Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Sense of sin

Today it is said there is no repentance because the sense of sin has been lost. However, this is not totally true, since the era is characterized by the constant denunciation of sin in the media and in courts.
This means that the sense of sin exists -- but the sense of sin that others commit, the cardinal said.
He said the repentance that saves is that which recognizes one's own errors; to move away from one's faults is to come closer to God as he is the antithesis of evil.
Cardinal Biffi

今日、人々は罪意識をもっていないとよく言われる。けれども、それは完全に正しい見解ではない。なぜなら、我々の時代の特徴の一つとしては、マスコミや裁判において絶えず罪が訴えられるからである。従って、罪意識はあると言える。ただし、それは他人が犯す罪に関してである。ところが、救いに導く罪の悔い改めは、自分の罪に対するのそれである。自分の過ちから離れることは、神に近づくことに等しい。なぜなら、神は悪の正反対であるから。

ビッフィ枢機卿(BOLOGNA教区名誉大司教)、今週教皇ベネディクト16世の四旬節黙想会を指導している。

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Malintesi (altro che dialogo !!)

"Le monde ne marche que par le Malentendu.
-- C'est par le Malentendu universel que tout le monde s'accorde.
-- Car si, par malheur, on se comprenait, on ne pourrai jamais s'accorder"

Ch. BAUDELAIRE, Mon coeur mis a nu, XLII, Pleiad, p. 704.


「世界は誤解によってしかうまくいかない。
ー 世界が一致するのは人類普遍の誤解によるのだ。
ー なぜならもし、不幸にも、理解しあっていたなら、決して一致できないだろうから。」

(ボードレール、Mon coeur mis a nu, XLII, プレイヤッド版、第一巻、704頁)

Sunday, February 18, 2007

Semplicita'

"Il segno di Dio e' la semplicita'" (Benedetto XVI, omelia di Natale 2006)

La semplicita' si distingue dalla INGENUITA' e dalla SPROVVEDUTEZZA in quando e' sostenuta dalla PRUDENZA, cioe dalla capacita' di vedere la realta'.

"In un mondo segnato dalla brama di potere, di successo, di affermazione - e a questo non sfugge a volte neanche il mondo ecclesiastico - puo' capitare che la semplicita' sia poco apprezzata, guardata con diffidenza, ritenuta poco funzionale e, infine, anche piu o meno apertamente derisa" (Aldo Basso, Testimoni, 31 gennaio 2007)

La semplicita' "non si cura di quello che fanno o possono fare gli altri...Questa virtu' ha molta affinita' con l'umilta'... E' solo l'amor proprio che ci fa guardare se quanto abbiamo detto e' stato ricevuto bene o male: la santa sem-plicita' invece non sta dietro alle sue parole e azioni; ma ne lascia la cura alla Divina Provvidenza, alla quale e' essenzialmente affidata. Percio' va avanti rettamente per il suo cammino senza guardare ne' a destra ne' a sinistra" (Francesco di Sales, Trattenimenti spirituali, San paolo, Roma, 1941, 217)

"Questo esercizio di abbandono continuo in Dio, nella sua semplicita', comprende eminentemente tutta la perfezione degli altri esercizi: e poiche' la pratica di esso e' gradita a Dio, dobbiamo usarlo di preferenza su tutte le altre pratiche" (Ibidem, 225)

"HOC EST PHILOSOPHIAE CULMEN: SIMPLICEM ESSE CUM PRUDENTIA" (S. Giovanni Crisostomo, citato da Giovanni XXIII nel Giornale dell'anima, pp. 275-276)

-----------------

1. La liturgia esiste per tutti. Dev'essere "cattolica", cioè comunicabile a tutti i credenti, senza distinzione di luogo, di provenienza, di cultura. Dev'essere pertanto "semplice". Ma semplice non significa a buon mercato. C'è la semplicità del banale e c'è la semplicità che è espressione di maturità. Nella Chiesa può tuttavia trattarsi soltanto di quest'ultima, della vera semplicità. La più alta tensione dello spirito, la più alta purificazione, la più alta maturità generano la semplicità autentica. L'esigenza del semplice, a guardare bene, è identica all'esigenza del pulito e del maturo, che si può avere a molti livelli, ma mai a quello della semplicità psichica.

Brani tratti da: Joseph Ratzinger, La festa della fede, Jaca Book, 1983
Fondamento teologico della musica sacraCenni riassuntivi della disputa postconciliare sulla musica sacra
http://www.ratzinger.it/modules.php?name=AvantGo&file=print&sid=223

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Brain, mind and hope

Friday, Jan. 19, 2007
The Power of Hope
By Scott Haig M.D.

