01-01-2008 - Traces, n. 1

It is possible
to live this way

The School of Community will soon begin to study the new edition of Is It Possible to Live This Way?.
When the Italian edition of the book came out in 1994, Fr. Giussani spoke about it in a meeting with the Rome community. We offer here some notes from that conversation, as a useful instrument to introduce us to the text and accompany us in the work of the coming months


Giacomo Tantardini:The content of the meeting this evening with Fr. Giussani will be his new book, Is It Possible to Live This Way?, due out next week. The meeting will be organized in the following way: there will be some questions by people who have read the draft of the book...
Luigi Giussani: First of all, I want to say a word about the book’s style. It’s a literal transcript of the dialogues held every Saturday for a year between me and about a hundred young people who were taking seriously the hypothesis of dedicating their lives to God. The latter is an interesting detail, but not decisive. The content of the conversations concerned the nature, the fabric of Christian experience. I believe that those who can get past the somewhat rough impact of the first ten pages, adapting, as it were, to the style of the book, will maybe learn something about faith, hope, and charity. (Catechism doesn’t seem to me very useful these days, because many don’t go anymore or never went at all.)
Let me also say a word about the dearest value that serves as the leitmotiv of the entire text. The most precious motive, the passion, in fact, that determines it, from chapter to chapter, is the immediate patrimony that I received by entering a high school to teach religion. Teaching religion gave me this intuition and this passion: the intuition that faith first of all needs to demonstrate its familiarity with reason in all its consequentiality, that is, the intuition of the reasonability of the faith, of the faith as the most reasonable thing there is and, thus, the most human thing there is, because reason is that level of nature in which nature becomes conscious of itself–and this is called the “I.” This has two pre-eminent characteristics: First of all, mobility, the mobile richness of life. The modalities by which reason turns itself upside down and by which it arms itself for contact with reality, with all of reality, without excluding anything, are called “methods.” The problem of faith first of all should be discovered as a problem of “method.” But this perhaps we’ll see further on (the questions must have centered on this point, because it’s the first thing emphasized in the text). Secondly, in addition to this living mobility (reason is the living “I” and in the living “I,” life in the life of the person; therefore, reason is not a mathematical formula or a piece of sheet metal clearly defined by a design, already fixed), reason is the demand, the passion and demand to know everything, the totality. An aware faith flows suddenly, providentially, graciously, fortuitously, precisely from this passion for totality in knowledge that is the fundamental characteristic of reason. A living reason is a totalizing reason as horizon of tension, as claim to know. This is enough. Thank you.
Question: Fr. Giussani, can you explain what it means to say, “Faith is thus a natural method of knowledge, an indirect method of knowledge, a knowledge that comes through the mediation of a witness.”1?
Giussani: You’ve hit the nail on the head. This question is the most interesting for me and I believe the most decisive, so that a religious sentiment not go astray, be subjectively colored or depressed, and above all, so that it not be monstrous. Religious sentiment becomes monstrosity when the object for which it sets out, or indicates, or in which it is interested, is created by the sentiment itself, by its imagination. If there’s an “object,” then it’s precisely the object of the religious sense. The question depends–for the Christian, but deep down, for everyone–on the problem posed by the question.
Knowledge. I’d be tempted to challenge you all on your conception of knowledge, on the idea you have of knowledge. Knowledge is a very simple thing: this is a microphone, and this is a book, and this is Fr. Giacomo Tantardini, etc. But knowledge doesn’t end as the reflection in a mirror; its value isn’t totally used up in this way. Imagine the eye of a cadaver–excuse the example–as big as the eye of a prehistoric animal (who knows, it could really exist, given all the questions on evolution that are thrown around these days!); a dead eye is a kind of mirror, because the eye is vitreous. Something passes in front of it and is reflected, as if on a sheet of glass or a photographic film. But if the eye were alive, the object passing before it would reverberate in hints of color, in vibrations. That figure would be vibrant in the eye, reflected vibrantly in that eye, would “strike” that eye. The eye gathers and hosts in its structure the object, but the object that passes in front of it, while it is being gathered, strikes the eye (not in the bad sense). It’s not that it punches the eye but, in some way, it shocks it. This word should be translated in Latin as affectus, as if to say an “eye affectus by.” The word affectus, therefore, achieves the dynamic of knowledge. Not wanting to see blocks sight; it can block sight, even to the extreme limits of pathology. How much morality enters into knowledge! This theme was amply touched upon and developed in our conversations. (We touched on everything; it was an interesting year–a year!–even though the transcript could be an insurmountable obstacle for someone who loves the purity of the Italian language.)
