know it. It is urgent that the matron who is self-satisfied because she zealously devotes herself to works of charity should discover herself to be very close to the woman who accepts being a sex object and follows her destiny. The two of them are in the desert, with the difference that the sex object can notice the daily depreciation of her value in the consumer market. Only an awareness of sterility can save us. Homo oeconomicus continues to produce, invent, and perfect many things, but not the person.

[1] Arturo Paoli, Meditations on Saint Luke, trans. Bernard F. McWilliams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1977), 1–22.

[2] Arturo Paoli, La radice dell’uomo. Meditazioni sul vangelo di Luca (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1972).

[3] Arturo Paoli, La perspectiva política de san Lucas (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Argentina Editores, 1974).