David's head was literally stuffed with lung cancer. I was called in to take care of his hip and pelvic bones broken by the growing metastases. His seeming nonchalance about the pain and the surgery was clearly out of concern for his beautiful, young family--his wife Carol, a nurse, and his three kids, who were there every night. He couldn't keep up the carefree charade over the next two weeks, though, as his speech slurred, then became incoherent. He stopped speaking, then moving.
I dreaded making rounds on a patient for whom there was no good news, no good plan. When his doctors rescanned his head, there was barely any brain left. The cerebral machine that talked and wondered, winked and sang, the machine that remembered jokes and birthdays and where the big fish hid on hot days, was nearly gone, replaced by lumps of haphazardly growing gray stuff. Gone with that machine seemed David as well. No expression, no response to anything we did to him. As far as I could tell, he was just not there.
It was particularly bad in the room that Friday when I made evening rounds. The family was there, sad, crying faces on all of them. I fussed with the hip a bit. His respirations had become agonal--the gulping kind of breathing movement that immediately precedes death. I knew Carol had seen this and that she knew what it meant. I said something inane and slid out the door fast, looking importantly at the papers in my hand, striving for the nice, empty corridor. But Carol came after me, needing to catch me away from the kids. Her eyes red-rimmed, she asked me where her husband was. I had noticed the cross around her neck. I said I wasn't sure where he was, but I was pretty sure where he was going. She wanted to believe me, and I think she did.
Saturday morning the sun poured in as I checked the room. The bed was at chest height, made up and empty, with clean, fresh sheets over the vinyl mattress. As I turned to leave, I was blocked by a nurse, an older Irish lady with a doleful look on her face. She had taken care of David last night.
"He woke up, you know, doctor--just after you left--and said goodbye to them all. Like I'm talkin' to you right here. Like a miracle. He talked to them and patted them and smiled for about five minutes. Then he went out again, and he passed in the hour." My eyebrows went up.
Two weeks later I saw Carol in the lobby. It was busy and very public. But before her last "God bless you," I couldn't help asking, "Uh. Carol, did ...?"
She knew my question. With a wide, knowing smile, she nodded and said, "Oh, yes, he sure did." And I believed her.
But it wasn't David's brain that woke him up to say goodbye that Friday. His brain had already been destroyed. Tumor metastases don't simply occupy space and press on things, leaving a whole brain. The metastases actually replace tissue. Where that gray stuff grows, the brain is just not there.
What woke my patient that Friday was simply his mind, forcing its way through a broken brain, a father's final act to comfort his family. The mind is a uniquely personal domain of thought, dreams and countless other things, like the will, faith and hope. These fine things are as real as rocks and water but, like the mind, weightless and invisible, maybe even timeless. Material science shies from these things, calling them epiphenomena, programs running on a computer, tunes on a piano. This understanding can't be ignored; not too much seems to get done on earth without a physical brain. But I know this understanding is not complete, either.
I see the mind have its way all the time when physical realities challenge it. In a patient stubbornly working to rehab after surgery, in a child practicing an instrument or struggling to create, a mind or will, clearly separate, hovers under the machinery, forcing it toward a goal. It's wonderful to see, such tangible evidence of that fine thing's power over the mere clumps of particles that, however pretty, will eventually clump differently and vanish.
Neuroanatomy is largely concerned with which spots in the brain do what; which chemicals have which effects at those spots is neurophysiology. Plan on feeding those chemicals to a real person's brain, and you're doing neuropharmacology. Although they are concerned with myriad, complex, amazing things, none of these disciplines seem to find the mind. Somehow it's "smaller" than the tracts, ganglia and nuclei of the brain's gross anatomy--but "bigger" than the cells and molecules of the brain's physiology. We really should have bumped into it on the way down. Yet we have not. Like our own image in still water, however sharp, when we reach to grasp it, it just dissolves.
But many think the mind is only in there--existing somehow in the physical relationship of the brain's physical elements. The physical, say these materialists, is all there is. I fix bones with hardware. As physical as this might be, I cannot be a materialist. I cannot ignore the internal evidence of my own mind. It would be hypocritical. And worse, it would be cowardly to ignore those occasional appearances of the spirits of others--of minds uncloaked, in naked virtue, like David's goodbye.

Dr. Haig is an assistant clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons

Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580392,00.html

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

How language grows (cfr. realism)

The growth of language follows the growth of knowledge and theexpansion of human activities. It is a vast, anonymous process, with manyvariations (in the optional area), many changes, false starts and short-livedattempts. Yet certain basic principles can be observed, demonstrating, notthe arbitrary character, but the objectivity of that process. … [A] wordsurvives and gains general usage only when and if it designates an actualcategory …. Many slang terms are coined every year, by one group oranother; some of them become fashionable, enjoy a brief, artificialpopularity of random mouthing … and vanish, like the stale debris ofsome noisy party. But a few slang expressions survive and become part offormal language – the apt, incisive ones that designate some aspect ofreality for which no formal term had previously existed …


Ayn Rand. 1997. Journals of Ayn Rand. Ed. David Harriman. New York: Penguin. pp. 691-2.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Luoghi comuni per muovere le masse

Victor Hugo: “Ogni pensatore che vorrà diventare oratore, ogni uomo di spirito e di cuore che vorrà diventare ed essere eloquente, muovere le masse, dominare le assemblee, agitare gli imperi con la sua parola, non avrà da fare nient’altro che passare dalla regione delle idee al territorio dei luoghi comuni”.


雄弁家になりたい思想家、雄弁術を通して大衆を動かしたい、集会を支配したい、言葉で天下を動揺させたい精神豊かな人、心のある人だれでも、思想の国から常套句の領域に移動すれば十分である。
ヴィクトル・ユーゴー