Gorazd Kocijančič In conversation (Interviews 1997–2022) Ljubljana 2026 International Series; 2 Original title: V pogovoru Translated by Gorazd Kocijančič and Christian Moe © Gorazd Kocijančič Electronic source * * * Kataložni zapis o publikaciji (CIP) pripravili v Narodni in univerzitetni knjižnici v Ljubljani COBISS.SI-ID 266422275 ISBN 978-961-7155-58-7 (ePUB) This book is dedicated to the memory of my father-in-law, Matic Žumer (1935–2023), a kind man with passion for conversation Table of contents Title page Table of contents Introduction A book of surprises… that can change your life Thought and spiritual heritage Irony in more than 2,000 pages, but first in about 500 ‘Whoever wants to be wrong, let them be wrong’ The desire to glimpse the Truth What is philosophy for in impoverished times? The truth is the silence of the coming age Conversation: Alberto Manguel and Gorazd Kocijančič Ethics cannot be invented like a new fashion Anti-Catholicism is the Slovenian equivalent of anti-Semitism The Gospel offers an eternal vision Conversations with contemporaries: Gorazd Kocijančič A laboratory of spiritual teachings Gorazd Kocijančič on the Church Fathers and the content of the second part of the Philokalia Original publication of interviews Notes Introduction In the last 25 years, I have turned down more interview requests than I have accepted (at least until journalists got used to the fact that I don’t ‘give interviews’, just as I don’t appear on television or go to the radio to record programmes) – and yet enough of them have accumulated for this little book. I have given interviews only when it was hard to avoid them. This was usually when a book I had written was published, or when I had received a national award. Some interviews were very well received; others went almost unnoticed or were hidden in hard-to-find publications. I’m not re-publishing them together just out of an old man’s ego trip, but because I think that, together, they mean something more than they did on their own in their original publications. As a collection, they also form a kind of stylised self-portrait, which probably resembles me a bit – if not in terms of who I am (which, as the Apostle John says, is know only to God, ‘who is greater than our hearts and knows everything’), then at least in terms of who I have wanted to be over the decades. But that is by far the least interesting thing. What’s more important to me is that the interviews show the ‘authorial intent’ behind my work. Now, as contemporary hermeneutics well knows, this doesn’t in itself constitute meaning, but is nevertheless not negligible. The interviews also briefly cover various dimensions of my work. Many of them refer to each other, explain each other, and with their pithy formulations – many of which I cannot remember ever having said1 – shed light on a fairly coherent vision that I have stuck to since the 1990s: a vision of how beautiful Christian truth is and how it relates to the universal human experience, a vision of the importance of authentic philosophical thinking and genuine art, a vision of the significance of spiritual heritage and its role in culture. This doesn’t make me feel any better after reading this set of conversations. The opposite is true: it seems to me that the conversations show (and in some places even reflect) the story of a failure. I started my public career at a time when Slovenia was becoming independent, albeit as a complete political outsider. I was naive and optimistic, kind of a believer in a ‘Christian Enlightenment’.2 At the time, I thought it would be enough to give an ill-educated nation – one that had been taught Marxism for decades – translations of some classical philosophical, theological, poetic, and spiritual texts and their in-depth interpretations. I assumed that over time people would realise by themselves what is true, beautiful, and good. Society would become more open to discussion. We would respect each other’s differences and be curious and friendly towards one another. We would discover the riches of the many traditions that founded Europe, as well as others that we only discovered a few hundred years ago, but which are becoming increasingly important for us in a globalised world. Philosophy, religion, and art would no longer be just unnecessary and fleeting embellishments of life. They would be seen as the things they really are: the foundations of noble coexistence and the building blocks of a culture worth living in. By listening to each other, we would be enriched by the Mystery and become creative, perhaps even original.3 We would build a free democratic society where different ideological groups could live peacefully together based on the lowest common denominator without interfering in each other’s affairs or trying to impose their own ideas on society aggressively. This expectation turned out to be completely wrong. What did I want to achieve with interviews and other ‘exoteric writings’?4 Definitely to appeal to a wider audience. Inviting others to read your book – whether it is your own philosophical or poetic work or a translation – and to think about it in depth is a big ask. We only live for a short time, and by reading seriously, each person shows you a lot of attention that you might not deserve. They spend hours of their life reading books that they could have spent reading other books that may be more important and more decisive for their life. This attention cannot in all decency be expected of them. I therefore saw occasional journalistic outings and public discussions mainly as a way of reaching the public, of reaching a wide variety of people who don’t read my books at all, briefly explaining what I do and what I am about. If possible, I also wanted to inspire them and encourage them to read the real thing. This would ‘influence’ them, open up new horizons, and encourage them to think critically and reflect on themselves. Viewed from an ‘objective’ distance, it’s clearly ridiculous for an ignorant being who originated from nothing and is about to sink back into invisibility and eternal oblivion to want to influence the public sphere in his lifetime, even in such a limited territory as tiny Slovenia. But I have actually tried to do so in these conversations (it probably has something to do with my philosophical understanding of the worldliness of the world, which has recently crystallised for me in the concept of ‘hypostasis’). It’s clear that it didn’t work. I think Slovenian society is in a much worse spiritual state now than it was in the late 1980s. It is vulgar, unintellectual, uncultured, spiritually bankrupt, ideologically deranged, and completely disoriented in terms of values (and it doesn’t matter whether it’s really society that’s got worse, or it’s me who have simply sobered up). The coronavirus crisis, this rehearsal for a new totalitarianism, has shockingly revealed its extreme wretchedness, the psychopathology of individuals (including and especially the so-called intellectuals). It has also shown the powerlessness of institutions: for example, the Roman Catholic Church has become – horribile dictu – a marketing department for corrupt pharmaceutical multinationals. The crisis has also shown how the legal system has failed to protect the constitution and defend human dignity, and how universities have lost their ability to encourage critical thinking. What’s more, subsequent warmongering, linked to media censorship and the numbing self-righteousness of a new ‘moral-political purity’, only serves to reinforce my general impression. The masses themselves are not entirely to blame for this. Weak, uprooted, and manipulated, robbed of a deeper spiritual life and authentic culture, and without a real identity of their own, they have found themselves caught up in the powerful currents of social unrest in the declining West (especially the slow decline of its hegemon) and in harsh geopolitical and economic transformations. The digital revolution and the rise of social networks have allowed us to see the worst in people: irrational passions and nihilistic fears, frustrations and delusional fantasies, desires for domination over others and those who are different. The dream of a free, open life in a democracy and a free, independent country was clearly just that – a dream. But as I am entering the seventh decade of my life, I care less and less about what is bad and stupid in our society. I don’t want to think about it or criticise it. It’s a waste of time, and I don’t have much time left. Luckily, there is a lot of goodness and beauty, even if it is sometimes hard to find. The most precious places in Slovenia (and other counties) today are small, almost invisible, but very real islands of thought and creativity, of authentic life and prayer: islands of nonconformists, rebels, and loners, separated from ‘this world’, spiritual friends and kindred spirits who often do not even know each other, but nevertheless connect in mysterious ‘networks’ and, like a kind of noetic archipelago, enable the survival of culture. They are still the place where the present and the past meet, the only meeting that can unfold a full future, a communication between time and eternity. The societal conversation that we dreamed of in the 1990s is clearly over. Once again, the time has come for the ‘Benedict option’, as Rod Dreher would say, for withdrawal from the ‘world’,5 for new forms of anachoresis and ascetic severing of ties with the social surroundings. People should focus on being anchored in their faith and steer clear of being influenced by the mainstream. In today’s world, this mainly means avoiding the media, information, and propaganda that are slowly poisoning and defiling our hearts without us even realising it. Without any bitterness and with love for everyone and everything, but also without any of the former optimistic illusions. I hope this booklet helps people in this invisible archipelago in future endeavours, and above all, I hope it encourages them! Even though society is in a bad state, we must never lose hope. We are not alone on our journey, and God’s holy providence watches over us, even when it seems that ‘the hour of darkness’ has already begun (cf. Luke 22:53). I have edited the text of the interviews here and there to make it more fluent, and I have made it as uniform as possible, given that the conversations were conducted in different ways. I have sometimes made small changes to the style or added a word or two to make the point clearer, but otherwise the texts have been published exactly as they were printed in original publications. When translating into English, I slightly adapted the text to the target language in some places with minor abridgements or added brief explanations to make it easier for non-Slovene readers to understand. I would like to thank the interviewers and interviewees for kindly agreeing to the publication of the conversations they conceived or participated in. Gorazd Kocijančič Lipnica pri Kropi, August 2025. A book of surprises… that can change your life A conversation with Gorazd Kocijančič, translator of the Bible How did your life journey lead you to the Holy Bible and what does it mean to you personally? My life journey led me to the Scriptures with all its winding, complicated, unclear, and obscure intricacies, through all of its difficulties, searches, discoveries, and experiences, good and bad. I believe this is true for anyone who reads the Bible. In this totality of experience – even in what seems completely foreign to the biblical world – words take on meaning; in it, everything comes to life, especially those key words that also carry the biblical message. I don’t remember where and when I first started to understand the meaning of words like ‘love’, ‘heart’, ‘holiness’, ‘life’, ‘light’, and ‘being’. It was especially at all those decisive moments when it seemed to me that an event was (perhaps?) a Word that my life journey led me to the Bible. For this reason, I would never want to talk about my relationship with Scripture in a simple story that would objectify it (as a ‘discovery’ or ‘conversion’) for myself or others. Least of all for others. I first read the Bible properly at a late time, when I was already a student. Before that, I wasn’t interested enough to read all the ‘boring’ historical narratives and ‘monotonous’ prophetic threats, let alone four (as it seemed to me) copies of similar gospels: they struck me as a collection of stories that I knew in outline and found as relevant as any collection of old myths and sagas. But when I accepted the faith, I discovered in the Bible words that could give meaning to my life. For me the Holy Scriptures are, in a radical sense, the Word of God. In this respect, I am probably much more ‘fundamentalist’ than many contemporary biblical scholars. I believe in the literal inspiration of the Bible, despite the difficulties this belief entails. That is why I am very interested in the logic and meaning of ‘allegorical’ exegesis, as well as the Kabbalistic interpretation of the Old Testament. My faith has always been closely connected to the Bible. It was through the Bible that my spiritual experience of the Absolute, of ‘salvation’, was revealed to me as the grace of Christ. The fact that the Absolute, the infinite Mystery that sustains our lives and gives them meaning, is truly ‘God’ – that He is in a salvific personal relationship with each individual – became clear to me precisely through reading the Holy Scriptures, through the image of Christ, in whom the written and the absolute Word coincide perfectly. Through the Holy Scriptures, my spiritual experience – if I may resort to Paul Ricoeur’s precise formulation – was transformed into a rational decision and ultimately culminated in a kind of destiny that has left its mark on my overall understanding of others, myself, and the world, in the sign of accepting the word of the Other. As stated, I didn’t learn about the Bible until I became an adult, and so I had a mature and curious attitude towards it. I soon took an interest in biblical studies, I began reading commentaries and exegetical studies – without any idea that I would ever use this knowledge. I immediately read the deuterocanonical books and the New Testament in the original (first in a wonderful, inexpensive Protestant interlinear edition printed on crumbling paper, which I read in Dubrovnik and which excited me like the sea and kisses); I learned Hebrew a few years later, when I attended a four-year language course taught by Professor Shulamit Steiner, a Hebrew teacher in the Jewish community in Zagreb. I had no idea that I would ever be able to use this knowledge. How do you approach the Bible now that you have worked as a translator and annotator? I’m just really grateful. I can’t tell you how happy and honoured I am to have had the chance to help accomplish the Slovene Standard Translation of the Bible. I did my best with the time I had for translating, editing and writing notes, so I am satisfied with the work I have done. And that increases my gratitude. My attitude toward the Holy Scriptures really changed for a while, which was to be expected after intensive study, translation, and editing work: I didn’t read the Bible for some time after its publication. I just didn’t feel drawn to it. Now I pick it up with the same excitement and anticipation as before, but now I feel a bit more familiar with it and I’m joyfully aware that, together with thousands of other people who help spread God’s word, I have been able to help with something that I consider most important: the entry of Eternity into time. Did you take part in in the previous translation, the ‘Jubilee edition’ of New Testament (1984)? No, I didn’t. I only joined the team of translators later. However, I wrote a very critical review of the Jubilee edition, which in several hundred places is not only paraphrastic, but downright wrong. Because of this analysis, the leader of the translation team, Old Testament scholar Jože Krašovec, invited me to take part in the Slovenian Standard Translation project. In the 1996 Slovenian Standard Translation, you are listed as co-author of the translations of the following books of the Bible: Baruch, Jeremiah’s Letter, Additions (in Greek) to Daniel from the Old Testament, and the Gospels and James from the New Testament. How would you describe your work: a new translation, a harmonisation with the original, corrections, or something else? This ‘co-authorship’ means that I based the translation on a computer version prepared by France Rozman, but the editorial work and final formulation of the translation principles for the standard translation resulted in a largely new text. Prof. Rozman kindly agreed to this (I really respect him as a biblical scholar even though we have very different views on translation). In the end, only a few of the original solutions remained, probably about as many as the traditional solutions taken from the old Jere-Snoj translation. As well as the translations you mentioned, I also edited and unified the terminology of the whole New Testament and (working with other Greek scholars and Jože Krašovec) the deuterocanonical texts. I also wrote notes for all the books mentioned and the whole translation by Alojz Rebula. How did your work proceed? Can you describe any particularly interesting events? For the last two years, I was able to stay at home and spend most of my day at the computer, thanks to the financial support from the Ministry of Science. ‘Particularly interesting events’ related to the translation were above all connected with ‘paranormal’ phenomena in the computer’s ‘head’. You know what I mean: files disappearing and reappearing, viruses and so on. Even so, I am thankful for technology. The computer programs Bible Works and SeedMaster were a big help when I was editing. When preparing the notes, I wanted to re-read some of the most important commentaries on each book of the Bible. My notes also include extensive references to the ancient Tradition of the Church, which required me to read a lot of patristic commentaries. You formed your own opinion about the translators and the translation method used before you started working on this project. Can you share any impressions, experiences, surprises…? As Ortega y Gasset once wrote, every ‘translation is not a work, but a path to a work.’ There are many ways to translate the Bible, just as there are many ways to translate other texts. This is a basic idea in modern translation theory. Problems naturally arise in group projects when one person (or several people) refuses to accept the translation principles agreed upon by the majority. But I think this is a problem of ethics, not of competence. I value translations that show reverence for the original text, like the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the Old Slavonic translation, the Revised Standard Version, the Buber and Rosenzweig German translation, the French translations of André Chouraqui and Émile Osty. This reverence is not just an abstract attitude or emotion, but a humble acknowledgement : what do I actually ‘understand’ in the text based on my language, history, and exegetical competence? If the translator conveys more than this to the reader, if he tries to use phrasing to conceal his ignorance and unfamiliarity with the text, its incomprehensibility or surprising nature, then I consider the translation to be flawed. It may be interesting and intriguing, but it is flawed. It’s basically bluffing, even though one claims it’s based on understanding the ‘spirit of the language’. In our country, people often justify this by saying they have a ‘feel for the beautiful Slovenian language’. But this often ends up as stilted, clichéd, poor Slovenian, flowery language, a dead language that actually betrays the bitter poeticity of the original text. I would like to emphasise again that it is very understandable that people have different ideas about translation. This is because translation is a matter of taste, which ‘is not to be discussed’, as the well-known Latin proverb says. However, I was disturbed to find that people who support ‘loose translation’ don’t know much about translation theory and its findings. Ignorance of hermeneutics means that when we talk about the translation of the Bible, we go round in circles. We keep trying absurdly to prove who is right, whether it is better to translate ‘beautifully’ or ‘slavishly’, etc. What has been said shows that the Slovenian Standard Translation largely corresponds to my translation principles. It features ‘the stance of a language that not only is not everyday, but also gives the impression that it has not grown completely freely, but bends toward a foreign similarity’, as Friedrich Schleiermacher once wrote. You are also a philosopher and a classical scholar. How would you compare the Bible to ancient Greek and Latin authors, and to philosophy, including modern philosophy? I am above all a Christian philosopher. Philology in its linguistic and positivist aspects interest me only as a means for philosophically approaching the wisdom hidden in ancient writings. How do ancient authors compare with the Bible? In different ways, of course. The most profound thinkers and poets of the past, like Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, the great Greek playwrights, Pindar, Plotinus, Virgil, and Seneca, wrote such deep thoughts that we can see in them a ‘divine pedagogy for gentiles’, as Clement of Alexandria said. The same applies to modern and postmodern thought, of course. Contemporary skepticism, the distrust of tradition, ideology, and the unconscious assumptions of thought: all this seems to me, in proportion to how sincere and sharp the critical theory is, to be very important. It is impossible for relevant thought today (including understanding and interpreting the Bible) to ignore these findings. But all these thoughts are only reflections, echoes. For Christians it is precisely in the Bible that we recognise the authoritative figure of Christ, who, as the incarnate Logos, is the fullness of all divine and human truth. Christ is the criterion of divine and human truth in all previous and subsequent thought. You are particularly interested in the Eastern Church Fathers. Can you briefly explain how they understand the Bible and how they read it? First, I want to make clear that I’m not interested only in the Eastern Fathers. A lot of my writing is also about the Western tradition, from John Scotus Eriugena and German mystics (especially an author I really admire, Meister Eckhart) to Erasmus of Rotterdam and German Romanticism. I just want to share the best and most original Christian ideas with readers in Slovenia – and the beginnings of theology (the Apostolic Fathers, the apologists, the Alexandrian school) are Greek, of course. I’m also planning to publish books with translations of classical Latin Patristic writers and studies on important thinkers in Western medieval theology. My aim is simply to trace the historical dynamics of Christian thought.. The Church Fathers provide a great commentary on the Holy Scriptures, but they also show us that we need to think freely so that we don’t start taking the Bible at face value and miss out on all its symbolic dimension. The Fathers always understood that the Holy Scriptures are the texts of a believing community that partakes of the Holy Spirit and experiences the mysteries of the Kingdom in prayer. The Bible did not just appear out of thin air. It was written and canonised by the representatives of the community of believers in a long process in which, through the power of the Spirit, they separated the wheat from the chaff. What would you say to encourage people in Slovenia today to read the Bible? What would you say to someone who is looking for the Truth and searching for meaning in a world full of different beliefs and existential pressures? I would tell them: Do not believe in your own prejudices and other people’s rumours. Don’t trust what Bible experts say. This is a special book, magical, unknown to anyone: a book of surprises, written just for you, which can change your life. Read the Sermon on the Mount and the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, and ask yourself whether the person speaking is a madman or God. If you can, cross yourself in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and set out for freedom. Alone, with the Bible in your pocket. The interview was conducted by Bogomir Trošt. Thought and spiritual heritage The important role of the Church Fathers in the development of European thought and culture He is mainly interested in spirituality, thought, and their mysterious dialectic in the present and in history. This is our current interlocutor, philosopher and classical philologist Gorazd Kocijančič, who presents living Christian thought and spiritual heritage in his work. *** First, we should talk about the genesis of the book series Cerkveni očetje (The Church Fathers). This series was first published a decade and a half ago by the Mohorjeva publishing house in Celje. In 1983, the first book by Fran Ksaver Lukman, Martyres Christi (Christ’s Witnesses), was published. How did this important cultural project come about? The word ‘genesis’ is used for stories about the beginning and creation, but these stories are characterised always by an elusive ambiguity that is a symbolic in character. What is a past life? Where does it come from? The Church Fathers collection is the final expression of a certain way of life, the closing act of a rather long, varied, and only partially known history of ‘Slovenianisation’ of one of the essential dimensions of the Christian tradition. We can trace it from the first written Slovene document, Brižinski spomeniki (Freising manuscripts, 9th century) through the reformer Primož Trubar (Primus Truber) to authors who left large amounts of translated manuscripts in the 19th century. But that’s not what you wanted to hear about, I know. The ‘real’ history of the collection began shortly before World War II, in 1938. Its soul was the important patrologist and professor at the Faculty of Theology in Ljubljana, Fran Ksaver Lukman. It was published until 1944, and various translators, mainly professors at the diocesan classical gymnasium, managed to publish some important works of Latin Patristics (the writings of Cyprian, Augustine, selected letters of Jerome, etc.) before the collection was shut down in the post-war chaos. For many years, only small parts of the old translations could be published in mimeograph. The first new translation was made by Anton Strle in the 1960s. It was a small but very important work, called the Didache (The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles). It’s interesting that the translation was actually published by our Protestants. In 1983, a collection of early Christian acts of the martyrs was revived by Marijan Smolik and published by the Mohorjeva Družba publishing house in Celje. The first volume, called Martyres Christi, was a slightly revised and expanded edition of the pre-war book. Then we got a translation of Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Rule and a reprint of Anton Sovrè’s brilliant pre-war translation of Augustine’s Confessions, which is still the patristic work most read by people in Slovenia. I prepared the next four books myself or with other translators, and I also wrote all the introductions and notes for them. These supplementary texts are more ‘philosophical’ than those in other translations of the Fathers into modern languages, at least those that I know. In my hermeneutical encounter with the patristic texts, I thought about how they could be important now, in our modern world, in the current intellectual and spiritual moment. I realise that this might be a shortcoming for people who are more interested in historical learning. Eight books have been published so far, and your work, especially the translations, is very noticeable in the last four. In the last book, a selection of writings by early Christian apologists entitled Logos in Defense of Truth, you also wrote the introductions and notes. Could you say more about what you did? In 1993, my first translation of old Christian texts was published. It was a collection called Grški očetje o molitvi (The Greek Fathers on Prayer). These are some of the most important spiritual texts of the Eastern Greek Church. In them, the authors discuss various aspects of spiritual life and the human relationship with the Absolute. The authors of the texts are among the most important writers of ancient Christianity: Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Evagrius Ponticus, and Maximus the Confessor. I presented their worldview in the introductory texts and equipped the texts with notes. I prepared the next translation together with Silvo Novak; we presented and translated Gregory of Nyssa’s texts The Life of Saint Macrina and On the Soul and the Resurrection (based on an unpublished translation by Frančišek Jere). In two short introductory essays, I tried to show how important ancient ‘hagiography’ (the biographies of holy people) is. I also tried to point out the foundations of Gregory’s teaching on the Resurrection. This teaching is based on profound philosophical and theological ideas. It is developed in confrontation with the radical ‘nihilism’ and ‘materialism’ of Gregory’s time, and develops persuasive arguments against the doctrine of reincarnation and other purely ‘spiritualistic’ (Platonic) ideas of death. The third and fourth works are called Writings of the Apostolic Fathers and Logos in Defense of the Truth:Selected Writings of the Apologists. In total, these two books are almost 1,000 pages long. They contain translations of all the most important Christian texts from the 2nd and 3rd centuries, except for a few individual works that are so long that they will be presented separately in the collection (Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Origen). This is nearly the lion’s share of the Christian literature written after the New Testament, so it is a logical continuation of my translation and commentary of biblical texts (Slovenski standardni prevod, the Slovenian Standard Translation of the Bible, Ljubljana 1996). For my translation, I sometimes used texts prepared by translators before the war, which could not be printed. Jasna Hrovat helped me a lot and also translated the dialogue Octavius by Minucius Felix in the last part of the second book. The collection won’t end with the eighth book if it’s going to be a complete account of early Christianity. So what will happen to it in the future? More and more young people are translating the works of the Church Fathers, so we can look forward to lots of new patristic reading material soon. Here are just a few projects I know about: Sonja Capuder is preparing a translation of selected writings by Basil the Great, one of the most influential authors of the early Church. Miran Špelič is translating one of Augustine’s most profound theological works, On the Trinity, and the collected writings of Victor of Ptuj (ancient Petovia). Jasna Hrovat has already translated the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Silvo Novak is preparing a translation of Cyril of Jerusalem’s Catechetical Homilies. Early next year, my translation of some writings by the most important Byzantine thinker, Maximus the Confessor, will be published. I think Maximus is one of the most important Christian philosophers and theologians of all time. In a few years, I plan to publish the collected writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. It is also important to note that the publication of the sermons and treatises of the German mystic and thinker Meister Eckhart, which I prepared together with a group of translators, marked the beginning of the Mohorjeva Družba’s publication of the most important medieval authors who lived in the spirit of the Patristic tradition and creatively passed it on to the new age. Why is translating and commenting on the writings of early Christian theologians important for European philosophy and theology, and for our general cultural awareness? Historically speaking, the study of ancient Christian writings has been very important in shaping European ideas and culture. Alongside the Holy Scriptures, the Church Fathers were the most important teachers of the Middle Ages. Their influence waned only in late Scholasticism, but it revived again during the Renaissance. Their ideas, patterns of thought, and spiritual insights can be seen in philosophy, literature, and art. You can’t understand the images and symbols used in Christian art without knowledge of their writings. The development of modern Catholic theology after the Second Vatican Council, represented by important theologians such as Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jean Daniélou, and Henri de Lubac, as well as modern Orthodox thinking, cannot be imagined without the revival of Patristics. Even in Protestant countries, there is a lot of interest in the Patristic tradition nowadays. Russian philosophical thought was born at the end of the 19th century, when most of the most important Fathers were translated into Russian. The books of Dostoevsky and the Russian symbolists, for example, would not have been possible without this foundation in ancient religious thought. The situation in Slovenia was different. The consequences can be seen, for example, in Dušan Pirjevec’s famous interpretation of The Brothers Karamazov. It shows that it is impossible to understand Dostoevsky’s masterpiece without knowledge of the sayings on love in the Philokalia, a collection of spiritual writings by the Fathers and other ancient spiritual writers which formed the ‘spiritual food’ of the great novelist. Heidegger’s ideas about the history of Western thought as a forgetting of the difference between Being and beings can be seen to be nonsense in the light of the radically daring ontological ideas developed by Patristic thinkers. The psychoanalysts’ claims that they can ‘undermine’ religious belief by examining its origins seem silly when we consider the deeper psychological insights of the Desert Fathers and spiritual leaders. But I don’t think these historical facts are the most important. We could still see them as a ‘private matter’ of a particular religious community or of a particular way of life that has probably completely disappeared today. But there’s something even more important in the writings of the early Christians. When I first started reading them as a student, I had no knowledge of Christianity. But I immediately saw that they were similar to the profound sayings of Heraclitus, the mysterious expressions of Far Eastern mysticism, and the sapiential writings of the Near East. In short, these are texts in which wisdom is expressed. If you have no respect for wisdom, and you don’t think that there is such a thing as a deep understanding of life’s mysteries that isn’t related to education, erudition, or formal sophistication of thought, then you should not read these texts. But if you feel that this kind of wisdom is real, and even the only thing worth searching for in life, then the books written by the Fathers are a never-ending treasure trove. Many of their writings are as profound in their thought and powerful in their expression as the most famous Western works, such as those by Plato, Hegel, Aristotle, Kant, Sophocles, or Dante. These texts are full of wisdom which comes from the experience of the Absolute, of Logos (Meaning), and you can see in them a trace of the bloody struggle with the forces of evil, nothingness, and destruction that lurk within us. This is what makes these texts truly relevant and enduringly interesting for all ages. But let me stick with Russia and end with a story from the The Way of a Pilgrim. The main character is a kind of wanderer in search of God, a kind of dissident who moves from one monastery to another in the strange world of Tsarist Russia. One day, he asks a holy monk why he needs to carry the Dobrotolyubie (Philokalia) along with the Holy Bible. The Holy Bible is a source of all knowledge, right? The old man replies: ‘The Holy Bible is like the sun. If we don’t look at it through darkened glass, we are blinded.’ And this is still true today. In today’s world, many people are blind to what is really important. This can be seen in different ways, from various forms of nihilism to clerical fundamentalism. But the Fathers help us us to look at the sun again and again. The interview was conducted by Mitja Košir. Irony in more than 2,000 pages, but first in about 500 Gorazd Kocijančič, translator of Plato The young bearded man spent eight years as friends with the old ‘wonderful madman’. This friendship had such an impact that we can see its effects 2,400 years later. According to expert Gorazd Kocijančič, ‘freak’ might be the best word for that old man, Socrates, the main character in Plato’s dialogues. And Socrates’ wife, Xanthippe, was not really the model of an annoying wife. This was an invention by the Socratic philosopher Antisthenes. But the world accepted it without question… Plato was 28 years old when ‘democracy’ put his teacher Socrates to death. The translator of his books into Slovenian is ten years older and has authored a lot of translations, literary theory, and criticism, as well as a suggestive collection of poetry called Tvoja imena (Your Names) in 2000. Does the work in the National Library Manuscript Department inspire people to wild creativity? We agreed to focus on Plato in our conversation. Gorazd Kocijančič devoted himself ‘25 hours a day’ to him for years, and now a selection of Plato’s most important dialogues will be published by Mladinska knjiga as the 39th book in the Kondor Classics series. And this is just the start. Next year, Mohorjeva družba in Celje is going to publish all of Plato’s works in translation. *** A selection of Plato’s dialogues have already been put into a book. How much work do you still have left to do? The translations are finished. Now I’m in the final phase of preparing Plato’s Collected Works for publication. This includes writing the references and footnotes, and checking everything. It’s a lot of work, but I expect the book to be out next year; it will be 2,200–2,300 pages long. Will this make us one of the few countries to have all of Plato’s works translated, along with the Italians, Germans, and French? No, translations of Plato are not that rare; in fact, translating Plato into national languages began very early. In addition to the most famous Latin translation, by Marsilio Ficino, the Italians were the first to get a translation into the vernacular in 1482, and since then translations have appeared in all major languages; there are dozens of them in English, for example, so we are only just catching up culturally. But it’s true that more modern versions are still being published: in Germany and France, etc. As you are now very familiar with nearly 40 of Plato’s dialogues, can you tell us what is essential in his work? Which words do you think are key to his opus? It’s hard to say in a few words. Plato is very important for all of Western culture, but perhaps not so well known to the general public (I asked some people in the street about this philosopher, and they didn’t know much about him, note by the interviewer). People who work on a particular subject often think that it is much more important than it really is. However, this is less likely to be the case with Plato. The American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that all Western philosophy is basically just a series of footnotes to Plato’s texts. These are also very interesting in a literary sense. Some experts say, for example, that there is no work in all of ancient literature that is more interesting to modern readers than the Symposium. And in addition to the philosophical significance and literary dimension of Plato’s work, there is a third dimension, the religious or theological one. Western culture, which is mostly based on the Judeo-Christian tradition, learned to ‘speak’, to express its religious beliefs, using a language that comes directly from reading Plato’s dialogues and understanding them. These three essential aspects of the mind – philosophical, literary, and religious – make Plato’s work timelessly relevant. But you asked me to try to describe his work myself. Please. My reading is personal and in a way original. That is why each dialogue in the ‘complete’ edition is is accompanied by an interpretation. The novelty of this way of reading Plato, which is characteristic of a broader movement in Platonic studies, is that we no longer read the dialogues as doctrinal texts, that is, as texts that express a specific philosophical doctrine. We don’t directly recognise Plato’s voice in that of his main character Socrates; rather, we understand the intellectual message of the dialogues as a whole. We try to take into account all the subtle elements in the dramatic whole. In such a reading, Plato is shifted into authorial anonymity, and his voice remains mysterious precisely because it is not identified with any character in the philosophical dramas. And his message is the message of the dialogues as a whole, and it cannot be expressed briefly in an doctrinal manner. If we take into account what Whitehead said in 1929, can we say that the top philosophers, those who just write footnotes to Plato’s dialogues, are basically the ones who carry on Socrates’ inspiration, sincerity, naturalness, and morality? Or rather, who can be compared to Socrates and Plato? This is a key question concerning modern philosophy. I would just rephrase it like this: if Whitehead’s thesis is true, and at the same time we know that Western philosophy is to a great extent a history of anti-Platonism, from Aristotle to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others, what is philosophy? Is it embodied by the figure of the philosopher, staged by Plato through Socrates? Is this the only horizon within which philosophy can take place, or is this horizon something broader? Plato is actually thought to be the inventor of philosophy. Before him, it is hard to talk about philosophical thought. I think that with this invention in his dialogues, he also thought in a very subtle – dramatic – way about the possibility of something else. This ‘something’ criticises the philosopher, his drama, his tragedy, and at the same time, it somehow styles itself as philosophy. For Plato, this is the very serious problem of sophistry. It is the problem of the sophist, i.e. someone who is publicly regarded as a philosopher, who figures in society as a sage, a teacher of various kinds of knowledge, but who does not actually have the essential quality that enables true philosophy, a true love of wisdom. What are the most important ideas in Plato’s work, apart from the ideas about the soul that everyone knows? As someone who doesn’t read Plato very often, I have words such as ‘love’, ‘teacher’, and ‘philosopher’ or ‘philosophical way of life’ on the tip of my tongue. Do these words convey to the reading public what Plato was essentially thinking? Your impression seems very fitting. After studying Plato for many years, I think the most important thing in his talks is not this or that philosophical problem, but that Plato, through conversation and the dramatic staging of a particular problem, is constantly talking about philosophy itself and the philosophical way of life. And this is, of course, defined by love. Philosophical eros is the purification of general eros, its pure, essential form. Yes, I agree with that. What was the Greek book market like, and what do we know about reading culture in the 5th and 4th centuries BC? When a text was made available for copying, it meant that it had been published. The authors edited it and sometimes also created new versions. For example, Plato wrote many different versions of the beginning of The Republic. The Greeks were not used to silent reading; they would have slaves, for example, read aloud to them. The perception of the written text was acoustic, which is important for a deeper understanding of Plato’s works. The ‘immediacy’ of the written word was different in the past. However, we actually don’t know who Plato’s readers were. Did you modernise the tone of the original a lot? You wrote that Anton Sovrè’s translations were ‘lively, but quite free’. This touches on a complicated problem in the philosophy of translation, in the understanding of the essence of the translator’s work. About a third of the dialogues, including the longer ones like the Republic and the Laws, had already been translated into Slovenian, and I was of course in close contact with these translations. At first, I even thought incorporating them into the whole and just adding new ones. But upon closer reading this proved impossible. In previous translations, we have two types of approach: Sovrè’s reflects a philosophy of very free translation. Here’s an example: Socrates says ‘By Hera!’ but Sovrè translates it as ‘Sapramiš!’ (roughly equivalent to ‘holy shit’). This is the way he usually proceeds. Even more problematic, Sovrè translates central philosophical concepts in different ways. On the same page, or even in the same paragraph, he uses three different translations for the same Greek term. This means that the reader sometimes cannot understand what is being discussed. The other extreme, in my opinion, is the type of translation of Plato that Valentin Kalan and Boris Vezjak have begun to establish in Slovenia. This is extremely literal translation. Every single Greek word, even a particle, is translated into Slovenian. This makes the text very foreign to Slovenian readers and sometimes misleading. I have a problem with this way of translating. Trying to reproduce the exact structure of the original text can sometimes lead the reader astray. My translation is an attempt to strike a balance. In a way, I rely on the theory of translation developed by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, philosophers and translators of the Hebrew Bible into German. Buber made a basic difference between ‘leading’ words (i.e. key words) and other vocabulary. ‘Leading’ words are those that tell the reader of the translation what the text means, that convey its structures of meaning. The decision as to what these basic words mean depends on the translator’s intuition, freedom, and creativity. I keep the basic words that I think are essential and which should not be changed in translation if possible, while at the same time making sure that the dialogue flows. Alexander von Humboldt said that when you translate an old author’s work, you have to keep the feeling that it’s a text from another world, but you also can’t make the reader feel disconnected from it. I try to find a balance between these two extremes. Please give an example of how the structures of Slovenian and Greek syntax differ. Here’s an interesting hermeneutical problem to think about. Attic Greek is an Indo-European language that has a lot in common with Slovenian. It’s also one of the few languages that has a dual form. You might think this is a big deal for translators from Slovenia. However, Attic Greek often uses verbs in the plural even when the meaning is dual! This is a big problem, and previous translators have mostly failed to notice it. Socrates always said, ‘We agree’, especially if someone else was present… I have often chosen the dual form in cases like this because I understand Plato’s dialogues that way: as an intimate communion in logos. How do you keep your knowledge of Greek and Greek culture up to date? Do you often visit Greece? I have been to Greece a few times, but Attic Greek is of course a dead language, which means that I keep my knowledge up to date by reading. I was lucky enough to have read all of Plato in the original by the age of twenty, but at the time I didn’t even think about translating him. I have spent the last five years reading him again and thinking about everything he wrote. I had the great privilege of spending last spring in Greece as a Onassis scholarship recipient, and I found the country itself to be an inspiration for understanding Plato. There I reread everything, I walked in Socrates’ footsteps with only the Greek text in hand, and sketched my interpretations of the dialogues under the open sky in the shade of olive trees. You also know Hebrew, Italian, German, English, French, and Latin … Have I missed anything? Yes, I have translated texts from these languages, and from Russian as well. Do you learn about all these languages by reading? I mainly read, yes. I actually don’t speak any of these languages very well. As a remark in an old book in our manuscript department says (interviewer’s note: the conversation took place in his office): Labor legendi legendo superatur, ‘the effort of reading is overcome by reading.’ That’s basically how to stay in shape. What is most important in Plato’s ideas for our time? Tell me, what is our time? I thought the answer to my question would lead to a discussion about the crisis of values. When Socrates was sentenced to death, Plato experienced a crisis of values. But it’s true that crises of values are a regular event, not just in our time. Yes, that is the problem. An answer to the question of what we can still learn from Plato today is based on the idea that some of his work has lost meaning or is no longer relevant. I would question this assumption. I believe that his relevance is linked to his oeuvre as a whole. Plato is above all a thinker of tremendous irony, humour, and self-deconstruction. He is not a dogmatic thinker. Of course, today’s world is also largely marked by irony, but in my opinion, its contemporary masters do not even come close to Plato in many respects. He uses irony not just to mock others, but also to mock himself. This is an art of self-deconstruction which leaves the reader an insight into a spiritual experience through that which ultimately remains. You mentioned a crisis of values. Yet Plato leaves the subtle reader with the possibility of insight into a world in which a crisis of values can never actually occur: a spiritual world that is absolutely reliable. This is Plato’s message, if we can call it that, since he really wasn’t a dogmatic person. In my reading, this is the insight his dialogues attempt to stage. He tries to convey the experience that every soul is part of this spiritual world. Some fundamental problems that humanity faces are thereby already resolved in advance: in fact, they are resolved by what each of us essentially is. Doesn’t this insight only help philosophers who are really dedicated to their work? No, not at all. Plato’s writing is interesting because it mixes literature and philosophy, and uses non-technical language that everyone can understand. This is why different people keep reading it, including artists and scientists, but also ordinary people. Even in Plato’s time, being a philosopher was not thought of as a very honourable occupation. Was being a philosopher ever a well-paid job? You know, philosophers are often clever people, even though it may not always seem that way. Even the oldest pre-Socratic philosopher, Thales, is said to have earned a good living from his understanding of the natural world. There have of course always been different types of philosophers. But you can without doubt make money from certain types of knowledge that sometimes go with philosophy. Cosimo Medici gave the famous Latin translator of Plato, Marsilio Ficino, a villa in which to translate in peace, so he got quite a bit out of Plato! But of course, this ability of philosophers to earn money – in one way or another – calls into question the very Platonic idea of philosophy. It was the sophists who introduced a novelty in Greece in Socrates’ time – teaching for money, a very lucrative training for political activity. Converted into today’s sums, their fees amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Isn’t it time for philosophers like that again? It’s already the practice around the world. It is exactly this possible economic exploitation of philosophy and related sciences that represents a radical crisis, a turning away from philosophy. This is what Plato explicitly opposes with his idea of philosophy. Socrates walks around and teaches everyone, not just those who pay. Contemporary institutionalised, academic philosophy is also often connected to certain structures of power in the mediation of knowledge, and increasingly to the financial aspect – the payment of tuition and so on. This is again a kind of sophistical affair, a complete aberration from the point of view of the philosophy that Plato stages – or tries to invent – in his dialogues. But manuals for a kind of popular philosophy, self-help literature, are a global hit on foreign and domestic (non-)fiction charts. Is their success the result of their deliberate use of literary and philosophical language? Indeed, and with this consolation of philosophy… Comfort… OK, with this comfort in mind, I would like to point out an especially important feature of Plato’s dialogues, which greatly distinguishes them from the self-help philosophers we talked about earlier. The latter claim to be wise and offer all the answers. Plato’s dialogues, on the other hand, often end in aporia, they have no answer, but lead to a dead end, point to a problem. They in fact often invent concepts that can shed important light on the problem. However, they don’t give a complete solution. This is the true philosophical attitude, which is uncomfortable because it means accepting that we can’t know the answers. We don’t know them, and that makes us all the more vulnerable. The basic problem that made Plato start thinking about these things is still there, but it has shifted to a different level. This aporetic way of thinking seems to be an important and enduring feature of Plato’s work. But Plato probably does not make as much money for publishers as other writers do. It seems that the magazine market is facing a similar problem. They need to find readers among people who don’t read as much as they used to. Does Plato also appeal to them, without having to be distorted? I think it is possible. Our cultural and artistic association, Logos, has been running ‘Philocafé’ events at the Union café for over a year now. Anyone who wants to come is welcome, and there are lots of people there; the café is full, standing room only! You don’t have to pay to get in, and we’re not trying to make money (apart from the coffee you can buy). We talk about serious topics. Death, love, God, science. Sometimes, you feel like you’re right there on the streets of ancient Athens, experiencing what was happening then. People talk about questions that everyone wants to know the answers to, where no one has all the answers, and where everyone’s opinion matters. (Interviewer’s note: the first Philocafé of the fall was held last Tuesday, and the topic was ‘the meaning of life’.) So, if you wanted to, you could easily make money from these café meetings… I read that they already do this in America. You get a distinguished guest, and the tickets are expensive… But whenever this happens, philosophy falls apart. Philosophy is always fragile, like all beautiful and genuine things. It is something that is difficult to maintain. Is there a good way to make philosophy more accessible to the public? Absolutely. I wish for Plato and all other real philosophy not to be limited to a small group of people. This is not what it was originally meant for. You can always make something more popular. This edition of selected dialogues in the Kondor series is a good example. If we are aware that Plato’s thinking is dramatic, that it is a thinking of the whole, expressed in a complex literary work, then the method of tearing out and combining the most beautiful passages is of course questionable. Hermeneutically – strictly philosophically – this procedure may be controversial, but like any anthology, it undoubtedly has great significance in that it introduces readers to the best passages of an author – or attempts to inspire them. It draws readers into an intellectual engagement with the whole. To paraphrase a well-known phrase: When you hear the word ‘art’, you reach for… what? (Interviewer’s note: A short pause, laughter, and the mention of a gun.) When I hear the word ‘art’, what do I reach for? Hm. As a philosopher, I reach for thought. As someone who also is involved in art, I ‘reach for’ resources of real art. I can’t really describe them … But certainly they are not just thought. The interview was conducted by Tadeja Zupan Arsov. ‘Whoever wants to be wrong, let them be wrong’ Gorazd Kocijančič is the winner of the Rožanc Award Even though you enjoy talking about things and always take part in public discussions, you could still be described as someone who does not give interviews. I usually avoid them and I plan to keep doing that. I want to use this conversation to talk about my concerns, because sometimes I seem moody and unfriendly when I avoid journalists. In brief: I get annoyed when I see narcissism spreading among our cultural figures, a desire to gaze at themselves in the mirror of the media. When the herd is running in one direction, it is often useful to go in the other. I see my work as being part of the cause itself. It’s not about me, it’s about the things I’m trying to say. These things only matter if other people can recognise themselves in them. When the spotlight is on me, it creates a perverse situation that I don’t like. There’s something else to consider: people think that an interview, where they get a simplified form of thought, allows them to understand what the author thinks or even who he is. That’s an illusion. You see fanaticism where it ought not to exist, for example among philosophers. You can find it among artists and scientists too. It’s not just something terrorists are into. Is this strong religious motivation the result of shattered images, the most basic religious ones? People become fanatical when they are distressed. It is embarrassing to face one’s own situation in the world or, more specifically, one’s own ignorance about the meaning of life, the ultimate mystery of the world, the death. All forms of fanaticism, whether religious or philosophical, artistic or scientific, stems from the fact that I want to hide my basic position from myself and start from the faked conviction that I have some kind of knowledge. I say I have something when I don’t. For this reason I first do violence to my own existence, and then mechanisms of aggression, real or symbolic, are triggered within me. This can also cause social catastrophes on various levels. Can we call it a psychological mechanism? I would avoid the word ‘psychological’. I think we are dealing here with fundamental existential spheres that, if I may say so, precede all mental activity, especially its scientific thematisation. It is an event that is spiritual in origin. What does ‘spiritual’ mean? ‘Spiritual’ is what I call the sphere of pre-rational experience. It is an area in which human beings come into contact with an unknown dimension that transcends the human psyche but is accessible to our thoughts and feelings in a mysterious way. This description implies two things. On the one hand, the ‘spiritual’ evokes the immaterial, sensually imperceptible dimension of the Origin of the soul and of everything – this would be the ‘intelligible’, i.e., the spiritual in the philosophical, Greek sense of the word. On the other hand, it means that this dimension is a ‘space’ in which an Event, a ‘storm’, can occur. This brings us closer to the original meaning of the Hebrew word ruach. This mystical storm, which reveals to us in wonderment how mysterious our existence is, can be a source of spirituality – or of fanaticism. If this happens, will it affect my soul as an individual instance of the spirit? Throughout history, great thinkers and mystics have had different views on this. The question is how much of the spiritual experience is about the soul opening up to the Transcendent, epékeina, the Beyond, the Source beyond being. How much it is an event that in no sense belongs to the subject, and how much it is about something that is already present deep within the self. Some people think that this experience is simply a revelation of what is most intrinsic to the soul. Others understand it as contact with a transcendence beyond the soul. I think that it is precisely because of the primacy of the sphere we are talking about that a clear answer eludes us. We are moving in an area where our everyday logic and ontology fail, and where the contradictions that the history of spirituality so often reveals are only apparent. And what is philosophy? I think that when we talk about philosophy, we cannot ignore its history. We cannot ignore the fact that philosophy first appeared with Plato, and in later Greek thought, which was influenced by Plato’s vision, philosophy was connected not only with asking general questions that transcend the competence of any science, but also with a certain way of life. It is a certain way of looking at the world that seeks a rational justification for its spiritual stance, which occurs in dialogue, in the confrontation of logos with logos, in argumentation. For me, philosophy is a an intertwining of a spiritual experience and a way of life that is connected to this experience, but also a radical rationality that seeks to argue in dialogue with various other approaches to reality. These three aspects are key to the essential character of philosophy. Do you think Indian spirituality can also be seen as philosophy? In early Indian texts, it’s hard to talk about philosophy the way we do today. But we can talk about a certain kind of wisdom, like the kind you find in the ideas of the Greek pre-Socratic thinkers. In later Indian schools, argument too was joined with spiritual insight and life practices. Great Indian thinkers like Śaṅkara are giants in the history of philosophical thought, despite their geographical and cultural distance from Greece. Do you see a big difference between the Christian view of the world and the Indian Vedantic view? Allow me to digress a bit. My thinking, writing and creativity are all centred on mystery of God. He is my inspiration, my fundamental desire, my elusive goal. But ‘God’ is a word that means both the purest Oneness and an infinite plenitude. Let me emphasise just two things. First, ‘God’ is the name for the Source, the Absolute, the Beginning. So, all thoughts that try to understand the Mystery that graces myself and all things with being, all thoughts that long for the One behind all multiplicity and above all multiplicity, in my opinion ultimately converge. I ‘see no difference’ and feel I am a disciple of many different spiritual currents, from Greek to Far Eastern mysticism. These ways of thinking all come together because they are all ways of radically realising and experiencing the ultimate Mystery. On the other hand, the word ‘God’ also suggests the idea that ultimate Reality might reveal itself. It points to the freedom of the Absolute. For me personally, the word ‘God’ is also fundamentally connected with this other meaning: with the history of the Jewish people, with the record of this history, with the event of Christ and with the record of this event (and let us not forget its Islamic response either). In this fundamental sense, when I say the word ‘God’, I am ultimately thinking of Christ. On the other hand, when I say ‘Christ’, I am also thinking of the original Mystery that has been expressed by all mystics, including non-theistic ones. In the mystery of Jesus – his incarnation, life, death, and resurrection – the self-revelation of the Absolute takes place, but in such a way that the Absolute is hidden even more infinitely than it was ever hidden before. Extreme intimate closeness is at the same time radical distance. God’s luminous self-giving is at the same time a complete darkness, which is experienced in a fundamentally different way than in archaic mysticism. Christianity seems to be the most demanding form of spiritual transformation for modern man? I find it hard to claim this generally, even though I am a Christian. Any kind of spirituality can be extremely demanding. And Christianity too can only exist and reveal itself as fullness – as the ‘most demanding form’ – within an openness to all spiritual traditions. We should try to understand and appreciate these traditions as much as possible in our limited time and with our limited abilities. But it is very important that we personally experience in our spiritual life what is the Measure: the full revelation of the Absolute and the instruction for life. If we cannot experience this ourselves, it doesn’t mean anything to us. Angelus Silesius expressed it very well: ‘If Christ is born a thousand times in Bethlehem and not in you, his birth is in vain.’ How did the wall before infinity begin to crumble before you? I don’t think it’s appropriate to answer your question. Such things are not spoken about. When they happen, we talk about what comes out of them. Does being a philosopher make things happen more quickly? You can find gold anywhere in the world, but what happens to a man working in a gold mine? The call of a philosopher is not just a profession, but a way of life. As Hölderlin says, there are so many paths: they are like walking tracks and mountain arc. They are all imperfect and all long for some kind of completion. Why are people so quick and eager to say: Something, Nothing, Holy, Everything, Energy – but find it difficult to say the word ‘God’ these days? Because the word is very abused and, in a way, sullied. It was made dirty by the same thing that made it: history. If I say that I call the Absolute ‘God’, I am also marking my entry into history with that name. It means that I want – and it’s hard for me – to name the Absolute with a name that is sullied. Why do I want to do this? I’m discovering that the name, which has sometimes had a bad connotation in history, has also hidden within itself – again in history – an inexhaustible variety of positive, rich and joyful human experiences, a great variety of wisdom and insights that give it meaning. When I discover that although terrible things have been done in the name of ‘God’, the same word has also been used to name the deepest Mystery of life and death by people with whom I want to be connected in a fundamental way, when I realise that the light hidden in this history is incomparably stronger than the darkness – that darkness disappears in the presence of Light – then I can begin to use the word ‘God’ with inner integrity and honesty. But I should always be careful and reticent, because there is always the possibility that light and darkness will continue to mix – also and above all in my own life and speech. This is true of all the banners we have used since the beginning of humanity: words such as ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘child’, ‘love’, ‘hero’, ‘justice’, and ‘freedom’. Even non-sacred archetypes have two poles within them. Yes, these are basic words that can’t be replaced. That’s what it’s all about. Perhaps the origin of human religiosity lies precisely in the realisation of the irreplaceability of fundamental words. What does the sentence ‘the goddess of Sais will reveal no other secrets’ mean? You wrote it in the introduction to your book of essays published this year, Tistim zunaj, Eksoterični zapisi 1990–2003 (To Those Outside, Exoteric Writings 1990–2003). This introduction addresses the relationship between culture as a space for the production of meaning and a place of transcendent truth. In opposition to various forms of philosophical realism, I advocate radical idealism in the construction of reality and its meaning. I think that the spiritual problems of Europe and the world can only be understood from the perspective of a yet unthought meta-ontology of the concrete, individual subject, which is very strange from the perspective of ordinary reason, very unusual. Some people might say that this is a solipsistic view. The goddess of Sais shows the seeker that the ultimate mystery is he himself. Which, in my opinion, paradoxically does not exclude the possibility that a transcendent, ‘spiritual’ dimension, which we spoke about earlier, is revealed in the production of meaning. The naive opposition of the subjective production of meaning to the reality of the transcendent Source is a great delusion of contemporary thought. Is it good or bad to be afraid of God? Fear is a dangerous category. Not only in spirituality, but elsewhere as well it can lead to one person patronizingly controlling another. But the idea of the ‘fear of God’ belongs to the fundamental experience of the sacred. When I experience the sacred, I experience something that fills me with awe and wonder, yet attracts me at the same time: mysterium tremendum et fascinans. If this dimension is lost in a religious relationship, only a caricature of it remains. Love, as the Apostle John says, casts out fear, but this is only true at the summit of spiritual ascent. Simple and cheap forms of spirituality reject awe as a remnant of archaic religiosity, thereby eliminating an essential dimension of the experience of the sacred. Life without freedom is impossible, but licentiousness also destroys it. I don’t like it when people are too negative or complain too much, especially in the typical manner of traditionalist, conservative intellectuals in Slovenia. This way of thinking comes from a misunderstanding of the space of freedom in which today’s culture must live. The culture should also allow for different experiments in nonsense, but that doesn’t mean we have to actively support them. If we try to close off this space using political measures, we lose our respect for social reality. It’s clear to me that a real and lasting culture is linked to a fundamental seriousness that arises unpredictably within this empty space and autonomously transcends licentiousness. What is needed along with freedom to avoid all kinds of terrible anomalies? All experiments with meaning or meaninglessness are, to some extent, experiments in the dark. I think we are basically beings of possibility. This means we can respond in different ways to existential situations where there is no evidence of ultimate meaning. Humans can see spiritually what the logos – the meaning – of things is, but this vision is not rational knowledge; it involves more subtle processes that already require the engagement of our freedom, our decision, our willingness to limit our own possibilities. So, there is no way to stop these problems, these ‘anomalies’, from happening. Jewish teachers taught that one of the most important things to know when you’re learning the Talmud is: ‘Whoever wants to be mistaken, let him be mistaken.’ Some philosophers try to help us by encouraging us to cultivate a kind of respectful care for all beings. Is this possible? You have raised an important issue with this question. Lots of philosophers are trying today to come up with a ‘soft’ ethic. They develop a post-metaphysical thought that renounces a rational explanation of the entire world founded upon the highest Being, while at the same time recognising the need to establish a certain ethic that is imperative for human coexistence and respect, for the respectful preservation of finite beings in their being. I agree with the first renunciation in many ways, but I am more skeptical about the second. In short, I don’t think human thought has that much power. In a world where the absence of rational meaning is felt, could we rationally develop an ethic that would be universally binding? An ethic that would not merely be an expression of the power and interests of the majority? This seems to be just wishful thinking, an attempt that stems from a need but which does not accept that humans cannot make a valid ethos on their own. I don’t find Lacanian playful ideas or Heideggerian claims about ethics based on the idea that all being is sacred or on Levinas’ idea about the primacy and appeal of the Other very convincing. I think Dostoyevsky’s statement will be the last word here: ‘If God does not exist, anything is allowed.’ But what do you think I mean by ‘God’ here? The interview was conducted by Meta Kušar. The desire to glimpse the Truth A conversation with Gorazd Kocijančič In addition to the Rožanc Award for your book Tistim zunaj (To Those Outside), Delo’s Person of the Year award is another recognition of your work within a short period of time. What do awards and praise mean to someone who says it is not he himself who matters, but only the ideas he tries to share through his work? And that these too, in turn, matter only if they also appeal to someone else? As far as I am a thinker, or rather, as far as I strive to be a thinker, awards mean nothing to me. Not a little, not a lot: nothing. The ambition of thinking is to glimpse the truth, the truth with a capital T. This desire is not only impossible to achieve, but so crazy, so excessive, that neither applause nor jeers can touch it. Anyone who tries to think, wants to step outside the realm of what is considered good and move toward what really is good. Or perhaps even further. This is why he feels alone and unsure about the value of his thoughts, even when they are applauded. On the other hand, Delo’s recognition mostly shows how happy we Slovenians are that we now have all of Plato’s works in translation. So, of course, I am very happy about that. You don’t translate for yourself, but above all for the community in which you live. A few years ago, the editorial board of Delo reconsidered the conception of its award. Faced with the fact that the Person of the Year had for several years been a politician, the editorial board decided to ignore politicians, if possible. So, in the last two years, you are the second philosopher after Tine Hribar whom the editorial board have considered to be a personality that should be put in the spotlight of this award. I think this decision is also ‘political’ – and not just in the figurative sense of the word. This was true last year, and it is true this year. But let’s not forget: over the past ten years, Delo has not exactly been an enthusiastic proponent of the idea of reconciliation for which it has recognised Tine Hribar. The structure is similar this year, although it is even more hidden. It is not just a political statement which finds expression in the avoidance of politics in the year following the parliamentary elections. It’s also the fact that the idea of ‘Platonism for the people’, as Nietzsche called Christianity, is a rather traumatic point in Slovenian journalism. Even today, not to mention the past. This means that the recognition heals a social wound. I hope this is genuine and not just a ‘political’ gesture. When you received the Rožanc award and your translation of Plato was published, we in the media besieged you with all our might. But you stayed resolute. You have agreed to only two interviews so far. One was requested by the editor of your selection of Plato for Kondor, and published in Nedelo. The other was for the Rožanč award and was published in Književni listi (the literary supplement of Delo). You also explained in this conversation why you don’t like doing interviews. You insist that they are misleading because they give readers the false impression that they can understand what the author meant or what he is like through such a simplified form of thought. Ha, obviously I’m not as resolute as I seem. This conversation proves it. A maiden who resisted her suitors this steadfastly would soon get a bad reputation. However, I insist that there is an almost complete difference between what I (can) articulate in such a conversation, which is dictated by some external trigger, and what I actually do. What’s interesting is what’s missing. Let me explain it to you in simple marketing terms: if you find Gorazd Kocijančič irrelevant in this conversation, read his books anyway. And if you find him interesting, then by all means, read his books. How would you define your relationship with the media? After all, you were a prominent columnist for the culture section of Delo, and you wrote a series of intriguing book reviews in the Branje po izbiri (Reading by Choice) column. And more. The media are – as their Latin name suggests – something in between, something that mediates. So, a medium should be completely subordinate to the original, i.e., the author, his freedom, the rhythm of his desire. Sometimes I want to say something to a wider audience; most people only know me from these texts. So far, so good. The problem is that, nowadays, the mass media have almost taken over authors. I often feel that journalists get offended when I tell them that I don’t want to be on their show or give them an interview. It’s as if the people who create things were public property, and being invited to appear in public was a special privilege. I’m trying to find a balance in this ridiculous situation. I want to have my own space, but I also want to be able to go out and about when I want to. But trying to resist these little gods always has an uncertain outcome. As you can see. Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, that philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it, was proved wrong in the last century. To change the world through philosophy was not only impossible, as well as alien to philosophy in its primary meaning as the love of wisdom, it was also dangerous. How much impact do intellectuals and their critical thinking have on what is real in today’s world? The inadequacy of my response to your demanding and fundamental question – which is all the more urgent given the intellectually and ethically irresponsible attempts to revive Marx’s legacy, such as those we are seeing in Slovenia – will only serve to prove my thesis about the inevitable frivolity of newspaper philosophising. But I’ll give it a try. I am convinced that the place of the world is the individual person. And I do not mean this in any kind of figurative sense, but ontologically. If you kill a man, you kill the whole world, says the Talmud. Whenever philosophy has touched a specific person in history, the whole world has changed with the changed understanding. Different philosophies have been world-shaping. And they still are. The problem with Marx’s thesis is therefore primarily that it stems from an extremely narrow view of human nature and reality in general: to put it bluntly, the world had to be changed not only because people lived a hard life – this task remains – but because there was nothing left that was really worth understanding. For Marx, philosophy in the traditional – world-shaping – sense became superfluous. And soon it became a negligible matter for the seemingly sole existing world, for the blind material ‘reality’, if you killed a person. Or a lot of people. However, we must never blame philosophy for this tragedy that arose from anti-philosophy, as is often done in spiritual-historical sketches that connect thinkers from Plato to Marx in an inseparable chain by sleight of hand. The interview was conducted by Ženja Leiler. What is philosophy for in impoverished times? A conversation with Dean Komel and Gorazd Kocijančič. Before we start talking about why philosophy is important in impoverished times, I’d like to make a few simple points. Maybe I should start with the title. Many of you will probably recognise it as a paraphrase of Hölderlin’s famous question: ‘What are poets for in impoverished times?’ The title might be a bit confusing. The words ‘what for’ stand out in the title and could indicate some kind of purpose for philosophy. But I don’t think we’re going to talk about whether philosophy has a specific purpose in today’s world. Instead, we’re going to discuss what wisdom is, what it’s for, and why it’s important for humans. That is why we have chosen philosophy, in its primary meaning, as the love of wisdom, as the knowledge that was first established by Plato as the first true philosopher. Many people think that philosophy is becoming less important in today’s society and culture. They think it is not talked about enough. We can talk more about this later, but first let’s look at the most important part. Philosophy started as a questioning. These questions can be simple, like ‘Who am I?’ or ‘What is life?’ or ‘What is the world I live in?’ – or they can become more ‘philosophical’ ones – why is something there rather than nothing? What is existence? What is being? My thesis is that philosophy is interrogative and that this is what enables the birth of philosophy as wonder. Well, with this thesis, I’m going to get the conversation started by asking the following: Has philosophy changed? Has philosophical thinking changed? Another way of putting it, from a historical point of view and based on the idea I just mentioned, is this: Do philosophers always ask the same questions? Dean Komel: Thank you for the floor and for inviting me. Maybe the best place to start talking about philosophy is really with the problem of philosophical questioning. But this question is not so simple. When it comes to philosophy, we are actually faced with a question. In other words, it is more important to accept the address itself than to ask questions, which can be methodologically controlled. And when we ask ourselves questions about philosophy in these impoverished times, it would be a good idea to think about what it is what it is that addresses us in the present day. Here, the word ‘poverty’ is important. Today, philosophy does not have a good reputation. On the other hand, this word shows us, and maybe this is an advantage of the Slovenian language (over the German dürftig, ‘poor’), that this time is seen as ‘u-bog’, as lacking in the presence of a god (in Slovenian: bog) . The word uboštvo, ‘poverty’, has a similar meaning to the German word Armut. And if we think about Hölderlin here, we find in his writings a passage that says: ‘In our country, everything is focused on the spiritual. We have impoverished ourselves in order to become rich.’ Perhaps this hints at the spiritual paradox that concerns this impoverished age of philosophy. When the question ‘What are poets for?’ is transformed into the question ‘What are philosophers for?’, it turns on itself and demands a shift in thinking. Gorazd, I have the same question for you. Gorazd Kocijančič: Gregor, first I have to settle a score with you. On the poster, you wrote that Dean and I are philosophers of the middle generation. Until now, I have always been introduced as a young philosopher – you too, I hope, Dean – so now I am having a kind of first midlife crisis (laughter). The problem is that, while we are of course getting older, we are both still young philosophers. In Plato’s sense, you have to be over fifty to be a philosopher… Well, given my ‘youth’, in this sense, I’m not sure I can give a definite answer to your question. If I do try, I don’t want to use very abstract language, because we have a very mixed audience of philosophers and people who simply want to hear what love of wisdom is all about today. I have a problem with using the term ‘empoverished time’ when talking about philosophy and how it changes. As Dean nicely explained, this category comes from a poetic metaphor that has become a label for our age, as interpreted by Martin Heidegger. This is based on his idiosyncratic interpretation of both Hölderlin and Western spiritual history in general. Unlike Dean, who is a Heideggerian, I don’t follow any particular philosophy or school of thought. Perhaps this makes it easier for me to ask: Is today really a poor time? Is it any poorer than any other time? If I dare to give an honest answer: I don’t think so. At that fundamental level where the search for wisdom, the love of wisdom, and the posing of the most general yet fundamental questions – the questioning that has constituted philosophy from the very beginning – take place, all times are absolutely equal. This place always conceals in itself the same amount of wealth and the same amount of poverty. It depends entirely on our openness to the mystery of existence, or rather, on that openness which is radically my own. This place of questioning is also paradoxical. Does philosophy arise from questioning? Or is a kind of answer primary to this questioning? We may suspect that questioning is at the heart of philosophy, but this is not true when we look at history. Philosophy begins with an answer to an unspoken question. It begins with a tradition of answers: The beginning of everything is… The beginning of everything is Water, the beginning of everything is ápeiron (= the Infinite). Only the Being IS. And so on. The hidden and unchanging dimension of the question is unspoken at the very beginning of philosophy. Now that we’re on the topic, let’s keep going. Does philosophy need something to start from, like science, art, culture, or similar, in order to develop its own principles, or can it find its own starting points within itself? G. K.: The question of what philosophy is, as we all know, itself a very philosophical question. Today, there are many different schools of thought around the world that call themselves ‘philosophical’, but they have very little in common. It is only fair that you should state, right from the start, what philosophy is in your understanding of the concept. For example, most people in the Anglo-Saxon world think of philosophy as commonsensical, formal, and logically consistent reasoning, whether it is used to analyse language, science, the philosophy of religion, or ontology. For so-called continental European thought, which is represented in our country by Dean, for example, the way of thinking of the Anglo-Saxons is not very philosophical and its results are not very interesting from a really philosophical point of view. The continental tradition (phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, etc.) is based on fundamentally different assumptions, a different categorical apparatus, and a different style of thinking. Again, if we consider a psychoanalytic theory or a philosophy based on it, it again relies on very specific ontological and anthropological assumptions, whose philosophical nature is questionable to others. Tonight, I will share my own thoughts on what philosophy is, but first I’ll tell you an ancient story. Maybe it’s clear from the way I connect my personal view with the past that I feel more connected to the hermeneutic way of thinking than to other approaches. But I want to talk about a simple notion of philosophy that was around long before the modern divisions, and that I think is still the best. Someone once asked Pythagoras what a philosopher is, who a philosopher is. He replied that life is like the Olympic Games. Some people come to compete and, if they can, to win. Others come to trade and sell. Some people come just to watch. This watching of the spectacle of life, this naked, disinterested observation of the whole, is philosophy. Those who are capable of such an attitude toward life are philosophers. The point is that the philosophical attitude in life is one that withdraws from involvement in life. We all know that life is a matter of competition, struggle, and in our time, competitiveness and competition at all levels are becoming increasingly prevalent and are valued positively. The basic gesture of philosophy, however, is to radically distance oneself from this drive of life in my innermost self and observe life itself, the whole, the world as a whole, and ask oneself what it is all about. Before any categorisation, before and above any logic. Before any tradition. Shortly before his death, George Harrison said: ‘I’m starting to wonder what this is all about.’ When someone matures in silence to this fundamental question without getting caught up in any of the drives of life, whether the competitive drive or the commercial one, he or she starts to develop a personal philosophy. But we live in the 21st century, and there is a philosophical tradition from Plato to Derrida, for example. Can a philosopher somehow forget this, step out of tradition, and ask these questions independently of it? G. K.: Insofar as someone is a philosopher, he or she always radically departs from the tradition. The moment when philosophy is truly philosophy is a moment of silence and absolute oblivion of all tradition. Tradition can lead you to this moment of quietness, of a new perception of everything, but this radical detachment and solitude are the only environment in which thought can take place. Of course, in its apparent monologic nature, in its closing itself off, thought does enter into dialogue with tradition – but without a prior moment of concentration in its own nakedness, it cannot even enter into dialogue. Dean, you also link philosophy with other subjects. D. K.: Well, that is also a kind of professional ‘deformation’. But let me continue thinking about the question of philosophical vocation. At the beginning of philosophy there is the commandment: Gnôthi seautón! ‘Know thyself!’ And of course, philosophy as a genuine way of life is linked to the fact that man encounters himself in the question, Who am I? I myself had searched for many things in religion, art, and elsewhere, before philosophy revealed itself to me as that which brings you back to yourself with the question, Who are you? And this question is something that transcends the limitations of schools; even my so-called ‘teacher’, Martin Heidegger, as we know, left his philosophical path unnamed and was rejected by various schools because of this. Yet he did not shy away from acknowledging his teachers; perhaps it is only by acknowledging teachers that we can liberate our own teaching. But it seems to me that modern philosophy is facing something even more confusing. This has been on my mind quite a lot over the last six or seven years. Namely: Can philosophy today still be based on the question ‘Who am I?’, which is to say, the question of what it means to exist? For if the poverty of the possibility of being-addressed is such that we are not addressed by anything in anything, we must leave ourselves so far behind that we also listen to the silence of the question ‘Who am I?’ Then philosophy can no longer be taken for granted as an existential proposition. In the 20th century, terrible things happened, like the concentration camps and the atomic bomb, which effectively neutralised the question of existence. But if we leave aside these external phenomena, which may document a certain deplorable state of human ‘progress’, we are faced with the inner necessity of philosophy, which confronts us with ‘unaddressedness’, a confrontation that cannot even be adequately named as such. This is the historical or ahistorical necessity of philosophy that confronts us today, given its origin in the ‘know thyself’. G. K.: May I? Of course, Gorazd. G. K.: In what sense, Dean, could any catastrophe change our fundamental ability to question ourselves? People have experienced misfortune of one kind or another throughout history. We cannot measure the experience of catastrophe. It is a very personal experience. You either go through it or you don’t. You can’t objectify or ascertain it. So, in this sense, neither the previous century nor any other was particularly privileged or cursed. This is just the way we like to see ourselves – but terrible things have always happened. Every century has had its wars, violence, bloodshed, and natural disasters. But this does not touch the primary place where philosophising truly comes from. D. K.: The worst thing is that, even though we’ve learned so much and developed so much technology, and all the other things that have happened all over the world, man can’t ask ‘Who am I?’ because he has too much of himself, everywhere. I don’t deny that the question arises, but self-reflection here runs into a particular problem that we cannot ignore if we are not to make the question too general. G. K.: Do you really think it was ever different? Was this problem less important in any other age? D. K.: If we look at history, we can see that with the establishment of the modern subject, man established himself as a project of expansion of all needs. And this optimism of optimisation is still at work. Increasingly so. This overcomes the primary dismay of the unaddressed nature of today’s humanity, which demands a different ear for the essential. I’m not saying that this is a terrible time in terms of atrocities, but the dismay of the times is such that it inevitably leads us towards something else. In the historical span that encompasses this period of philosophy, we may be faced with something that philosophy has not yet begun to address, but which requires a special exercise in philosophical thinking. I will also intervene here and move more towards Dean’s position and ask a somewhat simpler question. Can philosophy set itself tasks, or, to put it simply: does philosophy have a purpose, a goal, an aim? G. K.: Once again, the answer depends on how we understand philosophy. Dean said something like this: ‘I looked for answers in different religions, but then I realised that philosophy is what helps me find myself.’ This hides a ‘soteriological’ understanding of philosophy. Philosophy brings salvation (Greek sotería). I look for a way out of distress and finally understand that philosophical thinking is what gives meaning to my existence and ‘saves’ me. This way of thinking is common in ancient philosophy and similar types of thought, and I greatly appreciate it, since it entails a complete existential commitment to thinking. But I don’t understand philosophy like that. Why? I don’t think that thinking can save you. I definitely feel this way because I am a committed Christian and therefore I am convinced that salvation takes place elsewhere and in a different way. To put it simply: it takes place in reality, but in a way that’s beyond anything we could imagine. However, in my opinion, philosophy loses nothing as a result. On the contrary. If philosophy does not and cannot bring salvation, it is radically freed from even this highest function. Philosophy becomes freedom of thought, which can ask the most radical questions, yet expects no salvation from its own activity, from its own contemplation. It is commonly thought that faith limits philosophy. Precisely because of this understanding of philosophy, I believe that it liberates it. It leads it from anxiety to the absolute detachment of contemplation and radical questioning. This clarifies the meaning of the anecdote I told at the beginning: philosophy is the space of our absolute freedom. Freedom from all intentions, goals, from all the constraints of the everyday world and its functionality, freedom from our usual understanding of reality. This freedom is so radical that it can approach madness, as Hegel already knew. But if this madness is controlled, it remains thought. Thought without purpose. Dean, in one of your books you said that being addressed is important for philosophy, that something must address you. D. K.: I place the acceptance of an address in the event of speech above any methodology or conceptuality. But if I am to refer to what Gorazd highlighted as a move toward liberation: when it comes to spiritual seeking, philosophy does not compensate for anything here. In fact, an event must occur, a moment of freedom, in order for you to be your own person. As we know from the history of philosophy, this freedom always establishes a relationship with necessity. Thus, for Hegel, the summit of the development of the spirit of philosophy appears as that which is redemptive, i.e., absolute (from the Latin verb ab-solvere, ‘to release’, ‘to liberate’). In the speculative synthesis of freedom and necessity, Hegel finds that which is redemptive for the spirit and the redemptive spirit at the same time. In view of what I mentioned earlier in relation to our times, however, the coincidence of freedom and necessity falls into a kind of necessity, a kind of distress, where the redemptive no longer represents the absolute, but rather the absurd. After Hegel, philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger attempt to set up a philosophy from out of a state of anxiety, that is, out of a kind of existential necessity. From this, we cannot – as we cannot from a state of wonder – rise to a theory in the sense of pure contemplation. Freedom becomes historically different. As I emphasised earlier, it has become so different that not only can it no longer be subjectively posited, not only is it impossible to continue, say, Kant’s tradition, but we find ourselves in a situation of transition, of a turning point that cannot be forced by a free decision. Philosophy has no goals, but it does have something it is confronted with as its own necessity or the necessity of needlessness, with which it always conceives its ‘own’. Plato already indicated in the Statesman that Zeus’s age of the world is guided by blind necessity, so we also have a kind of historical testimony for this claim. Now, we could perhaps think about one of the most important questions in philosophy. For example, philosophy is linked to ideas, while poetry is linked to metaphor. Is conceptual language enough for philosophy to express itself? Or what is this space that Wittgenstein also talks about? Wittgenstein’s ladder explains that language is just a tool that we use to get to a certain point, and then we have to discard it in order to reach something beyond language, something that can’t be expressed in words. But what about language in philosophy? G. K.: Many people know that one of the few things that different types of philosophy have in common is the idea that language is fundamentally important for thinking. Moreover, in very different traditions, such as hermeneutics and analytics, thinking and language are strictly connected. This is what the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy means. My view here is heretical. I am convinced that thought – what I experience as thought – is something not only pre-conceptual but also pre-linguistic. The space of this thought can be described by the very broad concept of intuition, taken in a non-psychological sense. Thinking itself is, in its deepest sense, listening or sensing, to remain more faithful to the original ‘Greek’ metaphor, which does not take place on the linguistic – metaphorical – level, nor is it immediately conceptually articulated. I understand the emergence of philosophical conceptuality as a secondary process, metaphorically speaking, as a form of ‘translation’. If we understand thinking in this intuitive way, the question of how we understand the relationship between thought and language – both in its dimension of the originally poetic simile and in its dimension of the concept, the ‘dead metaphor’ – is raised to a completely new level. The difference between poetry and philosophy eludes the determination of different uses of language. The historical proof for my claim – or rather, the indication, since it is difficult to speak of proof, of apódeixis, at this level – is precisely the early period of European thought, which was a time not only of close intertwining but of complete unity between the ‘poetic’ and the ‘philosophical’. The most important thinkers of pre-Socratic Greece, such as Parmenides and Empedocles, wrote in verse, in hexameters, in a language that thrived on authentic poetic images. And yet, both the emerging concept and the metaphor are merely signs of something that came before. The same applies to the great Heraclitus of Ephesus, who expressed his view of reality in paradoxical gnomic sayings, which from today’s perspective are eminently poetic, perhaps even more so than the hexameters of his colleagues. And in the same way, the emergence of philosophy in Plato is again united with drama, with the drama of philosophising, which is also, in a poetic sense, one of the most beautiful creations of world literature. And that’s not all: Plato himself reflects on this fact and consciously stages philosophy itself as literature in an interweaving of metaphor and concept. Dean, I think things are a bit different for you. You’re committed to a tradition that is focused on the etymology of basic words. D. K.: I have a similar preoccupation to that indicated by Gorazd, namely with thinking that cannot be captured in a concept, except that I focus primarily on the phenomenon of speech. Not the actual words that are spoken, but the fact that speech is happening. If we think of speech as the thing that makes the world exist, we experience the relationship between thought and speech differently. The most important thing here is how we understand experience. If we start from here, then I think there is no difference between ‘thinking’ and ‘speaking’. After all, logos means both. Even understanding always involves some kind of listening experience. The experience of speech, to connect it with philosophy in impoverished times, is that stepping into the foundation that departs from tradition, that represents a discontinuity with regard to tradition, yet nevertheless allows it to speak in its essence and triggers a fundamental process. Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote somewhere that all the fundamental concepts of philosophy arise from the distress of speech. This essential distress lies in the fact that we can neither reach the foundation nor move away from it. This movement from the foundation and to the foundation is, in fact, European history, the West as history. And at this point, we can actually ask ourselves where we are. Developing this requires not only philosophical erudition, but above all individual trial. It has to go through you. If it doesn’t go through you, you have nothing to say about it. I myself see the relationship between the subjectivity and the objectivity in language as well. How do you perceive this relationship between the subjective and the objective in philosophy, Gorazd? How much room does philosophy actually leave for the subjective, and what or how much of it is objective? G. K.: I don’t like the words ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’. Allow me to digress briefly, Gregor. Recently, I have been working on a kind of ‘system’ of philosophy. One of the basic questions that drove me when I started working on this was where the different fundamental philosophical positions come from. The question of why we all have such different experiences of being. My answer to this question is very counterintuitive, but it seems obvious to me on another, prior, intuitive level, even though it represents a break and a departure from the entire philosophical tradition. For me, the experience of being is something radically intimate and individualised because the only being ‘is’ my ‘I am’. If we do not mean this solipsistically, we are faced with a para-logical world of multiple sole beings, through which and in which exists everything that exists – and if we think this radically on an ontological level, we arrive at an image of the world that is beyond the usual formal logic and dialectics and the laws that usually dominate Western thought, even in ontology and epistemology. We live in a – metaphorically and inadequately speaking – multiverse of sole beings. While common sense presupposes a unified field of being and various distinctions within it, including ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, in this altered perspective these two categories are posited as something that is very difficult even to name… And yet: for me, the deepest foundations of the ontological ‘objective’ problem are undoubtedly directly linked to a radically understood ‘subjectivity’. However, this ontologically absolute subjectivity is not something absolute in the final – metaontological – instance. On the contrary. It is radically finite. Well, now my detour has become quite long… The emergence, the difference between the ‘subjective’ and the ‘objective’, therefore always arises for me as a kind of positing of a radical subjectivity (understood in a non-metaphysical sense), that is, of you yourself or of me myself in our ultimate concreteness – the hypostasis as totality in its hovering over apophatic Nothingness. What you called ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ is therefore, in the final instance, a personal investment of the conceptuality of language, which is absolutely determined by how you yourself on the deepest level ‘are’ being, by the suchness of your – sole – being. That is why I linked this to language. I’m asking you, Dean, the same thing. After all, the tradition you come from is more focused on objectivity than subjectivity. D. K.: I also ‘forbid’ my students from using these concepts in a general way. If I go back to what I asked before, which was whether it is possible to name a basic philosophical theme today, it is clear that we cannot express it using the concepts of modern philosophy. Of course, it is possible to use something like ‘deconstruction’. But there’s another, deeper question: Where does philosophy get its basic vocabulary? Here, there is a similarity between philosophy and poetry, which also seems to strive for the experience of original verbalisation. It is not possible to invent a meta-language here. These ideas are from the last century. There is no meta-language that can justify language or languages. I find the path paved by Wilhelm von Humboldt, for example, particularly in his central work On Language: On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and Its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species, which was translated into Slovene this year, more promising, namely the path of reflection on the foundations of language, reflection on how some kind of self is expressed in the first place. How did the world’s grammar come to be? Heidegger didn’t come up with the idea in Being and Time for no reason. He said that to develop the problem of being, you need more than just the right ideas; you also need a grammar. If we think of Wittgenstein in this context, it is obvious that we cannot understand things in a constructivist manner. In philosophy, it is impossible to construct anything. Philosophy is constitutive in its approach, but transcendental positions have proven problematic one after the other. Another possibility is to conceive it through discourse from experience. In this case, we can see a certain affinity between poetry and philosophy as well as religion. As Otto emphasised, we can’t simply invent gods, we can only experience them. However, the possibility of such an experience is now affected by the functioning of science. Its meaning and purpose differ from those developed by philosophy. From the perspective of philosophy, it is problematic whether science today can still be considered science at all. What is at work is techno-scientific production, within which it is impossible to do anything philosophically essential or to prepare any fundamental experience. Before the general discussion starts, I’d like to ask one final question. What will philosophy be like in the future? Or can we think of philosophical thinking as a kind of progressive thinking? Gorazd? G. K.: I tried to answer this question at the beginning, but I obviously didn’t succeed. The idea that every time is equally impoverished and rich comes from the fact that there is no general time. The only time is yours. Mine. His. Everything else is just a more or less unfortunate metaphor. This only time – the time of the only being – is absolutely the time of possibility for philosophy. And of course it always will be. Dean, I have the same question for you. What do you think? D. K.: When I started studying philosophy, there were very few books on the subject in Slovenian. The philosophical tradition wasn’t very respected. There has been some progress. We now have some basic books in Slovenian and can have philosophical discussions. Today, we may be ‘richer’ in many ways. This is true not so much in terms of studying philosophy at university, where there is still a lot to be done, or in terms of institutionalisation of philosophy in general, but in terms of the ear of philosophy for these ‘impoverished times’. As long as we listen, we may be rich in thought. But I’m worried that most people in Europe and the rest of the world today think it’s all about a completely different kind of enrichment and expansion of power. I now invite the audience to share their thoughts. If you have any questions, please ask. Please! Samo Kutoš: Dean, something about what you said bothers and upsets me. I’ll start at the end, with today’s West. I agree with Gorazd that the time we live in is no worse than others. What makes our time on Earth special and different from others is that it is the only time we know for sure we have been given. I would like to comment on several points. I hope I will be able to summarise them. At the start, you said that the question is whether, in today’s world, philosophy or man can ask ‘What am I?’ or ‘Who am I?’ Then, towards the end, you developed an expected criticism of science, probably in terms of science as a technique of producing knowledge. And finally, you asked whether the West today can offer any answers. Let me ask the question in a different way. I think I am also following an important philosopher, a ‘father’, that we have not mentioned yet. Isn’t it precisely this despised and intimidating science that confronts man and the philosopher with the very radical questions of ‘who am I’ and ‘what am I’? By chance, I saw somewhere that you, Dean (unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend), participated in a public debate on genetics. I think it was about genetically modified organisms, mostly in relation to plants, but the same applies to humans. If we look at genetics, it seems to me that science and technology can now change the basic code that makes us who we are. This forces us to ask ourselves what it means to be human. Perhaps more so than in the past, when we didn’t know what a human being was. We just knew that it came out of our ‘belly’ and so on. Now we know that we can go deeper and do many things there and find out many things that we didn’t know before. We ask ourselves how far we can go. What are we getting involved in if we do get involved? Are we just dealing with a mix of molecules and cells? Is this now a human being? Where should we intervene in a human being? And so on… But I have never been against science. So I ask if it isn’t science and technology that now acutely pose the question who we are and what we are. Where is the line now, when do I become what I am? D. K.: Thank you for your comment. I understand that people see me as as a sceptic about the present and a critic of science. Why do I accept it? Precisely because of what you said, namely that science today represents a radical challenge for humanity. Science unconditionally realises itself as power. The philosophical problem is whether this science recognises itself as power. If it did, it would limit itself as manipulation of power. But if it does not perceive itself, how can it meaningfully delimit me in what I am? Or is it only through this meaningful limitation that we can truly determine what it actually means for science to be realised as unconditional power? Should man measure himself by the magnitude of scientific progress, or is there some other, perhaps more ‘impoverished’ measure by which man measures himself against God? What is the correlation between the withdrawal of this measurement and the immeasurable expansion of science as power? That is the question. Regardless of whether I’m for or against science. How can I decide? I can only decide on the meaning. Samo Kutoš: That wasn’t really what I was asking. Let me explain. The very fact that you took part in the discussion about genetics shows that there is some awareness of the power of science. D. K.: I know which TV debate you mean. Let me explain. The journalist placed me and the genetics professor on opposite sides. As a philosopher, I was supposed to be against genetics. So I asked the host how she knew that I, as a philosopher, was ‘against’ it. She just said, ‘That’s how it is.’ I replied, ‘Let’s first look at what the issue is.’ The problem is that philosophy is often asked in the media to take a position for or against something before the issue has been clearly defined. Moreover, this search for meaning is understood as supplementary to the ‘achievements’ of science, which are supposed to raise ethical dilemmas. But where does the ethical dimension come from? Gorazd has something to add to this. G. K.: When we think about the relationship between philosophy and science, we must first get rid of the idea that science emerged from philosophy. This idea is very common in today’s debates, but it is not true. I am sure that these are two separate projects, right from the start. The emergence of Greek medicine – which is actually the first time that this form of empirical knowledge, which strives to generalise knowledge in the way we now call science, was constituted – is a different project from philosophy, even though we are no longer aware of this due to the myth of the genealogical connection between science and philosophy. This original difference is very important. Why? It helps us understand a philosophy that swims against the tide, a philosophy that is aware of the ‘power’ of science today, but for which this power is not important. Deep down, this power is not power at all. Why? Because philosophy knows that scientific truth is not deep truth, but is based – to return to the initial anecdote – on involvement in the race of life, on interested competition with ‘nature’, and on a naive self-understanding that forgets the mystery of concrete subjectivity and the mystery of the whole, split open into Mystery. Any empirical science is constituted on the basis of the observation of sensory data and their description by conceptual or, nowadays, mainly mathematical models. If science, on the basis of this methodology – essentially an operation with two complete unknowns (what is the mathematical logos? what is a phainómenon in the broadest sense?) – arrives at the assumption that its descriptions refer to the real existing world, to reality itself, then it does not even suspect the power of philosophy. How differently philosophy can look at the totality of its data and methods and problematise them in the name of far more original kinds of evidence and intuition! Science alone, as science, cannot do this. A few more words about genetics, so as not to be too general… If I spoke of more original evidence, one example would be that a thought about me is always solely mine. What does that mean? Nothing? Or a lot. Thinking about any form of embryo is already pre-objectified, that is, it is a thought that reverses the original givenness-of-me-myself-to-myself. Philosophy is given more fundamental evidence: there is an essential gap, a real chasm between how I experience myself as a human being (and this is the only way I can experience myself) and what is before me in any form of objectivity. Science forgets this difference – just as we ourselves forget it in our everyday consciousness. But this forgetfulness is a delusion. That is why I think – and in this I am perhaps more of a Heideggerian than many Heideggerians – that the dominance of the scientific worldview today poses a great threat to humanity. Precisely because of its obvious falsity. In that this image of the world avoids something obvious: the possibility of a completely different view of the glimmerings of sensual perception and intellectual logos. An intimate view. An inalienable view that no one else can capture. The domination of the scientific worldview is simply a new form of ‘religiosity’ – and a very blind one at that. Because people readily accept ‘scientific’ facts without knowing or understanding them, without being able to follow the methodology of science and its abstract descriptions, a new caste of priests is emerging, which ultimately also provides answers to fundamental metaphysical questions. From the simple know-how with which Babylonian astronomy or Greek medicine began, the advancing specialisation and abstractness of scientific models ultimately create the appearance that the scientific project itself can reveal answers about the reality of man, the universe, and so on. This is complete nonsense and extreme naivety. And yet, through all possible means – the school system, the media, and so on – this is imposed on people from childhood onwards. An illusory, extremely false and false image of reality is imposed on them. Science without philosophy enslaves our minds. Samo Kutoš: I’m sorry, I really don’t want to take over the discussion. Just one more thing, then I’ll stop. From a sociological point of view, I would say that, especially in the last ten to twenty years, it is not entirely true that science has entered all parts of the spiritual world without restraint. There are strong movements in the West that are against science, or at least doubtful about it. This means that the idea that science has spread widely is not completely true. But maybe that’s not important. Let me put it this way: maybe I have made the debate too focused on the polemic between science and philosophy. I was just trying to show that some questions are common to both science and philosophy. Let me give you an example. You said ‘embryo’ and ‘I, as I perceive myself’. You probably accept that there is a connection between you and an embryo from decades ago. Whether that counts as being middle-aged or younger is not important. I would like to know, if there is a question about when and how you became the person you are today: Is this a philosophical question? Is it a scientific question? Does this distinction even make sense here? That’s what I mean. These are questions you also have to ask yourself in ethics, for example in the field of medical ethics. Where can I intervene, what can I do so that I can still say that I am intervening in an object and not in a person? G. K.: As I have already said, if I were to give any ‘scientific’ or definitive answers here, I would show that I am a complete fraud. What I am talking about belongs to the realm of philosophy: I perceive myself, based on phenomenological evidence, as someone who has come into being from nothing. My antecedents as ‘causal continuities’ in the philosophical sense do not exist. This is paradoxical. Coming into being from nothing is incompatible with the very concept of causality, which is determined by the axiom ex nihilo nihil fit. This radical emergence is, of course, contrary to the pre-objectified self-understanding of everyday consciousness, in which I am always already pre-objectified. But the problem with your question is that this basic, fundamental givenness-of-myself-to-myself is already objectified in the very formulation of the question. Everything else is then just nuances. This leap is radical. It is precisely in the philosophical reflection on the boundary questions of genetics that the importance of the philosophical attitude becomes apparent: namely, in thinking about original givenness and in recognising that any objectivity is always constituted in a fundamental sense. D. K.: Talking about how we see life as a continuous journey: sometimes, people can live their whole lives without thinking too much about who they are. As I said at the start, this question is also fundamentally elusive to those who ask it. And yet it is a matter of spontaneous experience. It can come to nothing because it originates from nothing; it is a kind of poíesis – given that Plato considers poíesis to be the cause of the transition from non-being to being. Such poíesis in the sense of self-origination is, according to Greek philosophical understanding, originally inherent in phýsis, nature. In genetics and other techno-sciences, nature no longer appears as the spontaneity of self-production, but merely as the production of ‘natural’ material. From nature being the producer, we have thus arrived at a situation where we produce nature, which is now also linked to the fact that we do not conceive of life in its immediacy, but rather from the perspective of the manipulation of life. This includes not only techno-scientific production, but also production in the humanities, for in the scientific-cultural-educational drive, the humanities have become a kind of information archiving where one can complacently dispose of ‘discourses’ without becoming disposed one way or another toward humanity. The discussion was led by Gregor Podlogar. The truth is the silence of the coming age Gorazd Kocijančič is a philosopher, poet, and translator who edits the book series and online magazine Logos. He has translated and commented on the complete works of Plato, as well as, most recently, the works of Dionysius the Areopagite. He has also contributed to the Slovenian standard translation of the Bible. He agreed to an interview – which he gives rarely – but on his own terms. Perhaps it was only out of politeness that he did not want to say out loud, following Nietzsche, that journalism is what remains when philosophy dies. In his view, the basic gesture of philosophy from its very beginnings to the present day has been extremely reckless. ‘The only thing that distinguishes a philosopher from a megalomaniac is that the glove he throws in the face of the world and its certainties, first hits himself – and that it comes from an unidentifiable “elsewhere”’, he said. The book Razbitje – sedem radikalnih esejev (Being Torn Apart: Seven Radical Essays), which was the starting point for our conversation, is directed against common sense. At the presentation of the work (published by Študentska Založba [Academic Press]), the author exchanged philosophical thoughts with the academic Tine Hribar, as he did in their correspondence at the end of the book. The topic of their conversation was the most abstract concepts that human thought is capable of contemplating: being, existence, oneness… ‘And yet, we both sense that thought, in its nakedness, forgets its own background if it leaves out of account the most concrete thoughts of myself’, writes Kocijančič in one of his letters. In their correspondence, they agree that nowadays everything is supposed to be available; but Being itself falls into complete oblivion. The same is true of ‘sanctity of life’, ‘respect for the dead’, ‘human dignity’ or the ‘golden rule’. It is truly difficult to take seriously another person’s thoughts. This requires not only lucidity or cleverness, but kindness. Openness. Friendliness. Hribar ranked Razbitje among the most important philosophical works of the last decade, so it was not surprising that the Lili Novy Hall was too small for everyone who wanted to listen to Kocijančič’s lecture. However, the attendee in the front row fell asleep that evening anyway. Despite the seriousness of the topics discussed in the NUK café, where we talked for two hours, we also laughed about this. The dreamlike quality, the ‘oneiricity’ of the being he spoke of clearly had an effect. *** What is it like to live in the shadow of Plato’s words? I doubt that I am as close to Plato as you obviously think. My reading and interpretation of his works distances him from me, seeking a permanent respectful distance regarding the text. This reflects the permanent enigma and mystery that Socrates embodied for Plato. Closeness to Plato – in the specific case of my own philosophising, which is presented in the book Razbitje – is simply the spiritual pursuit of life in all its complexity. On the other hand, perhaps similar to Plato, with these essays I am trying to invite and seduce people into a completely different view of reality than the one they are used to. What kind of view? Well, to find out, you’ll have to read the book. In any case, I try to develop an understanding that is also ready to listen to the different voices that speak to us from the past – voices such as Plato’s, for example. At the same time, however, I take a step back from the texts and ask myself how we ourselves are – or rather, I myself am – structured. How am I that these texts can inspire me and fascinate me with their mystery? Of course, every reader will have to ask themselves this question. In the Slovenian philosophical sphere, you are something of a loner. You are not from ‘anywhere’? It’s true. I resist belonging to any philosophical school. In Slovenia, philosophers mostly build their identity by belonging to a certain community. However, the reality and future of philosophy lie primarily in independent thinking. Of course, this requires knowledge and awareness of the fundamental philosophical questions of the past and present. What interests me in Razbitje, as a draft of my own system, is the idea of creative philosophising, which – and here lies the paradox – unlike most of these contemporary schools, is open to tradition. An original, creative thought, which is at the same time a ‘recuperative’ hermeneutics, as Paul Ricoeur would put it. Most of the contemporary philosophical schools, in one way or another, distance themselves from the history of metaphysics, even if they engage with it academically. They try to transcend it. I am not interested in that. I am attracted to what has been said throughout the ages, and what I believe still holds true today. At the same time, I am convinced that true philosophical thought can only be radically personal – intimate. Such intimacy requires its own philosophy and system. In both respects I follow my own path. Does this independence make you proud? Do you mean: does it feed my self-importance? Self-importance is poisonous to life. And to philosophy. That is why I hope I am not a victim of modernist aesthetics in the philosophical sense. I don’t want to create something new and different at any cost. I do not promote my thoughts merely as a novelty, but strive to use them to justify the relevance of the European spiritual and metaphysical tradition. This is my fundamental mission. For Europe has suffered the worst tragedy imaginable – the loss and oblivion of God. The loss of the absolute horizon, the horizon of the Absolute. On an intellectual level, I try to the best of my ability to show that this atheistic option is actually