Knowledge, therefore... This is a book. This thing in front of me is a book. But suppose that I have to go to Sao Paolo, in Brazil, as I’ve done many times.  First, I come to Rome, to see Fr. Giacomo who’s in bed with a bit of fever, nothing serious, just a bit of flu. I say goodbye and give him a hug, then I go to Fiumicino and get on the plane. I put my hand luggage up in the storage bin and sit down. And look who’s here! Nadia! “Nadia, it’s been a long time! Hello! How are you? Where are you coming from?” She’s an old classmate of mine, and we haven’t seen each other for years. “I’m coming from Beirut,” she answers, and continues, “I’m coming from Beirut and I’m on my way to Buenos Aires.” “Why in the world? What’s your job?” “I’m in insurance.” “And… family?” “I have three children.” “Three children! And you also dedicate yourself to your work? Goodness, you’ve got a demanding life!” “Yeah, it’s a bit hard.” In the meantime, the plane has taken off and after a few minutes of silence she suddenly says, “You remember Carlo?” “Of course!” He was the class clown, and made fun of all the teachers. Once, with the religion teacher, who was always waxing eloquent about the homeland, he stuck a rolled up Italian flag to his back, and slowly, slowly, it unrolled, and the teacher (he was called Monza, poor fellow!) was covered by the white, red, and green flag. Every day Carlo came up with something or other. “Of course! What ever became of that rascal? All the teachers spoke badly of him, and in all the class meetings they complained about him.” “No! He’s changed! I can say this because I saw him the other week, in Sao Paolo. He’s become a hard worker! He has factories all over the place, and he’s really rich. He’s gotten his head straightened out and now he has five kids!” “What the heck, kids, directly in conflict with the U.N.! Against the U.N.!” I get her to tell me all about Carlo–she’s a good friend of his, ever since our school days.  When we arrive in Rio de Janeiro, we say goodbye, and go our separate ways because she has to get another flight for Buenos Aires and I’m heading for Sao Paolo. It’s pure chance, providence. I go to get my seat assignment, and guess who I see there? Carlo! After forty years, I see Carlo. I congratulate him on his five children. He’s relaxed and composed, and then I congratulate him on the seriousness he’s acquired, against all our expectations and those of the others, the students and teachers. I congratulate him especially on the factory he’s built in South Africa, which Nadia had told me about. I tell him what I’d learned from Nadia as if I’d seen him myself. And I wasn’t mistaken. He didn’t say, “It’s not true! I don’t have a factory in South Africa!”  I told him what I knew about him not because I’d seen it before, or ascertained it before, but because Nadia had told me, my friend Nadia.
This is a book. I know it even if nobody tells me so. I know it, not because someone tells me, but because I see that it’s a book; I recognize it as a book. But the method, my way of acting with Carlo and with Nadia, my knowledge of Carlo and what he’s done, gained from the conversation with Nadia, and that he doesn’t contradict–because there’s nothing to contradict; it’s all true–is this method “rational,” as recognition, as knowledge, or isn’t it? If what Nadia told me corresponds to the objectivity of things, if what I know because Nadia told me corresponds to the objectivity of things, then that method is perfectly rational. When I was teaching at the Berchet High School, I understood–really nobody had explained it to me before–I understood then, teaching in that class (even if for other motives, for another event) that reason was that living thing I was talking about before: reason was me, myself; it aligned with everything I was; it penetrated my every sinew. In order to recognize those two young people there–one of them with a black scarf–I have to move from here; instead, if I want to recognize that well-turned-out fellow over there, I have to stand up. The object determines the way, the “method,” the path, for the eye of reason. Through this path it reaches the object, reality. So I discovered, generalizing the point, that reason, “my” reason, has a method for knowing reality that is direct (more or less direct–but I have no intention right now of doing a lesson on psychology or gnoseology). Thus, I am the subject of knowledge, and the means that brings me to knowledge is within me. But reason also has an indirect method. I knew those things about Carlo from my friend; I reached certainty through what my friend told me. I was certain of the fact that Carlo had five children and that he’d straightened out, etc., even before meeting Carlo at the Rio airport, because my friend had told me! There is a method of reason that is indirect knowledge. It’s called, to use the technical term from the courts, “witness,” the instrument that is no longer in me, but outside of me, that leads me to know something; it’s called witness or testimony. It’s a method like any other, through which reason touches reality. It’s irrational to refuse to accept that this is a “rational” method–that would be preconception. Saint Thomas2 made an observation that a lot of current psychology confirms: man is much more certain of what he listens to than of what he sees; man is much more certain about something he’s been told than he is about what he sees. For that matter, this is a testimony that makes the entire people of today completely homologated by the mass media–the people foreseen by Pasolini in his term “homologation.” People who don’t make the effort to reflect, as I did with those hundred-odd students, are all homologated. All of them! I remember that the first year I taught religion, forty years ago, I read in an American magazine that if a man went to the cinema every week to see a film, after only a few years, just two or three, maybe, he would take on the ethical, gnoseological, cognitive criteria, the average opinion, that is, the criteria, of the various film directors. If all the directors were heaped together and an average statement of their persuasions were to be established, these persuasions would also be those of the individual who had seen their films once a week. That article was from forty years ago–just think about how it is now! Once a week? Every hour there’s a film to see! Therefore, the homologation feared by Pasolini, or rather, “observed” by Pasolini, is irresistible. Certainly, we can all observe it. He observed it because he had a concern for man that the other writers, thinkers, and politicians didn’t have.
Therefore, I’ll answer your question by saying that faith is one of the ways, or one of the roads that a living and agile reason uses, utilizes to arrive at reality, following the invitation of reality: if someone’s here, do it this way, and if someone’s over there, do it that way. Instead, if reality comes to me through the testimony of another person, through the other as a witness, I can perfectly well reach certainty as if I had seen it myself. It seems obvious, but it isn’t at all.
I’d like to add an observation. In order to consider as certain the content of what someone testifies to me, I have to have a moral outlook and an attitude of the soul that won’t a priori, by preconception, oppose the person speaking to me.  I can’t be instinctively “against,” already definitively in opposition to the person who is testifying something to me. This correct attitude is necessary so I can accept what the person is witnessing to, so I can understand–understand!–realize, recognize that really he is saying it in a true way, and therefore I’m not mistaken in listening to him. One can err–we’ll talk about this later in a further observation–one can err, but one can also not err. The method is valid: it is possible not to err.
