Marcello Tarì

We live in troubled times. It should be the very time for revolutionaries. But someone, rightly, might tell me that today we are, however, immersed in the debris of all modern revolutionary traditions and ambitions, while the reactionary front is on the offensive, a bloody offensive. And it’s true. So, we must rethink many concepts, categories and words in order to penetrate reality. What does democracy, State, nation, capitalism, People, religion, communism, anarchy, fascism really mean today? And what does a movement, an insurrection, a revolution mean as well? Do all these things still make sense? I confess that I don't really know any better – and discernment is very hard. Then, how is it to be done? Where to start? I propose to begin by questioning a great word of ours: the Commune.

Paraphrasing an ancient and wise dictum about the Church, we could say: “Commūne semper reformanda”. Where by Commūne - the Commune - I mean ideas and ways to be, act, fight and love, a form of life placed in history and aimed at a radical transformation of the world and oneself through a “communionist” project [1]; by semper reformanda - in continuous reform - we can mean a never-ending process of inner conversion, starting from the very way we live that transformation in light of the times. In my view, finally, the Commune is the place of a process, but not something static or spatially defined. In other words, the Commune is more a matter of timing or, with an ancient Greek word, kairos. That is to say: the Commune is a process that, however, becomes fully visible only in relation to the kairos. Moreover, those of us who are faithful Catholics must try to think and act their communionist projects in communion with the ongoing synodal reform of the Church. After all, what is a Synod, which means “walking together”, if not a Catholic kairos and a traveling Commune, led by the Holy Spirit?

Actually, I believe, what we really need is the spiritual creativity and the determination in charity with which St. Paul, for example, was able to take up Hellenistic concepts and categories and subvert their meaning in the light of Revelation.

Let us think, for example, of the katechon, a former Stoic concept that indicated the action that is convenient for man insofar as it is inscribed in his nature. It becomes, in St. Paul, a mysterious restraining force of the Evil, personified in the Antichrist, thus becoming one of the most powerful theological-political concepts in the modern sense of the term. Namely: a total and transcendent subversion of the original Stoic meaning. Just as in the Gospel of John there is a reversal of the classical Aristotelian hierarchy between bios and zoe established by the polis, radically changing the meaning of what it is to live. In the deadly situation the world is in today, it would not be a bad thing at all to go back to St. John and re-think that change, that life. On the other hand, it’s what we celebrate every Sunday at mass.

Paul says: “We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1Cor 1:23). Yes, indeed it’s the subversive power of the Gospel at work: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). Tear down the walls! Over and over, the Spirit acts, the Empire begins to collapse and a new type of unity arises. A unity that in its own definition implies differences, but on a higher quality level of reality, that is the Trinitarian reality.

A Commune, in a Christian revolutionary sense, I think is one of the fruits of this kind of unity. And the way it works is what we could call communionism, which came from the Greek koinoìa used in the gospels in order to mean “communion”. So, we could be “communionists”, as St. Paul himself says in the First Letter to Timothy (1Tm 6:18): [einai]koinonikous, you’re communionists.

St. Paul was an incredible generator of new concepts that expressed the new life in Christ. It’s all a work of transfiguration in every order of reality that he points out with his powerful messianic theology. In St. Paul we can see how words could resurrect in and through the Word. Because even words, concepts, philosophies and policies, like everything human, die. But death is not the last act, as we know and hope.

Let’s always keep this in mind: the use and the transformation of philosophical concepts is a good thing if it’s part of the use and transformation of a form of life towards the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Every concept thought only per se, or to increase one's power for one's own gratification is useless at minimum, and otherwise bad. Down with the scribes!

For instance, the great novelty in relation to Marxism presented by operaism (or workerism) and new autonomous movements in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, a history of which I am a son, was something like that, a transfiguration of some concepts of the struggle against capitalism, a collective effort to build a more just and joyful form of life, and it was great. Sparks of the Spirit are always present in the struggles of those hungry for justice, even if not recognized.

Indeed, they lack something important which, we could think, was one of the reasons for their defeat. First, transcendence, which in fact was at the heart of Mario Tronti's thought in the last decades of his life: “Can conflict and transcendence be together? I think they must be together, because conflict is what arms subjectivity so that it can grow, self-organise, or organise from above, as I prefer; whereas with transcendence you have to look beyond the present and history” [2]. Let's look at what the Pope said recently in Verona: “A conflict is really a challenge to creativity (…) one only comes out of a conflict ‘from above’” [3]. This “from above” seems to me a clear indication of a transcendent movement, starting from the bottom, which does not avoid conflict; it can help us a lot in our research.

The other thing missed was love, in the agapic sense, which Toni Negri in his last works often linked to the figure of Saint Francis: “There is an ancient legend that might serve to illuminate the future life of communist militancy: that of Saint Francis of Assisi (…) Once again in postmodernity we find ourselves in Francis’s situation, posing against the misery of power the joy of being. This is a revolution that no power will control—because biopower and communism, cooperation and revolution remain together, in love, simplicity, and also innocence” [4]. Although I believe that, in fact, it is not St. Francis but communism that is an ancient legend, and that would also be easy to prove.