irrational. From a philosophical point of view, it is meaningless. The independence that impresses me is thus, in the final analysis, a plea for the thought of the Other. What is your philosophy? Despite its radically anthropocentric stance, reminiscent of the beginnings of subjective idealism and phenomenology, it is absolutely theocentric. The self, the hypostasis, as I call it, is at its core,always already corroded by the Mystery that structurally eludes and grounds it. In this sense, philosophy has been theocentric from ancient Greece through the entire Christian Middle Ages to Hegel, who wrote that philosophy is worship, or Gottesdienst. I too understand philosophy in this sense. Thought lives by its fundamental reference to the Absolute. However, contemporary philosophy is largely born from obliviousness of the Absolute and feeds precisely on attacking this tradition. Such philosophy, which styles itself as a critique of metaphysics, religion, and spirituality, is not based on reason and argument. Its intellectual project stems from an irrational – and in a civilisational sense catastrophic and tragic – desire. However, it seems that theocentric philosophy, if we can call it that, has fewer adherents among young people. Why is that? Few people, especially young people, know how to truly resist the Zeitgeist. This requires great personal sacrifice, whereas the easy carpe diem demands nothing. Of course, all young people would like to be rebels – for example, by resisting global capitalism or reviving communism – but precisely because they are trapped in their own time, they cannot see that the former and the latter share an identical metaphysical constellation. In short: a nihilistic one. As Kierkegaard said, the problem is that those who marry the Zeitgeist will soon be widowed. However, I would not be as pessimistic as your question suggests. I spend a lot of time with young people, and in Slovenia, as in other European countries, there is a growing generation with a keen religious sensibility and a positive attitude towards spiritual tradition. Of course, they will never be numerous. We’re talking about spiritual aristocrats. But there is another problem hidden in your question. Resistance to theocentrism, or more broadly to any discussion of God, is associated with resistance to the Church. The Church in Slovenia is certainly losing young people. This is not surprising. Young people’s attitude towards the Church reflects the fact that Christianity is generally equated with the Slovenian image of Catholicism. I am Catholic myself. This means to me more than just formal adherence to a particular confession; it means being committed to the universal Christian experience and believing what all Christians have always and everywhere believed, as Vincent of Lerins says. However, I am also aware that our small Catholic community – which is completely insignificant in global terms, as there are more Christians than here in every Brazilian favela –largely lives by its own very un-Catholic, provincial traumas. Of course, many people here live genuine Christian lives, but our clerical bureaucracy’s discourse often caricatures Jesus’s message. It appears as a community of politically like-minded people, always self-righteous and without any sense of humour or kindness, fascinated by the games of capital… This is especially off-putting to young people. Such a community is not only unsympathetic, but also completely unevangelical. Political appetites are fatal here. The Church ceases to be the Church the moment it succumbs to the distinction between friend and enemy, which Carl Schmitt says constitutes politics. Its avoidance is the strict criterion of the Church’s ecclesiality. When asked whether the Church was free under communism, Russian Bishop Anthony Bloom replied that its freedom lies in loving to the point of death. In a democracy, this kind of sacrifice no longer exists, but the duty to love unconditionally remains. This would seem to be an easier task, but it is clearly not. Therefore, we should ask ourselves to what extent the Slovenian Church is truly the Church of Christ and to what extent it is merely a folkloric association of anti-communists or despisers of the ‘forces of continuity’. Philosophers are probably not just interested in ‘beautiful theories’; they love life, comfort, and the company of friends, just like everyone else – not death, illness, opposition, loneliness, and danger? I’m not a melancholic pessimist. I love life, friends, and everything you mentioned. But to truly love, to have the right attitude to life, it’s important to remember that we will all die one day and that life is short and fragile. The book Being Torn Apart is in a way a philosophy of radical finitude. I want to think about it even more radically than Heidegger in his famous work Being and Time; the correspondence with Tine Hribar, which concludes the book, also revolves around this theme. The paradox is that the thought of my own finitude, the thought of death, does not condemn me to pessimism, but liberates me to what life is and to what is wonderful – and strange – in it. Here, perhaps, Hribar and I both draw on the Platonic tradition, which understands philosophy as meléte thanátou. As meditatio mortis. Contemplating death and ‘practising’ it. Not to make life seem repulsive, but to live it truly. As it is. What way of understanding reality do you present in your book? One in which our everyday understanding of reality becomes something much more dreamlike and unreal than we usually think. By posing the fundamental question of the Being of beings, of Being in its separateness from existing things, it equates Being with one’s own ‘I am’. But ‘I am’, the hypostasis, as I call it, is not something fundamental, but arises from complete unknowability and sinks into Mystery. This introduces the perspective of the multiplicity of only Beings (in the plural!) and their paralogical diversity, which allows for a new thematisation of ethics, aesthetics, etc. This opens up different ontological and anthropological perspectives. The destabilisation of reality that I am talking about means that I myself do not understand in advance what it is and what it means to be, but that I am nevertheless intimately capable of questioning both within myself. I want to lead the reader into this experience. Years ago, this is how we understood the role of Neo in the film The Matrix… Yes, The Matrix is, in Hollywood terms, a simplified way of posing the question that interests me. In the history of European thought, the suspension of our understanding of reality became a prerequisite for philosophy as early as in Greece. Parmenides says: only one Being exists. Everything that appears to us as existing is merely doxa, appearance. Heraclitus says that people are actually asleep when they are awake. And that our death is awakening. The relationship between reality and what we experience is very acutely posed in Greek philosophy. This was a prerequisite for philosophical thinking, which has now, in modern times, been largely lost. The main culprit is European science, which is understood as authoritative knowledge, but which conceals within itself a completely unreflective ontology of ‘common sense’: it assumes that the world is, that we are, and that this reality is knowable. That we know a lot about reality. And this image of the world becomes ingrained in people… What kind of image? Naive evolutionism, scientism, naturalism, ideas about human history, about the material structure of nature and its conditioning of the spirit… All of this has become so ingrained in us that very few of us are capable of thinking: What do I know? How do I know? Why do I know? Where do the things I believe in have their foundation? One of the key tasks I set myself in my last essay is a sharp analysis of the ontological foundations of Western science. This is the first thing that needs to be destroyed, broken down, and torn apart, so that we can free ourselves for a different view of reality. For new questioning and original wonder… Martin Heidegger knew this well when he wrote: Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht, science does not think. However, philosophical thinking differs from general thinking … Provided it is truly philosophical. Most so-called philosophical thought today is committed to the unreflective image of the world that I have just described. The banality of this ontology is evident in our lives. The abstract themes we are discussing are linked to the fact that so many people are unhappy and do not know what to do with their lives. That they are lost. This is not unrelated to an inability to think. How can they be happy and find meaning in the banal world imposed on them by the school system and the media? In an entropic cosmos rushing towards nothingness, where human life has no value or lasting meaning? Philosophy must resist this because there is no knowledge behind this way of thinking, only a poor ideology. My invitation encourages people to think for themselves… The idea itself essentially leads to something bright. The darkness of ignorance that I invite the reader into is a bright darkness. It is not a darkness that is frightening and contains no promise. Are you striving for transhistoricity? Contemporary consciousness is largely determined by historicism, especially in its postmodernist forms. Nothing is permanent. Everything passes; everything changes. There is no such thing as a subject or a human being. All fundamental categories emerge in history. But I ask myself: How do you know that? Where do you get that idea from? Why do you accept this view? If you ask yourself these questions, you will see that historicism is based on an unreflective and phenomenologically unfounded adoption of a scientific, common-sense model of viewing reality rather than on radical, intimate philosophical reflection. I see philosophical thought as a force that can most effectively combat historicism and reject its unfounded claims. Philosophy considers what is fundamental to our experience. All these ideas that presuppose a certain image of the world, are secondary derivatives. What ‘will be’? The basis of my thinking is a clear distinction between being and apophatic Otherness. In the context of life, I interpret this boundary – the separation between Otherness and being itself – by equating Being with the first-person experience of the concrete human being, the hypostasis as the only Being, which is the fundamental axiom of this book. This is an inside view of conception and death. I emphasise the absolute incomprehensibility and inconceivability of this apophatic otherness beyond Being within a world determined by Being and existence – a world that is myself. This applies on a philosophical level. On a religious level, however, this means that the space of the approaching total Mystery is one of potential promise. Of possible hope. This is where a different mode of existence, a mode of lived being in faith, comes into play. I am also trying to describe this phenomenologically. It is a hope for what the sacred writings call eternal life or resurrection. This is transrational; there is no intellectual warrant for it, but that does not mean it is irrational. The essential possibility for human beings is to live in trust in the Mystery awaiting them. To live piously? Yes, in genuine sense, but it is important to note that we cannot know anything about this structurally. Nevertheless, let me repeat: faith is not an irrational act. I am not repeating the words of Tertullian, which are often misinterpreted: credo quia absurdum, ‘I believe because it is absurd.’ Faith in eternal life is based on signs, such as one’s own experience of prayer and life, as well as the experiences of other spiritual people. In Christianity, above all, it draws its strength from trust in the fundamental Christian story: the account of Christ’s resurrection and the lives of the saints. These confirm and strengthen my hope. So, what does it mean to live a devout life today? You’re probably referring to Tine Hribar’s comment that I am a devout person. In that case, I might actually know the answer. However, I replied to him that I only hope I am devout. You were probably taught to say that because for a Christian, it is the appropriate response. But I meant it seriously. Due to my involvement with the Christian tradition, I know what piety really means. I have known and still know people who are truly pious. For me, piety is an ideal, something I strive for at a fundamental level of my existence. However, I would never have the courage to say that I am devout. I am well aware of how far I am from that ideal. However, I find your question about what it means to be devout today extremely important. Our established practices of piety have often descended into caricature. Sometimes they are not about having an authentic relationship with God, but idolising and domesticating Him. Personally, I can only say that my life with God – with the Mystery that is the first and the last, with the ultimate Reality that thinkers and mystics of all traditions search for, but which is also a living presence that has left its mark in the words of the evangelists, apostles, prophets, and Church Fathers, and which we can still experience today in the Church’s liturgy and personal prayer – is what makes me happiest. It is the centre of my life. However, Razbitje is a thoroughly philosophical book. It does not speak of these things. Perhaps it only prepares for them on some level. If there is anything I would like to convey, it is precisely this: piety as a possibility that could give the reader something extremely precious in their life, a pearl for which it would be worth selling everything. Christians often don’t want to talk about their relationship with God. Is that unusual? Why? I think it’s perfectly okay in the age of reality shows. Some things belong in the marketplace, but others should be left to the bedroom, as the old saying goes. Do you think that talking about God should only happen in the bedroom? These things can only be discussed at an intimate level … Do you find discussing your relationship with God intimate? Yes, it’s not something you chatter about; it’s something you might write poetry about. Maybe. I certainly understand true poetry as writing from an intimate place. So, if you want to know what my relationship with God is like, you’ll have to read my poetry. These things are so important to me that I don’t want to profane them. Poetry is the transcendent power of language, allowing respectful speech that is both intimate and inviting to others. In the chapter on the past, you discuss the manuscript of Edvard Kocbek’s letter to Bishop Rožman. Do you like Kocbek? As a poet, yes, absolutely. Even as a thinker, he was a true miracle amidst the vulgarity of Slovenian post-war ideology. However, the political ideas he developed and his philosophy of history conceal something delusional. The notion that Christianity and violent Communist revolution or dictatorship of the proletariat can coexist is a fallacy. It was a delusion then, and it remains so now. When society blows up, it blows up. There is no point in philosophising about it. But justifying it is another matter. Politically I am a conservative anarchist. I am conservative because I know that we don’t have enough time to create a new type of human being. We are finite. We are also prone to evil, which rears its head just when we think we are about to start a new era. This is fundamentally repugnant to me. Politics must minimise violence and ensure space for normal life – space for philosophy, spirituality and art; all the things that make life beautiful and fulfilling. This is why the recent resurgence of Marxism, partisan combat, and enthusiasm for revolution among young people seems not only to be a sign of poor political judgement, but also to be simply stupid. I am not saying this out of some kind of atavistic conditioning or ignorance: all my ancestors participated in the National Liberation War against fascism, and I am very proud of that. At university, we mainly studied Marxism, while I had to read serious philosophical books on my own. From the perspective of the actual objectives of left-wing politics, the modern neo-leftist movements and their theorists are so naive in their utopian revolutionary stance that, if I were the owner of a multinational corporation, I would generously subsidise them. As long as they continue to spout this old nonsense, they are working for capital. From an anarchist point of view, I resent Kocbek for his personal fascination with the state and its power. I am convinced that the political mechanisms we have developed in modernity and which still exist today are not the most appropriate way of regulating social relations. Even our much-vaunted democracy is largely a farce. But are 19th-century anarchist philosophies far from Marxism? There are different traditions within anarchism. I see myself as a Christian anarchist, following in the footsteps of Jacques Ellul. The basic idea behind his anarchist thought is non-violence. It is a false idea that it is only by brutal action that we can resist the subjugation of man throughout history and the mechanisms that man creates for his political life. In my opinion, the only real future for political thought lies in transforming this space on a personal level through constantly subverting false relationships and intimately suspending mechanisms of subordination and abstract delegation of power. To begin with, we just need to rid our hearts of masters and refuse to bow down to any human power. We must not recognise any such power, whether democratically elected or not. We must be completely free inside. We must start from our personal living spaces and worlds, which are authentic places where ethical relationships exist. The Christian anarchism I advocate is therefore not a utopia. Why not? I do not advocate radical social change because I sense that it is not possible. Society is fundamentally a brutal, irrational organism determined with mathematical precision by the instinct of self-preservation. Nevertheless, Christian anarchy is a project that can be realised here and now. Everyone can, to some extent, realise this political utopia. It is a present reality. Anyone who lives a transformed reality of interpersonal relationships – in service to others and the poor and needy; in pursuit of justice; in creative work that expresses different values; and in loyalty and friendship without regard to material interests – is already realising this utopia. Therefore, it is a political idea that radically rejects social engineering. It shifts the problems of political life to the personal and interpersonal level. Do you think that now is the right time to prioritise ethics over politics? Contemporary philosophy has lost ethics precisely because it has lost God. All of the aporetics of contemporary philosophy – from Derrida to Žižek and Agamben, the entire theoretical narrative of the new left – are linked to the quandary that without ethics, politics is impossible. We cannot justify meaningful political action without ethics. However, finding a politically binding ethical model on a theoretical level without metaphysics is a Sisyphean task. This predicament is evident in the fact that left-wing thought is almost exclusively based on references to Christian Scripture, as seen in the work of Žižek and Agamben, for example. This reveals the impotence of contemporary atheistic thought, which stems from the inability to justify ethical politics within a secular framework. A cynical attitude is here much more honest: if there is no God, then everything is relative, ethics is just pragmatism and the only thing left is politics, where the cunning and powerful prevail. A similar nihilistic mindset is evident in contemporary neoliberalism. However, liberalism’s belief that such cynicism will lead to universal prosperity is also a flawed utopia. Once again, it fails to take into account the fundamental human tendency towards evil. In the long run, therefore, it will lead us to a civilisation-wide catastrophe. It would not be the first time. What do you think about Obama’s Cairo speech, in which he confused Jesus’s ‘golden rule’ with Kant’s categorical imperative in the name of reconciliation and liberalism, attempting to implement ‘his truth’ in the context of the American–Arab conflict? Should Arabs therefore treat Americans the same way Americans treat them? Obama remains a mystery to me. I don’t want to say anything about him. But the utopian implications of liberalism, whether or not it refers to religion, are obvious. A few days ago, I attended an international conference on Darwin’s anniversary: ‘Evolution and the Future’. I was appalled. Many young philosophers and biologists from European countries spoke with great enthusiasm about genetic engineering. I got the impression that political utopias in the West were being replaced by biotechnological ones. They claimed that everything would be fine because we would be able to change humans and animals technologically. They presented this even as a moral obligation, claiming that the time had come to manipulate genes and create a beautiful new world free from suffering and pain. This harbours dangers that are at least as serious as those that arose when humans gained the ability to split the atom and create the atomic bomb. Don’t do all the things you can do – that’s just a translation of the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’. Let’s return to Kocbek… In the essay that refers to his letter, I focused on analysing how I construe the past and begin to recognise myself symbolically within it. There is no past. The past is always me. Therefore, all our debates about the past are, at their core, debates about ourselves and our present. I tried to problematise what we actually know about the past and how we construct it, as well as to develop a critique of contemporary discourse about the past. By writing about Kocbek and Rožman, I am not seeking to pass judgement on anyone in history. As a philosopher, I am interested in what we can truly know about the past. A secondary aim of the essay is to challenge the pervasive primitivism in Slovenian culture. What kind of primitivism? The absence of thought. My book, and my work as a whole, is an apology for thought against thoughtlessness. This does not mean that people with a religious relationship with reality are thinkers. Far from it. This is precisely why I am always looking for allies among those who do not consider themselves believers, but who think. My correspondence with Hribar is the best proof of this. I oppose those who claim to be religious yet demonstrate a complete lack of intelligence. One of the saddest examples of Slovenian stupidity today is not only the debates about the Partisans and the collaborationist Home Guards in letters to the editor in magazines and newspapers, but also the debates about the existence or non-existence of God in the same forum. Everyone thinks they can resolve questions of the Slovenian historical tragedy or the existence of God in six sentences. And this after two millennia of metaphysics, after Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas, Maximus the Confessor, and Meister Eckhart… Those who attempt to do so, on both sides, reveal a complete lack of spiritual depth. Ground zero. But for the first pages of the Bible, we can indeed say that they are tohu wa bohu, empty and void… (laughter) Are you alluding to the story of creation? How old are you? A little over thirty. According to Hebrew tradition, you shouldn’t read the first chapters of Genesis until you’re forty … (laughter) This tradition is just Hebrew manipulation. What’s supposed to be different at forty – that people stop doubting? Are they more likely to understand this narrative correctly at that point? Doubt is man’s purification for the truth. There is nothing wrong with it. I can only find peace when I surrender to what is unquestionable. In our case, the unquestionable is the aleph, which is not written. After this point of silence, the story of creation begins with the letter beit: Berešit. ‘In the beginning’. ‘After forty’ signifies the proximity of death. It is at this time that the compelling poetics of the desert and emptiness can be heard. The symbolic emergence of the world. The inexhaustible meaning of archetypal stories. You wrote that you have never wanted to be anyone else in your life, not even for a moment – not even when you said you wanted to be Bruce Lee or Bob Dylan. What’s wrong with wanting to be Bruce Lee? Nothing. I acknowledge my past, even if its being is questionable. (laughter) Who are ‘those outside’? Are you referring to the title of my previous book? In Christian literature, especially early patristic literature, the term hoi exo was used to refer to non-members of the Church. In ancient philosophical schools, it was also used to refer to outsiders. The basic idea behind my title is that the boundary between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ is always blurred. Invisible. However, what is essential to the very act of thinking is that this dividing line exists. Things are not all the same; it matters how some people think one way and others another way. It is not true that there is no community of people who have experienced the truth. This title is a tribute to that idea. If what you said is true – that art is only the cherry on top of the cake and science is a billion-dollar project – then in the third millennium, art may well be lonely, forgotten and unknown. History is very unpredictable. I don’t know what will happen. Every generation has the opportunity to redirect the course of history. In any case, the book Razbitje is countercultural in that it seeks to demonstrate the decisive status of art philosophically. In an ontological sense. If every individual is the only Being of everything, then art is the only way to symbolically reveal this Being. Therefore, the status of art is more fundamental than that of scientific discourse, which revolves around the various beings. In this sense, art is undoubtedly being displaced today, or transformed into something else in connection with science. Into a game for adult children. Into a conceptual game or a form of ludic political activism. Despite being a poet, you don’t even touch on sensuality in this philosophical book. That’s not true. The discourse surrounding it is really very abstract, but the whole question of the emergence of the world in the hypostasis is a question of sensuality. However, I sense what you are getting at. I will write about the more concrete aspects of sensuality in my next book, which will be a continuation of Razbitje. Its title says it all: Erotika, politika itn. (Erotics, Politics, etc.). The interview was conducted by Patricija Maličev. Conversation: Alberto Manguel and Gorazd Kocijančič As part of the Vilenica Festival, Alberto Manguel, a writer, translator, and editor who has authored numerous non-fiction works including A History of Reading (1996) and The Library at Night (2007), both of which were translated into Slovenian by Nada Grošelj and published by Cankarjeva Založba, visited Slovenia. He took part in a discussion in the large reading room of the National and University Library. He was joined by philosopher, essayist, poet, editor and translator Gorazd Kocijančič, whose new book, Erotika, politika itn. (Erotics, Politics, etc.), subtitled Trije poskusi o duši (Three Essays on the Soul), has recently been published. *** A question for Alberto Manguel. In addition to participating in the Vilenica festival, your visit to Slovenia coincides with the publication of your book The Library at Night, published a few weeks ago by Cankarjeva založba in a translation by Nade Grošelj. As the book is new and not yet familiar to everyone, a brief presentation might be a good starting point for today’s conversation, especially as we are in the large reading room of the National and University Library. In a way, The Library at Night, including its approach to the subject matter, ties in with A History of Reading. Could you briefly present the main points of this book? Albert Manguel: First of all, I would like to say that I envy Mr Kocijančič for participating in the translation of the Bible and for being able to delve into Plato’s works while translating them. In comparison, any other literary endeavour seems almost useless and pointless to me. However, since arrogance knows no bounds, I decided to write a book about what it means to have a place where you keep such books, despite lacking the knowledge acquired by a translator of the Bible and Plato. I was interested in why, if the most obvious thing in our world has no meaning, we arrange what we write about the world in alphabetical order and call it a library. My book The Library at Night is an attempt to answer this question. Tonight, I received an answer in the form of a poem by Mr Kocijančič. In it, he asks what he will leave behind in this world and whether it will be more than a hundred books. He also writes that our works do not redeem us. I completely agree with him: our works do not redeem us; rather, we are redeemed by the stories we tell in them and by reading them. And to preserve these stories, we create libraries. In my opinion, the title The Library at Night is a very good metaphor for the hidden life of libraries, or at least the lesser-known aspects of it. Could you give some examples of the libraries that have made the biggest impression on you or surprised you the most, perhaps the libraries in the Adrar desert in the Middle Maghreb or the Buddhist caves of Mogao? A. M.: The idea of secret libraries has always interested me, ever since I became aware that libraries existed. The most remarkable library for me is one that no longer exists, but has been partially reconstructed. When it existed, it was the most wonderful library in the world in my opinion. It was Aby Warburg’s library. Warburg was the eldest son of a wealthy Jewish banking family in Hamburg, and he had been fascinated by books and pictures from a young age. As the eldest son, he was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a banker. However, he wanted to be a reader, so he ‘sold’ his birthright to his brother on the condition that the latter would buy him any book he wanted for the rest of his life. His brother kept his promise. Warburg founded a library unlike any other in the world. Rather than being organised according to the conventional system of numbers or letters, it was organised according to a system of associations that arose in his mind. In this sense, it was the perfect reader’s library – the library we all want – as each book stood next to another because Aby saw an association between them. However, when the philosopher Ernst Cassirer visited the library, he asked to leave after ten minutes, saying that he was about to go mad. Aby Warburg discovered a set of rules that every reader should follow. One of my favourites is the rule of the good neighbour. This rule states that the information we are looking for can be found in the book next to the one we have picked up. During the rise of Nazism, Aby Warburg’s library was shipped out of Germany and the books were stored in a London university. Unfortunately, today (because, like all other intellectual centres, libraries are run by bureaucrats, not readers), Warburg’s library is being dismantled, and his collection is being sold because the University of London claims it lacks the space to store the books. This makes me think that, just as there is an international court for crimes against humanity, there should also be an international court for crimes against the imagination. You are known as a bibliophile with a library of over thirty thousand books. Could you tell us more about how this library was formed over the decades and where it is now located? A. M.: It is true that I have more than thirty thousand books. The problem is that, once a book enters my library, I cannot get rid of it. In fact, I have only ever thrown away one book in my life: Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Fortunately, as it is a personal library, not a public one, I can order any book I want. I know all my books. Of course, I haven’t read them all, but I’ve opened and read through all of them and know what they’re about. I’ve organised my library according to my own principle of grouping books together by language. Most of my library is made up of books written in English, German, Spanish, and Italian. Within this division, the authors are arranged in alphabetical order by surname, but this is not a genre classification. As with any system, there are, of course, many more exceptions than official categories. These include detective novels, cookbooks, travelogues, books dealing with various cultural issues such as ‘the history of the body’, ‘the legend of Don Juan’, and so on, as well as books about the Bible, various Bible translations, and theological works. Within these exceptions, there are further exceptions: for instance, I did not classify St Augustine’s works as theological, but in a separate category. Like any other library, mine eventually became too small for all my books. Ten years ago, I still had empty space on my shelves, but I no longer do today. Julio Cortázar’s story The House That Was Taken Over is about an elderly brother and sister. Something attacks their house, first taking over the bathroom, then the kitchen and living room. Finally, they find themselves on the street, locking the house and leaving. I know the same will happen to me. I think that, with books, there are always more in the morning than in the evening. I think they multiply like rabbits at night! Here’s a question for Gorazd Kocijančič. Mr Alberto Manguel is the author of The History of Reading and The Library at Night, and you worked at the National and University Library. What is it like to work in a library? How do you feel about libraries in general? What role did libraries play in your upbringing and development, and how did they influence your decision to translate Plato’s collected works? Gorazd Kocijančič: I didn’t work in a library because I felt a special calling to do so from an early age. Jokingly speaking, according to today’s news there is a Slovenian with 37,000 euros in income from monthly interest – if I were that lucky, I would never have worked in a library. Many things simply happen, at least from our perspective. It’s a combination of circumstances and coincidences that then become destiny on a deeper level. However, in this other sense, the library is still important to me as a place where one constantly experiences the mystery of writing and the excess of meaning in which we live. No one knew or felt this mystery better than Jorge Luis Borges, the famous writer who is also connected to Mr Manguel’s biography in a very interesting way. Many of you who have read his essays or A History of Reading will probably know that our guest read books to the blind Borges for many years. Borges is also the author of the concept of the infinite library, which ultimately intensifies the mystery of the meaning that surrounds us, of which we are only ever aware of a small part. For me, every library, even a finite one, is a manifestation of this mystery. This is why it is a privilege to be in these spaces and live in dialogue with this riddle, this profound enigma. This morning, while preparing for this conversation, I read the preface you wrote for Plato’s Collected Works. Based on what you said, I concluded that libraries played a significant role in its translation. You wrote something like this: ‘I reread the entire works of Plato and tested my reading against the treasures of the Athenian libraries, including the Gennadius Library, the National Library, the British School of Archaeology, and the library of the Department of Ancient Philosophy at the Academy of Sciences in Athens.’ Your home library, the National and University Library, also played an important role in this work. Looking back, how would you define the role and importance of libraries in your largest translation project to date (and in others, of course)? G. K.: Every major translation project requires the use of numerous commentaries, which are mostly unavailable in the libraries in a small country like Slovenia. The National and University Library has always supported my work. When I received the Onassis scholarship, it enabled me to live in Athens for a longer period. The availability of sources there is, of course, much greater, although still not perfect. This allowed me to complete my work properly. Today, a new interlibrary loan network allows you to obtain all the literature you need without having to travel as much as was necessary in the past. A question for Alberto Manguel. It has been fifteen years since the publication of your book The History of Reading, which was translated into Slovenian four years ago. What would you add to it now, to the history of reading? Have the last fifteen years, with the advent of digitisation in both the production and consumption of book content, been important in your view? How would you assess them? What has changed? For the better? For the worse? A. M.: When I wrote The History of Reading, I soon realised that our history as readers is not linear. It moves forward and backward, sideways and up and down. From the very beginning, ever since writing was invented, an incredible phenomenon has existed: in order to invent writing, we first had to invent reading. For a system of communication to allow me to say or write something and for you to receive it, you must first know how to receive it. Therefore, the beginning of the history of reading is not really a beginning, but a pre-beginning. Every significant technological development in the history of reading – the invention of scrolls, codices, and electronic media – means that we must first return to old, already existing forms. For example, the invention of the BlackBerry or e-books has, in a sense, taken us back to clay tablets, and computers have taken us back to Roman scrolls. The issue is not the value of each technological change, but how we use it. When I was writing The History of Reading and considering what to say about e-books, I realised that technology is developing and changing so quickly that what I wrote in the morning would be outdated by the afternoon. This is why I think it is still too early to write a chapter on electronic reading. I’ll wait for the next technology to emerge after electronic technology, and then I’ll write about it. I think it’s always better to write with nostalgia. Here’s a question for Gorazd Kocijančič: As a philosopher, how would you describe the evolution of reading and books over the past two thousand years? Starting with Socrates, who passed on his legacy orally and supposedly wrote only a few words which he then erased, arguing that a scholar must work solely with his mind, and moving through scrolls and codices to the current digital form of books, where texts are no longer spoken or printed words but exist in a digital space? G. K.: The person who deleted a few words he had written was Jesus, but that doesn’t matter here. Socrates and Jesus are also connected by their attitude towards writing. It is interesting that they did not write anything, in the sense that they left nothing in writing. The starting point for any philosophical reflection on books is precisely the observation made earlier by Mr Manguel, namely that the history of reading is non-linear. However, this has perhaps also a slightly different sense: we cannot place different types of books and relationships to books in a line or series, nor can we encompass them with a universal view that would equalise all types of books and relationships to them. Reading is philosophically interesting when something utterly unexpected happens. The book itself is always a space that allows such event to occur. Reading, an activity I know well and have mastered to the point of routine, only really becomes reading when it breaks; when the moment of rupture occurs; when I encounter a dead voice that becomes alive, with a completely incomprehensible epistemic and ontological status. This moment is a kind of ‘black hole’, a centre of attraction that draws every thought about the book into itself. Regarding specific changes in book media, I don’t believe they constitute a significant shift in reading practices. In recent years, I’ve done most of my reading on an e-book reader and I haven’t noticed anything significant changing. A question for Albert Manguel. In your youth, you had an extraordinary experience reading Jorge Luis Borges. You read some texts with him for the first time, and others you had read before, but in his presence they shone with a new light. How would you describe this reading experience, and what influence did Borges have on your later thinking and writing? A. M.: Reading to Borges aloud is an experience that cannot be compared to any other. I encountered him as a teenager while working in a bookshop in Buenos Aires, which he used to frequent. He went blind in the mid-1950s and, when I met him in 1962 or 1963, he had decided that, because of his blindness, he would no longer write prose but only poetry, which he could compose in his head and then dictate to someone else. However, in the mid-1960s, he changed his mind and decided that he could write prose again. He asked me if I could come and read to him in the evenings. For two or three years, I read to him in the evenings, mostly short stories by authors he greatly admired. These were stories by authors such as Kipling, Stevens, and Henry James, which Borges knew by heart. However, he wanted me to read them so that he could stop me after two or three sentences and analyse the stories as if he were a mechanic. It was a lesson in technical terms for me, as Borges’ interruptions taught me why a certain adjective was used where it was, why it was repeated two sentences later. He taught me how to start and end a paragraph. I quickly realised that he didn’t want any comments from me. When I was fifteen or sixteen years old, Borges would always end his comments on these works with a verbal trick typical of his generation: he would always end with a question. For example: ‘How interesting that Kipling used that word, isn’t it?’ Because I was fifteen or sixteen, I thought the question was directed at me. Yet I quickly learned not to comment on anything. Once, I dared to remark that a certain sentence was very common, and Borges insisted that it was not. That was the last time I allowed myself to do something like that. A question for Gorazd Kocijančič. In 2007 and 2008, you held eight discussions in this reading room on the topic of ‘What is a book?’ As you are a philosopher, I will ask you a question that you asked the philosopher Tine Hribar at the time. What is a philosophical book? The French thinker Pierre Hadot divided thinkers into two types: those who think directly and write down their thoughts, and those who write by commenting on a philosophical text, usually a classic. As a philosopher, which type of writing – and therefore reading – do you consider to be more important? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each, especially in contemporary philosophy, where it is difficult to discover anything new? G. K.: That is a very difficult question. In principle, I don’t favour hierarchising these two ways of philosophising. I think both are valid and justified. However, given the complexity of civilisation and its theories, I believe that this second way of philosophising – commenting on commentary, and so on – has become excessive, and that it is time for thought to return to directness. In other words, saying what you mean without getting bogged down in endless commentary. This does not, of course, diminish our responsibility and obligation to read and study tradition thoroughly – quite the contrary. As you are also a poet, and the theme of this year’s Vilenica Festival is ‘Read Me Live’, I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the significance of such events for poets. How would you describe the relationship between spoken and written poetry? Do you still think that a book of poetry is nowadays necessary to bring a poem to its ideal reader? Or are such festivals actually required today, since they are the easiest way to bring a poem to its ideal listener (today’s audience)? G. K.: I am somewhat sceptical about such events, but if I thought they were meaningless, I wouldn’t be there. But what is the real meaning of such events? That question should be answered by the audience of such festivals. I think the problem with public poetry readings is that the reading conventions often hinder the search for the writer’s own authentic voice. At festivals, voices are often imitated in a mimetic game, which makes me wonder whether it’s really live reading or just an expected reproduction of written literature. Ultimately, what is interesting is the author’s personal presence – and rightly so. I believe there is scope for innovation here, which would facilitate a more diverse reading experience and generate greater interest in the live presentation of literature. A question for Alberto Manguel. In your book The Library at Night, there is a chapter entitled The Library as an Island, which begins with the shipwreck of Robinson Crusoe (who was also washed up on a desert island with a few books) and the observation that, by doing so, Daniel Defoe indicated that the beginning of a new society must also be accompanied by books. People are often asked which books they would take to a desert island. For most people, this question is fairly easy to answer: they look through their bookshelves and choose a few books. But how would someone with tens of thousands of books answer this question? Which books would they choose? Conversely, are there books that you always have with you or always return to? A. M. Chesterton was once asked which book he would take to a desert island. He replied that he would take a manual on shipbuilding. If I’m not as specific as Chesterton, though, I think that, when faced with choosing just one or two books, that book should be a kind of manual, either for building ships or for building the soul. If I could read Slovenian, I would take Kocijančič’s translation of Plato’s works. The two books I perhaps always travel with are Dante’s Divine Comedy and Alice in Wonderland. I think you could keep yourself company with both of them. One more question for Gorazd Kocijančič. Let me ask you the same question a little differently: if you had to choose one genre of book to take with you to a desert island, which would it be? Why? Which examples would you choose from that genre? G. K.: Personally, I don’t like this question about books that one would choose to take to a desert island. ‘I don’t like’ is even too mild a response. Why? Because I think this question subtly conceals one of the worst forms of violence that can be inflicted on human beings: forcing them to choose between sacrificing some of the people they love and saving the others. The Jewish tradition, as recorded in the Talmud, also addresses this issue. Imagine that the Romans surround a Jewish community and say: ‘Hand over one Jew for us to kill, and the rest of you will be spared; otherwise, we will kill the entire community.’ The Talmud is renowned for addressing every conceivable issue, and there are myriad opinions on each one. It is precisely this diversity of views that gives the text its richness – as the rabbis say, God’s voice is hidden in this diversity of interpretations. However, regarding the aforementioned problem, the Talmud offers no alternative opinion to the view that under no circumstances should one person be sacrificed for the survival of the community, even if this results in the death of the entire community. I myself do not want to sacrifice some of the books I love to save others. I do not agree with this violence. I would like to apologise with this story and thus skip the answer. OK, I will ask a slightly different question, which may be easier to answer: Andy Kaufman was an American comedian who knew how to surprise his audience, for example by announcing that he would read the entire novel The Great Gatsby aloud on stage. Amid fading laughter, and then amid the boos of an audience already leaving, he actually did it. In line with this year’s slogan, ‘Read Me Live’, here’s a little joke to end with: Which book would you most like to read aloud to today’s audience, whether your own or someone else’s? G. K.: Hmm, I would read Thomas a Kempis’s De Imitatione Christi (The Imitation of Christ) to today’s audience in Janez Zupet’s brilliant new Slovenian translation. A. M.: Borges said that a wonderful way to revive The Imitation of Christ would be to attribute it to James Joyce. Perhaps I would listen to your reading of De Imitatione Christi as if it had been written by James Joyce and admire the extraordinary prose. The conversation was moderated by Samo Rugelj. Ethics cannot be invented like a new fashion In your latest collection, Primož Trubar Is Leaving Ljubljana – for which you received the Prešeren Fund Award – your Trubar says that man must work, yet he is also free. To combine these ideas, we invented ‘work with words’. You too are a worker with words: a tireless translator, philosopher, and poet. How welcoming is today’s world to this profession? Complaining has now become something of a stereotype, so we must first acknowledge that, in the developed West and in slightly less developed Slovenia, a much larger number of people are able to spend their time ‘working with words’ than in previous eras, and many more are able to appreciate and enjoy this work. This is a good thing. Of course, this state of affairs must be fought for. No one can decide how we should live. As a society, not just as a guild, we must resist any attempt to make society so functional that there is no longer any time or space for the free sphere of ‘useless’ and ‘unprofitable’ creativity. We must not allow anyone to steal the free time we need for this, but we must also use it carefully and responsibly, treating it as if it were our greatest asset. The fundamental quality of our lives is at stake – all of our lives, not just those of cultural workers. Although the revolt against cuts to state funding for ‘social parasites’ appears to many of our contemporaries as a struggle by an interest group for its privileges, there is something much more important at stake. The status of words in Western society is changing, as is people’s trust in the essential power of culture and thought, whether scientific, philosophical, or religious. The paradoxical ‘Trubarian’ combination of work and freedom is seen as fundamentally superfluous and something that society can do without. The problem is that this understanding is false; it does not reflect how we exist in the world as human beings. This is truly a question of being or not being. Every society is fundamentally based on certain values. These values, in turn, are based on a particular interpretation of reality and its original symbolisation . If there is a mistake, fallacy, or wrong turn in this sphere, everything goes wrong. This is what is happening to us now, yet we cannot see where the problem lies. Instead, we would rather bury our heads in the sand like ostriches. The scientistic understanding of reality and technological mastery of the world cannot help us here, because this is the realm of our primary life-world and the original sensations and experiences we have. Science always emerges from this realm as something secondary, as a useful abstraction and impoverishment. Calls to re-establish ethics and values are empty because ethics cannot be invented like a new fashion. The only activities that reach these fundamental depths and can therefore help society as a whole with its fundamental orientation are art, philosophical thought, and religious symbolisation. It is a spiritual confrontation with reality. If we are not aware of this and of how important it is to establish a deep, creative common language for our entire life together – one that is made possible only by culture, broadly understood, for all its antagonisms – then we are living a fatal lie. This will not lead us to a prosperous society, but to a new barbarism (if we are not already there, as some of the comments on our online conversation will probably soon show; I refer in advance to these comments as an illustration of my thesis). Against the imperative of constant innovation you turn to old writings: the Biblical authors, Greek and medieval philosophers, the Church Fathers. Have they already said everything, and do we only need to interpret them? Yes and no. Contact with tradition is absolutely essential because, without it, we are completely disoriented in the world. At the core of true tradition – different traditions, lest there be any misunderstanding – is not merely a human invention, but a gift from God: a revelation, or a multiplicity of revelations and epiphanies of the Absolute. Forgetting this inherited wisdom, tested by the lives of previous generations, whose meaning they understood, is crucial for the disintegration of European society, which we are witnessing in all areas. Our direction is nowadays largely determined by base passions: greed and the pursuit of pleasure. This is undoubtedly leading us to ruin. Yet deep down, I am not just a man of letters; I believe in the primacy of the individual, of life and of experience. As a Christian, I see the Gospels as the unquestionable expression of God’s absolute and incomparable revelation in the person of Jesus, and the works of the Church Fathers as its authoritative interpretation. In the writings of the mystics, I recognise accounts of experiences that most of us will never fully achieve in this life, but which guide us like powerful beacons in the darkness of history. However, like my Trubar, I see that none of this helps us much if we do not look beyond the words and truly embody the message of these texts. If the truth does not take root in us, in our generation and in each individual, then it is dead and powerless. As the mystic Angelus Silesius wrote, ‘If Christ is born a thousand times in Bethlehem / But not in you / You remain eternally lost.’ What is the current socio-political reality like for someone who has just lifted their gaze from Heraclitus’ fragments or Plato’s dialogues? Ambivalent. Tragic, fragile and meaningless, yet always potentially transparent of beauty and truth. This was also true for Heraclitus and Plato. Social reality was for them an object of both anger and love. I sometimes wonder if politicians ever consider that they will only live for a short time, and that in a hundred years, no one will remember them – just as no one will remember any of us. As the great Greek poet Pindar said, ‘man is a dream of a shadow’. Nowadays, many people work with words, and paper and electronic documents seem capable of conveying everything. Unlike in your beloved historical periods, almost everyone is a writer, and success is often measured by the ability to promote oneself. Does today’s flood of written words cause you any anxiety? Sure. Not so much because of the writers who engage in excessive self-promotion – excessive, I emphasise, because everyone is guilty to some extent: every publication is a form of self-promotion. These writers are actually punishing themselves. It probably doesn’t feel good to organise – and perhaps receive – recognition as an exceptional artist when almost everyone knows – and deep down you know too – that your work is only average and doesn’t really excite anyone (although self-deception can be very helpful here too, of course). In any case, I feel anxious when faced with the abundance of good and interesting books being published, knowing I won’t be able to read them all. Yet this anxiety is not insurmountable. We do not need resistance to new technologies or the contemptuous attitude towards traditional culture which has spread among young people. However, we certainly need a new asceticism in the face of the abundance of information, books, and names. Only in this way will it be possible to maintain inner peace and tranquillity. This is one of the problems where we can learn little from previous generations; we must creatively draw on the wisdom handed down to us and find new answers and ways of life. In your aforementioned collection, we follow the first-person narrator Trubar as he spends his last night in Ljubljana before going into exile, contemplating his situation. What was it about Trubar’s personality that appealed to you so much that you decided to engage in this kind of ‘poetic placing of the other in me and myself in the other’? Firstly, Trubar founded our literature and is therefore a symbolic figure of the literary creator. Secondly, he was a man of the Gospel. Thirdly, he was a rebel against his time. These three characteristics enabled me to oscillate between him and myself, and between the 16th century and the present day. This oscillation became a metaphor for the poetic questioning of the meaning of creation, as well as a spiritual reflection on the meaning of witnessing. What else enabled you to bridge the distance between yourself and Trubar? Perhaps a belief in the universality of certain truths and experiences? Without some kind of original closeness, this would certainly not be possible. I certainly share Trubar’s Christian faith, which illuminates life and the world with a light that is constant throughout time. Conversely, I am also convinced that people have not changed in essence from time immemorial to the present day: we experience the same things, love the same things and have the same anxieties and fears. Of course, we speak different languages, but these are always translatable. Trubar has no kind words for the Slovenian people, whom he describes as idolatrous, greedy, petty, and hostile. Is this also a mirror of today’s times? Is it a diagnosis of the present (perhaps even a prediction), or more of a personal confession marked by despondency at the time of departure? It is certainly also or even mostly a diagnosis of the present, but I believe the decisive factor here is the dramatic arc of the collection, and indeed of my entire body of work: from darkness through darkness to light. Despite his disappointment in the darker aspects of his people, Trubar does not despair; ultimately, he finds meaning of his activity. I hope that my readers will also be able to overcome their despondency in the end. The book concludes with a religious experience of the absolute certainty of God, which now requires a fresh endeavour: not belief in God, but belief in the transient world and one’s own soul, both of which are at risk of extinction from the feeling of connection with the Eternal. Could we say that your maxim is to put into words such – nowadays ‘untimely’ – experiences, even though, as you say in Razbitje, this is ‘bad marketing’? In our largely agnostic and atheistic Europe – a strange global anomaly in this regard – where God appears at most on the margins as a private choice in the marketplace of spirituality, putting these things into words is, of course, a shocking paradox and something ‘counter-cultural’. However, I am convinced that the fate of our civilisation lies precisely in this discovery: if we do not realise that, as the American Orthodox theologian John Anthony McGuckin says, God is not a question we should agonise over, but a joy we should celebrate, the original Certainty and the irrefutable, incomprehensible Foundation, we will all perish. A society in which there is no absolute responsibility – something which, at its core, can only be responsibility before the absolute Mystery, ‘fear of the Lord’, as the ancient Hebrews would say – is rotten. All the talk today about a ‘crisis of values’ reveals this deeper crisis. Only if we know how to live in the right configuration of reality – in the right symbolic ‘geography’ (or its complementary symbolisations) – can we live values grounded in reality, not fiction. This is the something that only revelation can give us; we cannot achieve it by our own power. Faith, hope, and love are based on this reality. Trubar knew this well. Do you accept the imperative of social engagement on the part of the thinker or artistic creator? I do, but I interpret it in my own way, from the perspective of Christian anarchism. My esteemed fellow writers’ commitments at the moment seem rather naive to me, although I respect their dedication. Is it really as simple as honest, good, intelligent masses on one side and thoroughly corrupt, malicious politicians on the other? I’m not sure it’s that simple. We have had some bad luck with the authorities lately; they often behave like hooligans. I don’t believe in the masses, social unrest, the passions of the street, or simple slogans, but only in specific persons with whom I have experience. ‘The masses are a lie’, said Kierkegaard. We can never strive too hard for equality before the law and respect for the law, but that alone is not enough to transform society. Let me say something politically incorrect: only people who are connected as friends and share the same values – only ‘networks’ – can leaven society. The key question is what kind of people they are, and what their values are. I presented my own view on this problem, which I believe to be more complex and therefore more relevant than the usual view, in an essay on politics in the book Erotika, Politika itn. (Erotics, Politics, etc.). I have a feeling that not many people have read it. What are your plans for the future? What are you currently working on? As a translator, I am returning finally to the Church Fathers. I am preparing a translation of the collected works of Evagrius of Pontus, an extremely important and influential spiritual writer who wrote in Greek in the Egyptian desert. I also plan to translate three Christian poets: Synesius of Cyrene, Andrew of Crete, and Simeon the New Theologian. I am writing the final book of the introduction to my my philosophical system, which will deal with dreams, animals, language, and nothingness. I also have two poetry collections in progress: the first will be a kind of history of Western philosophy in verse. So, quite a few plans! Finally, here’s a question we ask all our interviewees at MMC, the answers to which we publish in the Big 5 section. In your opinion, can fame, power, money, and influence coexist with dignity, honour, respectability, and integrity? That’s a difficult question because it involves me in what I’m going to answer. Every award is five minutes of fame, and every article or interview is an attempt to influence the reader. But let me answer the question honestly: the two cannot coexist if we strive for the former for our own sakes and if we understand the latter not superficially and externally, but as spiritual virtues. God’s word is crystal clear on this: ‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave – just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.’ Self-love and self-admiration, the inability of dying to the self, are the sources of all evil because they rob us of our freedom and our ability to love others, even our enemies. They take away our openness and devotion to God. The only innocent way of receiving fame, power, authority, or money is if this occurs without us actively wanting these things – and even then, it becomes a constant temptation and danger, although it can also sometimes be a source of good. Few have been equal to this temptation, but it does happen occasionally (I immediately think of Dag Hammarskjöld, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and his diary). Lord Acton nicely summed up the basic rule: ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ The same goes for fame, money, and influence. That’s just how we are; the flesh is weak. The interview was conducted by Erna Strniša. Anti-Catholicism is the Slovenian equivalent of anti-Semitism On the cover of your book, Primož Trubar zapušča Ljubljano (Primož Trubar Is Leaving Ljubljana), it says that you are ‘currently the most influential Slovenian confessional poet’. Perhaps my impression that your poetry is ‘pure’ literature is mistaken, but still: do you consider yourself a confessional poet? The label on the book cover is editorial; I would never describe myself in that way. In the usual sense of the Slovene expression, a confession is a specific religious belief, so a confessional poet would be someone who versifies or poetically expresses the teachings and beliefs of their religion. I am Catholic, but when writing in the persona of Trubar, I adopt a purely Protestant, Evangelical perspective. So there is already a confessional crossover. Through this perspective, I aim to convey a transconfessional Christian message in this collection and others, to explore what unites all Christian churches. It’s no secret that I personally feel closest to the spirituality of the Christian East, which I dedicate most of my translation work to. At the same time, I am convinced that my verses have a universal message – just as, for example, the verses of an Islamic, Buddhist, or Jewish poet do for me – and that they are intended for everyone, even though each reader naturally interprets them in terms of their own spiritual world. However, if we understand confessio in the broader sense of confession and praise, as it is for example used in Augustine’s ‘Confessions’, then the description of my friend Aleš Šteger on the cover is certainly accurate. From my first collection, Tvoja imena (Your Names), to my fourth, my poetry has been a praise of God, a doxology, and a linguistic expression of spiritual experiences and insights. In other words, my lyric poetry is a side gift of contemplative prayer, which is the only thing that really interests me and is also the most difficult thing I know. It is the crystallisation of the rare moments when something happens to me that I feel is not only mine. Can this be considered ‘pure’ literature? By asking this question, you have touched upon a fundamental problem. The concept of ‘pure’ literature is a Western invention that emerged in modernity, when the cultural sphere sought – to its own detriment – to renounce its spiritual and artistic tradition. It is the result of an irrational departure from Christianity (although it is stylised as ‘rationalism’), as is the case with supposedly pure philosophy, pure science, and so on. In this context, spiritual poetry was marginalised as an inferior borderline genre, labelled as ‘religious poetry’, in the name of a supposedly pure aesthetic experience. I oppose this understanding of literature, and I am in good company, both internationally and in Slovenia, where Vid Snoj and Alen Širca have written brilliantly on this issue. Therefore, part of my translation work is directed towards establishing my own lyrical context, for example Byzantine hymnody, medieval Hebrew poetry, Angelus Silesius and Rilke, Claudel and Péguy. The collections Poezije and Logofanije, which I co-edit, also seek to transform our canon of ‘pure’ literature. In the latter, last year we published Pavle Rak’s novel Utišanje srca (Silencing the Heart), which was very well received by readers. Pure literature is never pure. In modernity, purity of literature meant unquestioningly accepting initially ‘enlightened’, abstractly theistic or deistic, and then increasingly materialistic, naturalistic, and ultimately nihilistic assumptions. It has therefore always expressed a certain (anti-)spiritual context. If we view the establishment of pure literature, and the exclusion of spiritual literature as impure, as a consequence of secularism, then my literature is decidedly post-secular. Such literature aims to redefine the space of the literary, not by limiting it, but by introducing a new intertextual richness that has been neglected due to a neglect of tradition. In other words, it expands the field of literature and makes it more interesting. The problem with the concept of the confessional perhaps stems from something you pointed out eight years ago when you were named the Delo newspaper’s Person of the Year upon the publication of your translation of Plato’s complete works: ‘Platonism for the people, as Nietzsche called Christianity, is a rather traumatic point in Slovenian journalism. Even today, not to mention in the past.’ Do you think anything has changed in this regard between 2005 and 2013? The optimist in me would like to think that things are changing for the better, and that perhaps this Prešeren Fund award is part of that process. Unfortunately, however, I believe that things are generally getting worse – and not just in journalism. Anti-Catholicism is the Slovenian equivalent of anti-Semitism. It is equally unjust, primitive, malicious, and demonic. Above all, it is false. In other words, it is devoid of any experience of the real people, the individual persons, who make up the Church. Not only is it devoid of knowledge of the Gospels, the Church Fathers, the apostles and prophets, mystics and saints, and past and present Christian thought, art, charitable activities, and spirituality – just as anti-Semitism knew nothing of the rich Jewish culture and spirituality – but, above all, it is devoid of experience of the people in whom this fantastically imagined and despised institution exists. It is devoid of any understanding of how we live, what we believe, how we pray, how we make friends, and how we are both similar to and different from non-Christians. These anti-Catholics and anti-Christians know our three ambitious pseudo-theologians who ‘show up at every dog’s funeral’ as long as they are being filmed and thrash about with their empty rhetoric. But when people walk through the streets today with placards against the Church, desecrate churches, and sing anti-Church songs, they are not protesting against those three pseudo-theologians, but against all of us, without looking us in the eye. After a century of the worst persecution and martyrdom that Christianity has experienced in its history, I find this truly sad. But life does not learn from history, and human primitivism knows no bounds. Like anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism is hatred toward a minority large enough to bother the majority, yet small enough to be despised with impunity. An uneducated person who only follows media hype – and, unfortunately, this constitutes the majority – might reasonably believe that the Church is just an association of paedophiles (in anti-Semitism, there is a recurring myth about the ritual sacrifice of ‘our’ children), greedy thieves (remember the Jewish bankers?) and, in our country, followers of a leader (preferably alongside a Vatican conspiracy to subjugate society – remember The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?). It’s as if no one may know or wants to know that Christianity is a great opportunity that God has given each and every one of us to prepare for eternity. It is a great, infinite opportunity, but it always requires our radical determination, free commitment, effort, hard work, and asceticism. Despite God’s mercy and help, we fail time and again due to our depravity and stupidity, sometimes with disastrous consequences (the Catholic Church in Slovenia is a case in point). We do not realise how anti-Christianity, manifested in anti-Catholicism, is also fatal for the future of our entire society. The institutions of the European welfare state merely express the secularised Christian ethos, particularly the understanding that every human being is the image of God and has inestimable value. This is why we still live better better than people in China, North Korea, India, or Japan. After Christianity was expelled from public discourse in modernity and communism tried unsuccessfully to destroy it by violence, we have now entered a second phase of secularisation. This is a real crisis. Why should persons be worth anything at all? Perhaps they are only worth as much as the market value of their body parts. Why should the weak and incompetent have any rights? Where is that written in nature, if nature is all we have and all we are? Commentators have noted that it is often unclear whether the lyrical subject of a particular poem is Trubar or the author. How much thought did you give to the structure of the collection in advance and as you went along? Did you perhaps consider a more obvious and solid framework than is apparent from the preface and from the note on the back cover, which is presumably not only humorous? Or even shifting to another literary genre? The ambivalence is intentional, and in my opinion it opens up various possibilities for interpretation. I therefore found the framework sufficiently (un)clear and the ironic self-criticism on the back cover convincing, to the extent that some people asked me what kind of idiot had written it. People probably think that poets are incapable of self-irony, and given our recent involvement in politics, I agree with them. I write poetry by first creating numerous fragments with no framework or broader context. Once these fragments begin to form larger wholes, I start thinking about the concept of the book, not as a framework external to the material, but in a way that is probably similar to how a sculptor discerns veins in stone. From what has emerged spontaneously, I try to discern a pre-existing image or dominant feature that comes to the fore both in content and form. Only then does Horace’s labor limae begin: the individual fragments get connected, smoothed out, changed, and transformed. Often, nothing remains of them. In your essay ‘The Poet and Science’ in the book Razbitje (Being Torn Apart), through interpretation of the poetry of Gregor Strniša, you indirectly write about science, focusing almost exclusively on the ontological content of poetry. ‘In poetry, against the backdrop of absolute mystery, the essence of my world is expressed, an essence which is the concrete only one and therefore also universal. […] My hypostasis, the only being, is reflected in poetry in such privileged places as the letters of Strniša’s poems.’ Despite its fundamental, even existential themes, the Primož Trubar Is Leaving Ljubljana collection is vivid and rich in expression and imagery. In many places, it is a pleasure to read and proof of the poet’s mastery. While a sophisticated aesthetic dimension is not an existential category, it is an important component of high art. How do you experience this as both a poet and a philosopher? In the essay ‘The Poet and Science’, I don’t focus only on the ontological content of poetry. The issue is more radical. There, I attempt to highlight the extremely privileged ontological status of poetry (in a broader sense, encompassing other arts), which is increasingly obscured in a world dominated by the myth of science. What is it about? You can only come to me through aisthesis or perception. I perceive you only as something that is, as existing. However, the being of your world – the only one you know and can know – the ‘how’ of everything, and the way everything exists in and through you, can only reach me via the astonishing transformation of aisthesis. This transformation expresses the apophatically non-existent being, rather than anything that exists. It expresses you as the only one. This happens through a language, image, or sound that tells me nothing and does not inform me, but which expresses this mysterious ‘non-being’ of your – only – being and, at the same time, the radical concreteness of who you are, through which exists everything that exists. In addition to reflecting the world, poetry expresses its opposite: absence, emptiness, and nothingness, as well as that which is woven from the reflection of the world and from this absence. Thus, poetic language is formed as a series of potentially infinite folds and metaphors that reach into the depths of the inner self and return this intimacy to the outside world. It reveals and communicates this intimacy to fellow human beings, who can sometimes accept it into themselves. How this is even possible is a great mystery. Those of us who, like Primož Trubar, believe that ‘Language – Logos – was with God and Language was God’ have a slight inkling of why. However, in the Primož Trubar collection, there are concepts that we experience or understand differently almost 450 years later. In the poem ‘Zrcalo II’ (Mirror II), we read: ‘That you live / leaves a mark on your forehead, / carved into your skin. It is tattooed / with sin, indelible.’ The poem goes on to say: ‘Death walks / like a teenager / with pert breasts. / She looks contemptuously at old men / and walks through the streets of Ljubljana.’ Does ‘sin’ have a different meaning for us (and for you personally) today than it did for Trubar? To the secularised Westerner of today, the word ‘sin’ seems to have almost no meaning, even though it has been preserved in Slovene phrases such as ‘it’s no sin to ask’ and ‘she’s worth a sin’. But deep down, perhaps we all know what it means – or we will soon find out. Sin is not a transgression, a moral error, or a violation of the law, even though it may manifest itself in these ways. It is also not a cause for irrational feelings of guilt or a burning conscience generated by one’s own traumas and fears. The place of sin is only before God, not before our fellow human beings, nor before ourselves. ‘Against You alone have I sinned’, says the psalmist. In essence, to understand what sin is, we need revelation. For Christians, the only place we can see how sinful we are is Golgotha, where God incarnate died pro nobis, hyper hemon, for us, in our place – and by our hand. There is my sin; that is how great my sin is. This horror is much deeper than the horror of nothingness. There is no way out of it. ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God’, as the Letter to the Hebrews says. The God-Man fell into His own hands instead of me. We are sinners insofar as we symbolically kill God, who has given us everything, in our daily lives by despising and scornfully rejecting the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount and all the parables of the Kingdom. We do this by not allowing God into our lives as kenotic Love. On this same cross, in a crazy reversal, He offers himself completely non-violently to faith. With the power of the Spirit, with the energy of the Resurrection, He frees us here and now from every sin, death, and evil. Like the ‘still wind’ heard by the prophet Elijah. This is how Trubar understood sin, and this is how I understand it too. Obviously, I am not quite ‘up to date’. In the poem Svoboda I (Freedom I), which ends with the beautiful line ‘Terrible prison, this freedom’, the subject could be either the historical Trubar or the contemporary Gorazd Kocijančič. Despite all the recognition you have received for your work, you live a rather secluded life within a circle that you have more or less (co)created. Is this loneliness, this ‘freedom’, a ‘prison’ or a privilege? The loneliness referred to in this poem is different from the seclusion I live in; in fact, it is the opposite. In other words, I consider my seclusion a privilege and a gift, even though it is also a choice. You are also detached from the university, which has been the ‘official’ home of philosophy for at least two centuries. What was your entry point into philosophy, and does it even exist without unconditionally entering a specific philosophy? In your case, is it the ‘birthplace of the fundamental insight of that logos about existence, that ontology which, in reflecting on its own origination, touched upon the mystery of the absolute, apophatic ‘Nothingness’, unbound by all determinations’? It’s true that I’m not involved with the university and have turned down several informal offers to become a professor there. There are three reasons for this. The first is simply a matter of character: from a young age, I have disliked classrooms and the idea of having to speak every week in public and even pretend that I know something. In fact, to reveal a secret, I know nothing at all. The thought of earning my living that way makes me anxious – there are many things I would rather do. This is probably a psychological flaw – basically, I want peace and quiet. On the other hand, however, I have never turned away any young person who wanted to talk with me about philosophy. The second reason is more substantive: I am convinced that philosophy as a ‘school discipline’, as an academic cerebral activity or conceptual gymnastics, is a terrible distortion of its original essence. The Greeks, who spent over a thousand years developing philosophy, had no schools in our sense, no academic titles, exams, or publication scores. You are amazed by reality; you think about it; you express your thoughts or write them down; someone else becomes interested; they come to you; and you socialise. This is the Greek philosophical ‘school’. You begin to live differently. That is all. But the ‘something’ that you think about is not arbitrary. The point of entry into philosophy is not just anything. Thought must place itself before the First and the Last, before the ultimate reality. Thought is capable of this; this is the incredible gift of thought. If I could explain my terms correctly, my definition of philosophy, which you quote, would be endorsed by Plato, Plotinus, Dionysius the Areopagite, Nicholas of Cusa, Vladimir Solovyov, Semyon Frank, Emmanuel Levinas, and Michel Henry. When reading their writings, I can only say ‘yes and amen’ – even though I use different words and inhabit a different place in the syntax of thought. True philosophy is eternal; it is the harmony of different voices listening to the infinite Mystery. ‘The wise call the one Reality by different names’, as the Upanishads say. Years ago, you gently mocked ‘spiritual-historical constructs that, by sleight of hand, connect thinkers from Plato to Marx into an inseparable chain’. This is potted philosophy, if it is philosophy at all. Apart from concepts and categories, does it have much in common with a genuine ‘love of wisdom’, or even with (‘woundedness by’) truth? No, it doesn’t. Here, too, things are getting worse. Entropy continues unabated. My irony that you mention was aimed at Heideggerian summaries of the history of Western thought as the ‘history of metaphysics’. Nowadays, Lacanianism has become the most influential school of thought in Slovenia. Without wishing to offend anyone – the Lacanians I know are nice people – it is an incomparably more barbaric anti-philosophy and pseudo-philosophy. Not only is Lacan a real dwarf in philosophical terms compared to Heidegger, but what’s more important is that both Heidegger and his students took the Western canon seriously. In his latest works, Tine Hribar has attempted to transcend Heidegger’s dogmatism, at least in some respects. Today, it is virtually impossible to find serious, erudite, sober, and intelligent interpretations of classical philosophical works in Slovenian, even though such interpretations are available elsewhere. At his best, Heidegger was able to truly listen to the texts of the past – for example, the Pre-Socratics, Aristotle, Kant, Schelling. and Hegel – and, in his lectures on the phenomenology of religious life, even some early Christian writings. However, Lacanianism, which has taken over almost all of the academic space in Ljubljana – the Department of Philosophy and the Institute of Philosophy at the Academy of Sciences and Arts – is not philosophy, but a sect. In fact, it is a ‘Slovenian version of Scientology’, as Slovenia’s harshest critic, Marko Bauer, wittily put it. Thus, in academic ‘philosophy’, there is less and less genuine wonder, questioning, strenuous study, humble reflection, intersubjectively binding argumentation, and awe of reality. When I was twenty, I sensed that Slovenian academic philosophy would collapse, and I wanted it to. Now, as I witness this collapse, I am not happy. Everything has become a game: a search for witty twists and clever ideas in a society of spectacle. When this is combined with resuscitation of communism and similar nonsense, we find ourselves in a land where there is no longer any logos. It is the twilight of reason. With the decline of phenomenology and hermeneutics in Ljubljana, the last hope for the institutional development of sound scholarship has disappeared. And that is at least a prerequisite for serious, systematic philosophical work. The flame of philosophy is kept alive by individuals, whether within or outside the institution, such as Branko Klun, Vid Snoj, Marko Uršič, Edvard Kovač, Boris Šinigoj, and Lenart Škof, albeit without wider influence. Although analytical philosophy is still a herald of reason, – or precisely for that reason, it clearly does not have enough power to resist. Pure charlatanism and conceptual hocus-pocus now prevail. A lack of existential seriousness, and a nihilistic ironising of both metaphysics and nihilism itself. Philosophical Houellebecq. No longer ‘from Plato to Marx’, but ‘Plato, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Alan Ford’, to quote the title of one of the more recent books of ‘philosophy’. Lord, have mercy. Although Razbitje (Being Torn apart) and its follow-up Erotika, Politika, itn. (Erotics, Politics, etc.) are a unique construction of a ‘system’, you also write poetry throughout. In Razbitje, you write in passing that ‘poets are masters of brevity’. Are these two separate aspects of your work, or are they complementary activities that precisely result from the starting point of your ‘system’ (with or without quotation marks?), offering an insight into ‘my hypostatic nature, which is triggered only by reflection on my origin and my end, on my radical limit’? I think it is the latter – these aspects are complementary – but as an author, I have no right to preclude different interpretations of my work. The matter is actually quite simple. When I write philosophical texts, even with essayistic ambitions, the demand for conceptual rigour and logical argumentation necessarily excludes the realm of the intimate, although it is essential to my philosophy. My hypostatic thinking is an intimate post-phenomenology. Radical personalism. But those ultimate paradoxes of feeling and wonder which are trimmed off in philosophy, find their place in poetry. This does not mean that people who want to read my poetry must first be familiar with philosophy. Many people do not enjoy conceptual thinking, and reach for a gun when they see the word ‘ontology’ for the first time. That’s OK. But I still want to say something to them. As a poet, I believe I can convey as much as I could as a philosopher. Towards the end of ‘Correspondence on Being(s)’ with Tine Hribar, in a kind of epilogue to Razbitje (the aptly titled poem ‘Pavza. Bolečina milosti’ [Pause. The Pain of Mercy], in which ‘Mutely // all things / break / into nothingness’), there is an unexpected thought: ‘The thing about my freedom is the following … either we extract the purity of good from the world – in which there is good and evil, and a multitude of positive and negative experiences intertwine – and transfer it to the Unnameable, as Plato or the evangelist John did; or we project the chiaroscuro of the historical into the radically Other, as Heidegger did.’ Isn’t this a kind of justification of personal freedom and responsibility as understood by classical liberalism? (Of course, with the realistic addition: ‘That this problem doesn’t work out is evident from these two examples: in the first, the calculation results in an charming deity but a painfully feeble theodicy; in the second, it has no problem with evil in the world, but in return, it obtains a rather frightening “God’’.’ This sentence could be understood as a ‘liberal’ justification of fideism or as the result of radical scepticism, which, for whatever dark reason, throws itself into the abyss of one faith or another. I am, of course, very sympathetic to the tradition of Christian scepticism, which has always been close to apophaticism, but the matter is much more complicated here. It is not true that Christians have no reasons for their faith, even if these reasons do not come before faith itself. Here is a radical place of freedom. This quote is a snapshot of this moment. However, when I surrender myself freely to the gospel in faith, my cognitive faculties become capable of discerning reasons. Paradoxically, this ‘after’ becomes ‘before’. Only when I purify my heart can I experience illumination and insight. However, this insight is valid precisely as insight, not as an a priori fixation. Plato and the evangelist John knew more than Heidegger. Few philosophers can write with complete confidence that ‘the passage from Heidegger’s letter to Mongis… appears to be a simple evasion or ignorance of late Greek (both pagan and Christian) thought (Plotinus, Proclus, Damascius, Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor…)’. Nevertheless, like Trubar, you live in your own historical space and time. Does this influence, inspire, or annoy you? Without a doubt, everything you mention. Sometimes it annoys me so much that I suggest to my wife that we leave everything behind and go somewhere – for example, to a Greek island or Germany, since we’re talking about Trubar – where I’ll work as a waiter, given that I speak a few languages, and we will live happily ever after. But my wife reassures me in jest that nowadays, no one would hire such an old, worn-out gentleman as a waiter. Above all, though, I enjoy my historical space and time. I travel through time every day, of course, but it is always a journey in the here and now. I enjoy socialising with my contemporaries and with the invisibly living, who ‘even being dead still speak’. Could a lover of books and music have been born in a better time than the age of piracy? We must never lose our gratitude for being given a few moments to experience this human adventure, with all its hardships and difficulties. Nor should we lose our gratitude for being given just a few moments to live. Some critics have noted that Primož Trubar Is Leaving Ljubljana also has political connotations; it is, in its own way, a political statement that responds to the present day. This is certainly true. It is better to write a few poetic curses than to waste time on the same old faces, empty words, and petty passions. I haven’t completely lost hope in the theurgic power of poetry. Perhaps we just need to find the right combination of letters and the right intention – and then some world will change. The interview was conducted by Boštjan Tadel. The Gospel offers an eternal vision Lucija Fabjančič: Good afternoon, Mr Kocijančič, and welcome, dear visitors! Today, we will have a more relaxed conversation, if that is OK with you. Gorazd Kocijančič: I am very pleased to be here with you. I hope we will have a pleasant time and that you will not be bored. I would also like the conversation to be relaxed. I am not a reserved person, so please feel free to ask me anything that interests you. Only then will our meeting have meaning. Izidor Benedičič: It is customary – and a good custom at that – to say a few words about the guest first. To begin with, we will read one of the poems from the collection Primož Trubar Is Leaving Ljubljana. Mysterium magnum I As you undress at night in our bedroom, you always tell me something: of no great importance, plain ephemeral things. Alas, this happens just as I’m washing myself and splashing water in the room next door & can’t hear you very well. I feel sorry for these words. They’re like love’s last will, but keep dripping into a void where we’re not together. Never shall I hear them, make sense of them. Likewise the Eternal uncovers Himself to me every night & whispers to me, but I can no longer hear Him. Because of my desire to cleanse myself with my own hands. L. F.: Initially, we intended to approach this in a slightly more formal manner in order to familiarise ourselves with your latest poetry collection. You wrote it as if you were looking through Trubar’s eyes. G. K.: Yes, it’s called in persona, which means that in the poetry, I am pretending to be Trubar, his person – he is my mask. L. F.: You have probably been asked this many times before, so I hope you don’t mind me asking. But why Trubar, and why this particular event – his departure from his homeland to Germany? G. K.: It’s very difficult to say when you get an idea like that. I didn’t start out thinking: ‘Now I’m going to write a collection of poems in which I imagine that I am Primož Trubar and that I am leaving Ljubljana’, and then actually start writing these poems. I write in such a way that the poetic fragments emerge gradually, and I don’t know where it will all end up or what it will become. Once enough material has accumulated, I consider how to shape this poetic material into a complete work of art – the inspiration largely ceases at this point, and a much more rational process begins. The aim is to collect this rough poetic material into a coherent body of work where it will be possible to discern a common thread running through it all. When I was confronted with the material that would become this collection of poems, I realised that the religious, Christian element was so strong that, without placing the poems in a different time, they would be perceived as religious poetry, a marginal genre in today’s poetic context – something that would not appeal to everyone. However, by shifting the context of the collection to another time, I distanced myself from the character who speaks in the poems. This allowed a larger number of readers to approach the message itself unencumbered. The distance between poet and lyrical subject creates a greater space for addressing the reader. Another important aspect for me is that this poetry also reflects on the meaning of literature, and ultimately on the meaning of our existence as a nation and our efforts to preserve our culture. At its core, there were two important things: to transcend and preserve the boundaries of the poetry of religious confession, and to raise the question of the meaning of language and literature. The third important thing is that my spiritual poetry often contains an element of protest, which is why I thought it was worth linking this collection to the most important figure in Slovenian Protestantism. As more threads came together, the idea crystallised that it would be good to put these poems in the mouth of the founder of Slovenian literature while simultaneously defamiliarising the author, who writes poems as we do today. Thus, two exchanges take place: I step into the Reformation and Trubar steps out of the past into the present. Perhaps that is a brief answer to your ‘why’. L. F.: Did you write as Trubar, as you imagined he would have written? Did you ever feel that he would have described certain things differently to how you did? G. K.: Let me answer with an example. The poem you just read captures a moment when my wife and I were going to bed and I heard her say something, but I didn’t quite understand. I wanted to capture this contemporary, intimate experience in writing. The second element of the poem is the fundamental insight of the Apostle Paul that man is not saved by his works, but by God’s grace. This is not specifically a Protestant doctrine, although it was controversially debated in the time of Luther and Trubar, but rather a biblical teaching and an important aspect of New Testament theology (emphatically emphasised in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, for example). Nevertheless, this doctrine came to the fore in Protestantism, and these ideas were emphasised in the 16th century – and so, unexpectedly, the elements of the poem came together. When two unexpected things come together, a poem is born – neither entirely yours nor entirely foreign. It is a flash of insight into an everyday, intimate experience which, at first, is not connected to Trubar and his private life, to which we have no access. Then, a connection is formed between two levels: intimate life and spirituality. Once you recognise this analogy, the work with language begins, the question of how to shape it into an effective poem, and then how to place that poem within a broader spiritual narrative. L. F.: For those unfamiliar with the collection, how should it be read? From beginning to end, or backwards? G. K.: The first option is fine, except for Jews – they read from the end to the beginning (laughter). The poems are in chronological order and depict events set on the night before Trubar’s expulsion from Ljubljana, before the day he left for Germany by wagon, after wandering around the city. Various moments and events are depicted, from washing in the bathroom and insomnia to visiting the children’s room and meeting friends. Alongside these everyday events, there are, of course, other, more metaphysical stories. Then Trubar sets off on his journey. The evening before his departure and the beginning of the journey itself are marked by despair and pessimism. Everything he has done is crumbling to dust; his work has not borne fruit. However, roughly in the middle of his travel and in the middle of the collection, he experiences an inner enlightenment when he realises the spiritual meaning of his work and failure. This is the essence of these poems, their Christian message, even: the triumph of failure, victory in the midst of defeat. The triumph of suffering and the triumph of the cross: external failure can mean internal victory. Trubar relives the story of Christ, experiencing enlightenment himself, and the final part of the collection thus becomes a kind of hymn, a poetic expression of the essence that has been revealed to him. This is the framework, and I hope that within it, each individual poem also has its own significance. L. F.: Does anyone have any questions at this point? Jože Kurinčič: I read the collection from the end, like the Jews, and I must say that I was very impressed by the ending. There is a kind of review of the collection on the cover. In it, the reviewer asks: ‘Isn’t it a waste of paper for such ‘rubbish’?’ It was precisely this provocative self-criticism that drew me to read the collection. G. K.: This self-review is ironic. I wanted to anticipate and poke fun at the usual objections raised in the world of secularist Slovenian critics against activities such as writing spiritual poetry. Tone Homar: I am interested in the final part of the Lord’s Prayer specifically. How would you comment on the words: ‘Lead us not into temptation.’ Does God tempt us, as we know that Jesus was tempted by the devil and that God allowed the devil to tempt Job? And what evil does He deliver us from? G. K.: I understand this part of the Lord’s Prayer as a request that brings me back to humility, an acknowledgement that I will not be able to withstand a severe trial beyond my strength. It is an attitude of elementary humility; an acknowledgement that I am not a superman. I have faith, but I am aware of my weakness. Lord, do not test me; do not put me in a situation where my fragility would be exposed! I believe that God sets everything straight and that His providence guides everything that happens. In the Gospel, Jesus himself says that not even a sparrow falls to the ground without the Father’s will. In the Lord’s Prayer, I humbly ask not to find myself in a situation where I appear weak, fragile, or worthless, which is what I really am. That is the first point. Secondly, the genitive form toû poneroû can be understood as neuter or masculine, as ‘evil’ or ‘the evil one, the devil’, but in the New Testament sense it – at least in my opinion – clearly refers to the latter. Translating it as ‘evil’ is essentially a consequence of our modern desire to secularise New Testament demonology. Demons appear everywhere in the New Testament, but today they are nowhere to be found except perhaps in movies like The Exorcist. They are rarely spoken of even in the Church, and nowhere to be found in public discourse. The question, of course, is how to understand this demonology. However, I believe that by closing ourselves off to the possibility that there is an evil that is not necessarily a person in the common sense of the word, but nevertheless strangely similar to a person, we have exposed ourselves to great danger. They say that the devil’s first trick is to convince people that he does not exist. Question from the audience: I am interested in whether Primož Trubar’s Protestantism in the collection corresponds to your faith. G. K.: Personally, I see myself primarily as a Christian who transcends narrow confessionalism, even though I am Catholic and attend Mass in a Catholic church. I was baptised in the Catholic Church at the age of nineteen. However, I am interested in different Christian traditions. Besides German mysticism, I am particularly interested in the Christian East, Byzantine spirituality, and the Greek Fathers. I have spent a lot of time studying these subjects. At one point, I was also extremely attracted to Protestant thought, especially through my study of Karl Barth, who is widely regarded as the most important theologian of the 20th century. Barth wrote two incredibly interesting works: the first is maybe the most influential theological book of the last century, his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, and the second is a comprehensive dogmatic work that he did not manage to complete. The Logos Publishing House has published a shorter version of the first commentary in Slovene, but it cannot compare to the longer version. This was a truly incredible, explosive theology. Karl Barth wanted to read Paul’s letter as a text that brings the word of salvation, taking it absolutely seriously. The fundamental provocativeness of his commentary lies in the fact that he turns what Paul says about the Jews in the Epistle to the Romans against contemporary Christianity and the modern-day Church. For Barth, everything Paul says about the desire to justify oneself by one’s works applies also to Kulturchristentum (cultural Christianity, Christendom), i.e. a Christianity that no longer knows whether it is a faith or not; a Christianity that is merely a collection of traditions in which we may feel comfortable – something left to us by our ancestors, which we respect but no longer believe in. Barth questions this strange mixture, which is familiar to us in Slovenia, with the power of the radical explosion of the Word of God: the Gospel, which condemns such an attitude. Through Barth, I discovered the power of Protestantism and realised that Protestant thinkers had expressed ideas not present in other Christian traditions, or at least not to the same extent. These ideas are very important for Christianity as a whole. In this way, I tried to engage with Slovenian Protestant authors and the dimension of the Christian tradition that should be relevant to all Christians. We need to recognise the interesting aspects of this evangelical attitude, despite its differences with the Catholic tradition, and appreciate its enduring appeal. L. F.: As we’ve said, this is spiritual poetry, but the collection also contains socially critical poems. Could Izidor read one of those? In the morning, when everyone is just waking up, I want a fairy-tale atmosphere, but I’m afraid of voices. They always ruin everything. I want a festive atmosphere. Details that smell of this land – without people. I want… But all I get is only sanctimonious claptrap, a swarm of empty eyes and I watch acquaintances who writhe like snakes. When I leave this land, I return from the bowels of something rotten and sweet that thinks of itself that it will last forever. L. F.: Well, this poem may not be so obvious, but elsewhere Trubar is extremely critical of the Slovenian people, sometimes even bitter. What is your view of the role of poets, or intellectuals in general, in society? Should they primarily seek out flaws in every system and point them out, or should they also be positively engaged and advocate for change? G. K.: It is true, social criticism is evident in many of the poems, especially in the first part of collection. As I said, these are poems of pessimism and despair. But that’s not the whole story. In principle, I certainly approve of poets being socially engaged and using their words to do as much good as possible in society and change it for the better. The question is how poets should communicate this and engage with society to help improve it. It seems to me that the structure of my collection allows social criticism to be expressed on behalf of the spiritual. Spirituality is precisely what is lacking today. Everywhere in the press, on the radio or on television, you hear that there is no vision, that no one really knows what we want or which direction to take. There is no real programme or general direction in Slovenia or elsewhere. Trubar knows what a programme is and what a vision is, not because he has his own vision, but because he knows that the gospel he believes in is an eternal vision. In the name of the Gospel, he can therefore criticise social reality. He can be radically critical without being accused of merely grumbling without offering any solutions. Here, in the Gospel, there is an eternal solution. The problem with criticism is always where it comes from and what its foundation is. Personally, I have never responded to political events in society with direct political commentary or criticism, as many writers do these days. I have never been a party member or voted. However, this does not mean that I am apolitical; I care deeply about what is happening in society. I think about it a lot. I try to use my modest powers to change society for the better within the limits of what I know about the world and in the micro-segment where I can do something. The fundamental question for a writer is therefore how to channel their energy into engagement and express social criticism in a meaningful way, so that it does not remain an empty repetition of what we all already know. Question from the audience: You mentioned that writers, especially recently, are very politically responsive and active. It seems that your criticism does not align with these rebellious forms of social criticism, which verge on the revolutionary. How do you view the public response to your work? Clearly, you are proposing different solutions. G. K.: Let me answer the second question first. The award itself indicates that a significant proportion of the critical public has begun to accept my work as a poet. However, that doesn’t mean that those who gave me the award agree with my political views. The situation here is quite complicated. I understand why my fellow poets in the writers’ association are protesting against the current government. I also respect their commitment. I know the abolition of the Ministry of Culture6 is the reason for their anger, as it was an extremely inappropriate political move by the right-wing authorities. Artists feel they have to defend themselves, and that’s normal. So why am I not participating in these protests? It is clear to me that behind the entire uprising lies a naive Enlightenment rationalism and a belief in the goodness of human nature, combined with a left-wing rhetoric that I personally find distasteful. This leads to the conviction that those of us who protest are fundamentally good people. Those in power are corrupt; we are good. That’s how everyone sees themselves. If you watch the protesters in person or on TV, you’ll notice that each one is convinced that they are incredibly honest and intelligent. However, even a basic Christian understanding of human nature, of our fragility and stupidity, and our ability to be led astray, tells us that this is not the case; that we are all flawed and that it is unwise to rely on any social group, even a protest movement, as if it consisted entirely of good and honest people. Question from the audience: Is your view of the state of the Slovenian spirit similar to Trubar’s? Is it pessimism or optimism? For example, there is a kind of despair about the Slovenian nation at the beginning, but no concrete solutions are offered. However, your portrayal of Trubar also shows a certain optimism, and at the end of the collection he expresses his trust in the Slovenian people. G. K.: Ultimately, Trubar discovers love, not only trust. Love overcomes pessimism. What he lacks in the first part of the collection, just as he lacks radical criticism, is love. ‘Love’ is a powerful word, but it is also overused, which is why I don’t like to use it. But this is not about sentimentality… Ultimately, Trubar realises that Slovenians are just people. Despite everything they have done to him, he loves them. Suggestion from the audience: Perhaps we could read the poem entitled ‘Register und summarische Inhalt’ at this point: Now I no longer believe in you. I gaze at you gazing at me. Breath, sense, abyss, one God only. I gaze at you blindly, being in your gaze. You are the only one. Now I must try hard to believe in this gentle-cruel world of yours & in my fleeting soul to stop them from disappearing without a goodbye like late-season snow in the early sun. I. B: Reading this reminded me of Pascal’s thoughts on the story of Isaac and Jacob. I wonder if this is the same idea. G. K.: It’s difficult to say whether it’s the same thing. In Pascal, it’s about the contrast between the God of reason – the God of rationalists, philosophers, and theologians – and the spiritual experience, a mystical fire. In my poem, it is from the very beginning a matter of faith, of a mystical experience so powerful that it makes the world disappear. However, the lyrical subject wants to preserve the world and knows that he must do so precisely because of his faith. At the same time, however, there is a twist in this poem. The register of faith that opens up in Pascal appears to vanish at the outset of this poem (‘I no longer believe in you’). Here, faith in the fire of mystical experience reveals itself as deeper spiritual knowledge and absolute certainty. Thus there may indeed be an analogy between this poem and Pascal’s turn from the God of philosophy to the God of the Bible. Question from the audience: I would like to return to social engagement. Do you ever find yourself in a conflict of roles, torn between your identity as a poet, someone who distances themselves from current politics and social issues, and your identity as a philosopher? Every political elite and every political movement has its own philosophy. As a spiritually awakened philosopher, do you feel it is necessary to be actively involved in politics in order to provide much needed guidance with your comments? G. K.: Well, I am very distant from concrete forms of political activity. As I said, I even ignore basic ‘civic duties’, but I am intensely engaged with these issues intellectually. In my latest philosophical book, I wrote a long essay on politics. The book is titled Erotika, Politika itn. (Erotics, Politics, etc.). There I address political experience and attempt to develop a phenomenology of what gives rise to our political engagement. I speak very specifically about these issues and the questions we face at a social level. This is not a non-committal philosophical abstraction. We are unable to think about politics in a sufficiently complex and genuine way. I see this as a major problem. I am convinced that truly effective political action requires rigorous prior reflection; without it, all political activity is delusional and ultimately irrational. Every day, we witness the irrational forces that influence our politics. If someone tried to assess these forces rationally, they would say, ‘These people are crazy; this is not normal.’ But these are the forces that shape our external lives. I am personally interested in another level. For example, what are political passions really, and where do they come from? How is my political identity shaped by society? Why am I enthusiastic about a particular party or leader? I am primarily interested in the pure phenomenology of political phenomena. Jože Kurinčič: In this regard, I find the two interviews you gave after receiving the Prešeren Fund Award particularly interesting. I am referring to the interviews on the MMC website and in the magazine Pogledi. Both had a considerable political impact. I’ve had the feeling that, since their publication, there have not been such pronounced attacks on the Church as we used to experience before. It seems to me that these two interviews, especially the one in Pogledi, had an extremely strong influence on the Slovenian spiritual and political spheres. This was achieved through your manner of communication. For example, you said something like this: ‘People outside the Church who talk about Christians and the Church, and who criticise the Church, don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t share our thoughts, and they don’t know us.’ In my opinion, no one in Slovenia had expressed it this way before, and this clear language has a very strong impact in the political arena as well. G. K.: Thank you very much for the compliment. That is precisely the kind of political activity I agree with and try to engage in. If what you say is true, that is exactly what I would like to achieve in my political life: to say something meaningful at a certain moment that hits home and moves things forward. I don’t want to play some kind of power game or tug-of-war; I want to bring about real change for the better. Things can certainly change in that direction, but how can this be achieved? How can you find the right words to lead to the right actions? That is definitely the kind of politics that interests me. Question from the audience: Recently, Škofijska strela, our discussion group, organised a roundtable debate here to celebrate the 20th anniversary of our school. At the end, we asked ourselves what we could do in light of the current societal crisis. What needs to be changed first for things to move forward? G. K: The crisis is certainly a problem, but first we should ask ourselves what kind of person feels they are in a crisis. We live in a dangerous world. We could disappear in a matter of seconds – our existence is inherently dangerous and precarious. The fact that we spend a single day in peace is a blessing and a gift that we often take for granted, but that does not make it any less real as gift. This supposed crisis, or our feeling that we are in a crisis because of something alarming that happened in the banking sector or because of problems in the economy, which has made us feel more uncertain, is ontologically insignificant. The first step in resolving the crisis is recognising that there is no crisis; it is essentially just an ideological construct. Secondly and paradoxically, we must realise that our lives are in a much worse crisis than we can imagine. There is no crisis, but the crisis that does exist is infinitely worse than what is discussed on television and radio. The real solution is to free yourself from concern for material things so that you are no longer a slave to the economic sphere. This does not mean that you are not concerned about the poverty and hardship experienced by others, but rather that deep down you realise that this is not the only thing that determines human existence. You must also be aware of a more fundamental crisis that affects your life and the lives of your fellow human beings at every moment: the crisis of being torn between nothingness and God, between destruction and Truth. In other words, we must all be aware of how everyday talk of crisis distracts us from reality. On a purely economic level, this talk is often highly hypocritical. Our economic problem is simple but, unfortunately, unsolvable. Recently, a building collapsed in Bangladesh where girls were sewing for a wage of €40 a month. However, if we have opted for a global market, this means that wages will slowly begin to equalise. In two years’ time, workers in Bangladesh will be earning €50 instead of €40, and workers in Europe will be earning correspondingly less. However, this kind of crisis is merely the slow triumph of justice. For so long, the Western world has been stealing from Asia, China, Latin America, and so on, and now it will have to pay something back. It’s simple math; it’s the most natural thing in the world. There is no way around it other than abandoning the global market and closing off with borders and taxes, which could lead to isolation and regression. In short, any discussion of the crisis that fails to acknowledge these facts and accept that this will continue is a lie. Following the demise of ideologies, fear is the only thing holding society together, which is why we will experience it in ever stronger doses. Only frightened people can be easily governed. Question from the audience: I wasn’t really thinking about the financial crisis. It seems to me that, to use a bit of a cliché, it is a crisis of meaning and values, and that nothing has any purpose anymore. G. K: That’s true; everyone today is tormented by the question of meaning. I am preoccupied with this myself and ask myself: What am I doing in this world? What could I do? What more could I do? I once read a quote by a Russian monk that I find crucial in this context: ‘Find your peace and you will save thousands of people.’ When we think about what we can achieve in our lifetime and how we will help others, it is often because we have not found that fundamental peace within ourselves – reconciliation with God, with ourselves, with our neighbours and the people we meet… Without this, we are walking a path that will not take us very far. I am absolutely convinced that what is crucial for today’s world is for individuals to find their spiritual peace. This peace is not just a psychological state; it is a spiritual reality and, philosophically speaking, an ontological event. Such peace attracts others and heals them, slowly restoring their confidence in the meaning of life. It is an incredibly difficult task. I haven’t solved it myself. However, I know that it is fundamental: ‘Find your peace and you will save thousands.’ L. F.: Hmm… G. K.: Not satisfied? L. F.: I don’t know. I always thought something more concrete was needed. I suggest the audience reads the aforementioned interviews, which don’t talk much about this collection of poems. One is titled ‘Anti-Catholicism is the Slovenian equivalent of anti-Semitism’ and the other ‘Ethics cannot be invented as a new fashion’. What’s in the interviews seems very concrete to me. G. K.: What does? L. F.: Reading them, I understood that you think culture is now taken for granted as a value, and that people believe they could still live normally even without culture. I don’t think culture is valued enough. How could we come to value it more? I also found interesting what you said about ‘pure’ literature and how the West wants to purify it from spirituality. G. K.: Look, what you’re saying about culture is tragic, but true. People can live without culture, or with a very low form of it. Let’s be honest: a large part of Slovenia has practically no culture. Many are satisfied with this; their culture consists of watching bad Hollywood movies or TV series, listening to Radio Veseljak (folk-pop), and so on. The problem is how to change this. Because there is basically no human answer. In my opinion, no school can help with this and no one can really reach you only with words. People have to experience two things: hunger and disgust. Disgust for what is currently there – the banality, the corruption, the emptiness – and hunger for something else. This question is so profound that we’re entering the realm of metaphysics – it is something that can’t really be induced. As teachers, are you able to do so? Question from the audience: What should we do to induce it? G. K.: The problem, as I said, is that, in my opinion, this cannot be done. The only things that help here are kindness and not giving up. I wanted to say that these things are beyond our power. We probably need to return to the Lord’s Prayer, as we were discussing, and acknowledge our own weakness. You can’t convince people that spirituality and culture make you happy. And not just you; it’s something universal and important because people need to experience things that are far more interesting than anything they’ve experienced before in order to become truly human. How do you make people feel that real culture and spirituality can make them happy? L. F.: Right now, I have in my head those words that we always hear: ‘We have to figure something out’. So I’m looking for solutions, but I can’t find them. G. K.: Well, you really have to come up with something… L. F.: But if, according to you, there’s hardly anything that can be done, how can we figure something out? G. K.: No, I didn’t say that. Those are two different things. I believe things can be done; they can be changed – even very radically. Many people achieve great things. But I maintain that the right path, if there is one, is through spirituality – not spirituality in general, but specifically through your own spirituality. In short, if you ask me how you, as a girl with good intentions, can save the world, I’ll tell you: ‘First admit that you can’t.’ Good intentions are not enough. That doesn’t mean I want you to give up, though. Question from the audience: It seems to me that there is a big problem here because we are unable to face our own struggles. From infancy onwards, we are wrapped in cotton wool and then left at the mercy of this instant culture. We are always a little dazed, and then actually paralysed by it. G. K.: Of course, I absolutely agree. I recently read a book by the renowned German biblical scholar Klaus Berger entitled ‘New Testament Spirituality’. I was surprised to find that one chapter is about patience. According to Berger, patience is one of the essential ingredients of New Testament spirituality. This is something we completely forget today. He argues that contemporary instant culture is characterised by such a high level of impatience that it has become absurd. What we are experiencing is constant haste. Berger then elaborates that impatience is the essence of sin. Therefore, it is a sin to want something sooner rather than waiting for it to mature. I find this a very profound thought that actually touches on fundamental social issues today. Jože Kurinčič: One more slightly more personal question. I don’t know if this is the right place to answer it – you can decide for yourselves. What made the nineteen-year-old Gorazd Kocijančič, who was certainly promising and talented, decide to be baptised? Apart from God’s grace, of course. G. K.: Apart from God’s grace, nothing really happened, not in terms of spectacular spiritual events. Life was just life, with its joys, but also its mistakes and disappointments. Given that I grew up in a completely non-Christian environment, the fact that God drew me to Him is incredibly strange. I can only see that now. When I think about it seriously, I am filled with the feeling expressed in the New Testament: ‘If you could do this to me, you could also make Abraham’s children out of stones.’ I have no merit, no special talents, nothing. Something happens to you and a desire simply arises, a feeling that there are things that interest you and are important and decisive for you, somewhere – and increasingly concretely. You realise that you need salvation. And you sense the direction. That’s it. Now, I marvel at this with awe and gratitude. Question from the audience: Didn’t you write somewhere that your grandmother passed her faith on to you? G. K.: No, neither my grandmother nor anyone else in my family. One grandmother sometimes went to church, but we never talked about it. My ignorance of Christianity lasted a long time. I read Hegel before I read the Gospels. I. B: I’m also interested in another aspect of your personal life. In an interview, you said that you spent 24 hours a day translating Plato for a couple of years. Surely you did other things as well? How did you find time for your family and spiritual life? G. K.: Well, if I actually said that, it was said in jest. When I was younger, I could sleep a little less, but I’m too old for that now – I already feel tired. When it comes to more demanding work, such as translating Plato or the Bible, or working with extensive original texts and books, above all you must be disciplined. Perhaps it would be beneficial for you young people to hear this. Discipline is essential. Not destructive discipline that exhausts you, but having a solid structure to your day or week. It means structuring your life and persevering, knowing what you are doing at any given time – what you are doing in the afternoon, what you are doing in the morning – and not deviating from this unless it is really necessary. It is also important to maintain islands of free time, solitude, and silence. As for family life, my children grew up with Plato. They used to climb all over me while I was translating. Serious theoretical or artistic work does not require reclusive asceticism. I: B.: One more question. It’s not philosophical, but maybe it is relevant to you as a philosopher. What do you think the point of a formal philosophical education is? As I understand it, philosophy is a kind of wisdom that comes from life and practical experience. How do you see it? Does a formal philosophical education make any sense at all? G. K.: It’s the same as with any kind of formal education. The thing about philosophy is that, if you understand it broadly as a love of wisdom, then formal education is not necessary. In other words, if you understand it as a love of wisdom and would also like to read some fundamental texts, then you can certainly do that without formal study. However, philosophy as a academic discipline has many different areas of study and is very intellectually demanding; it requires an interest in theory. You also need the ability to think abstractly and conceptually. Linguistic competence is also required. Therefore, it is a very specialised discipline and you need to consider how much it really interests and appeals to you. Many students enrol in the philosophy course at the Faculty of Philosophy in the first year, but only ten remain in the second year. Those who drop out are probably looking for the meaning of life. Students who are only interested in these broader questions usually give up quickly. You simply have to learn formal logic, the history of philosophy, and lots of different terminology from various philosophical schools. