Ad Usum Fabricae - The Construction of the Duomo of Milan
Ad Usum Fabricae - The Construction of the Duomo of Milan
This article traces almost in its entirety the talk I gave at the end of the lecture entitled "Ad Usum Fabricae- The Construction of the Milan Cathedral" by Prof. Mariella Carlotti at the annual event of Tirelli &Partners held on January 30, 2013. The entire lecture can be viewed here.
Very welcome guests, dear friends, dear colleagues,
What I would like to do today is to try to share with you the feelings aroused by this story and try to understand how this beauty can be brought into our daily lives.
What I feel now is a sense of joy, a contentment of the heart. I therefore ask myself three questions:
- Where does this joy come from?
- What's the point?
- How does understanding its meaning change my actions in today?
I believe that in the story we heard, what stirs joy in us is confronting the ability of those women and men to commit themselves to something that transcended their lives, that surpassed them. To participate in a work that will not be seen to be completed is to work for the common good. In the case of Milan Cathedral, whose construction took many centuries, even for a common good that generations far away will enjoy.
The common good is affixed to one's own good. So cries the world since time immemorial. But it deceives itself!
Instead, our heart is able to recognize this beauty because it is tuned to play and sing when it encounters what makes us happy. Happiness is our deepest desire and I believe also our destiny. We are not moved by rationality-just look at the amount of completely unreasonable actions we have done and do. We are moved by the desire for happiness.
That is why economics, which assumes the existence of this ghost he calls homo economicus, a zombie guided in its actions by personal profit alone, is increasingly foreign, an enemy in some cases of our lives.
Our external visible actions are therefore determined by the desires we carry in our hearts and not by rationality. The point, however, is that in our heart there is a little bit of everything, there is Good, but there is also all evil. Therefore, it is essential to recognize the motions of the heart. If these remain unknown to us, we are simply unconscious. We do not act: instead we are acted upon, we are agitated, by forces we do not understand. Our behaviors do not reach the threshold of the Human.
However, it is not enough to sense the existence of these motions of the heart. We must also learn to discern whether they lead to good or evil. Distinguishing one from the other is what makes our action responsible because it gives it direction. "Being responsible" is thus the ability to direct our action in the world toward Good. Only if we are responsible can we be free! Freedom is going to meet our desire and not just our needs. Freedom cannot be just the ability to choose between different kinds of cars, clothes, vacations!
We always know what we need, but our desire is without object. When we trace our ability to desire back to having needs we become slaves to things, things that were made for us instead. Sure we will be well-dressed, tanned and comfort-filled slaves, but still slaves we will remain. We must therefore have the courage to go for our happiness and not just our pleasure. So did the women and men who built the Dome. They lived in hovels, but they dreamed of cathedrals!
Happiness and not just pleasure, then. However, we cannot fall into the opposite mistake. We must be able to recognize that pleasure is good, not bad! To recognize in pleasure the Good is to have respect for our humanity. We cannot make an apologia for deprivation, for castration. The serious Man is not a castrato! Instead, he is a man who can freely renounce immediate enjoyment as an affirmation of a larger truth about himself. Morality is the place of a yes, not the praise of a no; it is a way through which we seek to fulfill ourselves as men and women, not a punishment.
Pleasure is therefore a good thing. However, each of us can recognize within ourselves, has the intimate capacity to understand, that there is more to life. If we stop to reflect, a capacity that only Man has -- the animal does not reflect, it is guided by instinct -- we feel that besides ourselves, our pleasure, our needs, there is more. Man has within him the capacity to exceed himself, his need, his very life, as witnessed by countless unknown men and women from time immemorial and forever, of whom the famous ones are only the most visible vanguard.
However, the experience of this surplus, this something that makes us greater than we thought we were, is inextricably linked in this life to the experience of our limitation. On the one hand we are capable of feeling a greatness that transcends us, on the other hand we feel our difficulty in living it, in fulfilling it. It is the experience that someone called of "not everything." A beautiful expression because on the one hand it tells of our limitation, but on the other hand of our striving toward fullness.
