01-09-2006 - Traces, n.8

Reason is...

Reason
Is Asking

The text of the talk about the title of the Meeting. Monday,
August 21st


by Giancarlo Cesana

Yesterday, the Italian President of the Senate, Marini, expressed an attraction for the unity among Catholics, which immediately caused the newspapers to fear the return of the Christian Democrat party. I didn’t hear it that way, just in political terms, but as an exigency that was born from a root of belonging, from the history of his family, from his parish. But unity among men, this objective that all men seek (we’re in wartime; let’s not forget that), is attained neither with sentiment, nor with will. I’m not saying that these aren’t necessary, but they aren’t sufficient; they don’t suffice, especially the will. The will is a necessary condition for human action, but it is not sufficient; it’s not enough, because the betrayals and the contradictions each of us lives are too great. Our will to be different tomorrow is too weak. Unity is achieved by something that is stronger than will, a conception of yourself and of the world; but a conception is based either on a philosophy or, more in lay terms, on an experience. I say more in “lay” terms, because, as the Greek root of laos –people–suggests, experience is something possible for everyone. A conception based on experience is possible for everyone, even for those who haven’t studied; while a conception based on a philosophy is possible only for those who have studied, who truly know how to interpret reality, who explain to others how things work. In fact, the opposite of being lay is not being Catholic, or Christian, or a believer; the opposite of laicism is intellectualism. Ours is a society of clerics because it is dominated by an acidic intellectualism that bars others from entering.
Thus, unity, the tension man has toward friendship, that is, what each of us is searching for, is realized through a conception (as approximation) that is founded on experience. Experience does not mean just trying things; rather, it means trying things and retaining what’s of value. “Test everything; retain what is good,” said Saint Paul (this is the most beautiful definition of culture, commented Fr. Giussani). Unity is attained through the experience of your own humanity, of what it means to be a man or a woman. But what is humanity made of? Freedom (last year’s Meeting), reason (this year’s Meeting), and also experience. What I’m speaking to you about–I’m not a philosopher–is my experience. And the appeal I’m making is to your experience. In our experience, what does it mean that reason is the need for the infinite? Where do we see this need for the infinite? We see it in the relationship we have with reality. In the relationship with reality–both when reality manifests itself to us positively and when, even more obviously, when reality manifests itself to us negatively, when it is against us, hurting us–something is always missing. As the word itself says, from the Latin satis facere, to do enough, satisfaction is enough, but it is never everything. The perception of the infinite, for a person who is sensitive, is born as melancholy. Fr. Giussani wrote in Reality and Youth: the Challenge, “I, in that first year of high school, in the song performed by Tito Schipa, perceived the chill of something that was missing; something that was missing, not from the exquisite song from Donizetti’s romance, but from my life, something that was missing and that would never find satisfaction, support, fulfillment, response from any quarter. […] There is a vanishing point; something that perforates the object we grasp, because of which we never get a sufficient grip on it, because of which there is always an intolerable injustice, which we seek to conceal inside ourselves, distracting ourselves. Throwing ourselves into instinct is the most sullen way of closing ourselves off against this opening that all things demand, toward which all things press.” (L. Giussani, Realtà e giovinezza. La sfida [Reality and Youth: The Challenge], Sei, Torino, 1995, pp. 32-33).
Fr. Giussani told me that, living this experience, he understood for the first time who God could truly be. He was already in the seminary, and this was not a secondary notation, precisely because the perception of God is not an intellectual phenomenon, but comes from a “hunger,” in the sense that the hungry man understands much more about the value of food than the cooking expert. Even if the hungry man usually eats worse, he nonetheless understands the value of food more. You understand things when you go toward them with a tension. The melancholy of life (we live it on Saturdays, not Sundays) is the sadness of Dostoevsky, the sadness you feel in the unfulfilled relationship with the person you love most, because you are not capable, because she is not capable. This is the sigh. Reason is the need for the infinite and culminates in the sigh. When there is a judgment on things; when you live; when you’re not distracted; when you don’t throw yourself into instinct; when you maintain judgment, that is, when reason is present; when you are present, –the most human characteristic of daily life is this sigh, the consciousness of incompleteness, of the perennial expectation that is life. As Cesare Pavese asked in Il Mestiere di Vivere [The Craft of Living], “Has anybody ever promised us anything? Well, why are we waiting?” On the other hand, you can’t wait for something that doesn’t exist; if it were so, if we felt that our waiting were for something that does not exist, we would be overcome by the fear of the unknown (this is the hint of another