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Even if you have spiritual aspirations and want to study and think about traditional spiritual topics, you still need to express them within the intellectual context of contemporary philosophy. Only someone who has absorbed and processed this can speak with real confidence in today’s public arena. This is the significance of the formal study of philosophy. Above all, however, do not be frustrated by the fact that you will not receive a formal philosophical education unless you decide to study it. Do not let this take away your joy in reading and engaging with philosophical texts. Every human being is called to a fundamental love of wisdom, and everyone can find in the spiritual history of humanity works that will greatly enrich their lives. One more thing: the language used by people unfamiliar with contemporary philosophy is really often just chatter and babbling – an abstract rambling about with concepts. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that people today understand and express themselves through this kind of rambling. The complex forms of modern jargon express who people are at the present time. In very exaggerated, diluted and abstract ways – but that’s just who we are. If you can’t absorb it, it’s difficult to contribute anything meaningful in the modern context. Jernej Pisk: In one of your interviews, you said that prayer is the only thing that interests you now. Could you explain that a little more? G. K.: I would refer back to what I said earlier to Lucija. In my opinion, the path to real change in others is discovering one’s own peace. I am convinced that this peace can only be achieved through prayer. Not by talking or babbling about it, but by entering the school of great men and women of prayer and important spiritual teachers. Unfortunately, there are very few of them left alive. This is a great crisis for the Slovenian and European Church. It is terribly sad. The Church used to be a school of prayer, and that was its main purpose. And that is still its main purpose. It is through prayer that you will find inner peace. This is the real answer to the crisis. This doesn’t mean praying for higher economic growth next year, but rather maintaining spiritual peace in all circumstances so that you can experience God’s presence even in the midst of disasters. This must be learned. It is a practice; it is like skiing or swimming. You simply need to devote time to prayer and persevere with it. Reading about it is helpful, but, of course, it is better if you can find a wise person to advise you. In the past, priests were teachers of prayer, but nowadays they prefer to deal with other matters. Question from the audience: In this context, could we say that the contemporary, modern world is regressing in comparison to earlier forms of life? G. K.: The fact is that we are making unimaginable progress in some areas, practically from year to year, while we are also, of course, regressing in others. We can see this regression when we read Meister Eckhart, for example. He alone would be a sufficient reason for me to be a Catholic. He was out of grace with the Church for centuries, but Pope Benedict XVI rehabilitated him when he was still Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Read Eckhart! I cannot summarise his teachings in my own words. You can immediately see the spiritual problems of his time in his work, and how he responded to them. His spirituality is so profound that people in churches today would not understand it at all. It’s not that they wouldn’t understand the answer; they wouldn’t be able to grasp what it’s all about, they wouldn’t be able to understand the question Eckhart is answering. Such concrete examples illustrate the truly incredible decline in the quality of spiritual life in Europe. Voice from the audience: Having listened to you and read about you, I see you as a challenge and an exceptional person who approaches everything he does and says from within, thus getting to the essence. Nothing is ad hoc. I was reminded of this when we were talking about philosophy earlier. In one of the aforementioned interviews, you also mentioned that the position of academic philosophy in Slovenia is rather dismal. You said that there are few individuals who are truly philosophers and who really think about the world, humanity and God. I recently came across one of your books of conversations with various people in the National Library. There, you constantly show your desire to elicit what these people really think rather than what this or that philosopher or theory says. I think that is a great virtue of yours. G. K.: Thank you very much for your kind words. The point is that people are important to me, not systems. In the philosophical system I am currently developing, the person – or ‘hypostasis’, as I call it – has fundamental significance. It’s not just about showing that people are important; it’s about showing that people actually constitute the world. The world is ontologically based on persons. Question from the audience: Did you encounter any problems with the limitations of the Slovenian language when translating Plato’s Republic? I am thinking in particular of the word ‘justice’. Do you know anyone in Slovenia today who would be willing or able to step into Socrates’ shoes? Perhaps you? G. K.: I hope you’re not predicting the same end for me as Socrates (laughter). As for translation… You know the joke? Translations are like women: if they’re faithful, they’re not beautiful; if they’re beautiful, they’re not faithful. The Italians say traduttore – traditore: ‘The translator is a traitor.’ Translators navigate between different language systems where every word has a different semantic range and is, of course, never completely equivalent to the word being translated. In Greek philosophy, ‘justice’ is not as problematic a concept as some others. The Slovenian language has retained the idea of distributive justice in the term ‘pravičnost’ (justice). In other words, justice is ensuring that everyone gets what is their due. This concept is more problematic in the New Testament, however. There, justice is no longer the same thing. Joseph, for example, did not renounce his right to publicly reject Mary because she was pregnant because he was ‘just’ in our sense of the word. Had he been just in the ancient Greek sense, he probably would have rejected her. In the Semitic world, ‘righteous’ also means ‘merciful’ and ‘compassionate’. Turning to the second question: who would be Socrates in Slovenia today? I am not disheartened by the lack of critical intellectuals in Slovenia; many are trying to move society in the right direction by asking provocative questions. However, Socrates was more than just a man who walked around ‘bothering’ people and criticising ideology. He had a deep, hidden knowledge of the mysteries of humanity and the human soul. This is the dimension that is most lacking today. In short, social criticism is not enough; we have plenty of critics, and that is a good thing. The problem lies elsewhere, in the question of why we lack insight into our purpose, our calling, our essence. Jernej Pisk: Finally, perhaps this: it will soon be the twentieth anniversary of this school. What would you like this school to offer its students? What would you expect us teachers to convey to these students? How can we teach them to be Christians today and in twenty or fifty years’ time? Is it possible to guide young people now? Do you have any ideas? G. K: I have never taught; I have an innate aversion to school. As a student, I ran away from high school at sixteen and took differential exams, which were possible at the time, so I could enrol at the Faculty of Philosophy. I practically started studying at the age of seventeen. The two years I spent in high school were a pretty traumatic period in my life. Why? I never really thought about it much; I just tried to forget. I think the problem with high school is that young people are taught things that they feel are irrelevant to their future lives. That’s a serious problem. People need to believe in the meaning of what they do – it’s a basic requirement of humanity. Without that connection, it’s a terribly disheartening experience. Of course, this is incredibly difficult, and in our externalised world, schools alone cannot achieve much. In a Christian school, I would say the most important thing is sincere kindness. Above all, those of you in positions of power should be kind to children, which is probably very difficult at times. I have two sons. The older one has already graduated, and the younger one is halfway through his studies. They both struggled in high school, but did very well at university and got very good grades. So, based on my experience, I believe there must be something wrong with our high school system. Voice from the audience: Initially, there was much discussion about the current pessimistic atmosphere in Slovenia and the lack of a clear vision for the future. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on our president Borut Pahor’s efforts to find a Vision 2030, and whether you’ve been following these meetings in the media, and what various intellectuals, such as theologian Mr Stres and medical doctor Mr Ihan, have said at them. G. K.: I only saw a short TV report on this, so I don’t know exactly what it’s about. However, I have to say that I find the idea rather lame. In my opinion, it’s a futile gesture and a marketing ploy to say, ‘Now we’ll gather all the smart people in Slovenia and form a common vision.’ No vision can be achieved in this way. A student from the audience: A constant problem at our school is Latin, and perhaps Greek as well. You are a specialist… G. K: Why would classical languages be problematic? Student: Because students say, ‘We’ll never use this. What’s the point?’ G. K: That’s a mistake. You have to help the students discover the meaning of studying these languages for themselves. To tie in with the previous question, for me, Greek and Latin are two of the greatest joys in life. I consider myself very lucky to be able to read in these languages. This is certainly not universal, and it would never occur to me to try to convince everyone that this would make them happy in life. However, I also believe that I am not alone and that there are others among you who would be just as interested in this, if not more so. The problem is probably how to find students for classical schools who would be genuinely attracted to this field. The initial problem is how to generate interest or, right from the outset, select individuals who would be genuinely interested and whose lives could be greatly enriched by knowledge of classical languages. Question from the audience: You can say that about Greek and Latin, but what about Christianity? That’s supposed to be universal. G. K.: Of course it should be universal, but the problem today – the problem that young people feel most acutely – is that we cannot simply assume the universality of Christianity. It can only ever be a goal, not a starting point. All your students will probably experience serious spiritual and intellectual crises. It’s a mistake to think that we can organise a school where we’ll become Christians quickly and easily, where the truth is clear to us and we’ll remain Christians forever… This cannot prepare students for real hardships. It is better to be aware of the real situation and help these young people find their way in life, and perhaps ultimately find their real shelter. L. F.: Thank you very much for coming. I think we all enjoyed opening up. G. K.: Thank you very much for listening so attentively. The discussion took place at the Diocesan Gymnasium in the Dr Anton Breznik Library. It was conducted by Lucija Fabjančič and Izidor Benedičič. Conversations with contemporaries: Gorazd Kocijančič In the media, your name is often accompanied by the labels ‘philosopher’, ‘translator’, ‘poet’, and ‘publicist’, but you say that you are primarily a mediator of faith who tries also to articulate it strictly philosophically and express it artistically. Could you please explain this in more detail? Oh dear, we’ve started on a serious note! I haven’t been a publicist for a long time, but alongside philosophy, translation, and poetry writing, one of my main tasks is editing the Logos book series. This takes up a lot of my time, but it also gives me great satisfaction. For fifteen years, we have been presenting important works of spirituality, thought, and poetry, as well as original writing. I have also started editing the Textus Recepti book series at the National and University Library, which aims to present central works of literature that have been read in Slovenia but do not have an appropriate Slovenian translation or commentary. But the focus of your question is elsewhere. I would be very happy to pass on my faith to others, as it brings spiritual peace and deep happiness. After all, I come from a family of medical doctors and would like to help others in my own way. Unfortunately, I do not have the power to do so. I have only produced a large body of texts – translations, philosophical texts and poems – which may enable readers to become acquainted with how believers (including, least importantly, myself) experience and interpret reality. Whether someone then embarks on the personal adventure that is faith – which is certainly decisive and life-changing – is entirely up to them and God’s grace. Or rather, it is entirely up to their own free choice, because while God’s grace is necessary for faith, it is given to everyone. In what sense are you talking about faith? There is certainly room for misunderstanding here. Nowadays, people often understand faith in God as faith in a supremely exalted being with glorious attributes – an ethereal being that we can imagine, or at least conceive of. Some believe that this benevolent being exists, while others are convinced that it does not – after all, there is so much evil in the world, and bad things happen to good people and vice versa – and that it is a figment of the imagination. The fallacy here lies in the starting point. Whatever we can imagine, conceive or define conceptually is really not God, but an idol. This is the teaching of all great spiritual traditions, including Christianity. ‘Every thought about God creates an idol’, wrote St Gregory of Nyssa. Even our highest categories – Being, the One, pure Spirit, and so on – are misleading. This is the problem with rationalistic metaphysics and overly intellectualised theology, both of which we have largely (and fortunately) overcome in Christianity today. At the same time, for all great spiritual traditions, and for Christianity in particular, the whole of creation is a sign and a symbol of this inexpressible Mystery. It is a ‘theophany’, as they used to say. The elusive obviousness of meaning. If we wish to discern God’s mystery through these signs, even through the thick veil of evil and suffering, we must renounce ourselves and all our thoughts and ideas. Therefore, faith is not fundamentally about believing that certain dogmatic statements are true, but rather about surrendering oneself and abandoning oneself to an incomprehensible, absolute, ultimate Reality. It is a personal experience of the closeness of the perfect Mystery from which we and everything originate. So where does Christianity fit in? You are right; there is nothing specifically Christian in what I have said. This was the faith of the great ‘pagans’ whose texts I have also translated – from the great Pre-Socratics through Plato to Proclus – and it was the faith of the Hebrews too: that God is qadosh, which means precisely that he is different from everything else; that ‘his ways are not our ways, and his thoughts are not our thoughts’, as the prophet Isaiah says. However, Christianity begins and ends with an Event in history, even though this Event is merely a manifestation of the Unchangeable. Even though we can only conceive of God through infinitely poor approximations and metaphors, this does not mean that we cannot live with Him and in Him. While it is true that we all ‘live and move and have our being’ in Him, as the Apostle Paul says in the Acts of the Apostles, I am talking about a different kind of closeness: an extremely intimate union with the inner life of God. This is not universal, but particular: a paradoxical possibility. This is ‘salvation’, and it is what God makes possible for us, as we Christians believe, through his revelation in Jesus – an event in which he remains hidden as God, even more so than before the incarnation, as Dionysius the Areopagite writes – and then through sacred scripture, the sacraments, and the sacred liturgy. While I do not believe these are the only channels of grace – God’s mystery is too vast for a single religion – they are the only ones I know of, and I know them to be inexhaustible. It is not good to speculate too much about Christianity; we can only know it through personal experience. The first condition for our relationship with the incomprehensible God is believing that He became incarnate in Jesus – that is, He entered history as a concrete human being. This is not a blind faith, but one that slowly develops, through a change in our way of life, asceticism, spiritual struggle, and prayer, into a real communion with God and a strange kind of knowledge. In this process, to which everyone is invited, many things happen, of course. We experience the grace of the Holy Spirit. Together with millions of sisters and brothers throughout history and today, we undergo a daily transition that is painful and extremely demanding – and therefore often unsuccessful – from ourselves to the Other. The Oxford philosopher C. S. Lewis wrote that he believes in God as he believes in the sun: not only because he sees it shining, but also because he sees everything else in its light. I think every Christian can relate to this. Returning to your initial question, yes, I am both a philosopher and a poet, and I endeavour to practise both disciplines sincerely, without reducing my thoughts or words to mere tools for something else. Philosophy and literature undoubtedly extend far beyond the boundaries of the Christian faith in terms of time, civilisations and their conceptual scope – and this is wonderful and interesting because Christian humanism has always recognised the traces of beauty, goodness, and truth in all cultures. However, for Christians, God’s revelation in Christ remains the sun by which they see everything, including their literary or philosophical creations. You view your work as a vocation, emphasising that the ideas you express in your writing have meaning and value only if others recognise themselves in them. Who do you think your readers are? I don’t know. In fact, I only know a few people who have read almost everything I have written and translated: my wife Katarina, and my friends Vid Snoj and Jasna Hrovat. They usually read my texts before publication and provide critical commentary. Sometimes a young person comes up to me for a chat, and I can see that my writing inspires and encourages them on their intellectual and creative journey. I am very happy to see traces of my writing in the brilliant, intellectually independent works being created these days, such as Images of the Unimaginable by Sebastjan Vörös and The Groundless Wave by Alen Širca. Translations of my work are also important as they expand my readership beyond anything I could have imagined. Thanks to Pavle Rak, my major works have been translated into Serbian and are widely read in the Balkans. This year, a translation of Razbitje was published in Sarajevo. Second editions of Posredovanja (Mediations) and Razbitje (Being Torn Apart) will be published in Italian this year. I am particularly pleased with the success of the Russian translation of Posredovanja. The book is to be reprinted this year and I have seen online that it is required reading at several Russian universities. As an author, I have thus found myself in the spiritual world of teachers who have played an extremely important role in my intellectual and spiritual development: Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Pavel Florensky. It is a wonderful feeling to communicate with complete strangers yet feel intimately connected to them in an invisible way. Over the past year, the public has primarily come to know you as a poet and the recipient of the 2013 Prešeren Fund Award. You received this award for your fourth collection of poems, Primož Trubar zapušča Ljubljano (Primož Trubar Is Leaving Ljubljana, 2012). In this collection, you remain faithful to the dramatic arc on which all your work is based: ‘from darkness through darkness to light’. Could you tell our readers more about this? This arc is not my invention, of course. It is the fundamental structure of myth. Joseph Campbell has written an interesting book called ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’; unfortunately, it is saturated with psychoanalytic ballast, which makes it difficult to read. However, its basic idea is fascinating. According to Campbell, all the great and important myths of different cultures have the following structure: a supernatural call is heard by the hero; he rejects the call; he then receives supernatural help; he enters the adventure; he experiences a night of trials and temptations; he reconciles with his past; finally, he achieves apotheosis; and he experiences bliss. The essential point is that we all identify with the mythic hero because we recognise our own story in his. Each of us is a hero. This archetypal story is repeated in Christianity, but with a new radicalism: we are all sons in the Son, christs in Christ, and so we experience the night of the spirit, of abandonment and of the cross, before finally surrendering to the Father. Finally, the resurrection awaits us. Thus, the story of Jesus is not only a revelation of God in human form, but also a revelation of the Human, of what we truly are as human beings. It is the essence of our story. We can be sons in the Son. Yet the path to God’s glory leads us through abandonment, suffering, and nothingness. As Christians, we are optimists, but we do not turn a blind eye to the darkness in the world and in ourselves. We are optimists not because we believe in or rely on our good deeds, our immortal soul, our hidden self, or a non-self, but because we rely solely on God’s incomprehensible goodness. ‘God is light, and in him there is no darkness’, says the Apostle John. This is what awaits us in the end. It is the overarching theme of my poetry collections and their characters, from the Byzantine monk in Tvoja imena (Your Names), to the contemplator of death in Trideset stopnic in naju ni (Thirty Steps and We Are Gone), the spiritual warrior in Certamen spirituale, and, finally, Primož Trubar. In an interview, you said that you can identify with Trubar as a literary creator, a man of the Gospel faith, and a rebel against his time. What allows you to identify most closely with this giant of Slovenian culture? I would say it is the combination of all three. Why do you think Primož Trubar lives on especially in the collective consciousness of Slovenians, but much less so in that of individuals? Until recently, Trubar was a controversial figure; traditional Catholicism considered him an apostate and did not hold him in high regard. It is only recently that Catholic Church has recognised him as a positive figure, someone who was driven by a desire to reform the Church in accordance with the Gospel rather than destroy it. Liberals and later Marxists, on the other hand, turned Trubar into a critic of Christianity, a patron saint of freethinkers. It is only when we recognise all three of the dimensions you mentioned in the previous question that he will become an archetypal figure. Perhaps literature is necessary for this to catch on in the individual consciousness as well. Critics agree that the collection Primož Trubar zapušča Ljubljano gains added value from the satirical self-criticism printed on the back cover. What is its purpose or meaning? I simply wanted to show that I am well aware of how spiritual poetry is viewed today by critics who are slaves to secularist ideas – and there are many of them in our country. And that I don’t care. I read that your poetry features ‘trimmed-off edges, the ultimate paradoxes of feeling and wonder’ which are essential to your philosophy, but ‘necessarily fall by the wayside in philosophical writing due to the demands of conceptual rigour and logical argumentation’. Is your poetry, then, the true space for your ‘radical personalism’? Probably, although I would also like my philosophy of hypostasis to conceptually prepare the ground for the radical intimacy of the person as a fundamental ontological reality. I would argue that my philosophy is, among other things, an attempt to justify the truth of poetry and art in general – a truth that many artists themselves no longer believe in, as they too often fall victim to contemporary naturalism and scientism, thinking within these limited horizons. Peter Kolšek concludes that it is precisely because you are also a poet that your ‘figure as an extremely spiritual philosopher is complete’. He believes that you are a ‘phenomenon in Slovenian Catholic thought’ and ‘a completely original and rather solitary phenomenon within Slovenian spiritual philosophy’, attributing this to the fact that, in your philosophy, ‘God is not an object of intellectual operation, but an intimate fact’. Do you agree with this? I don’t really know what spiritual philosophy would mean. If it is meant in the sense of ‘philosophia spiritualis’ of the German mystic Heinrich Seuse (also known as Henrik Suso), whose ‘Book of Truth’ I am currently translating, then I hope that is correct. However, if it refers to some kind of ethereality of thought, then I am sceptical of this label. If philosophy is good – that is, if it is faithful to reality – it does not need any adjectives. In my latest book, I tackle some rather carnal topics, such as sex and realpolitik. I don’t feel very lonely either. I think there are quite a few neglected thinkers in our country who deserve more attention than those who dominate the spotlight. You often emphasise that a society in which God is merely a private choice is rotten, and that this is precisely why European society is disintegrating today. Could you please elaborate on this? I am not suggesting that we need a new violent theocracy in Europe. It is a purely empirically verifiable observation: if people do not have a relationship with God, as we discussed at the beginning, then society is infiltrated by what Nietzsche called ‘the most terrifying guest’ – nihilism. This guest has clearly penetrated every aspect of our society, as illustrated in the book by the Italian philosopher Umberto Galimberti on young people and nihilism, for example. The breakdown of the family; hedonism; economism, that is, viewing man primarily as a ‘producer’ and society as a machine that must produce more and more every year, or there is something wrong with it; the resort to drugs, virtual worlds, and ‘purchasable’ ecstasy; and generational disunity resulting in unemployment – these are all primarily symptoms of a spiritual crisis. They are symptoms of a deep sense of meaninglessness that stems from forgetting God. They are the result of the disappearance of a fundamental reverence for life and responsibility before the ultimate Mystery of existence. However, I am convinced that this is not inevitable, predestined, or unavoidable; it is not a matter of ‘historical necessity’, but rather of spiritual and social processes that can be reversed within a generation or two. The various Christian churches and other spiritual communities have an enormous task and responsibility in this regard, one which they often fail to fulfil. You also point out that, in Western society, the status of the word is changing, and so is people’s trust in the power of culture and non-scientific thinking, which are becoming superfluous and dispensable. Why could this be fatal? Simply because, insofar science is not consistently rational, autocritical, and therefore sceptical of itself, insofar it is unaware of its cognitive limits, it turns into the totalitarian ideology of scientism – which is the strongest ally of the nihilistic spiritual cancer. The French phenomenological thinker Michel Henry beautifully analysed the scientistic truncation of our actual experience of reality in his book Barbarism. This truncation leads to an extreme impoverishment of thought. I myself have undertaken a similar analysis to Henry’s in an essay on science in Razbitje. However, I am no enemy of science. I follow it as far as I am able, and also hope that some open-minded scientists will recognise the potential for a fruitful connection between scientific empiricism and the fundamental ontological structures I present. They could then develop them further in areas such as physics, historiography, mathematics, and psychiatry. You believe that only a ‘spiritual confrontation with reality’ can lead to a so-called welfare society. How problematic is it that Slovenian academic philosophy is characterised by ‘less and less genuine wonder, questioning, strenuous study, humble reflection, intersubjectively binding argumentation, and awe of reality’, and that ‘the flame of philosophy is kept alive by individuals, whether within or outside the institution, (…) without broader influence’? I am not at all concerned about the future of philosophy in Slovenia. There are many young people with great insight; the problem lies in the adjective ‘academic’. The problem lies in what is taught as philosophy in school: ideological rather than professional criteria still apply there. But this creates a wonderful paradox: attempts to take over institutions and indoctrinate young people never succeed in the long run and instead have the opposite effect; the most capable students will strongly resist any attempts to manipulate their thoughts, and will become the most insightful critics of their ‘teachers’. With the exception of the original thinkers already mentioned in Slovenian philosophy, Lacanianism has dominated for three decades. Although you deny it the status of philosophy, it is the only domestic movement in philosophical thought that has had an international breakthrough. How do you explain this paradox? Firstly, it is not I who denies Lacanianism and other forms of ‘leftist theory’ the status of philosophy; they deny it themselves. Their attitude towards philosophy’s historical development from Plato to Hegel is merely a combination of arrogant criticism of metaphysics and manipulation of tradition. This is not a serious attempt to understand and embrace the ‘love of wisdom’ and all that it implies today. Secondly, the international success of Lacanianism is quite understandable (and, as a Slovenian, I am vaguely proud of it, just as I am of the folk-pop band Avsenik and their international success, despite not being a fan of Slovenian folk music). The first reason is obvious: our leading Lacanians are smart, ambitious people who knew early on what they wanted. We could say that they are among the first successful Slovenian entrepreneurs, with a great sense of marketing and networking. This, of course, does not qualify them as great thinkers. Žižek is undoubtedly extremely talented in his own way; he is Slovenia’s leading entertainer and his wild associative thinking is fascinating – until we start to question the validity of his claims. The second condition for the international reception of these ideas is less obvious: there is still a left-wing international community, albeit probably weaker than ever before. Much of the Western European and American intelligentsia became radicalised in the 20th century, but when the Berlin Wall fell, their worldview temporarily collapsed. Even Mao Zedong’s children began to embrace capitalism. So what should you do with your intellectual identity? You could stick with the old one, which isn’t easy; you could change it, which is pretty painful; or you could update your basic ideas and give them a more modern look. If someone sells you a ‘theory’ full of illogical and poorly argued twists and turns that ultimately offers you what you have always believed in, you will gladly embrace it. Of course, groups of world-weary young people will always flock to pseudo-revolutionary old men. ‘I don’t really get Lacan, but Marx and Lenin are cool’ – and ‘die Partei hat immer recht’ (the party is always right), as the dedication to Žižek’s book on Hegel reads. This is not a large market niche nowadays (in the philosophical world, Lacanianism is a marginal phenomenon, although the media in our country with their Lacanian agents are trying to convince us otherwise), but it is not negligible either. However, I am convinced that nothing will come of it. It is an intellectually second-rate phenomenon with no significance for the history of philosophy. Through your original philosophical thought, which you have been systematically developing in recent years in books such as Being Torn Apart: Seven Radical Essays (2009) and Erotics, Politics, etc. Three Essays on the Soul (2011), you tirelessly dismantle Lacanianism and other types of contemporary philosophical fundamentalism. Is it true that you are already writing a sequel of sorts, which will conclude the introduction to your philosophical system? Let me correct you first: in my system, I do not engage so much with the ideas of others; I only touch on them in passing. I did engage with them at in my book Mediations with regard to Lacanianism, and I recently wrote an article about Žižek’s book The Monstrosity of Christ, his dialogue with John Milbank, which was published in the proceedings of the symposium Dionizij Areopagit in evropsko izročilo (Dionysius the Areopagite and the European Tradition). As I said, I’m not really interested in that specific area of thought. If I did not live in Slovenia, I probably would never have read a single book by Lacanian theorists. There are too many beautiful and interesting works that I want to read to torture myself with books where you know from the beginning what the ending will be. As for my new book, what you say is true. It will examine four phenomena that, in my opinion, open up new ontological horizons: animals, dreams, language, and nothingness. Animals have a different experience of reality to us, which contradicts our mistaken belief that we have understood the world and that this understanding only needs to be articulated. Dreams are filled with an abundance of the imaginal, which presents itself to us in its own transcendent reality and leads us into the boundlessness of experiences that we push away due to our limitations: experiences to which we have largely lost access. Language, deep down, is Logos: the sacred place of the presence of meaning. Criticism of this concept in contemporary philosophy merely liberates thought to the new insight that this presence is not fixed, but is always only an interval between the free departure and arrival of meaning as the energeia (activity) of the hypostasis (the concrete person as the only being of beings). In the experience of nothingness, all the abundance given to us is ultimately transformed into radical deprivation due to our stubborn egoism. Translations are also an important part of your work. The most significant of these is undoubtedly your translation of Plato’s complete works, comprising over three thousand pages. How many years of research, working hours and sleepless nights went into such a huge undertaking, which is not only a translation, but also a cultural project? I studied Plato in Greek already as a student, so it’s difficult to estimate the time involved. When taking on such a huge project, it is essential to have a clear plan of work and to identify the most critical translation decisions. The project itself took just under ten years to complete. The great Slovenian philosopher Tine Hribar said that, with this translation, ‘Plato has not only been translated into Slovenian, but a new image of him has emerged before us.’ That is undoubtedly a great compliment to your work, isn’t it? Of course, it is all the more impressive coming from such an important philosopher, who has a very different understanding of Plato himself. In recent years, you have edited the Slovenian translation of a bilingual edition of the Pre-Socratics and, in collaboration with Vid Snoj, prepared a translation of the German Baroque poet Angelus Silesius. You have also translated Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, The Collected Works of Dionysius the Areopagite, and The Porch of the Mysteries of the Second Virtue by Charles Péguy. You are currently preparing translations of the collected works of the important spiritual writer Evagrius Ponticus, as well as works by the Christian poets Synesius of Cyrene, Andrew of Crete, and Simeon the New Theologian. So you have no shortage of work or challenges! There is certainly a lot to be done, but one can only achieve a small fraction of what one would like to. I will be fifty this year, so there is not much time left for megalomaniacal plans. I certainly hope that others will continue my ‘mediating’ work. I came across your statement that you intend to focus primarily on translating the works of the Eastern Church Fathers in the coming years. What is it about this spiritual world that attracts you so much? That’s hard to answer. You need to read these Fathers to understand. I would encourage readers of this interview to read the works of Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, and Origen, the teacher of them all (the translation of his seminal work On the Principles, which Neža Sagadin and I have prepared, has just been published). There is a special atmosphere in their writings that I wanted to evoke in my answer to your first question. An atmosphere of extreme reverence for the mystery of God; restraint combined with love for the God-man Christ and his Church. A contemplative and sapiential reading of the Holy Scriptures. This atmosphere is a union of thought and piety; of high Hellenistic culture and holiness. This may not be for everyone, and I fully understand that some people are drawn to different forms of spirituality. For me, however, the world of the Greek Church Fathers represents true Christianity, even if it is understandable that Christianity seeks different forms of expression and intellectual forms in different cultures. You are known for having been self-employed in the cultural sector for many years, and for being self-taught – you are said to speak twelve languages fluently. Can you tell us which ones? Oh, you mean fluent in twelve languages? I don’t even speak Slovenian fluently. I can read about twelve languages, though, and I can translate reliably from them. I taught myself some of them, but I had brilliant teachers for most of them, such as Erika Mihevc-Gabrovec and Primož Simoniti in the Department of Classical Philology. Shulamit Steiner also taught me Hebrew for several years. But being able to cope in everyday situations and actively mastering different language registers is something else entirely. Every year, dozens of people graduate from modern language studies at our faculties. I have no doubt that they can speak the language they studied fluently. However, in Slovenia it is extremely difficult to find a translator for serious philosophical or theological work in these languages. They simply do not know how to translate; they lack technical terminology and have a poor command of Slovenian. I know this as an editor. Incidentally, if I am not mistaken, I myself have published translations from nine languages: Greek, Latin, Modern Greek, Hebrew, Russian, German, Italian, French and English – some extensive corpora from some, small works from others. This is not true polyglotism. At international meetings of patrologists or congresses on ancient philosophy, understanding these languages is the norm, not the exception. If someone were to say here that they don’t understand Spanish or German, they would be laughed at and told they’d come to the wrong place. In Kant’s time, university admission required sufficient knowledge of Greek to read the Gospel of John, and sufficient knowledge of Hebrew to get through Genesis. Nietzsche still had compulsory Hebrew at Pforta Grammar School, although he was not very good at it and received a final grade of ‘good’. Not to mention Latin. Nowadays, someone who reads Greek – which, a century ago, was within the reach of any slightly brighter high school graduate – is regarded as though they understand Mandarin Chinese. My language skills are simply a remnant of the European humanist culture that was common a century ago but now seems exceptional in our country. This is a bad sign for philosophy and theology. At the Faculty of Theology, for example, students should be taught the basics of traditional texts in their original language. Instead, they are subjected to various pop psychotherapies, which are often based on outright heretical anthropological principles. Sadly, no theologians are protesting against this. On the subject of languages, this year’s Prešeren Award winner, the writer Vladimir Kavčič, warned in his acceptance speech about the endangered status of the Slovenian language and Slovenian culture as a whole. Is it possible that, in a few years, on the centenary of the establishment of the first Slovenian university, there will be no lectures in Slovenian? The problem is not only which language is spoken, but what is spoken. This ties in with my previous answer. Many professors are convinced that they speak a foreign language brilliantly, but, as a rule, theirs is an impoverished language which even native speakers find slightly comical (although well-educated people do not smile). To truly master a language, you need to read widely, absorb the literary canon, maintain regular contact with the language in various contexts and, last but not least, dream in it. Even for one’s mother tongue, the first of these conditions is difficult to fulfil, and in the case of foreign languages, it is usually only a matter of more or less successful temporary shortcuts. In technical subjects, however, the transition to teaching in a foreign language can be made without causing too much damage, since these subjects involve technical jargon embedded in various grammars. However, in the humanities, which deal with subtle expressions of human experience, transitioning to a foreign language would limit our science to a poor parody of the creativity of the great nations. What threat does the so-called cultural battle (Kulturkampf) pose to Slovenian culture, in your opinion? According to moral theologian Ivan Štuhec, someone has been permanently generating this struggle in recent years. I don’t think anyone is deliberately generating this. If Mr Štuhec said this, then unfortunately the statement itself is just part of a cultural battle. Anti-Catholicism certainly exists and is a concern. Last year, in an interview in magazine Pogledi, I compared it to anti-Semitism, a statement which caused quite a stir. However, no one ‘deliberately generated’ real anti-Semitism. It was already there, and had been for a very long time. It just needed to be stirred up, directed, and intensified. The problem is therefore much deeper, stemming from fundamental antagonisms in our society. Ideally, everyone in Slovenia would want an open society where everyone has the right to be different, is treated equally, and where the wider community treats everyone fairly, without any groups or individuals harassing or despising each other. It would be a society where, in matters of common interest, everyone were able to take a step back and set aside their worldview or ideological convictions. A society where people would respect each other’s different beliefs sincerely, not just in public, but also among their own circles, and where this respect would extend to all areas, including the economy, politics, culture, and so on. Unfortunately, our society is far from that. Many people among us – including Christians and secularists, ‘leftists’ and ‘rightists’ at all levels, from ordinary people to academics – do not really want an open society. They publicly spout democratic slogans, but only want their own group of like-minded people to win, while they want to humiliate and ultimately ‘run over’ everyone else. My cause will only be proven to be true and just if my opponent crawls to me on all fours, admits he was wrong, begs me for forgiveness, and acknowledges that I was right about everything. This scenario will, of course, never come to pass; it is a mentality that leads to physical confrontation. These are people who cannot even imagine, in their wildest dreams, simply wishing well to others with whom they disagree ideologically, out of the goodness of their hearts. I fear that such people are not only very numerous in Slovenia, but that they are in the majority. Cultured, reserved, rational, and polite people are not ‘popular’. The Catholic Church in Slovenia is not innocent in this situation; this is one of its great sins, at least as great as the Maribor Diocese’s surrender to financial demons. By doing so, the Church betrays its own identity and the commandment to love one’s enemies radically and sincerely. I do not condemn anyone for this, as I am aware that historical traumas such as civil war, post-war massacres, and communist oppression are extremely difficult to overcome, especially when you know that, as a Christian, you ought to forgive, but cannot do so in your heart. However, let us be honest with ourselves: such a state of mind can only stem from doubting God’s absolute sovereignty and His absolute control over every event – not even a sparrow falls to the ground without His will, as the Gospel says – as well as doubting the just eschatological judgement that will befall every individual. Those of us who have not experienced these traumas must understand this distress, but as Christians, we must be clear and uncompromising. The Church of Christ stands and falls with an ethos of love for its enemies and slanderers. When the Church’s press, for example, descends to the level of its enemies – who are many and aggressive – and begins to repay them in kind by always defending ‘its own’ with an abhorrently self-righteous apologetics, something is seriously wrong. The fundamental problem lies at this level; the cultural struggle is only its superficial manifestation. Finally, I would like to challenge you with another topical question: when will new archbishops be appointed in Ljubljana and Maribor? I have no idea, and frankly, I don’t care. But I hope they will be men of God: men of prayer, good works, and love for all. And this is a small personal wish: that they will not speak in the affected, unctuous clerical Slovenian that we have heard enough of, and may God protect us from it. The interview was conducted by Leja Forštner. A laboratory of spiritual teachings In October, the first book of the Philokalia, the greatest work of the Orthodox Christian tradition and a treasure trove of Christian spirituality, was published in Slovenian. This collection of writings was translated from the Greek by several classical philologists, including Gorazd Kocijančič, the initiator of the project and editor of the book. ‘Finally in Slovenian!’ exclaimed Fr Rupnik when he heard about the publication of Philokalia. What kind of book is it? Etymologically, ‘Philokalia’ means ‘love of beauty’ – beauty that is also goodness, in line with the broad meaning of the adjective kalós, which in New Testament Greek means both ‘beautiful’ and ‘morally excellent, honest, good’. For example, in John’s Gospel, Jesus is called ho poimèn ho kalós, meaning ‘the good/beautiful shepherd’. The word philokalia sometimes has a simpler meaning: an ‘anthology’, that is, a ‘flower bouquet’ or ‘a selection of the most excellent texts’. The book we are discussing today is a veritable library of selected Eastern Christian ascetic and mystical writings composed in Greek between the 4th and 15th centuries. Who selected and published these writings, and who are their authors? The first edition of the Philokalia was edited by two Greek Orthodox saints, Nicodemus the Hagiorite and Macarius of Corinth, and published in Venice in autumn 1782. It had an enormous influence in the Christian East, and later, from the mid-20th century to the present day, also in the West. The first of the four planned volumes of the Slovenian translation was published this year, with the second to follow next year. Translations of the third volume are already underway: David Movrin is taking on the extensive work of Peter Damascene; Jasna Hrovat is translating the work of Niketas Stethatos; and I am currently translating the Spiritual Homilies of Pseudo-Macarius of Egypt. The fourth volume is still so far from completion that, given my age, I dare not hope to live to see its publication… But someone else will finish the work that has been started. What was the path of this anthology, this ‘flower bouquet’ of writings by the Church Fathers, and when did it take shape? Macarius and Nicodemus built on the existing tradition of ascetic and mystical manuscript anthologies, although researchers have yet to discover a manuscript containing all the authors in this collection. According to tradition, Macarius selected his texts from a manuscript entitled ‘Anthology on the Union of the Intellect with God’, which he found in the Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos. So what was Nicodemus’s role? He primarily edited the texts and contributed an important preface and also introductions to the individual authors. Who are these authors? The Philokalia contains 63 literary works written by more than 30 authors over a period of a thousand years, and as several texts are anonymous, it is not possible to determine the precise number of authors. Can they be divided into groups? Yes, we can roughly distinguish three groups of writers. The first group, published in the first volume of the Slovenian translation, consists of classics of early Christian spirituality: Evagrius Ponticus, John Cassian, Mark the Ascetic, Diadochus of Photica, Hesychius the Presbyter, and Isaiah of Gaza. The second group, which will be the presented in the second volume of the Slovenian translation, consists of authors who wrote in the second half of the first millennium. These authors summarised the fruits of monastic culture, providing brilliant syntheses of its insights: Maximus the Confessor, Thalassius of Libya, and Pseudo-John of Damascus. Less well-known authors who draw on tradition and offer their own interpretations can also be classified as synthesisers and summarisers. Examples include Theodore of Edessa and Abba Philemon. Their writings contain references to the Church Fathers and the first Philocalic generation; the growing influence of Dionysius the Areopagite and John Climacus is also evident. The third group of authors, who belong to the third volume of the Slovenian edition, are associated with the emergence of Simeon the New Theologian: an extremely interesting mystic and poet who lived at the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Together with his disciple Niketas Stethatos, Simeon introduced the first generation of hesychasts, including Nikephoros the Solitary, Gregory of Sinai, and Theoleptus of Philadelphia. These spiritual writers began to systematise the method of the so-called ‘Jesus prayer’, that is prayer to Jesus, in various ways. This trend reached its peak with the great theologian Gregory Palamas, who is presented in detail in the Philokalia alongside his disciples. That’s a lot of names! Could you briefly summarise what we find in the Philokalia? In short, the Philokalia reflects the entire history of Byzantine Christian spirituality. Of course, not all authors or texts are included. It is therefore a diverse collection of writings and a kind of laboratory of different spiritual teachings, while simultaneously displaying a kind of polyphonic unity. Where and when did you first encounter these mystical and ascetic writings? I bought the five volumes of the Greek Philokalia in a small, dusty bookshop in Cyprus in 1987. My wife and I had stopped there for a few days on our way to the Holy Land, which we travelled across from end to end, often hitchhiking. Since then, the Philokalia has accompanied me in various ways on my spiritual and intellectual journey. Most recently, it was a significant source of inspiration when I wrote the book O nekaterih drugih (About Some Others). Fr Rupnik says that this is the most important spiritual reading after the Holy Scriptures. Can you explain why we Catholics know so little about it? Catholics are not very familiar with the writings of the Eastern Christian Churches because of the thousand-year schism between the Eastern and Western Church. As a result, Eastern Christian spirituality was marginalised for a long time, and even largely forgotten in the West. However, the situation has changed considerably in the last century, especially with the Second Vatican Council and the ecumenical movement. John Paul II often said, for example, that the Catholic Church must learn to breathe with both lungs. The theological movement of a return to the sources, or ‘ressourcement’, has borne fruit in the form of numerous critical editions of the Greek Fathers, also those included in the Philokalia, as seen in the classic Sources Chrétiennes collection. Is something similar happening in Slovenia? Yes, over the last two decades, we have acquired a substantial collection of the most important patristic texts in Slovenian. Unfortunately, the average Catholic still reads very little spiritual literature, whether Western or Eastern. This is, of course, a great pity. Reading like this can namely lead to deep spiritual joy. It makes the millennial tradition our intimate conviction and inspires us. This is especially important at a time when there are few living spiritual teachers or ‘elders’ to whom we can turn for advice in times of need. The books of the old saints can speak to us and offer us guidance. Much could be done to promote this kind of reading culture through education within the Church. How do you personally approach these writings? What place does the Philokalia occupy on your bookshelf? For many years, I read the Philokalia alongside the New Testament in the original as my morning spiritual reading. I read it in order, from the beginning of the first volume to the end of the fifth and then started again from the beginning. I would only read a short passage or two, as is appropriate for lectio divina. Such texts need to be ‘chewed over’ – in the West, monks actually used the term ruminatio for this kind of reading – and allowed to sink in, not only into one’s memory, but also into the deeper layers of the mind and spiritual perception. Do you still continue this practice? No, as I am intensively engaged with these texts as a translator and editor during other parts of the day, I have recently abandoned this way of reading the Philokalia and turned to other writings for spiritual reading. Lately, I have especially enjoyed the Latin writings of Meister Eckhart, which I am translating in parallel with the Philokalia. The full title of the original edition of the collection is ‘The Philokalia of the Neptic Saints gathered from our Holy Theophoric [‘God-bearing’] Fathers’, through which the intellect is purified, illuminated, and made perfect by means of the philosophy of ascetic practice and contemplation’. The Church Fathers teach us to pray. Do they also offer advice on how to live spiritually? Yes, that is essential. The Philokalia is not primarily a source of information, although it contains many passages of high theology and brilliantly expressed philosophical insights. Rather, it is practical. It teaches us what we must do and how to act and train ourselves, focusing more on the internal than the external aspects. It shows us how to free ourselves from the distractions and dispersion of everyday life, so that we can become independent of worldly ties and experience a different, eternal, and infinite reality in our hearts. This ultimate reality is the foundation of all things and governs global history and our personal lives. What kind of translation project was the Philokalia? The Slovenian translation of the Philokalia was created as an online collaborative endeavour, uniting several translators specialising in Greek at various stages of its development, from Hellenistic koine and classical idioms to various shades of Byzantine Greek and the early forms of dimotiki, from which Modern Greek evolved. Jasna Hrovat, a classical philologist and an experienced translator of patristic texts, translated most of the first volume. She also helped me improve the language of the entire translation, together with Jan Ciglenečki and Mateja Komel Snoj. Due to the linguistic and stylistic diversity of the Philokalia and the translators’ unique translation poetics, intensive editorial work was necessary to ensure a basic conceptual uniformity and formal consistency between the texts, which were created over many centuries. It is certainly unusual in our times that the project collaborators embarked on this arduous task years ago without any guarantee that their translations would ever be published. This was ultimately made possible by generous donors, including Alenka and Tadeja Battelino, the Serbian Orthodox Church (Zagreb-Ljubljana Archdiocese), and numerous donors in a fundraising campaign, as well as the Slovenian Book Agency subsidy for demanding, multi-year translation projects. In the early centuries, people also faced diseases and epidemics. How did the ‘Greek Fathers’ respond? To rephrase Fr. Rupnik’s statement as a question: ‘How can we remain with God in the midst of trials and tribulations?’ In his early book on the understanding of life and death among the Church Fathers, the renowned historian of Christian doctrine Jaroslav Pelikan beautifully shows that, although there were very different models of understanding death in Christian thought, they all agreed in the belief that death had been conquered by Christ. If we believe in Him, we can face the inevitable agony with confidence and at the end close our eyes with peaceful expectation. Pelikan’s discussion of St Cyprian of Carthage, who wrote On Mortality, is particularly interesting as it refers specifically to the plague that was ravaging his city at the time. We can see that the Church behaved very differently to how it does today. The comparison is by no means flattering to the modern Church. How did the Church Fathers free themselves from earthly ties and long for eternity without fear of death? I wrote about this in the foreword to Against Religion, a book by Christos Yannaras, one of the most important contemporary Greek Christian thinkers, which will soon be published by your publishing house, Družina. Let me summarise: Christianity certainly would not have spread throughout the world if the handful of Jews who fled for their lives after Jesus’ arrest had not later experienced something that turned them into fearless witnesses. This transformation was made possible by Easter and the outpouring of Christ’s Spirit. If the first preachers had run around wearing some kind of ‘sanitary masks’, teaching, ‘Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul’, everyone would have laughed at them – and rightly so. Today, however, we are obviously very far from the attitude of Paul and the other apostles, even those of us who call ourselves Christians. Anyone who thinks the apostles were so courageous simply because they were unaware of viruses, bacteria, and the exponential function that forms the basis of epidemiological models, is an idiot. But isn’t Christianity a religion of life and history rather than an Eastern contempt for the world as an illusion? That is not what I meant. The longing for the afterlife, which is part of the essence of Christianity, shows us what it means to be saved. In history and in life. This does not imply a morbid love of death or a weary reluctance to embrace life, but rather the transcendence of both through Christ’s grace: a liberated love of life and a relaxed attitude towards death, bestowed upon those who accept salvation with unwavering faith. As the author of the Letter to the Hebrews beautifully says, the Son of God ‘has freed those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death’. One of the most important themes of the Philokalia is therefore ‘remembrance of death’, meaning the duty of every Christian to be aware of their mortality and await death joyfully every day. Allow me to search through the book and share just one thought from Hesychius the Presbyter… Here it is: ‘If possible, let us constantly remember death. This memory removes all worries and vanity. It gives rise to the guarding of the intellect and constant prayer, detachment from the body and disgust for sin. In truth, almost every virtue in us comes from the memory of death. Therefore, let us use it, if possible, as we use our own breath.’ In what ways did the Philokalia influence Eastern Christian culture through monasticism? By publishing it during the Western Enlightenment, Nicodemus and Macarius created an alternative ‘encyclopaedia’ of traditional knowledge relating to the prayerful and spiritual life. This can be seen as an expression of Orthodox spiritual renewal during the final decades of the 18th century. This renewal was led by monks. Under the leadership of Paisius Velichkovsky of Ukrainian origin, who had independently researched the hesychastic tradition on Mount Athos and may have originated the idea of the Philokalia, the book was soon translated into Church Slavonic. Published under the title Dobrotoljubie, it became popular reading even in non-monastic circles of the Slavic world. For example, a ‘Russian pilgrim’ carried it with him on his travels and read it; his confessions were the first to bring fame to the Philokalia in the West, and his account can also be read in an excellent Slovenian translation by Janez Zupet. In the following century, the Philokalia was translated into Russian by St Theophan the Recluse. This edition significantly influenced ‘Russian religious philosophy’, which flourished before the revolution and in exile after it. A second Greek edition was published in Athens in 1893, but the edition published by the Athenian publishing house Astir in the second half of the 20th century was particularly influential and remains in print today. The Philokalia has had an enormous influence on various Orthodox cultures, including the Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian and Serbian ones, in terms of spirituality, literature and the visual arts. After the October Revolution, Russian émigrés began engaging in theological work in Western capitals, and the Western Christian world also discovered this treasure of shared Christian heritage with great interest. Kallistos Ware was therefore quite right to write: ‘In the recent history of the Orthodox Church, the Philokalia has had a greater influence than any other book except the Bible.’ But what do the Church Fathers of the early Christian centuries have to say to people today? In his striking introduction to the spirituality of the Philokalia, which is also included in our Slovenian edition and was translated by Vesna Velkovrh Bukilica, the French Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément beautifully writes that it was actually the previous century – a time of pronounced secularisation – that most eagerly awaited the Philokalia. This can be empirically confirmed by the number of translations into the world’s major languages. Clément explains this paradoxical phenomenon by saying that the descendants of the Enlightenment, whom Macarius and Nicodemus feared so much – that is, we ourselves – have realised in our search for freedom that there can be no true freedom without overcoming nihilism, and that the Western mind has arrived at critical self-reflection. This has led it to conclude that the premises of the modern project are flawed because, in our fascination with the external world and its possible interpretations, we have forgotten the one true thing that has been given to us: our inner selves. We only know that anything external exists because it is already part of our inner selves. Of course, such a spiritual sobering-up is not a mass phenomenon. Western culture is currently in a major crisis which is clearly deepening. You say that, in your opinion, the crisis of Western society is deepening. What, then, is the current socio-political and ecclesiastical reality through the eyes of someone who has just received a book of centuries-old spiritual writings from the printer, and who has read it with an attentive eye before publication? Over the past year, I must admit that I have been quite concerned, not because of the obvious nastiness of the corona virus, but because, according to all available data, it is by no means a sufficient reason for the global hysteria that accompanies it. Yet we are constantly being convinced of the opposite by an incredible mobilisation of propaganda. I am much more concerned that under the pretext of fighting the virus, we have found ourselves in the midst of a major social revolution with unpredictable consequences, a revolution of which the majority of the population is not even aware. The achievements of European political life, from antiquity to the establishment of modern liberal democracies, are quietly being lost in it, perhaps permanently. A few weeks ago, 250 prominent French intellectuals signed a statement saying that ‘the second wave is not viral, but social and economic’. The real victims of the corona virus are those affected by the measures taken against it: more than a billion people in the Third World who have been plunged into extreme poverty as a result. They live from hand to mouth and will starve if the world stops. So, what is this invisible revolution all about? No one really knows yet because it contains elements of both spontaneity and orchestration, conspiracy and chaos. Perhaps we will never know. In any case, it cannot be discussed at a primitive level, as is happening today due to the vulgarisation of reflection, but rather requires an understanding of the history of Western political thought, from Plato and Aristotle to Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger. We must confront the insights of these great thinkers with events that, due to their global nature, have no parallels. Fundamental, extremely serious issues are at stake. Giorgio Agamben, the Italian philosopher who has distinguished himself in the last year as an insightful analyst of these social shifts, has described this revolution as an attempt to introduce a permanent state of emergency. In this state, those in power appropriate the right to suspend the rights and freedoms guaranteed by stable constitutions and laws on a daily basis, in the name of one biological threat or another – threats which, of course, will never disappear. At its spiritual core is nihilism, the belief that the highest value is bare life because with death, everything is annihilated. Agamben puts it beautifully in his latest October column, saying that this is a manifestation of ‘a culture that is desperately managing its own decline, a culture in which there is no longer any life’. This is completely contrary to the spirituality of the Philokalia. Diadochus of Photike says that ‘theology’, or the experiential contemplation of God, ‘first prepares us to joyfully despise all attachment to this life, because instead of perishable desires, we have the words of God as an inexpressible treasure’. But isn’t the accusation of suspending freedoms typically levelled by leftists and other ‘protesters’? No, it is something completely different. It is important to note that the ‘Covidian’ revolution cannot be understood through the traditional left-right political divide. In Spain, totalitarianism in the name of biosecurity is being implemented by the left; in Italy, by the centre; and in our country, by the right-wing government. This radical change in governance suits all political factions in power. Incidentally, I have no political preferences, and I don’t care who is in power as long as there is peace, and life is reasonably normal, free and relaxed. If anyone is interested in the philosophical justification for this stance, they should read my essay on politics in the book Erotika, Politika itn. (Erotics, Politics, etc.).This great revolution has not only swept through Slovenia and Europe – with the notable exception of Sweden, which has not yet lost its mind – but it is almost global. In China and many Asian countries, it does not need to be carried out because it has already largely been achieved. As with every revolution, it is supported by many people because revolutions always present an opportunity for career advancement. In the current climate, this is especially true for fanatics who present themselves as priests of a a science that in fact is no science and who finally enjoy the limelight. Contrary to popular belief, true science does not guarantee objective certainty or universal consensus. Nor is it a new naturalistic religion, which people long for because they have abandoned God. Rather, it is a space for critical questioning of everything and of different and contradictory hypotheses – and therefore a sphere of uncertainty. However, it is difficult to expect today’s scientific rabble and barbaric public to read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and similar fundamental literature. The Philokalia also contains many profound passages about true knowledge and insight beyond the scientific episteme: ‘Without the memory of God, true knowledge is impossible. Without it, something else, something false, appears,’ says Mark the Ascetic. But aren’t revolutions, by definition, bloody, involving many sacrifices and human lives? You are right that this revolution is not yet bloody – if we shamefully ignore the millions at the bottom of the human ‘food chain’ – but all the prerequisites for it are in place in the developed world. The social body is already boiling over in different directions. In addition to ideological polarisation, a deep emotional division is emerging between those who want a ‘firm hand’ and fear freedom, desiring to escape it as much as possible – to paraphrase Erich Fromm – and those who instinctively resist any form of authoritarianism (I belong to the latter group, as you may have guessed). However, despite all our other, less honourable qualities, we human beings are undoubtedly freedom-loving creatures. It is quite possible that this unprecedented social experiment we are witnessing will eventually lead to physical conflict on an unimaginable scale, unless the new engineers of society manage to rein in the horses. You have forgotten the reality of the Church… How would you evaluate the actions of the Catholic Church in this social context? I am quite concerned about the Church in Slovenia. Despite my love for it and my gratitude for everything it has given and continues to give me spiritually, and despite my friends within the Church – who have also supported the Philokalia in various ways – I must admit that historically, our Church has often responded very naively to challenges, especially in times of social crisis. This response has had disastrous consequences for the Church itself. Well, ‘naively’ is perhaps not the right word. It is more a kind of Machiavellianism, where the end justifies the means – a fundamentally un-Christian and deeply unethical principle that always prevails in critical situations. Can you illustrate this statement with examples? Let me mention just two of the most striking examples. Firstly, the Church opposed the undoubtedly fatal threat of communist revolution by supporting tactical pacts with fascist and Nazi occupiers. This ultimately plunged a Christian populace into disaster. I do not wish to demonise this decision too much, as is customary, because the Church found itself in a tragic situation, forced to choose between two bad options. It chose the worse one, which understandably led to constant attempts at self-justification later on – attempts that are only convincing to those who are justifying themselves. During the turmoil of the transition period after Communism, our Church, employing similar logic, succumbed to capitalist greed – again convinced that the means by which money is obtained is irrelevant, provided it is used for the right purposes in the end. The result was the Maribor Bishopric financial disaster. Several years before these events, I publicly warned that this would happen, but of course no one listened to me – they even laughed at me. In what sense could this paradigm repeat itself now? Quite simply and concretely, if the Church, because of the favours it expects from the current right wing government in resolving its current problems (and it will certainly find more sympathy from this government than from some radical leftists), complacently agrees with the logic of totalitarian restructuring of social life or even defends it, after the end of this revolution, however it may end – and it is very likely that it will turn out to be one of the greatest collective deceptions in modern history – it will lose even more of its already tarnished credibility. In today’s critical situation, the Church should fiercely defend the divine truth of the Gospel and human freedom, and work towards normalising life. It should uncompromisingly assert its sovereignty within church premises, even if this leads to conflict with politics and the hysterically anti-Christian public. Otherwise, it will become apparent that it has also been infected by the deep nihilism that is prevalent in European society and that it has begun to assist in spreading it, albeit unconsciously, unreflectively, and without wanting to admit it to itself. I am almost embarrassed to have to emphasise such things: the Church does not proclaim health, but salvation. It is therefore necessary to discern spirits constantly, carefully, and attentively… This is also one of the great themes of the Philokalia. Cassian characteristically says, ‘Discernment examines all human thoughts and actions, separating out and rejecting everything that is evil and displeasing to God. Thus, it removes every kind of error… Without the gift of discernment, no virtue can arise or remain firm to the end.’ The interview was conducted by Ksenja Hočevar. Gorazd Kocijančič on the Church Fathers and the content of the second part of the Philokalia We talked to philosopher, translator, and editor Gorazd Kocijančič about the Church Fathers and the content of the second part of the Philokalia. *** When the first book of the Philokalia was published last year, you told Družina in an interview that publishing the entire work would give us insight into ‘the entire history of Byzantine Christian spirituality’. What part does the second book represent? A very important one. One could say that the second book contains the intellectual – theological and philosophical – backbone of the entire collection. It contains texts by two brilliant authors: Maximus the Confessor and his friend Thalassius of Libya. They wrote in the second half of the first millennium, summarising the fruits of the previously flourishing monastic culture and patristic spiritual insights. They also set out ways of reading the Holy Scriptures symbolically, as these had developed during the golden age of Christian literature. The Gnomic Flower Garden and the Discerning Chapters of Ilias the Presbyter can also be placed alongside these authors. Of all the spiritual writers in the Philokalia, Maximus the Confessor has the largest presence. We in Slovenia are now quite familiar with Maximus. Why is he such an interesting author today? Probably because we sense a balance between all forms of Christian spirituality in his work. This is also the reason why I titled my selection of his short writings a few years ago simply ‘What is Christianity?’. In his magnificent theological vision, Maximus is influenced by Origen, Evagrius, Cappadocian theology (especially the works of Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus), and the mysterious Dionysius the Areopagite – the most profound Eastern Christian thinkers of previous centuries. However, we must be aware that, with his synoptic mind, Maximus was able to shape individual currents of tradition into something universal and timelessly binding. According to Hans Urs von Balthasar, the inner form of his work in all its dimensions is synthesis, which the great Swiss theologian ultimately defined as the harmonious union of Eastern and Western spirituality. You speak of theological thought and vision. But isn’t the Philokalia primarily practical? Isn’t its essence to guide us, through useful advice and tried-and-tested methods, towards a complete transformation of heart and mind on our journey towards God? This is undoubtedly true, but according to the Philokalia’s teaching, we must not neglect thinking in our ‘practice’. Otherwise, we risk losing our fundamental orientation in life and, sooner or later, falling into idolatry in our spirituality – our active love of God and neighbour. Therefore, from a practical point of view, it is extremely important that we mentally internalise the fundamental Christian dogmas in such a way that they provide a secure framework for our intimate spiritual experiences. So, is the second book of the Philokalia more difficult to understand than the first? Yes, the second book of the Slovenian translation of the Philokalia is certainly more demanding than the first in some respects, since it contains fundamental theological discussions – and often philosophical ones – on numerous pages. These discussions undergird and provide in-depth support for the spiritual-ascetic and prayerful teaching of the entire collection, and with their brilliant – and often paradoxical – insights, they always direct us back to the ultimate horizon of the incomprehensible Principle of all that exists. As emphasised by Dionysius the Areopagite, whom Maximus the Confessor likes to quote, this Principle becomes even more mysterious in the New Testament revelation of God’s Trinitarian life and the description of the salvific mystery of the Incarnation of the Logos, even though it invites us to participate in its mystery. Do you find any teachings from the second book of the Philokalia particularly relevant for our times? There are many relevant teachings, but I would like to highlight Maximus the Confessor’s teachings on agape, or selfless love. Today, we undoubtedly live in an era of discord and strife, and perhaps even the fatal disintegration of society. According to the Philokalia, however, all forms of social conflict are merely superficial symptoms of a deeper hostility that we, as sinful beings, feel towards one another. According to Maximus’s teaching, when Christ came into human history, it was also to remove all hatred between us once and for all. Regardless of our position on current social problems – and it is, of course, right that we take a position based on our conscience and reason – as Christians, we should cultivate kindness, benevolence, tolerance, and respect for others in their otherness, even when we consider them to be stupid, misguided, or wicked. Maximus emphasises that selfless love must recognise the divine in humanity – namely, our godlike human nature and existence, which arises directly from God’s creative act and is redeemed through Christ’s sacrifice, regardless of the choices individuals make in their lives. If we truly love others, regardless of who they are or what they do, then we love God in their existence. God gives us and them life at every moment and redeems everyone and everything. Anything else is pseudo-Christianity, a house built on sand. For if we are incapable of this selfless love, we are on Satan’s side, not Christ’s. We must not deceive ourselves. Love for our enemies is the only criterion. Of course, we cannot achieve this agape on our own. We can only pray for it. It can only be instilled in us as a gift from God, as the grace of His presence. The second book of the Philokalia also deeply instructs us in this through its teachings on prayer. The interview was conducted by Ksenja Hočevar. Original publication of interviews 1. »Knjiga presenečenja … ki lahko spremeni tvoje življenje. Pogovor z Gorazdom Kocijančičem, prevajalcem Svetega pisma«, in: Božja beseda danes. Revija Slovenskega bibličnega gibanja IV (1997), no. 4, pp. 3–5.. 2. »Mišljenje in duhovno izročilo. Velik zgodovinski pomen patristike za oblikovanje evropske misli in kulture«, in: Dnevnik, vol. 36 (19 Dec. 1998), str. 13. 3. »Ironija na več kot 2000 straneh, najprej pa na dobrih 500: Gorazd Kocijančič, prevajalec Platona«, in: Delo, Književni listi, vol. 44, 30 Sept. 2002, no. 225. 4. »Kdor se hoče motiti, naj se moti: Rožančev nagrajenec Gorazd Kocijančič«, v: Delo, 15 Sept. 2004, vol. 46, no. 216, p. 11. 5. »Želja po uzrtju Resnice: pogovor z Gorazdom Kocijančičem«, in: Delo, 4 Jan. 2005, vol. 47, no. 2, p. 3. 6. »Čemu filozofija v ubožnem času? Pogovor z Deanom Komelom in Gorazdom Kocijančičem«, in: Nova revija: mesečnik za kulturo, Nov./Dec. 2007, vol. 26, no. 307/308, pp. 150–164. 7. »Resnica je molk prihodnjega veka«, in: Sobotna priloga Dela, 7 Nov. 2009, vol. 51, no. 258, pp. 26–28. 8. »Pogovor – Alberto Manguel in Gorazd Kocijančič«, in: Bukla 70, 10 Oct. 2011, pp. 18–20. 9. »Etike si ni mogoče izmisliti kot nove mode«, published on the MMC portal: https://www.rtvslo.si/velikih-5/kocijancic-etike-si-ni-mogoce-izmisliti-kot-nove-mo-de/301800. 10. »Antikatolicizem je slovenska varianta antisemitizma: Gorazd Kocijančič, filozof in pesnik«, in: Pogledi: umetnost, kultura, družba, 13 Feb. 2013, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 6–8.. 11. »Evangelij je večna vizija«, in: Domače vaje (Literarni zbornik Škofijske gimnazije) 40, 2014, pp. 52–73. 12. »Pogovori s sodobniki: Leja Forštner z Gorazdom Kocijančičem«, in: Sodobnost, vol. 78, no. 4 (2014), pp. 357–370.. 13. »Laboratorij duhovnih naukov«, in: Družina 69 (2020), no. 44 (1 Nov.), pp. 16–17. 14. »Gorazd Kocijančič o cerkvenih očetih in vsebini drugega dela Filokalije«, in: Družina 70 (2021), no. 51-52 (15 Dec.), p. 24. Notes [←1] Or maybe wrote them? The interviews are mostly transcribed from conversations which were often slightly modified or supplemented in subsequent written authorisations, while some were conducted using a modern substitute for conversation, namely electronic messaging. [←2] This seemingly paradoxical designation is not without historical foundations; even in Catholic countries, there was once a strong movement for a Christian-inspired Enlightenment, which has only recently come to the attention of researchers; cf. U. L. Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement, New York 2016. [←3] The hyperbolic culmination of this optimism was undoubtedly my manifesto on the future of Slovenian thought in Videnja (Visions), a special edition of the magazine Tretji dan (Third Day) in 2000; its revised text was also published in the book Med Vzhodom in Zahodom. Štirje prispveki k ekstatiki (Between East and West. Four Contributions to Ecstatics), Ljubljana 2004 (English translation 2026). [←4] This is the subtitle of my book Tistim zunaj (To Those Outside), Ljubljana 2004 (English translation 2026). [←5] See R. Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, 2017. Benedict of Nursia (480–547) started the Western monastic movement in a time of decline of classical culture. [←6] In 2012, Janez Janša’s center-right government abolished the independent Ministry of Culture, which had existed since Slovenia’s independence.