Anyway, I think we should deepen these insights, which can be considered a beginning of a spiritual conversion of the contemporary revolutionary logos, but do it under the inspiration of the Spirit, trying to progress all together, believers and non-believers, “not by finding the lowest common denominator, but by overflow, aiming at what most ‘makes hearts burn’ (cf. Lk 24:32)”, as it’s wonderfully stated in the second Instrumentum Laboris for the Universal Synod (IS 2° session, Oct 2024, 63). A great attempt in this direction is that of the young French philosopher Guillame Dezaunay with his Le Christ rouge (The Red Christ) [5], as well as yours [New Personalism] through a militant transfiguration of Personalism.

I think it is an exciting task for us. Let’s do it!

So - this is what I actually want to suggest - the various concepts and categories that we have inherited from the revolutionary tradition, but also from the radical philosophical thought of nowadays, which often to us appear exhausted, should go through a serious work of reformulation, obviously using all the disciplines and sciences at our disposal, including theology, but also especially via a work of purification, in the light of the Scripture first of all, then with respect to salvation history and, as Catholics, not losing sight of the living Tradition of the Church. Following the Pauline advice: ‘test everything; hold fast to what is good’ (1 Thes 5:21). But, on this path, even if only one of these three theological and spiritual references were missing, I believe the task would easily turn to failure, if not to perversion. Think for instance of the “messianism without Messiah” so in vogue for many decades in several radical circles. Indeed, it can only lead to getting lost in some form of bad nihilism. As Jacob Taubes said, commenting on Walter Benjamin’s eschatological fragment: “(…) one thing is clear: there is a Messiah. No shmontses [nonsense] like ‘the messianic’, ‘the political’, no neutralization, but the Messiah” [6]. The way, the truth and the life are a Person, not simple concepts.

So, we can read the insurrection in the light of the resurrection, as the comrades of the French Christian collective Anastasis do. They say in their Manifesto: “Anastasis is a Greek word meaning ‘resurrection’ and ‘insurrection’. In our view it designates the two key polarities of Christian life. One pole is our belief in a God of love who died on the cross and was raised from the dead and who is the promise of salvation for all human beings. The other pole is our belief that this God invites us to struggle everywhere and always for justice. And his reign is already at work in those places where love is concretely put into action” [7].

This kind of vision has already been worked in a way by theologians such as Hans Urs von Balthasar when, during an Easter time radiophonic homily, he wished to emphasize the absolutely revolutionary value of Christianity: “The Christian, together with everyone who has genuine hope, fights his way through the meaninglessness of the world. He establishes cells, islands of conspiracy, of insurrection, networks of hope in the kingdom of the dark lord of the world. Right from the beginning Christianity was seen as a total, highly dangerous revolution. Why else was it so persecuted? It is meaning’s revolt against the meaninglessness of dying, which casts a shadow of absurdity on all that lives. It is the revolt of Resurrection against the finality of bodily disintegration. The revolt of love’s absoluteness against any resignation on the part of the heart. Everything depends on the power of faith, love and hope” [8].

Finally, quoting Pope Francis, “In this day and age unless Christians are revolutionaries they are not Christians” [9].

Being revolutionary is now an instruction of the Magisterium. Everywhere we can, we should inhabit those insurgent islands of the new Sea of Galilee, which has its shores all around the world. Looking for a widespread “conspiracy of Goodness”, as my friend Luca like to say [10].

Once again, the heavens will storm the earth!

Our challenge, as Christians, is that we cannot do this kind of operation by relying solely on the capacities of our reason or our imaginative power, even if the temptation is strong and apparently convincing: it’s the Holy Spirit who is within and for whom every process of destitution and restitution, invention and clarification, can and must take place. As Pope Francis often repeats: without the Spirit we can do nothing.

Of course, there are famous radical or militant thinkers today who try to make use of the Christian tradition within their own very personal theoretical itinerary, relying solely on their own great intelligence, large culture and exceptional power of thought, and often this Pelagianist/Gnostic power fascinates us. I mean, it’s understandable. But, on closer inspection, the result of their speculations ultimately often appears as something kitsch, as well as suffering from a terrible form of megalomania. Humility, instead, is not the least of the revolutionary's virtues.

After all, is it not through this fragile humility that God’s power has always acted? “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor, 17:9). And so much the worse for resentful Nietzschean followers!

The Spirit always comes before and accompanies us. Personal and communitarian prayer, a prayer of the heart, is therefore a key moment in our militant lives. We should then always keep in mind an equation like this: without the Spirit, no revolution and without spirituality, no revolutionary.

It’s not God who must fit into our paradigms of thought and action - this forcing seems to me to have been the tragic limits of many revolutionary experiences, even Christian ones - but we who must try to listen and understand what God’s thought and action is in history and in our own lives, the celebrated “signs of the times”. Therefore, think of social movements which move analogically to the eternal movement of God-Trinity, traditionally called perichoresis, a flow of divine love between the Father, the Son and the Spirit that, consequently, also defines the human being as a relational creature grounded in love. As St. Paul beautifully proclaims to the Athenian philosophers: “For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17, 28). The Passion, the Cross, the Resurrection, the Effusion of Spirit, it’s all an ontological revolution deflagrating at the heart of the world and our life itself. Well, then, why should social movements not be involved in the Trinitarian kind of movement and relationship?