Meeting title). The unknown is the darkness beyond which is nothing, the opposite of mystery, which, instead, is the manifestation of what there is, even though we’re not capable of grasping it fully. In the words of Melanie Klein, a psychoanalyst who studies the onset of paranoia as a psychotic phenomenon in children, absence becomes a bad presence. But if we look at our experience, it isn’t this way: our expectation is not fear. Our hearts are burning in our chests, as the disciples of Emmaus said, accompanied by the One they hadn’t recognized, but who was the Risen Christ. Your heart is on fire in your chest, because the promise is there in reality, and you have to stay with this promise, this presentiment–here’s the other term that defines the tension of reason toward the infinite–with this sentiment that comes before everything because, even when your eyes close in the last moment of life, reality, all the good that there is, cannot be negated. Being is there, even if life cripples you. You can’t deny the arm supporting you; in fact, if it weren’t for this arm supporting you, life would no longer be. Being is there. Again, in the text I quoted before, and also in the tenth chapter of The Religious Sense (to which an exhibit is dedicated this year), Fr. Giussani told readers to imagine leaving your mother’s womb with the head you have today. The first motion of your gaze would be filled with wonder at all that exists, because you would feel that everything is made for you. Then, perhaps, reality crashes into you like a truck crossing into your lane, and then the problem is that you have to decide with reason: what is the meaning of reality? The positive that you originally sensed, that you had the presentiment of, the being that is there; or the negative that crushes you? If it were the second, living would be useless; any action would be useless, any thought. So, life can’t help but affirm its positivity, seek for its meaning.
But let’s turn again to our experience: when do we experience this presentiment, this sentiment that comes before everything about the positivity of being, the positivity of that which exists? When do we have this experience? When we are in need, when we feel that lack, which is melancholy, break out like the search for what can respond to us–the infinite always presents itself when the need for something finite arises. This can mean anything, not just money, but even a gesture of friendship, a possibility, something you are looking for in life. Jesus said life belongs to the poor, precisely because if you aren’t needy, you don’t realize. This is why Fr. Giussani said life is asking. Once I said to my parish priest, in confession, “I pray badly,” and he responded, “In the Gospel, it doesn’t say pray well. It’s written that we need to pray always.” That is, as Fr. Giussani said, life is asking, prayer. Asking for something finite. Again, Fr. Giussani, in The “I,” Power, and Works, says, “The desires that truly come from the heart, those that are truly constitutive, are limitless desires; they have a horizon that is like an angle open to the infinite, because they aim, starting from any point, at the fulfillment of the entire person” (L. Giussani, L’io, il potere, le opera, Marietti 1820, Genova, 2000, pp. 52-53). They can start from any point–the child who wants a toy train, you who want to pass your exam, who want that girl–if the desire is sincere. That the desire is sincere means that it has to be decisive, that is, expressed, and, in the second place, you have to recognize that its fulfillment doesn’t depend on you, otherwise it isn’t a desire. Recently, the newspaper, Il Foglio has been collecting a series of essays on concupiscence–it isn’t desire in this sense. Rather, it is the desire that takes; it is the man who eats the apple to eat everything. It is reason the measure of all things, the exact opposite of reason as the tension toward the infinite. Starting from any point, desire tends toward the fulfillment of the whole person. Fr. Giussani educated us, brought up this Movement because, let me say it, unlike many other priests, he didn’t fear desires; that is, he didn’t fear mixing reason with desire, because there is no reason without desire. The infinite is not one thing plus another, plus another, plus another; it is not an infinite set of things. The infinite is another thing. It’s something greater; it’s another dimension. In the fulfillment of desire, the infinite manifests itself as the unexpected, that described by Montale: I prepared everything for the trip, but they tell me that something unexpected has changed life and they also tell me that there’s no use talking about it.
That desire introduces the infinite can be explained with a banal example: when a student gets a perfect score, why is he happy? Because he understands that not everything depends on him, that there is, in fact, something unexpected beyond study. Life is dominated by the unexpected.
Eugenio Borgna, in an encounter at the Milan Cultural Center this year–significantly entitled, “The defeat of rationalism”–said, “Reason knows reality if it is transformed into passion.” Today, reason isn’t lacking the neurons; the neurons are there as they were yesterday. Affection is missing; passion is missing, because without affection, reason doesn’t exist. We’re not a computer, an electronic circuit. Affection is needed, but affection doesn’t depend on us. It is from the Latin affectus, struck, and being struck doesn’t depend on us; rather, it depends on an encounter. Reasoning is done with an encounter that introduces one to the infinite, as said above. Marco Bona Castellotti, at the encounter with the Meeting volunteers, drew on the talk Fr. Giussani gave in 1987 to the responsibles of Communion and Liberation at the universities, in which he said that young people today, compared to those of yesterday–this was 1987–are as if they were exposed to the radiation from Chernobyl: the same physically, but sick inside, without capacity for affection. How can we get out of this condition? Through an encounter. You have to find an other who strikes you; you have to find an attraction, otherwise reason is cold; it doesn’t become attached to anything and, in effect, it doesn’t understand anything.
