A pupil of Giuseppe Greco, he taught in several Italian universities, including Trieste, Turin, Rome, where he closed his brilliant academic career in 2002. But certainly the experience that most marked him, spreading his name also abroad, was teaching at Cattolica in Milan, then directed by Agostino Gemelli, started in 1960. He entered into conflict for his position of uncompromising controversy towards the more backward part of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, he was expelled from Cattolica, unleashing what, in the pages of Italian and foreign newspapers, took the name of “Cordero case”. The occasion of the clash, not sought or even avoided by Cordero, was the publication of the text entitled The Observants (1967) but above all the subsequent novel genus that in 1969 will cost him the removal from the chair. Accused of heterodoxy and attacked frontally by the Catholic right, Cordero responded with equal sharpness, sparking a controversy that even reached the Constitutional Court.
Since then, his person has become an occasion for constant controversy. Attacked by confessional circles, it has become for others a banner of independence and free thought. His writings, some memorable, range from legal technique – his manual of criminal procedure, reprinted several times, still constitutes an essential reference for law studies – to philosophy, theology, anthropology. What is striking about them is the extraordinary blend of erudition and originality, of philology and hermeneutic ruthlessness.
If his monumental biography of Savonarola in four volumes still contains a mine of information for scholars, his Commentary on the Letter to the Romans by Paolo di Tarso continues to surprise us for the radical nature of his interpretation, which is both faithful and extreme. Today, in an academic culture increasingly inclined towards a specialization without reserve, the vastness and the versatility of its knowledge remain a sort of unicum with which it is difficult to make comparisons.
But this multiplicity of interests and languages never results in a sort of vacuous eclecticism, much less in popularization. On the contrary, his writing style, sometimes dense up to hermeticism, represents for the reader a challenge that cannot leave indifferent. Indeed, it can be said that, despite the breadth of horizons of his culture, all his texts seem to converge towards a central focus, both theoretical and ethical-political.
Cordero’s strength – in the full sense of the term – was in rejecting any compromise, any too easy answer to complex questions, such as that of the relationship between the sacred and the profane, theology and politics, eternity and time. Among them, for Cordero, there is no possibility of dialectical synthesis. But tension continues between irreducible poles, one necessary to illuminate the other not by analogy, but by contrast. He teaches us that the great contradictions, in life and in thought, never have easy solutions.
His – we could say – is a theological-political thought aware of the risk of any overlap between theology and politics. As it is impossible to rationally found the sacred, so any sacralization of power must be avoided. Indeed, it is what Cordero has fought all his life.
At the end of the university teaching, Cordero strengthened his political commitment through a series of interventions, articles, controversies that remained unsurpassed for their radicality and even semantic fantasy. How can we forget the real lexical inventions, such as those addressed against Berlusconi, identified now with the “Caiman”, now with a contemporary Mackie Messer? His controversy over the collapse of Italian political culture over the past two decades has had a harsh and harsh tone, as was his character.
Today perhaps they are no longer in fashion. But just reread some of his titles – da Black moons of Italy to Italic disease – to realize that those books are still talking about us. His ethics, lucid and desperate, is a light that is still needed. His speech, Leopardian, on the present state of Italian customs has not stopped asking us. It still awaits an answer and a promise of redemption that lives up to its questions.
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