So, we should imagine what a trinitized movement of women and men that fight for peace and justice can be, what it can do and especially how it can do it. Trinitizing is a neologism made by the Servant of God Chiara Lubich and studied in depth by Italian theologian Piero Coda, who writes: “This means that every reality can be known in truth only when it is known as containing within itself all other realities in a Trinitarian relation” [11]. In other words, we can test the sincerity of a movement through the presence or absence of Love-Agape as its main blowing force. For our purposes, I think the work that some theologians and philosophers are doing on “Trinitarian ontology” is very interesting [12]. Even the old Personalism, which today you seek to renew, would gain in theological terms.

In July, I and nine other friends were at the Santa Marta residence, for a visit to the Holy Father. Among us were three young migrants, who had arrived in Italy from Africa after terrible journeys: thrown into the desert, sold as slaves, tortured in Libyan detention camps, left adrift in the Mediterranean Sea and finally rescued. One of them had lost his wife and daughter on the journey, dying of thirst in the desert, whose photograph had gone around the world, and he had already met the Pope last year, as soon as he arrived in Italy. In fact, the Holy Father told him that he carries him and his story in his heart and retains the photo of his wife and daughter fixed on his desk.

One of the three, the one who was sitting closest to the Pope, at a certain point in his story pulled up the sleeve of his shirt to show him the marks of torture and Francis, closing his eyes, laid his hand at length on those marks. In this gesture and in the long listening he seemed to take their suffering upon himself, transforming it into hope: “Courage, now you must move forward. Without allowing bitterness to remain in the heart, because it easily turns into desire for revenge... Remember, we are all brothers... And tell me, how can I help? What can I do for you?”. Really, I thought while listening to these words: “now I understand why he is indicated as the Servant of the servants of God”.

So, some of us handed him a document, a text outlining the path of a ‘fraternity’ that we called, inspired by a speech by the Pope to popular movements, ‘The collective Samaritan’. Finally, we all prayed together, in a circle, feeling that at its core, in our midst, was the Presence of the Spirit of Jesus.

As we left, all moved, we said to each other that this is how we imagine the very life under the Spirit of the first Christian communities: listening to each other, loving the poor, putting in common their resources and possibilities, praying to God together, spreading fraternity, tendresse, commonality and justice. The “essence of Christianity” as form of life.

For an hour we were an insurgent island in the calm strength of a revolutionary sea of Love. Undoubtedly, it was an indication of the Spirit for us all.

Brotherly in Christ Jesus
Marcello Tarì
Rome - 07.18. 2024 - Saint Emiliano, martyr of Mesia.

Notes
[1] The second issue of “The Reservoir” [Autonomedia, 2023], the journal edited by the comrades of Woodbine in Brooklyn-NYC, titled Communion, which I had the honour of participating, is a very interesting insight from this point of view.
[2] These words belong to the last public intervention of Mario Tronti on 10 June 2023, a long dialogue-interview with philosopher Adelino Zanini. Here the transcription of an excerpt: https://www.leparoleelecose.it/?p=49666.
[3] https://www.vatican.va/content...
[4] M. Hardt-A. Negri,Empire, Harvard University Press, 2000, p.413.
[5] G. Dezaunay, Le Christ rouge, Salvator, 2023.
[6] J. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, Stanford University Press, 2003, p.70
[7] https://collectif-anastasis.org/manifeste-anglais/
[8] H.U. von Balthasar,“Tu coroni l’anno con la tua grazia”, Jaca Book, 1992, p.74.
[9] https://www.vatican.va/content...
[10] "Conspiracy of Goodness» is an expression that has often been used in recent years by Luca Casarini, a former militant of Italian autonomous movements and currently special guest at the Synod, to imagine a network of resistance starting from his experience in the NGO he co-founded, Mediterranea Saving Humans, which deals with the rescue of migrants and refugees in the Mediterranean Sea. Cf. for example https://ilmanifesto.it/la-cospirazione-del-bene-contro-la-falsa-pace. With him and other friends we are now starting a Christian fraternity working in social movements called ‘The Collective Samaritan’.
[11] P. Coda, Chiara Lubich and the Theology of Jesus. The Trinity as Place, Method, and Object of Thinking, in “Claritas. Journal of Dialogue & Culture”, Vol.3. n°2, oct. 2014, p.32
[12]  https://trinitarian-ontology.o...

[Plea for an Insurgent Catholicism is an original article written by the Italian Catholic and social researcher Marcello Tarì for New Personalism in July, 2024. Some of Marcello Tarì's work can be found at Settimana News, where he writes a frequent column on religious and political subjects. He has also written a full-length book that has been translated into English entitledThere Is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution (Common Notions Press, 2017).