It’s a matter of identifying when you’re using this method so well that you don’t err. The proverb, “It’s good to trust but it’s better not to” is a stupid proverb, contrary to what’s most evident. The capacity to trust is proper to the great and adult human person, to the person who has come up against many things, who has reflected on everything. This person knows immediately when someone speaking should be doubted or if the person is candid, and knows this much better than a young person when a companion of the same age is speaking. The richer a person’s humanity, the more she is critical of herself, conscious of the limits of her human progress, conscious of her reality, the more she knows when and how to trust. To know how to trust: this is genius! Not knowing how to trust: this is an error that we all commit, even the husband with his wife, even the mother with her child, children with their parents, and this is at the origin of many breakdowns and upheavals. Certainly, you can make mistakes. If, for example, as I said to those kids, you’re walking down the sidewalk, caught up in your thoughts, distracted, and don’t realize that coming toward you is a fellow with a long, very long, shaggy beard, a crooked hat full of holes, a filthy jacket, his toes sticking out of his shoes, a spaced-out expression, and he’s coming right at you, and you realize at the last minute, and he says, “Young lady!” “Yes?” you ask, and you’re thinking he’s a poor man, and reach for your wallet. But he says, “Do you know what’s happened?” “What’s happened?” “Clinton died!” “Really?” “Clinton’s dead, killed.” “Killed?” If you went away thinking, “Oh my God, what times! When these things happen they’re the sign of general chaos, such chaos that there’s no living peacefully. And here I am, planning to get married in two years! Who knows if I’ll be able to pursue my projects peacefully to their completion? And then, even after, what sadness!” If you go off shaken by what that fellow told you, you’re the one who’s nuts, because a fellow like that is a mess, not only from the social point of view, but also from the physiological and behavioral points of view; he’s evidently wacked out, crazy. In that case, believing wouldn’t be right. But it’s not my job here to go into details; I’m not doing a lesson on when and how to believe.
 “Believing” is a knowledge of reality you reach with certainty as if you’d seen it yourself, though you arrive at it through the witness of another person. Therefore, you have to come to grips with this person, with this other, and the relationship with the other is also an ethical relationship, psychological and ethical. How much depends on the capacity of using judgments, information, and news from the other; how much depends on your–your! –candor, on your integrity, on your simplicity, on your clarity, on your acumen! When you know a reality through a witness, through the work of a witness, your whole personality is engaged, not just your reason like “cogs” in your brain, but the reality of the brain is engaged, with your eyes, hands, sense of smell, and, with these, your heart, the memory of your past, your reactivity, your vivacity, your clarity. Your whole personality is obliged to engage with another personality. Therefore, faith, knowledge through faith–knowledge of reality through the witness of another–delineates and reveals the capacity for the right, human position and stance before a human being.
For that matter–excuse me, where were you born? “In Salerno.” He was born in Salerno. For him to say this is an act of faith, because he wasn’t present at his birth; he was present, but unconsciously. Saying this is an act of faith.
Human coexistence, society in its complexity, history in its development, culture in its continual going toward the ultimate horizons of things, of reality, depend on this type, this modulus of knowledge. If man always had to start from the beginning and accept only what he saw, we’d still be Neanderthals: man would always have to return to the beginning, could never start from what others have given him. We, instead, always start out accepting, and with certainty, the inheritance of a past. The fact is that we can choose from what in the past we hold to be the best and what we hold to be the worst. One can easily err in this judgment, but this judgment, too, depends on the heart, on the purity of the heart, or poverty of spirit, as Jesus would say. This is my answer.
And I’ll add something more. It’s clear that the observations made are very important, because if there’s something beyond our horizon that’s impossible to overcome when we reach the threshold where reality becomes an unknown by its very nature, when we reach the threshold of what is called “mystery,” only this method can let us know something of the mystery. How can we verify the truth of what we know of the mystery through the witness of someone who comes from beyond the last line, who enters into the human world? How can we know if what this person reveals to us is right? We’ll only know it by the fact that it fortifies the human. If it fortifies everything that is human, however it plays out, then it is confirmed as true.

Question: In the book, you make the distinction between faith as definition and faith just as it bursts out, as it begins. I’d like to understand this point better.3
Giussani: The nexus between faith as definition and faith as… actuated.
Giancarlo Cesana: Could I read an answer you gave in Is It Possible to Live This Way? so we’ll get familiar with the accent of the book, which, as you will see, is very easy to understand, because it’s a dialogue. So then, we’ll start out from far away:
“Let’s say you get on a cable car with a normal conductor and you push your way in and go forward because you like to be in the front of the car. You’re up there and you watch the conductor operating the cable car, trickety track, trickety track. You don’t go home and tell your wife: ‘You know what, I had an encounter!’ ‘What encounter?’ ‘With a cable car conductor.’ But instead, imagine that while you’re there next to the conductor, he stops the train all of a sudden because somebody walked in front of it, and then he opens the window and yells, ‘You idiot moron cuckold!’ And then imagine that the guy who crossed in front of the cable car runs behind it and jumps on at the next stop. He shoves his way on and goes up front to where you and the conductor are. The conductor begins to shake a little and this guy asks him, ‘Excuse me, why did you say that my wife’s unfaithful? How did you know that she betrayed me?’ And the conductor goes, ‘Excuse me, but I was so scared when you jumped in front of the train that I said that to curse you out... you really should have been more careful.’ ‘No, no you’re right, I am a cuckold. You see, I got married, then I went to England, to London, was there two years working, returned, and my wife had a baby. What would you have done?’ The conductor nods in understanding.  And the other guy goes, ‘Right, I kept him. Poor kid, it wasn’t his fault, so I kept him. Only the baby grew up and it was time to send him to kindergarten... and my wife says, “Let’s send him to the nuns because we’ll rest easier with him there.” What would you have done? I told her, “Send him to the nuns!” And after kindergarten there was elementary school, and my wife told me, “Let’s leave him there with the nuns”... which was expensive–it cost me an arm and a leg; you know how expensive private schools are... So, I left him there with the nuns. After elementary school, middle school–and still with the nuns... what do you expect? I’m too goodhearted, and so I left him there with the sisters, paying, paying through the nose! And with my wife who doesn’t deserve it. After middle school, my wife persuaded me: “Let’s send him to a prep school.” What would you have done? So I sent him to a preparatory high school... and a private school at that! So... this child really cost me a lot! But last week, I really lost my patience. My wife goes, “Listen, he finished high school with honors. Let’s send him to the university.” “Ah, no. No!” I blurted out, “That’s it, no way! Because the most a little bastard can hope to become is a cable car conductor, at best!!!’” I and the three or four others there listening laugh... Then when I go home I tell my wife: ‘You know, I had quite an encounter today!’ This is right, isn’t it? Because it’s somewhat exceptional to run into something like that”.
Thus, the text continues:
“The second characteristic of the act of faith is that the fact from which it comes, the encounter you had, is something exceptional. But be careful here. When can you say something is exceptional? I don’t know whether this observation is more comical or dramatic–nature, as it is created by God, can be comical, sometimes–because we feel that something is exceptional when it corresponds to the deepest needs for which we live and move.
There are deep needs that give a goal to living, to reasoning and moving. When something corresponds to the criteria by which everything is judged and lived, when it corresponds to the criteria with which life is lived, wishes to be lived, when it corresponds to the deepest desires of the heart, when it corresponds to what the School of Community calls “elementary experience,” when it corresponds to the deepest needs of the heart, that is, those for which everything is lived and judged, when it corresponds to the most natural and fully present needs of the heart, when it brings to fruition what life has been awaiting, then it’s exceptional.
To be exceptional, an encounter must correspond to what you’re waiting for. What you’re awaiting should be natural, but it’s so impossible for what you’re awaiting to happen that when it does happen, it’s something exceptional.”4
Thus, this is the second characteristic of the act of faith. 
And then there’s a “last point: the response.” When this something exceptional happens, what is our response?
“Guys, what is the supreme characteristic of any truly human act, above all when the human act is in front of its destiny? Remember Péguy: God never obliges anybody. Freedom!
Before all this in which everything is so clear–‘If I don’t believe in You, I can’t believe my own eyes’ (this is the substance of St. Peter’s position)–before the question ‘Who is this man?’ and before the response Peter gives, one can say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ One can adhere to what Peter says or go away like everyone else.
The only rational thing is the ‘yes.’ Why? Because the reality that is proposed corresponds to the nature of our heart more than any of our images. It corresponds to the thirst for happiness that we have and that constitutes the reason for living, the nature of our I, the need for truth and happiness. Indeed, Christ corresponds to this more than any image we can construct. Think what you want; just show me someone who’s better than this man as He’s described in the New Testament! Tell me, if you can think of one! You can’t; He corresponds to your heart more than anything we can possibly imagine.”5
Giussani: But this system has a drawback. In order to understand that Barolo wine is good, you have to drink it, in a certain way, with a certain caution, but you have to drink it. Through experience of what this book affirms, through our experience, we understand that without Christ it’s impossible to live, as Saint Peter said in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel: “We don’t understand what You are saying either, but Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”6 In experiencing it, we understand it. Since this is the only case of a challenge set before you, before you claim to belong to something else, it’s in your best interests to verify this challenge, that is, experience it, follow it in such a way that it becomes experience. Then you will become accustomed to noticing in your days accents or acmes of your experience that can be found nowhere else, that are unimaginable from any other position.
When He was in the boat that night, He was so exhausted that He was sleeping and didn’t even hear the terrible storm–as suddenly happens, still today, on the Lake of Tiberius, when the stones from the bottom are pulled up and thrown around by the wind and then thrown into the air. The boat was full of water. So they decided to wake Him: “Lord, save us! We are perishing!” He got up, motioned to the sea, the storm, and there was great calm. Those men who were His friends, those seven or eight who had been continually going to His house for months now, who knew everything about Him–father, mother, all His antecedents–those friends, awed, said among themselves, “Who then is this whom even wind and sea obey?”7 The disproportion between how that individual presented Himself and their possibility of imagination was such that they were forced, knowing Him, to say this. Two years later, His enemies asked the same identical question, after they had exhausted all their answers, their attempts to answer, and in the end said to Him, “How long are you going to keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”8 They had their registry; they’d noted the facts and figures. At times, it seems impossible that a man can escape, slip out of the sweet and powerful narrows of these facts. Then one looks attentively at himself and understands: man can escape, and how! Because man is an imposter. Jesus says, “All of you are wicked.”9 He said it in a sad moment, but the observation was sad too, and it was an observation: “All of you are wicked.”

Question: Can you explain better what you mean by hope, when you say, “If faith is to recognize a Presence that is certain, if faith is to recognize a Presence with certainty, hope is to recognize a certainty for the future that is born from this Presence.”10 What do you mean by hope?
Giussani: I don’t remember how I developed the argument (because I still haven’t re-read the book), but I thank God for the certainty that He has given me; as Saint Peter says, “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope.”11 A child who has to pass through a fast, deep stream, if he has his father, who, he knows very well, is strong… The father has always carried him in his arms! He remembers the time when his father went to make hay and brought the boy with him. His father crammed the pannier of hay and the child wanted to help him, continuing to step on his feet, saying, “I want to carry some hay too, Daddy!” And finally the father decided: he pulled out a handful of hay and put it in the child’s hands, and so it took an extra hour to get home; usually, in fact, he would pick up the boy and put him on top of the hay. The child knows well that his father has strong arms; he’s terrified at crossing that little bridge (I can say it because I, too, am still terrified at passing over those narrow gorges), but the father tells him, “I’ll carry you.” The child climbs into his arms and is no longer afraid at all, because of a presence, a presence that ensures a step that isn’t yet present, but will happen, will come.
