“The first obligatory step” that all “the Christian confessions must take” in pursuit of peaceful co-existence between peoples “is that of fully dissociating the name of God from politics” even if “a prerequisite of this is self-criticism in the Christian conscience about everything that implies violence and exclusion”. So said Paul Ricoeur, the great French philosopher of the Reformed faith, who in recent days was honoured by the Pope with the award of the international “Paul VI” Prize. Ricoeur recalled the responsibility of Christians for avoiding the clash of civilizations, a scarecrow often being agitated also on the European horizon. In particular, the French philosopher stressed the importance of “a face to face” encounter with the Moslem world, a culture that today has a great deal of difficulty in recreating itself, since it is in the grips of violence”. Hence the need for “religions to rediscover their own message of peace”: only thus can they arrive at “a dialogue in which each side may bring with it its own conviction, the fundamental messages” that “are like great texts to confront, interpret and translate”. This is Ricoeur’s lesson: “It is always by having a clear knowledge of one’s own language that one is able to translate from a foreign language”, a field in which “the relation between the insider and the outsider is absolutely structural” and reciprocal understanding is made possible by the “hospitality of language”. “Each human being is able to learn a foreign language, ‘different’ from his own, and to promote an exchange between them concluded the philosopher . I would say that we need to do the same thing on the religious level”.
