«A lot of people imagine that God is a stuff of spirituality, of feelings» writes Costanza Miriano in her latest book dedicated to the Bible that despite the heart on the cover and the light graphics and the super-friendly style is anything but sentimental. Love or rather marriage (in the world of Constance, evangelical sine glossa, they are practically synonymous) is something very serious and just as hard. The Bible, she writes, is “a guide to reality” or a booklet, or big book, of instructions for the use of life. We therefore understand that one of the essential chapters is number ten: «Rebecca. How to find a boyfriend ». Starting from the story of Isaac’s wife, narrated in Genesis, you develop a lesson of very precious common sense: “It is necessary to have a vision of the world that has at least the fundamentals in common”. Other than mixed marriages, for the union to last it is necessary to belong to the same environment, to the same culture and even more basically to the same religion, as explained, albeit with caution, on the next page: “I am no longer so sure even of the fact that faith is not essential. Perhaps it could still have been thought about thirty years ago (when I was looking for a boyfriend), because in general there was a minimum common basic heritage, quite shared. I fear that today this is no longer the case, and that a Christian may feel like a Martian in certain situations: find himself speaking a different language, which makes it impossible to understand each other even on fundamental concepts ».
I, who am not looking for a boyfriend, did not feel very involved at first. The usual book of the usual writer for readers? I would not say, because the usual writers for readers are atheists or at least they do yoga. But in any case, without a doubt, a book aimed primarily at women. For me, who are patriarchal, the biblical heroes are called Abraham, Noah, Moses, David, Solomon, for Constance besides Rachel they are Judith, Ruth, Susanna, Esther … The book that reads us. The Bible as a treasure map (Sonzogno) has therefore served me to fill some misogynistic gaps. I had always avoided investigating Giuditta because the violent paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi, feminists ahead of the letter, were enough for me and advanced. After reading chapter three I have not changed my mind, on the contrary: the heroine of the Jewish people is young, beautiful and falsely available, and it is natural that a male, even if not Assyrian, tends to identify himself with poor Holofernes, seduced and beheaded.
While from Rebecca’s story, looking back, even a man can profit. Even those who are not looking for a boyfriend, nor a girlfriend, need criteria to select the people with whom to relate. Having the same worldview, the fundamentals in common, after thousands of years is still important, and in an even greater number of situations: even just to go out for dinner, in my personal experience. Reading the Bible through Costanza Miriano, and therefore not as a document but as a teaching, means to stop harboring dangerous illusions. And very dangerous utopias. First of all, the cosmopolitan utopia, the one which, as Flavio Cuniberto wrote, “passes like a steamroller over the iridescent landscape of differences”. Which passes or which passes, since the war between Russians and Ukrainians, the differences of which seemed laughable to us, has among its side effects the relaunch of ethnic faults. Like it or not, humanity is reframing itself, between the different languages and the different religions the gaps seem to deepen. Even among the different opinions, as we experienced in the last election campaign. The crude propaganda of the Democratic Party did nothing but exhort discrimination, let’s say cultural, with its red / black binary, good / bad. The real content of the posts by and with Enrico Letta were not the contents, irrelevant to the limit of the joke (in fact, there was no lack of parodies), but the distinction between friend and foe, a political category dear to Carl Schmitt who was also the president of the National Socialist jurists , damn. Other than an open society of Popperian memory: everything plots to lock us up in Manichaean cells. I suspect that this macro-trend can be opposed as it can be opposed to the melting of the glaciers: with unrealistic initiatives, destined to fail. Better to make a virtue of necessity and the virtue is that of Rebecca, who marries Isaac because they belong to the same lineage. In a small way and unconsciously I was practicing it too, avoiding dinners and even aperitifs with those who think like Letta. Call me Old Testament, I’m not offended.