01-05-2007 - Traces, n. 5
Obedience and...

Obedience A Matter for Reasonable Men

The word obedience is once again timely; it is a term that embraces human relationships, education, the Church, and politics. An era that has asserted the rights of the individual, pursuing the dream of freedom unfettered by any bonds, now seems to have generated only bewilderment and insecurity, to the point of violence.

The following pages witness to how reasonable it is to obey. A teacher, a mother, a monk, and a politician provide four examples of the benefits for human life obeying something greater than oneself that corresponds to the needs of the heart.

by Davide Perillo

Right there in the center of the newspaper, a three-page spread thick with text by a theologian monk, a historian of religions, and a political scientist, including insets, bibliographies, and quotes from such varied figures as Saint Augustine, Max Weber, and, naturally, Fr. Milani, used to explain how and why an apparently out-of-fashion word has become important again: obedience. Clearly, that April issue of the major Italian daily, La Repubblica, was very politically oriented, in the context of the Italian Episcopal Conference’s “call to Catholics” about the government’s proposed law on civil unions and family, and the question of “where the Church’s authority ends.” But it doesn’t take much to see that the issue goes well beyond the problems of conscience of “adult Catholics” in response to the clarity of the bishops’ recent positions. This issue goes far beyond the arena of Italian politics, but is a concern in today’s society for all peoples.
Just think about the situation in schools. News coverage of cell phone videos, shared on the Internet, featuring boys beating up a handicapped student in a classroom (a place where authority no longer exists), shocked even the most distracted viewers. Now, many people talk about “the emergency in education” (and it’s about time). But few manage to take a step beyond the anxious question of how to return to being obeyed. This same doubt torments other debates in other sectors. How can we provide renewed impetus to a weakened public authority, to ignored laws, to a common good that has become impossible, where the only urge is for self-affirmation (hardly that of obeying a greater reason)? Is it really true, as a famous and poorly understood text of Fr. Milani asserted, that obedience is no longer a virtue?

Neither blindness nor child’s play
Addressing this topic again can help us clarify it and go to the root of a word–or rather, an experience–to which the Church has called the faithful often, since the beginning. In these pages of Traces you will find, above all, practical documentation, testimonies involving the daily life of a family, a school, a monastery, even a political commitment. These facts help us to understand how obedience in the Christian life is neither blind (is it an accident that “blind obedience” is one of the most trite commonplaces of our language?) nor childish (as implied by the political figures who assert that they are “adult Catholics” and thus must make their decisions on their own, without the encumbrance of “Mother Church”). It embraces something much broader, more sensible, and, in the final analysis, more human.
For obedience is very closely connected to reason. Even more: it is the primary factor that preserves it, enabling it to light up and to breathe. Just think about it. The first act of reason is to recognize reality, to bow before the data of the real; in a word, to obey. Without this start-up, reason only revs its engine, failing to engage its gears, and certainly doesn’t move forward. It will always remain a few yards short of the truth, which, said Saint Thomas, is adaequatio rei et intellectus, conforming the intellect to reality. Conforming, that is, obeying.

Obeying reality
It’s not by chance that Fr. Giussani’s Religious Sense begins with this point, with his first premise, realism: “The method of research is imposed by the object.” Imposed–the subject has to obey. Remember the example of the notebook? Out of the corner of my eye I see a white object on the table. What is it? “I could think of many possibilities: ice cream spread out over the table, or even a rag. But the method for knowing what it truly is, is imposed by the object itself…. If I truly wish to know it, I have no choice but to look down and fix my eyes on the object itself.” Knowledge begins there, from that leaning down, because I do not give myself reality. I discover it.
This is precisely the same way I discover in myself this factor that makes me man: reasonableness. I discover it in myself; I don’t give it to myself. Fr. Giussani highlights this factor as the second premise of the Trilogy. While the object imposes the method, it is “the nature of the subject” that decides “the way this method is used. And the nature of the subject is a being endowed with reason!” This reason must be used entirely, in all its fullness, without reductions, once again, obeying the subject’s thirst for the infinite, not bridling it with my measure.
But this isn’t enough, because the third premise, morality, also involves conforming the intellect to reality. Fr. Giussani points out that in the field of knowledge, the rule of morality is, “Love the truth of an object more than your attachment to the opinions you have already formed about it. More concisely, one could say, ‘Love the truth more than yourself.’” In other words, morality is bowing before the other and affirming it. In a word, again, obeying, which, if you think it through, is in some way a synonym for loving.
So, maybe a worthwhile point of departure for speaking about obedience would be to start from the premises of The Religious Sense, and from love for reality. Rereading those pages is the best way to help ourselves, to simplify everything. As Anne Vercors said in The Announcement Made to Mary, so often quoted by Fr. Giussani, “And why torment ourselves, when it is so simple to obey?”