Against culture: destroying the past
€ 3.00While it is hard to admit after seeing sledgehammers wielded by so-called Islamic State’s fighters destroying statues in Mosul, Islam is not behind the worst vandalistic destruction in the history of religious conflicts. Neither are the Turks and not even the Protestant reformers of 16th/17th century Europe. Rather it was the Catholics, whose Fourth Crusade conquered Constantinople in 1204. ISIS manipulates religious ideology to distort and destroy the past. The human tendency towards fanaticism provokes the contraction of knowledge into a single creed and turns the facts of history into ideological absolutes, driven by a longing to cleanse history of its multifaceted, ambiguous and hybrid nature. The truth is that the West no longer appears to have a past. Within the microstructure of rolling news, tweets and social media posts, our world is purely in the present. But it is important to learn about the plurality and diversity of the past because, as George Orwell wrote, “who controls the past, controls the present”.
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Silvia Ronchey is a professor of Byzantine Civilisation and teaches Classical Philology and Byzantine Civilisation at Roma Tre University in Rome. She is an internationally renowned expert of the Byzantine world, author of essays, translations and widely distributed publications, among which: L'aristocrazia bizantina (with Alexander Kazhdan, Sellerio, 1998); Lo Stato bizantino (Einaudi, 2002); L'enigma di Piero (Rizzoli, 2006); Il guscio della tartaruga (Nottetempo, 2009); Il romanzo di Costantinopoli (with Tommaso Braccini, Einaudi, 2010); Ipazia. La vera storia (Rizzoli, 2010); Storia di Barlaam e Ioasaf. La vita bizantina del Buddha (Einaudi, 2012); and the critical edition of Eustathius of Thessalonica’s commentary on the Iambic Canon for Pentecost (De Gruyter, 2014). She writes for the newspaper la Repubblica and has interviewed renowned observers of the 20th century, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and James Hillman. Her encounters with the latter led to a long-standing collaboration and subsequent books about their conservations, L'anima del mondo and Il piacere di pensare (Rizzoli).
Silvia Ronchey & i Dialoghi
2017
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