Imagine the widow of Nain, the woman following the coffin of her only son, and she already a widow. Jesus came up to her and didn’t say right away, “I’ll restore your son to you: son, arise!” First of all, He said, “Woman, do not weep,”12a sentence that could even seem obtuse, from a certain point of view, because how can you expect a woman in those conditions not to cry? How can you say something like that? But this little antecedent to the sublime gesture that Christ did later is the sign that the love with which He came to men was a love, a mercy, so personal, so profound, so moved, that it was charity. As is explained in Is It Possible to Live This Way?,13 charity, God’s charity for man, is a moved love.  If it weren’t moved, it wouldn’t be divine–you can go shovel mud or distribute money without emotion. Emotion is the index of profound participation, profound sharing that an individual has. You live not to die, but you live to live; so much so that even death, as Huizinga said,14 being part of the definition of life, even death is a passage, a threshold toward a greater, more profound life.
Clearly, based on a secure present, I can organize wise projects for the future, plans that are appropriate for what I have. However, this wasn’t the aspect of the question that interested us. This is self-evident: hope, psychologically, is founded on a present, always. It’s something you have in the present that enables you to make plans for the future with certainty–certainty up to a certain point, of course: your project has to be well considered, your imagination well governed; it can’t be a false claim. However, in actual fact, structurally, hope is a present possession that enables you to hypothesize a construction for the future. It’s not an extra something, because people live for tomorrow; they don’t live the moment exhausting in the prison of this moment all their desires. Someone who lives this way can only be a drunk, a drunk in many senses, for many reasons, but always and only a drunk–as Jesus said in one of the sentences taken from the papyruses found in Egypt, in Ossirinco: “He came among them and found them all drunk; none of them was thirsty.”15 Ibsen translated it in other terms, with the image of a room where the owner was never present. And the owner, in the end, says, “Lord, You’re the sun of the universe; You’ve always illuminated that room, but You’ve never found its owner. Therefore, You’ve lit it uselessly, lit and heated it uselessly.”16 It’s clear, in any case, that within certain limits, this impetus for building, constructing, and for organizing time, that pushes into the future, cannot be repressed. On the contrary: why are you living today? For tomorrow, for a tomorrow. You can’t reduce this; if you remain mute–if you don’t respond–it’s a sign that you’re already dead. You’re already dead!
But the question that interested us above all concerns what Christ said to us, He who came from beyond the furthest shore, who came from the other shore toward us, to say, “You’re gathered here, massed on this strip of land. You find it hard to eat; everything is arid, everything ends up in aridity, but I’ll bring you to the other shore, the other bank, where it’s always green and lush.” The certainty I have of Jesus now gives me the capacity to wait for the future with assurance, and hope is waiting for the future with assurance; to wait for the future means to wait for a new content, a new future, with assurance. Not “within certain limits”–actually, yes, instead, “within certain limits,” that are only apparent limits, within the terms of the design of God, of the will of the Father, which is an infinite and eternal will. Without the perspective of the eternal, even the most loving embrace–as Claudel said in The Satin Slipper–even the most tender embrace becomes a harbinger of death. And, as Rilke said, “And all is at one, in keeping us secret, half out of shame perhaps, half out of inexpressible hope.”17 What we’re made for is something that cannot be said; we can intuit it and we cannot say it. The closer life flows, conscious of the presence of Christ, the more this intuition becomes rule and norm, source of vitality. However, as I said long ago in high school, the poets, the great poets, are all prophets: you read through so many pages, and at a certain point you find a verse, a strophe, a page in which it is clear that truly it is God of whom they are prophets; even more, it’s Christ. This is precisely because what they start from is human, the image they form is human; it’s Christ, God made flesh, of whom they are prophets. Studying literature–just as I did, thanks be to God–lets your studies also become a way of participating in an extraordinary story.
To hope in vain: is there anything crueler than this, a more tremendous ending than this? Life isn’t tragedy, but it’s tragic, as was the last word on life of the great Greek thinkers and poets, who represent the best of human literature. Only with Christianity is life no longer tragic, but dramatic. The drama is the battle between an “I” and a “you,” like that of Jacob, the biblical Jacob, when night came to the river ford, and he took his servants, women, children, and animals across, and then it was his turn. It was already dark and he, too, wanted to cross, but a hand stopped him, and he wrestled with the mysterious Being all night long, until in the morning the mysterious Being won, striking Jacob’s hip socket, so he limped for the rest of his life, marked.18 Who lives, who lives seeking to realize the consciousness of the great Presence? Saint Paul says, “So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God.”19 To eat and drink:the earthiest paragon he could use, without getting vulgar!

Question: In the text, you defined the great challenge as returning as children, returning to our origins, returning precisely to how God made us. Then, to explain, you gave the definition of morality: “Morality is to live with the attitude God instilled in us when He made us.” Could you clarify this relationship?
Giussani: My friend Carlo will answer.
Carlo Wolfsgruber: I’ll read the sentence quoted, so we can understand better: “Therefore, the big question is to return to being little children; …the big question is to return to the origin; the big question is to return to how God made us. Really, what is morality? Morality is to live with the attitude God instilled in us when He made us.”20 This excerpt is an answer to a question, above, that says, “But God, when He came, who recognized Him?”21 Precisely. The great challenge is returning as children, being moral, living with the attitude God instilled in us when He made us.
