On Thursday 4 July 2024, at the end of the first semester of the financial year, the usual monthly meeting of the Lombardy Delegation of the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George took place. The meeting began at 6.45 pm with the celebration of Mass, presided over by a Chaplain of the Delegation and hosted by the Barnabite Fathers at the Basilica of Sant’Alessandro in Zebedia (in the square of the same name behind Piazza Missori), which serves in this period as a delegate church. The meeting continued with a conference held by a distinguished professor from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan.

At the invitation of the Director of Cultural Activities of the Delegation, Prof. Edoardo Teodoro Brioschi, Knight Grand Cross of Merit, the musicologist Prof. Enrico Reggiani discussed the theme “Music is culture… and the university is proof of this.”

Music has already been the subject of some interventions by the Delegation in the past, but this time there is an opportunity to delve more deeply into a basic theme, Music is culture… and the University is proof of this, which will be treated by the speaker in the light of his theoretical and operational experience.

Culture – or the “cultivation of man” as the great scholar Prof. Giuseppe Lazzati said – is certainly also relevant for a chivalric order.

Culture cultivates man and does not subjugate him in the name of technocracy. The word culture itself derives from the verb to cultivate: knowledge involves daily sowing which, immersing itself in the furrows of reality, bears fruit. Culture is like a great river: it connects and flows through various regions of life and history, relating them; it allows one to navigate the world and embrace distant countries and lands; it quenches the thirst of the mind, waters the soul, makes society grow.

One hundred years ago Romano Guardini, a great intellectual and man of faith, had a fruitful cultural intuition just as he found himself immersed in a landscape made unique by the beauty of the waters of Lake Como. He wrote: “In these days I have understood more than ever that there are two forms of knowledge (…), one leads to immersion in the object and its context, so the man who wants to know tries to live in it; the other, on the contrary, gathers things together, decomposes them, orders them into boxes, acquires mastery and possession of them, dominates them.” He distinguishes between humble and relational knowledge, which is like “reigning that is achieved through serving; a creation according to nature, which does not go beyond established limits” and another way of knowing, which “does not observe, but analyzes (…) it no longer immerses itself in the object, it grasps it.”

The aforementioned Giuseppe Lazzati embodied the figure of the christifidelis, the lay person who lives in the world, who sanctifies himself precisely thanks to his being inserted into temporal realities. The lay person who assumes from baptism his vocation to be salt and leaven, through a growing awareness that comes from knowing how to take risks on his own, in autonomy of conscience and with the ability to mediate, maintaining a double loyalty: to God and to man.

In Lazzati the Gospel becomes an interpretative figure of reality and a compass to guide the person’s path, both personal and ecclesial, towards the realization of justice, solidarity and peace. The Christian is called to give a unified meaning to his existence and his commitment to service to the growth of human coexistence.

Consistent with this vision, Lazzati has always worked to regenerate the faith of believers: not a faith as a reassuring refuge to overcome fears, but a happy and courageous faith capable of giving a supplement of soul to face, with conscious hope, a society complex, fragmented, often devoid of values ​​and orientation maps. A faith capable of fertilizing life, of supporting it and giving it a unified meaning.

On the occasion of the celebrations for his seventieth birthday, Lazzati said: “The passion for truth and service in charity are the uniform of the Christian and I have tried to draw inspiration from this uniform in the small story of my poor life.” Lazzati reminds us that political commitment is nourished by disinterest, by free service for the overall good of society and for the development of the weakest groups, to whom all those goods that are a person’s right must be ensured: the right to a life of dignity, the right to education and training, the right to work, equality of opportunities, the right to medical care and social security, the right to be considered persons and not subjects.

However, Lazzati’s fundamental mission was not politics. He has always considered himself rather an educator of young people, a master of vocations, a scholar and a teacher.

A fundamental dimension of Lazzati’s life experience is what could be defined as a true “diaconia of culture,” understood as “cultivation of man,” as the ability to deal with the challenges posed by scientific research and the vast fields of knowledge, which require continuous re-elaboration, even in new terms and with adequate language. Faith must be able to be challenged by the questions posed by a profoundly changed society which asks in rational terms to account for hope.

The speaker, Prof. Enrico Reggiani, is Professor of English Literature and the Culture and Civilization of English-speaking Countries at the Faculty of Linguistic Sciences and Foreign Literature, as well as Professor of Musical Language ​​in Historical Perspective at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart. Furthermore, he directs the Literature and Music Seminar and coordinates the cultural-musical project “Note d’InChiostro” of the university.

He is considered one of the leading Italian experts on William Butler Yeats.

Graduated in Foreign Languages ​​and Literature at the same University, he also holds a diploma in piano and has studied musical composition and in the analytical-musicological field.

He was a teacher of musical analysis at the “Claudio Abbado” Civic School of Music in Milan and editor of the magazine Analysis of the Italian Society of Music Analysis. He has taught English musical terminology and translated volumes in the historical- and analytical-musicological field from English.

He is regularly invited to hold conferences by the La Verdi Foundation in Milan.

He was a member of the scientific committee of the music-literary festival Le Corde dell’Anima and is still a member of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA).