Reason is...

The Sigh of the Meeting
Reason is the need for the infinite
and culminates in the sigh and the presentiment that this infinite be manifested
Reason is not content with just what it sees. It is the need for something other–the infinite–without which it cannot subsist. It is the sigh and presentiment that this infinite be manifested.
We offer here journey touching upon some of the encounters of the Meeting that plumbed the title of the 2006 edition, drawn from a thought of Fr. Giussani’s. Encounters that most of the Italian newspapers did not report, as if they had not happened. Yet the journalists were there in Rimini, just like the over 700,000 people who participated in the Meeting, and they did see, but their newspapers were evidently not interested

by Carlo Dignola

While I was at the Meeting, a dear friend called me on my cell phone and told me she was separating from her husband. She didn’t say that he had an impossible character, that he voted for Berlusconi (she’s Communist), that he snores too much at night, or that he’s found a younger woman. She sighed briefly and said, “In life, all the things that have a beginning, end.” It’s true. Those who are adult know it; when you’re young, you can still pretend you don’t know anything. “The ship of love foundered on daily life,” said Mayakovsky. I answered her, “Not all things.”
This was the theme of the Meeting, wasn’t it? That sigh there, that came to me unexpectedly on the phone, from someone who isn’t in CL. And my sigh. Because reason isn’t content with what it sees; it senses, it suspects, or, better still, says Fr. Giussani (who doesn’t mince words), it “demands” the other. But it cannot build it with its own hands.

The most evidently infinite thing
Let’s start from the beginning, with Monday morning’s encounter with Marco Bersanelli and other luminaries. Edward Nelson, who teaches Mathematics at Princeton (it’s like teaching soccer to Coach Lippi’s World Cup champions), asked himself what this infinite is, this non-number that the Greeks–but also the Indians, in their drawings–caught sight of at the end of their calculations 2,500 years ago, at the dawn of rational humanity. Nelson said that the most evidently infinite thing is our ignorance of the universe, and that’s of no small account. Mystery, the infinite, surrounds us on all sides. Geniuses like Dedekind and Peano attempted to express it in a formula, but with his “Theorem of Incompleteness” Kurt Gödel even succeeded in demonstrating that a similar “capture” will be impossible forever, even were human intelligence to last a billion years–in our logical proceedings there is a structural breach.
The infinite is a bit like the sideways 8 on the focus dial of a camera lens: it doesn’t indicate a distance, but if you don’t use the horizon as a reference, the ultimate line toward which everything goes in perspective, you can’t focus on anything in the foreground. Every century that passes, explained Steven Beckwith, who directs the Hubble Space Telescope project for NASA, we steal a sizeable patch of terrain from the infinite, and yet it doesn’t diminish; it doesn’t contract. “In the last 400 years, we have pushed back the borders of mystery considerably,” he said, but if you subtract something from infinity, mathematics teaches us, you haven’t reduced it a jot–it always remains infinite. In fact, you’ve made it bigger, so to speak. The researcher Massimo Robberto, who works at the observatory in Hawaii, said that it’s as if all of reality, when men gaze deeply into it, takes a step backwards and asks, “What are you looking for?” “And it always strikes me, because it’s the sentence the Gospel puts in the mouth of Being-made-man. When Jesus encounters His first disciples, He asks them, ‘What are you looking for?’”

The “more” that counts
In only a few words, the distinction was immediately clear between open science and science that is a slave to itself, the great theme of this year’s Meeting, with Cardinal Schönborn in center field and Darwin coaching the adversaries. “Life,” said the Archbishop of Vienna, “is something more than its material conditions. Just what this ‘more’ means is a problem that goes well beyond science’s quantitative methodology, but is not for this reason any less a reality.”
However, for man today, what does this “more” matter on the practical level? Little or nothing, responded Javier Prades, the Spanish theologian. He had on hand data on the faith of young people in his country. From 2000 to 2004, half of them left the Church. They say that what counts in life is family, health, friends, work, well-being… God is only seventh, just squeaking by in front of Zapatero. When religion means anything, at best it indicates “being honest,” and “helping those in need.” Prades cited the ubiquitous, phosphoric Nietzsche: “The concept of God was invented in antithesis with that of life.” To do everything that’s enjoyable in the world, do you have to leave the Church?