As a first comment, the most striking thing is that this attitude God instilled in us when He made us is an attitude we have before all of reality, and thus before the problem of Christ, so much so that it’s not an abstract problem, that is, an idea; it’s not a theoretical problem, but taking a position about a fact present in reality. Christ is a presence in reality, so the right attitude that enables me to recognize Christ is the same attitude that is right before all of reality, before myself, my mother, the things I have and desire to have, others, my friends–in short, before reality. Recognizing Christ requires a certain right, moral attitude, but this moral attitude is the same one that enables me to have a right relationship with everything.
So then, let’s look at what this right attitude is. He says it there: it’s the attitude of the child. At a certain point, he explains what this attitude is, in the assembly that follows, and says the child is “openness, curiosity, and adherence.”22 Therefore, the moral attitude, having a moral attitude before reality, which is the attitude that enables you then to recognize Christ, means that before reality you are open, curious, and adhere. In a word, it seems to me that one could say not having preconceived ideas, that is, not being irrational, not being dominated by the irrationality of preconception, because I believe that preconception is irrational for at least two reasons: first, because you claim to know something you don’t know, claiming to know it already–thus, it’s an evident contradiction–and second, it’s irrational because normally what you think you already know about what you don’t know is simply what the others think, not even an original idea of your own.
So then, “the great challenge is returning to being like children,” and this is morality. Then the text applies this position in the relationship with Christ. If I may, I’ll read: “All of the Apostles were like this, except one. He was totally like the others, and was full of initiative, so much so that Jesus put him in charge of the purse, made him the administrator of the group. But he didn’t follow Him with those feelings. He was hoping for something else. The Apostles also were hoping for something else, hoping that Jesus would finally bring the reign of Israel, the reign of the Hebrew people to dominate the world and the powers of this world, but even though they shared everyone’s mentality with these images, their attachment to Jesus was more acute than these images to which they had remained faithful. In fact, when the risen Jesus encountered them for the first time, they said, ‘Master, now will you establish the reign of Israel?’ as if He hadn’t died, as if nothing had happened; they repeated the mentality of everyone. And Jesus calmly told them, ‘It’s not like that! The time of these events is known only to the Father.’ And they were so child-like near Jesus, they let it drop; they didn’t remain attached to the demand that He correspond to their interrogatives as they imagined them; rather, they remained attached to Him more deeply than they were attached to their opinions, with a greater simplicity. ...This is exactly the great danger for all of us: that our images prevail over the expectation that God has awakened in our hearts and that Christ renewed–no, more than that, that He made precise. How did He make it precise? He made it precise by a relationship with Him: ‘Trust in me.’23
There’s a piece of a book called Morality: Memory and Desire–it’s the piece that most struck me in that book–that describes with other words this openness, this curiosity, and this capacity for adherence without preconceived ideas. It says, “In the relationship between a son and his own father, in the relationship between a disciple and the true teacher, the son and the disciple live entirely within that relationship.”24 This is the original position, which is morality.

Question: You state that the problem of intelligence in dealing with reality is entirely in the episode of John and Andrew, in the first chapter of St. John, when they follow Jesus, pointed out by John the Baptist. And then you say that the foundation of true morality is in the twenty-first chapter of St. John, when Christ asks Simon, “Do you love Me?” and he answers, “Yes Lord, You know that I love you.”25 I’d like you to explain these two things to me.
Giussani: There in the text, I simply wanted to summarize in two points (John 1 and John 21) everything that is the true movement of man that Christ brought into the world and that became an experience for everyone–when one is called to experience it. Whatever isn’t in the present, in present experience, a thing that in some way isn’t in present experience, doesn’t exist; only present experience, only what can be affirmed as being exists. Our trouble, religiously speaking, is that we don’t perceive Christianity as a present reality in present experience. Instead, in order to live, we start out, we judge, etc., from a present experience. Whatever isn’t present in experience doesn’t exist–in some way, it has to be present, if it exists–even if it were the furthest star, without our seeing it, a light would reverberate on the current structure of my present; it would slip in, would give the possibility of a point of view that otherwise we would not have.
I wanted to summarize in two points all that Christ brought us and that we are called to experience from the point of view of the real value of the person of Christ and, therefore, of the real value of the mystery of God that has penetrated into our world and is already present now, here and now, the real value of this mercy whose name in history–to use the Pope’s words–is Jesus Christ.
How did the problem of Christ in the world begin? What is the point, the literary and historical page that narrates how? How did the presence of this problem in the world begin? By looking at that image, we can become conscious of what we have to do in the present, what we need, in the present, to understand it. Christ can’t be an abstract name, but it is so when it doesn’t correspond to anything of the experience we have. Since He entered–Christianity is the announcement that God became man, and entered into our experience–there’s something missing in our observation, something missing in our attention: we erase His name first, obliterate it relentlessly, censure it, in order to be part of the people of today.
