"I wanted to be
a great magician”
We have multiplied knowledge
and lost wisdom.
- by Francesco Cicione
The learned and
powerful toil like the magicians of Egypt: ephemeral solutions, then surrender.
“I wanted to be a
great magician,” Claudio Baglioni sang autobiographically in one of the most
beautiful albums in the history of Italian music: Oltre.
At the pinnacle of
his (and not only his) musical and literary writing.
With immortal arrangements by the late Celso Valli.
“I
wanted to be a great magician / to enchant girls and snakes / to eat fire like
a young dragon / to give wonder to the eyes of those present … one who can make
the moon drool / with wrists of stone and a winged heart…”
To charm girls and
snakes, to eat fire like a young dragon, to give wonders to the eyes of those
present, to make the moon look strange.
In Baglioni, that
dream initially takes on the luminous face of wonder.
It is the desire of the artist, the acrobat, the storyteller who seeks to
enchant not to subjugate, but to inspire wonder.
And above all, to
reach those whom life has left on the margins: the sad and the beaten, the
unfortunate and the forgotten, those the world considers strange.
He would like to reverse their fate, give them what they never had, invent a
happiness for each of them.
A power entirely
at the service of beauty and others: making one's art a gift, and one's prodigy
a caress.
But the song
doesn't stop at the luminous omnipotence of the dream.
Little by little, the great wizard discovers the limits of his own magic.
He would like to
right every wrong, heal every sadness, redeem every loneliness; he understands,
however, that not even art can abolish pain or remake the world.
It can amaze, console, accompany; it cannot save.
To achieve this,
one would have to accomplish the impossible: make water fall from the moon.
It is here that the childhood dream becomes adult consciousness, and the song
reveals its deepest melancholy.
The artist's good “magic” does not consist in overcoming every limit, but in continuing to give beauty even knowing that he is not omnipotent.
We, on the other
hand – and this is where the song turns on its head – have developed the
presumption of being magicians of a very different kind.
No longer magicians who enchant to bring joy, but sorcerer's apprentices who pretend to deceive humanity and history, bending them to an illusion of omnipotence.
"Come, all the audience!"
Thus, more or
less, we all become Promethean and deceptive magicians of destiny.
We delude ourselves into thinking we can command the sun and the rain, death
and birth, the nature of man and his truth, history and Eternity.
Convinced that
there is no threshold that knowledge cannot cross, nor mystery that technology
cannot dissolve.
We no longer want
to know the world: we want to possess it.
No longer inhabit it, but dominate it.
And here lies the
most subtle and perverse deception, now an alibi. Because the magic of our time
is dazzling, and its glare blinds us.
The wonders of technology are real, its fruits tangible, its achievements
undeniable. And it is precisely this splendor that persuades us that illusion
is not illusion, that omnipotence is within our grasp, that nothing is now
denied us. This is the great deception.
The perfect alibi
for not looking deeper, for not questioning meaning, for mistaking power for
wisdom and possession for fulfillment.
But all that glitters is not gold. And if we dig beneath the luminous
surface—beneath the seemingly triumphant numbers, beneath the displayed
prodigies—we find not a demigod: we find, instead, a man lost. A man who has
multiplied the means and lost the ends, who knows everything about the how but
nothing about the why. A magician who, behind his glittering cloak, no longer
knows who he is. And that bewilderment has a social face even before it is an
internal one. That social face bears the hallmarks of the great paradox of our
time: never so much well-being, never so much inequality.
Never has
humanity, as a whole, been so rich; never has wealth been so concentrated, and
never have inequalities and injustices been so radical.
The global product
has reached heights that no previous generation would have dared to imagine.
And yet, a tiny
portion of humanity holds a disproportionate share of the world's wealth
compared to that left to the multitude.
As early as
1973—the year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, along with Karl von
Frisch and Nikolaas Tinbergen—Konrad Lorenz, the father of ethology, delivered
to Europe a small, dazzling warning book, The Eight Deadly Sins of Our
Civilization. In it, he denounced the paradox of a progress that, by
multiplying material well-being, was eroding the very roots of
humanity—overpopulation, the devastation of the earth, the rush to acquire, the
cooling of emotions. A humanity technically powerful yet spiritually
impoverished.
Laboriously intent
on bringing about her own ruin.
And the following
year, 1974, a converging statement came from the opposite side—that of
economics. The American economist and demographer Richard Easterlin formulated
what would go down in history as the Easterlin paradox, or happiness paradox.
Analyzing data
from the long postwar US boom, he observed that, beyond a certain threshold,
income growth ceased to increase people's happiness.
Indeed, beyond that point, the curve tended to bend downward.
Material
well-being continued to increase; life satisfaction did not.
Since then, economics has had to rediscover what ancient wisdom already knew:
that wealth alone does not produce happiness, and that the Gross Domestic
Product does not measure what makes life worth living.
Half a century
later, that double paradox hasn't resolved itself: it's expanded.
And it's not just a question of money.