Thinking about love of a woman in general differs from being in love with a precise woman: the latter position is much more reasonable, even if you are so burning with passion that you act like an idiot. Why do people have desires? Because we do not make ourselves; my “I” is not a monad, it’s a relationship. In order to exist, the “I” needs an other; in order to be born, a child needs his mother. I see my girl who has a little baby doll and she has to keep it in her arms all day long–the “I” does not exist without an other, without acknowledging the necessity for an other. Without passion and without attachment, reason is a mockery; it’s the discourse of the clerics, who tell you that you have to reason like them to be okay. Reason seeks meaning, and meaning is the relationship that things have among themselves and with everything.
When Fr. Giussani said that education is the introduction to total reality, he didn’t mean that you have to explain all of reality, all the things that there are in reality, because you can’t. He meant that a particular introduces to the whole, that is, it makes you grasp the nexuses with everything. The universities–uni-versitas, “toward one”–were created to affirm that the knowledge of the particular is something that introduces us to the whole. A far cry from the mini Master’s program! Reason worthy of the name is the tension toward the infinite because it understands that this meaning ultimately eludes; faith, that is, isn’t a kind of good luck, meaning that you’re so lucky if you have it. Rather, it is a necessity, because you understand so clearly that you do not make yourself, that you have to entrust yourself to someone.
As Chesterton suggested, atheists aren’t those who don’t believe in anything, but those who believe in everything. The fulfillment of desire depends on the effective presence of an other next to you who introduces you to the meaning of things. Why do you get married? Because you acknowledge this other-than-you as fundamental for your whole life, because she speaks to you of God, of meaning. The “I” depends on an other, and it is in an other that it finds satisfaction. And love: I live if I make you happy. This other is not a general other; it’s a particular other: my wife, my children, my friends, the people who are close to me; it is a particular other that, however, puts you in relationship with everything. Christ is the name of this Other that puts you in relationship with all the rest. The Unnamed said, and I repeat it too, “God, if You exist, show Yourself to me.” I also repeat it because, if God didn’t exist, my name would be worthless, and I too would be an unnamed person. Christ is the Other par excellence we all need because He conquered death. Death is that which negates the relationship; it is what denies meaning; it is absence–the bad presence, the devil, the wages of sin, as the Bible says. We need someone who helps us defeat this. Our faith was born because we encountered someone who spoke to us of this presence. You understand how much this is bound to reason, to the relationship with reality! Because reason serves to enter us into relationship with reality. That a person is reasonable, rather than mad, is understood by the fact that he has an appropriate relationship with reality. What we have become involved in, Christianity, is a sequela; it’s following someone, as the Apostles followed Christ and then, suddenly, when they were in the boat and He had calmed the seas, they had already known Him for three years, and yet they asked, “Who is this man?” This is Christianity: following that Presence, following this entreaty that is the entreaty for life. This entreaty is precisely the soul of that which we are and is the central factor of the encounter, of what speaks to us of the meaning of things, of God. As Fr. Giussani said to me, shortly before he died, “You can’t love men if you don’t love God, and you can’t love God if you don’t love men.” For us, Christ is the particular presence that puts us in relationship with everyone.
When the Pope speaks of the Church and says that the Church is a great friendship, he indicates that she is the particular presence of the faces of our friends that put us in relationship with everything, that is, they empower reason because they put it in the condition of trustfully seeking a meaning, of perceiving the positivity that exists, of perceiving that everything is given for me. There is nothing to which I am extraneous. Like when a boy falls in love, the proof that the relationship is true isn’t that the boy has the desire to stay forever and only with his girl, but that he has a growing desire to stay with everyone.
At the beginning, I said that we are in a time of war. What I have said to this point isn’t just a private judgment on my own life. It’s a judgment that concerns history; it concerns our human condition; it concerns justice; it concerns peace–the peace that must be for everyone, for everyone! And, let me say, above all for Israel.