The first moment in which the problem was posed in the world, in history–historically, chronologically–is when two Galileans came to hear John the Baptist, famous throughout the whole Jewish world of the time, testified to by other sources as well, in addition to the Gospel, pagan sources as well: after a hundred and fifty years, finally a prophet had come. All the people went to him: friends, enemies, Pharisees, the people. These two Galileans went for the first time to see him. Imagine them there, their faces wide open in the wonder of hearing him speak, struck; they didn’t understand everything he said, but they were struck by his face, by his tone of voice, by the edges of his thought. At a certain point, observing him, they saw him staring at a young man who was going away, taking the path for the north, to the right of the river, and he shouted, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” In general, the people didn’t make much of it; hearing him talk, they were used to seeing him explode into incomprehensible sentences every now and then, without connection with what he was saying before or would say next. But those two, having understood where John the Baptist’s gaze was fixed, went after that man, that young man, and, not daring to approach Him, they shadowed Him. “Jesus turned and saw them following Him and asked them, ‘What are you looking for?’ They answered, ‘Rabbi , where are You staying?’ He said to them, ‘Come, and you will see.’ So they went and saw where He was staying, and they remained with Him that day. It was about four in the afternoon.” But it doesn’t specify anything else. Right after, the page of the Gospel story says–without connection, as if in notes, as one who jots down notes from past days, because they were the notes of one of those two, John, in his old age–that they returned home, and the first person Andrew found was his brother, coming up from the beach, because he’d been fishing. He told him, “We have found the Messiah.”26 He doesn’t first say why, or what He said, or how He demonstrated it, no! Imagine the two of them sitting, looking at Him as He spoke (in such a way that people said, “Nobody has every spoken like Him”). They were so struck by the exceptionality of that young man that they didn’t breathe another word. When they returned, they left in silence. Imagine when they returned home, in silence. Andrew enters his home where his wife and children are, and his wife says, “What’s wrong with you? You’re different. This evening, you’re different!” He doesn’t respond, and maybe hugs his wife without saying anything, and she has never felt embraced like that before in her life. And so she asks, “What happened to you?” He tells her what he would then tell his brother Simon: “We’ve found a man who says He’s the Messiah.” He undoubtedly repeats to her some words that he’s heard Him say. “If I can’t believe in that man, I couldn’t believe my own eyes, either. I couldn’t believe anyone else. I’m different; I’ve become different!” My God, how true this is! How many of you could say, “I’ve become different.” Not, “I was blind and now I see!” Not, “I was lame, and now I walk!” “I’m different; I don’t know how to tell you…”
Imagine, after weeks of this privileged listening, and after months not only of His talking, but of living with Him, they were witnesses to all He said, of everything He did. They spent days, weeks, without even saying a word, because they were rapt, their attention was entirely taken by that exceptional presence, by that mysterious presence, until three or four months later, when that evening came when He went fishing with them. In addition to speaking with them during the day, He went fishing with them in the evening. There came the night we spoke of before. Toward dawn, the storm threatened to capsize the boat and that man “got up, rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was great calm,” such that “the men were amazed and said, ‘What sort of man is this, whom even the winds and the sea obey?’”
Thus, the Christian problem arose in the world, in this precise way, in a precise space and time, a precise way that then was communicated to the friends they told about it, to the family members they told about it, to the town friends they told about it, and many of them ran to hear Him and, like the Samaritan woman, exclaimed, “Now I say what you said. I say it now because I’ve seen, I’ve heard: nobody ever spoke like Him.” I say it too. “Nobody ever spoke like that man.” From one to another, to another, to another, and to me, this event has reached me and you: it’s here! I swear to you that we’ll all pass away, and He will still be among those who will come here to study Math or Philosophy, or to hear a “harangue” about Him; it’s the same–the same! Now you’ll return home, and you can’t erase what happened. You can erase what happened by not thinking about Him. And if you think about it, you don’t understand anything, but you ask, “God, if you exist, reveal Yourself to me,” in the most desperate and most conscious position, that of the Nameless; but more simply, “Lord, let me understand something too! Come, Lord, to me, too, in my house, so I understand that the world, the peace of the world, the goodness of the world, the gusto of the world, the joy of life depend on the change that You bring”–because there’s no party, no President of the Republic, no American money, no victory at the Berlin Wall, no invasion of East Europe by part of the West, no victory of the Japanese or the Chinese, there’s nothing in the world that can change man. This Presence can. “I’m not the way I was before; I’m like before, but I’m not the way I was anymore. I see, Lord, things that these people don’t see; let them see too.” How can we not say this? We say this not because we’re carried away, but because it’s true–because it’s true! If you have children, what do you give them, if you don’t give them this? Why do you bring them into the world? Now the impression that it’s unreasonable to bring children into the world has become normal. Why? There’s no “why.” His Presence brings back the “why” of life.
The second point (John 21), taken alongside the one we’ve just looked at, deserves an even more attentive reflection, which we’ll do on another occasion.

Question: I’d like to understand why you say that the experience of the hundredfold here and now passes through a sacrifice of the immediate, and also that experience of a greater possession, of a true possession, happens through a detachment.27
Giussani: I normally tell my friends that you can’t establish a true relationship with anything, and especially with anyone, unless a sacrifice is implied. In order to establish a true relationship between me and you, imagine that there are these six yards to cross. Within these six yards, at every inch, something appears, an appearance arises that invites me, that in some way invites me. If I stop, I’ll never reach you. If I stop and go after it, I’ll get lost and no longer recognize the road. If at every inch there’s an appearance, I have to leave that appearance to come to you. Leaving an appearance–even a painful appearance–is always a sacrifice for man, always painful. Detaching from the appearance… the appearance has something like glue that holds you, that, for better or worse, happily or not, holds you. But it’s a false present; the apparent is a false present. Therefore, woe to the man who rests his prospects on an appearance!  It’s the opposite of hope, and the origin of disappointment; appearance is the origin of delusion. I stare at a certain thing–certain! –certainly exact: that you’re here, if I want to come to you… like a young man wants to go to his girlfriend, because he knows she’s good, knows it’s right, knows that she loves him. He could have made a mistake, but he knows that she loves him and that his erring is in the past. He has to leave everything that grabs his arm to hold him back; everything grabs his arm to hold him back. He has to pull away and go, pull away and go. And when he arrives before the face of his girlfriend, that appearance–because even she is an appearance–attracts him a hundred million times more than all the rest, but if he flings himself at her, as the impetus would tell him, it would all be spoiled, it would be a possession. Possession either transforms you or betrays you; it changes you into the form of animal claws that rip (as I said today), that “lacerate” the other’s entire face–two or three years later, it’s not the same as before, in the sense that it dies; what it evoked inside you dies. With Christ, every day they went with Him, what was evoked inside them grew and grew; it grew so much that it even moves me two thousand years later. It’s here, now, here and now.
