by Enzo Piccinini

The dynamics of knowledge
Imagine going to see the painting you love most, by the painter you love most, the most incomparably beautiful one. For years, you’ve thought about going there and, captivated by this vital interest, when you’re facing it you cling to it, with the painting here, in front of your eyes, to peer at all of it, then all at once you exclaim, “Hey, it’s all a green blur! What’s this rubbish?” There’s a friend beside you, and he’s just as passionate about it as you are. “Calm down, listen, step back! Why glue yourself to it like that?” So you take a couple of steps back and you realize all the green you saw was a meadow, it was part of a large fresco, and now you can see a lot of other things in it.
Naturally, taking a step back like this, as a way of seeing things correctly, doesn’t mean you’re not focusing on reality. It’s not like what the Greeks called atharaxia in human feelings, which means being imperturbable and rejecting or subduing all your reactions, everything that might hurt you. First, you make sure the only feelings that get through won’t trouble you, and at that point a relationship is okay and you can risk it. No, it’s not this kind of distancing which enables you to dominate yourself or block all the stimuli, the provocations, feelings, and reactions coming from reality.
The detachment Fr. Giussani speaks of is always part of an attachment; it’s a dynamic within an attachment. If there is no attachment and no interest, what sort of knowledge is it? You see, we really learn and remember only the things that interest us. That’s true, isn’t it? How often have you heard that if you cram the last three days before an exam, you’ll forget everything two days later? When you do that for an exam, it just doesn’t interest you. It’s an experiment you can do at your leisure whenever you want. You’re all university students, just as I was, even if I was on the other side [in a left-wing student group]. It’s all the same. What interests you stays with you, and that’s what fosters a dynamic of knowledge. The rest just flows away like water on a rock; it’s irrelevant.
So let’s get this clear: when it comes to knowledge–meaning, our relationship with reality–the detachment Fr. Giussani meant is a dynamic that is part of an attachment. Otherwise, knowledge is impossible. This is firstly because nothing will remain with you, but this isn’t the only reason. Detachment as a dynamic of knowledge is an approach that does not only mean you mustn’t reject the reactions and feelings reality arouses. You have to treat your reactions and feelings as factors that actually bring you closer to reality; they make you take a greater interest in reality, and you want to understand it better. Those feelings and those reactions, says Fr. Giussani, need to be brought into focus. We can compare the feelings and reactions to reality that we want to understand to a magnifying glass or the clear crystal of the eye. They can either bring you closer to reality or distance you from it, depending on whether they’re in sharp focus or not. But don’t eliminate that feeling, that reaction–it can be as instinctive as you like–from the process of knowledge. That kind of detachment would be strange, if we were to eliminate what we feel about reality, the very thing we’re trying to understand.
Detachment has to be a dynamic within the reality we want to understand. And it involves those very feelings and reactions that reality inexorably arouses in you, and it brings them into focus, meaning it enables you to see their correct proportions and understand their importance.
I just wanted to explain the different kinds of detachment, because that’s crucial. And this is also true of science. Imagine my work or my university research. If I wasn’t caught up in this dynamic, it would be a problem! It would be absolutely disastrous if, all the time when I was working, I kept thinking that detachment is a kind of imperturbability or the inability to feel reactions and feelings, and then I’d be able to cope better. No, no, no! So it’s not an exercise in being detached from the world; these are ideological aberrations and they have nothing to do with experience. Stepping back and trying to see the big picture is one thing, but anyone who wants to live human experience realizes that what he feels and how he responds to reality are important parts of his life. Then a serious humanity or a response to our humanity of the kind we want to embody in our lives has to take account of all the factors in experience, not eliminate them. Otherwise, we won’t know what to do with them.
The detachment I mean is not an exercise in being detached from the world, so that it no longer has any influence on the relationship of knowledge or the relationship with the reality of your feelings or your reactions, but it’s a dynamic within attachment. Just imagine loving someone as an exercise in “detachment”! It’s stupid; only someone who is detached from experience can use phrases like that. The words seem to fall into place logically, but the logic fails to include the whole of reason. That’s why logic can lead to utter disaster, if it’s based on premises of a certain kind coherently developed. Look at Kosovo: if you start from certain premises, in the end you get disaster.
When we talk about detachment, what’s the effort? It is a fact that we would like to take things in our own way, but we can’t do them like that because otherwise things wouldn’t exist, but only whatever you feel you want. We would like things to go our way. That’s normal, but then we have to reckon with the fact that they hardly ever do. And we also want to take them in our way. I remember once I was invited to a parish group as an expert on matters dealing with love. At a certain point, I said to a girl in the front row, “Have you got a boyfriend?” She went all red, she wasn’t expecting it, she didn’t know how to begin. So I said, “Why have you got a boyfriend?” “Because I like him, I’m fond of him,” she said sincerely. And I retorted, “What’s he got to do with it?”
Embarrassed silence. In the relationship of knowledge, but above all in an emotional relationship–which is the most impressive form of knowledge, from a certain point of view–in the relationship with reality, the point is that reality has to affirm itself without being conditioned by you. And when does reality affirm itself? When it is loved–wonderful! When does the book in front of you affirm itself, so that you actually manage to study the page that was giving you a lot of trouble? When it is loved. Loving doesn’t mean feeling a special feeling or inclination for something (because that’s not love). It means affirming the truth of what we have before us, of what exists. Loving means affirming the essence of the truth of what we have before us. If it just meant what we feel, that would be disastrous.
And so, does that mean that what you don’t feel doesn’t exist? What you don’t feel certainly exists. So the whole problem is here, the effort, when we talk about detachment. It’s because detachment is part of that true dynamic of our relationship with reality that is called loving seriously. But loving seriously means affirming what you have in front of you, and so it also means dying a little to yourself. You have to reckon with the fact that loving seriously means changing yourself, because it’s an affirmation of what lies before you, not of what you feel. Something has to break inside you. And who spontaneously wants to be broken like this? That’s why it involves hard work and an effort. If the relationship is to be true, you have to make a break with that inclination that has been the measure of everything for you so far.
True detachment is precisely this dynamic within our true relationship with reality when we love. And what does this mean? It means that you affirm what is before you. But what does that mean, affirming what is before you? It means that you must always question what you yourself feel and think. Always question it. I’m not saying what you feel or think is wrong, but it cannot be the ultimate criterion.
If you begin to reason like this, then life is illuminated, you are capable of patience, of fidelity, of tenacity, which means you can begin to enter into the large feelings of life, those great and powerful feelings that really make life, that can carry people and things on their shoulders.