Faced with this recognition of being a "not-all," man has two viable paths.
The first is the acceptance of this essence, which binds us to re-remembering, to bringing back to the heart, that our possibility in this world of experiencing wholeness is linked to relationship, to encountering the other from us. Encounter full of joys certainly, but also encounter dense with daily labors. I believe that any possibility of living a peaceful beginning of life, at peace with oneself, with one's body - which reminds us that we are not Carl Lewis, Alain Delon, or Angelina Jolie - with one's brain - which reminds us that we are not Rita Levi Montalcini or Sigmunt Freud - one's heart - which reminds us that we are not Gandhi or Mother Teresa of Calcutta - and with others, is linked to embracing our being a "not-all."
The other path is the one that is before everyone's eyes: destruction. Man who does not accept that he is a "not all" tries in vain to experience the all by destroying, plundering, swallowing as much as he can in goods and people. All the events of destruction we hear about every day -- violence on women, on parents, on children, on other human beings in general, physical violence, but also verbal violence, of manners -- are nothing more than an unconscious attempt to be a whole in ourselves, to experience wholeness outside of a relationship with otherness.
I would now like to reflect on today, on the world in which we live in order to lay upon it the gaze of the joyful heart that I have at this moment.
Man has always had a tendency in looking back to consider what came before him as better than today. We are no exception, and for good reason, I believe.
A friend recently wrote that the world has undergone greater changes since the 1960s than in the previous 20,000 years! A world of constant change that touches our lives and not always painlessly. At the origin of this age of ours is the technology that changes everything. Technology is a good thing in itself, but by the power it has over the lives of us humans it calls us all louder to responsibility. Even if everything changes, however, we are not dispensed from seeking a meaningful life and helping by our example and help others to do the same.
Past generations had in tradition an extraordinary tool for interpreting the present and foreshadowing the future. It is worth reflecting, however, that greater predictability was accompanied by more limited freedom. One mostly died being what one was born. Peasants or princes.
Since the 1960s this has not been the case. Reality today is fluid, liquid, and the future is a 360-degree open horizon. It is the extraordinary age of maximum freedom, an age when nothing is taken for granted. Everything and its opposite is possible. It is up to us to know how to make use of all the means at our disposal without these means compromising our Humanity.
Economics is going to unify the world into one culture, but the kind of culture we want depends on the kind of economics we use. Today economism is raging, which is the economy of business not aimed at man, but at itself. That is why today more than yesterday we cannot close our eyes to the lack of justice, the first problem of the world that includes all of them. It makes me think a lot that in the Bible the opposite of justice is not injustice but wickedness.
Perhaps having the courage to pronounce that certain lifestyles that oppress other men are evil can open our eyes and convert action.
The first injustice is that of globalized labor, which, after great battles of civilization, returns to being, in many places and for many women and men, ill-concealed slavery induced by the ruler of our lives: profit!
I think we need to move away from the logic that the justice of the economy and our economic behaviors is measured by adherence to codes of conduct, codes of behavior, by not breaking laws, and instead embrace the logic that true justice is measured by the performance of relationships between people.
I close with a thought about Italian society.
A general surge of pride and indignation is needed today to get out of this agony in our society. We need to feel pride in what there is to be done, in the confidence that accomplishes the good it desires, instead of the fear that accomplishes only the evil it fears. And we need indignation at what should not be done instead.
The best service we can do for ourselves and others is to carry out our profession with responsibility and concern for the common good. Let us therefore regain the taste for engaging for the common good, the enthusiasm that contributing to the common good arouses in our hearts, and let this guide our action.
Every day. As in the days of cathedrals.
Marco E. Tirelli
[Lecture "Ad Usum Fabricae - The Construction of Milan Cathedral" on 01/30/2013]