Economic
inequality is the emerging tip of a deeper inequality: of power, of
recognition, of hope, of the future.
It is the
anthropological fracture of which the social fracture is a symptom.
Man is de-finalized – deprived of his purpose, reduced to producer and
consumer, to data among data – builds irremediably artificial societies that
reproduce, by amplifying it, its own loss of measure.
Because the Greek
metron , that balance between being and having, between possession and gift,
between limit and excess, has been lost.
And where measure
is lost, tyranny thrives.
This confusion,
however, has an even deeper root, which is of intelligence before it is of
society: there has never been an era so rich in knowledge and so poor in
wisdom.
We know
everything, yet understand nothing.
We accumulate data
like the pharaohs accumulated grain, but we no longer know how to make bread
from it.
The infinite library is at our fingertips, and meaning slips away like water
through our fingers. Since the Age of Enlightenment—with its splendid and
legitimate promise of emancipating Man from the darkness of superstition—we
have multiplied notions to the point of dizziness, and we have lost sight of
the purpose. Reason, which was meant to enlighten, has ended up separating
itself from the truth it was meant to serve.
Thus science
emancipated itself from wisdom.
Aristotle, in the
Nicomachean Ethics, already distinguished episteme — the science of
necessity—from phrónesis , the practical wisdom that knows how to deliberate on
the good of Man, and from sophia , the wisdom that contemplates the highest
realities.
To know is not to be wise.
Knowledge
informs; wisdom shapes.
One fills the
mind; the other orders life.
And Leibniz, at
the dawn of modernity, dreamed of a science generalis , a characteristica
universalis capable of reducing every truth to calculation, every dispute to
computation: « calculemus », we calculate.
But that same
Leibniz knew – and we forget this – that every truth of reason refers to an
ultimate Reason, to that raison enough that it is not in the world, but
founds it.
As
time went by, this perspective was lost.
And so, century
after century—from rationalism to positivism, from the triumphant scientism of
the late nineteenth century to the current idolatry of algorithms—we have built
a civilization prodigiously capable of doing and desperately incapable of being.
This is the culmination of a long drift.
Extropianism
Its most extreme
form is extropianism : that current of techno-utopian thought which, by
reversing entropy into " extropy ", promises to break down every
limit of Man – illness, aging, death itself – through the unlimited enhancement
of technology.
It is the dream of
a humanity that no longer knows boundaries, that deludes itself into
self-transcending into the posthuman, that mistakes the promised eternity for a
fabricated immortality.
No longer knowledge that consoles: knowledge that claims to replace the
Creator.
It is knowledge that, ceasing to vivify, aspires to divinize.
And,
by deifying, he dehumanizes.
Humanity, then,
seems to be without solutions.
Faced with the
tragedies of contemporary times—the wars that flare up, die down, and blaze
again, the biblical migrations, the feverish land, the mass solitude, the
frayed democracies—the scholars, the powerful, the wise men of the century
appear strangely defenseless.
They promise, announce, convene summits, draw up agendas. And then, faced with
the incessant march of history, they remain silent.
Or they give up.
These wise men of
ours resemble the magicians of Egypt before Pharaoh. Remember?
When Moses and Aaron performed the first signs, the court magicians—the wise
men, the diviners, the technicians of the sacred—at first manage to imitate
them with their occult arts. They too transform the waters, they too evoke
frogs. But the moment comes when the test surpasses them, and then they are
forced to confess, faced with the plague of mosquitoes: "It is the finger
of God!" (Exodus 8:15). In the original Hebrew— ʾetsbaʿ ʾelōhîm , אֶצְב
ַּע אֱלֹהִים – and so, literally, in Septuagint Greek: δάκτυλος θεοῦ , the
finger of God.
Their power stops
at a threshold; beyond that threshold, their knowledge stammers.
They are capable of replicating miracles, not of understanding them; of
imitating power, not of possessing it.
Or are they like Nebuchadnezzar's wise men—the magicians, the astrologers, the
Chaldeans of Babylon—called by the king to reveal the dream that torments him
and its meaning. And their response is the very confession of all human power
when it reaches its limits: "There is no one in the world who can grant
the king's request... The king's request is so difficult that no one can give
the king an answer except the gods, whose dwelling is not among men"
(Daniel 2:10-11). It is the surrender of the intelligence that has measured
everything and can do nothing in the face of mystery. Theirs is vain talk: much
knowledge, no power.
It is said that
during the years of the great French drought, a cartoon portrayed the Minister
of Agriculture while, from the height of his authority, he ordered the sky to
obey: "Sun, get out of my agriculture!"
Here's the perfect
image of human impotence disguised as leadership.
Yesterday and today.
The Man of Power
who orders the star to retreat, who decrees against the heat, who signs
ordinances against the firmament.
The sun, of
course, did not obey. It continued its millennial course, indifferent to
decrees and gazettes.
And
the earth was parched.
He is the exact
figure of the Godless Man before the incessant march of History: a magistrate
who summons eternity, a bureaucrat who summons the infinite, a magician who
claims to make the moon glare. He shouts, gesticulates, promulgates.