The sign of Mystery
By now, reason is made to coincide with science, and mystery is the dark zone where its crystalline light doesn’t reach. The Muslim kamikaze is someone who is poorly integrated into society, not someone who has a problem with God. Prades quoted Octavio Paz, “The only thing that unites Europe today is its passivity in the face of destiny.” And Europe, said the Madrid theologian, does not just mean those who take a Ryan Air flight to go to discos from Bergamo to Barcellona; it means us. It means people who maybe feel a bit Christian at heart, but who at the right moment are always ready to be prudently silent, because, by now, “in the West, there dominates a reduced version of reason, an instrumental conception that tends to reduce the profundity of vision,” said Prades. He told the joke about the director of personnel who was given two tickets for Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, and who wanted to optimize the energies of the orchestra by thinning out the violins so they would all play the same note, and by cutting the repeated passages. This is a reason understood as “measure” that does not even permit us to perceive what reality truly is. Its presbyopic eye makes us enjoy less, not more, of music and life (this was the case for Nietzsche).
It’s not true that Mystery does not enter into our experience, said Prades. It enters, but always does so through a sign. It always happens “inside, not outside reality.” Cesana explained it very well. If you skip that “obstacle” (at times it could be your husband, or your hospital bed), every infinite is lost. “Giussani told us that during his first year of high school, listening to a song performed by Tito Schipa, all of a sudden he perceived the chill of something that was missing, not from Donizetti’s romance, but from life itself. And he realized that he would never ‘find satisfaction, support, fulfillment, response from any quarter.’”

The vanishing point
“‘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.’ It was through listening to that recording of songs, said Cesana, that Fr. Giussani ‘understood for the first time who God could truly be’ (and he was already in the seminary!).”
“That sadness you feel in the unfulfilled relationship with the person you love most, because you are not capable, because she is not capable,” the sigh for the infinite in which reason culminates, is “the most human characteristic of life, the consciousness of your own incompleteness.” On the other hand, says Cesana, you can’t wait very long for something that doesn’t exist. “If it were so, if we felt that our waiting is for something that does not exist, we would be overcome by fear.” Melanie Klein, a psychoanalyst who studies the onset of paranoia in children, said that when man no longer has trust, “absence becomes a bad presence” that never gives you respite. However, in our life, said Cesana, there is a different pre-sentiment (a sentiment, a feeling that anticipates all the others) that “Being is there, even if life cripples you; you can’t deny the arm supporting you.” But we begin to understand this only “when we are in need; when we feel that lack, which is melancholy, break in as the search for what can respond to us–the infinite always presents itself when the need for something finite arises,” like the hedge in Leopardi’s poem, The Infinite, that lets him see what its silhouette excludes from view. In order to perceive what’s deep beyond, Cesana said, you have to touch that limit, get hurt at times. “Jesus said life belongs to the poor, precisely because if you’re not needy, you don’t realize.”

The fragrance of gratuitousness
Today, said Cesana, what reason is lacking is not neurons, but passion, because without affection, reason can’t subsist. But affection doesn’t depend on us. As long as the infinite is there, on the horizon, even if the man whose head and heart still functioned well came to sense it in every step he takes, this still would not be enough–it would be too far. Thus the ship of love cracks up, families separate, children divorce from their parents, and people you love go away, to look for other provisional hedges. If the infinite eludes you infinitely, you can’t make it by yourself. “You have to entrust yourself to an other,” explained Fr. Mauro-Giuseppe Lepori, Abbot of the Benedictine Monastery of Hauterive. “We want to tear from the hands of God, and thus from the hands of others, what we’re convinced is our right to have.” We steal the bishop’s silver, and when he forgives us, pressed by the bad remorse of those who don’t know how to be good, maybe we do something even more ignoble, like stealing the only coin from a beggar child’s hand. We are always tempted to steal the apple, to “separate love from the exigency of the infinite,” said Lepori, because, deep down, “we are afraid of being seized.” Instead, the thing that really changes life is the fragrance of gratuitousness. Giussani himself told him, “The miracle is charity,” love that has rejected any kind of bookkeeping. The true great “ontological difference,” the new thing that changes the cards on the table, the surprise of life, is not loving, but being loved this way. Charity will never end. It is infinite.