A Presence to overcome fear
Fear is always a second feeling, never the first one.
A person feels an attachment, then he begins to be afraid of losing it. The attachment comes first. Objectively, man opens his eyes on reality and goes toward it. Fear is a later feeling. Our first feeling is a sense of freedom to attach ourselves to whatever appeals to us.
Then we begin to feel fear precisely in the degree to which things familiar to us, which have always been a point of reference, vanish unexpectedly, or to the degree that we are no longer able to make them form part of a relationship.
Think, for example, of a child who finds himself suddenly in a dark room. He begins to cry; he’s frightened. It’s the same room where he’s often been before, but now he no longer has a frame of reference; he can’t see the familiar things that should soothe him. Then his mommy arrives, she takes his hand, still in the dark, and the child stops crying, because he now has a frame of reference, despite the darkness.
Life is always like that. And fear is a feeling that stems from a normal attachment, because we are attached to life itself, from an instinct of survival, if for no other reason. But you can lose the frame of reference that enables you to live. So, inevitably, we need a frame of reference, we need landmarks to live by. If this frame of reference is not just a conviction or series of moral rules or instructions but a Presence, a company of faces to love, it helps us live!
Of course, always remember, it’s impossible for you to never feel frightened. When you’re frightened, it’s because you’ve lost a certain frame of reference; there’s no doubt about that. In fact, when are you afraid of losing a girlfriend or boyfriend? When you’re not sure they love you, for example. Psychologically, that’s how it works, but the same sort of thing happens in everyday life. In life, freedom enables you to move freely, if you have a frame of reference, known, recognized, and loved; otherwise, it’s impossible.
So, when Christ came, He said, “Come with Me.” He loved our freedom because He gave it a frame of reference. And when we tell people, even those we meet for the first time, “Come with us,” it’s because we love freedom; it’s not propaganda. We give them a frame of reference, then only God can say what will happen. So you should tell everyone, “Come with us,” because otherwise you do not love the freedom of others.
There is one last point. Systematically calculating what might happen will never save you from being afraid. You need to have a frame of reference; the systematic calculation of what might happen before you act is an expression of fear of reality. What we need is a reliable frame of reference, reliable and loved, and then we can act.

Three fundamental points
What can we do to help ourselves? First, things are really loved and desired when we want them for ourselves. Everything that we have said and that has struck you, ask for it for yourselves, request it for yourselves. Second, always remember it. Third, remain close to the path of this group of faces, of people and events that remind you of these things. Because, luckily, this is not an organization of great thoughts but a story of people, so you too can belong, everyone can belong. You do not really want it and love it, if you do not ask for this. So ask for it: First ask God and then ask men, or rather both God and men together. And then remember it. This is why there has to be a company of people who have you at heart for this reason, who have this at heart. Finally, in your lives, never abandon the journey you have been making with this group for many years, or for a day, or for an hour, because this is the way we grow, because without a history, made up of faces and events, we will be unable to grow, and then we will only be left with nostalgia for the things we have been told. Tonight, we have learned something, let’s never forget it. At last we are beginning to discover that this life that we have begun is reasonable, meaning it is human. So whenever we make it interact with our authentic human needs we feel truer, we feel more understood, we gradually shed all our doubts and we begin to follow seriously.

The historical archive is continuing its search for the numerous “traces” left by Enzo Piccinini. In particular, the collection seeks to find duplicates, photographs, films, and any other “traces” that document Enzo’s life and achievements (family, work, education, leisure moments, etc.). To make the collection as complete as possible, it is important for whoever has any kind of document of the kind described above to contact the archive office. In particular, we would like to collect everything written personally by Enzo Piccinini in the form of personal letters, telegrams, notes, etc. We assure all potential lenders that every document will remain the property of the person who owns it. The archive only needs a copy (digital formats included) or to be informed of its existence.

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