And History—sovereign, patient, unstoppable—carries on.
Not out of cruelty, but to teach. Because she is a teacher.
It is the
instrument of mercy that, from failure to failure, wants to lead us back to our
most authentic truth.
In its most
dramatic events, it confronts us with our limits and reminds us that there is
something greater than us.
That there is
something – Someone – who goes beyond, who is beyond.
Power, the true
kind, the kind that rules fate, unties knots, and opens paths, does not belong
to the princes of this world.
The
power is God's.
And we have forgotten how to recognize it. We Christians, too, are often magicians who deceive with a diluted, partial, and secularized truth.
A Christian
magician is ruin for history.
Recognizing,
however, that everything comes from God is not a confession of weakness: it is
the conquest of truth.
For He is the Lord
of History, not a retired watchmaker who abandons the world to its own devices,
but the Presence who weaves a promise into the fabric of events.
He is the God who "remembers," who "brings down the mighty from
their thrones and raises up the lowly," who writes straight on the crooked
lines of human history.
Every problem is
entrusted to Him; every solution is invoked from Him.
With humility.
With
responsibility.
Because
recognizing that power belongs to God doesn't mean resigning from History,
folding our arms, and sinking into an ineffective fatalism.
Quite the opposite, it means fully assuming responsibility for the solution
entrusted to us.
Because Man, who
knows he is not God, is finally free to be fully human.
Free from the debilitating anguish of false omnipotence, from the exhausting
pretense of having to single-handedly save a world he did not create.
And therefore free
to operate – in his field, with his own strength, within his limits – with a
serenity that the deluded do not know.
Ora
et labora
Ora et labora :
pray, as one who knows that the fruit does not depend on himself alone; and
work, as one who knows that the fruit has been entrusted to him.
Faith doesn't
exempt us from work: it establishes it. It doesn't extinguish responsibility:
it ignites it.
Because the
servant in the parable is not praised for having stored the talent in the
ground, but for having made it bear fruit.
And the Lord
entrusts the vineyard to those who cultivate it.
What,
then, is the meaning of History?
What is the value
of this finite time, with its burden of toil and waiting, of failures and
rebirths?
The highest answer comes to us from the great wisdom tradition, from Augustine
to Thomas, from those who thought of time not as a prison but as a womb. The
History of Finite Time is a gift of love. A patient and
pedagogical gift.
It is given to
us—with its trials and limitations, its droughts and its impotent wizards—so
that we may learn to recognize what we are: creatures and children, not masters
and creators.
It is the school of humility and, at the same time, the pedagogy of hope.
Every limit we
touch is a finger pointing to the Beyond; every helplessness we experience is a
door ajar to the Almighty.
Augustine
understood this, and in The City of God he interprets the entire human story as
the pilgrimage of two loves and two cities, reaching towards a fulfillment that
is not in time, but beyond time.
And in the
Confessions, questioning the most arduous mystery – «what, then, is time?» – he
recognizes that our soul is stretched between memory and expectation, restless
until it rests in Him who does not suffer time but gives it: « inquietum est
cor nostrum, donec requiescat in Te».
Time, for
Augustine, is not the prison of the creature: it is the distension souls towards
the eternal, the tightrope between the already and the not yet.
And Thomas had
understood this, distinguishing with adamantine lucidity the time of Man from
the aevum of the angels and from the aeternitas of God – that « interminabilis
vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio » , the total and perfect possession
of a life without end, which he takes from Boethius.
Time
passes
Time flows, the
measure of what changes; eternity endures, an undivided present.
And the temporal creature is ultimately made for eternity: ordered, inwardly,
to that bliss that no finite good can satisfy, since—as Aquinas teaches—the
human will finds rest only in the infinite Good. This, ultimately, is the
secret that magicians do not know and that the myths know. Finite time is not
given to us to make us little gods, but to prepare us to enjoy endless
eternity.
Not to build
towers that challenge the sky, but to recognize the Heaven that calls us.
Not to command the sun, but to let it shine upon us.
The man who
accepts that he is not God discovers that he is, finally, a son.
And the son does
not fear History: he goes through it.
Because he knows
in whose hands it rests.
Let us therefore
lay aside the cloak of the omnipotent magician.
Not that of the
artist who inspires wonder despite knowing his own limitations, but that of the
sorcerer's apprentice who claims to remake the world and save it himself.
Let us renounce the tired illusion of omnipotence, which is the most subtle of
despairs.
Armonauts
And let us
return—learned and powerful, small and gentle—to that wisdom that can transform
knowledge into life-giving wisdom, calculation into discernment, power into
service.
Let us return, as good Armonauts , to do what we can and to entrust the
impossible to Him who alone can make water fall from the moon.
Because faith
begins precisely where Baglioni's great magician melancholically lays down his
wand: in the recognition that Man can give beauty and consolation, but cannot
save himself.
And let us,
together, with industrious humility, assume full responsibility for the
vineyard entrusted to us.
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