Belief or Nonbelief? A Confrontation

Belief or Nonbelief? A Confrontation. By Umberto Eco and Carlo Montini. Translated by Minna Proctor. New York: Arcade, 2000. 102 pp. $17.99 (cloth).

This slim volume is as challenging to read as it must have been for the authors to compose their responses to each other. As a distinguished semanticist and the renowned author of The Name of the Rose, Eco takes the lead, addressing the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan by his given name to establish a kind of parity and to overcome the negative feature of going first: that he would be posing questions for a cleric to answer. Anyone acquainted with Carlo Montini's reflections over the years would know, of course, that he is no answer-man, but a profound questioner himself.

So the match is near-perfect, as they canvass issues which elicit the mutual respect of believer and unbeliever. Eco is utterly clear that he, as a once-- Catholic, has no claim on criticizing intra-church affairs, yet his desire to understand the ethical and anthropological stances of Catholicism allows Montini ample room to present a picture of church which often runs askew to the one which Eco departed from as a young man. Moreover, in doing so, he never hesitates to offer the profundity of a faith-perspective, never trying to tailor his faith to a procrustean bed of contemporary sensibility-nor does Eco demand that.

Chapter titles offer a glimpse of the territory explored: "Secular Obsession with the New Apocalypse" (UE); "Hope Puts an End to `the End"'(CM); "When Does Human Life Begin?" (UE); "Human Life Is Part of God's Life" (CM); "Men and Women-According to the Church" (UE); "The Church Does not Fulfill Expectations, it Celebrates Mysteries" (CM); "Where Does the Layman Find Fulfillment?" (CM); "Ethics Are Born in the Presence of the Other" (UE). This final exchange, initiated by Montini, is perhaps the most illuminating: how can one uphold an ethical stance without a transcendent mooring? It is Sartre's dilemma: if I choose my values, what can make them normative? Eco's response, predictably, reveals just where his commitment to transcendence lies-in our encounter with another, and so belies any easy label like "secular humanist."

Useful for beginning classroom or adult education sessions in faith and reason, this work deserves a wide readership, whether or not Montini will be selected for the next Pope! Readers need to be warned, however, of an annoying translation glitch, revealed in the first title of the fourth exchange: the Italian laico is regularly translated "layman," but laico (like the French laicisme) connotes an aggressively secular stance towards matters religious; whereas "layman" (in English) simply distinguishes among believers, so it is both confusing and offensive to use "layman" to refer to a person lacking (and sometimes even contemptuous of) faith.

DAVID B. BURRELL, C.S.C.

University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Winter 2002
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