Therefore, first of all, you can’t establish a relationship of knowledge, of affection for a thing or a person, without a sacrifice inside, without ripping yourself away from something, without ripping yourself away from an appearance. Something beyond the appearance must emerge, make itself concrete, make you change, rip you away from your own appearance, change the game. Then you can really have a family, begin a family, in a true way. Think about every evening, not when you do the gesture of the Hail Mary together (as couples often fail to do), but while you look the other way and think: today, too, was full of objections, of unease. But there’s a thing, a memory, an image, the consciousness of a Presence. Memory is the consciousness of a Presence, the presence of a thing that began in the past–this is why it’s called memory–but invades the present. This is what purifies your thoughts, making hope emerge. What you’re made for, what you met your wife for, what you had your child for, this will win, is destined to win, through the power of an Other, through the power of Being. In fact, you didn’t give yourself life. You didn’t make your wife. Your child isn’t yours, and all that belongs to Him. If you think of He to whom all this belongs, who is so present as to make your flesh in this moment (review the tenth chapter of the first School of Community book, The Religious Sense;28 go re-read it–that tenth chapter challenges any other book. It’s not presumption on my part; mine is more simplicity than presumption.), this thought of Christ is what purifies. So you say, “Hail Mary, full of grace…” “May I be born, may I be re-born as He was born of you, from your womb, the God-made-man,” and you are once again at peace.
Sacrifice doesn’t let you forget anything, embraces everything, and ends up in joy; it often ends up in joy. It’s striking how this was the last word Christ said to His Apostles–and therefore to all men–before dying, at the end of that terrible night, that terrible evening narrated in the four chapters of Saint John: “I have told you this so that My joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.”29 Let’s take up the challenge; let’s see if it’s true, if this joy is possible–but by engaging the experience of our life as He says! Engaging the experience of life as He says, we remain poor people like everyone else, people who no longer judge anybody, because we’re so aware of our own limitations, but who have the possibility of joy, which in normal daily terms is called gladness. “I’ll make evident that I am God by the gladness of their hearts.” The word “gladness” should be expunged from every dictionary, because in normal man, there is no chance of gladness. Happiness, yes, but gladness, no. Joy is highly impossible, except in the light of Christ, of the certainty brought by Christ. We’ve spoken with the style of the text.

But before going, let me read you half a page of the dialogue with the students at Cervia a few weeks ago, where before beginning we sang the Sevillanas del adios (I’m told that you haven’t learned it yet; learn it, because it’s beautiful). It says, “Something dies in the soul when your friend leaves, when your friend goes away and goes leaving a trace that cannot be erased. Don’t go yet; don’t go, please, because even my guitar cries when it says goodbye. A handkerchief of silence at the moment of departure, at the moment of departure, because you have words that wound and cannot be said. The boat, look, is getting smaller when it goes further away on the sea. When it goes further away on the sea and when it becomes lost, how great is the solitude! This emptiness left by your friend who leaves… The friend who leaves is like a bottomless well, that cannot be filled.”30 So then, imagine this man or this people on the dock, waving to the friend who’s leaving on a small boat. He’s going, going, until he disappears on the horizon. He disappears on the horizon, and the line of the horizon cannot be crossed, and the well cannot be filled, and you remain alone. Christianity is the opposite: man is alone, there on the dock, but waiting, because everything in him is waiting. And look, on the horizon a point appears, a point that comes toward the shore; it gets bigger, bigger, bigger… it’s a boat, and at a certain point you can see the boatman, you can make out the boatman. It’s arriving, arriving, arriving… and it docks; and the person on the boat embraces the man who was waiting on the shore. “A point appears on the horizon, on the line of the horizon: it’s this boat. This barquiño, which is a point, becomes increasingly bigger; to the eyes of the attentive man staring at it, it becomes bigger and bigger, until he can also make out its internal factors and sees a man, the boatman, seated inside. The boat approaches the shore, docks, and the man who was waiting embraces the man who has arrived. Christianity is like this, like the man who waits, who embraces the man who arrives from the otherwise enigmatic and previously unknown horizon.”31 The man who arrives is God-made-flesh.

Notes
1 L. Giussani, Si può vivere così?, [Is It Possible to Live This Way?], Rizzoli, Milano 2007, p. 26.
2 Cf. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, III, 40:30.
3 Cf. L. Giussani, Si può vivere così?, op. cit., p. 71.
4 Ibid., pp. 46-48.
5 Ibid., p. 55.
6 Cf. Jn 6:68.
7 Cf. Mt 8:23-27; Mk 4:35-41.
8 Jn 10:24.
9 Cf. Mt 7:11; Lk 11:13.
10 L. Giussani, Si può vivere così?, op. cit., p. 180.
11 1 Pt 3:15.
12 Cf. Lk 7:11-17.
13 Cf. L. Giussani, Si può vivere così?, op. cit., pp. 325-337.
14 Cfr. J. Huizinga, Autunno del Medioevo [The Autumn of the Middle Ages], Bur, Milan, 1995, p. XXXIII.
15 M. Erbetta (editor), Gli apocrifi del Nuovo Testamento, I/1, Scritti affini ai Vangeli canonici, composizioni gnostiche, [The Apocrypha of the New Testament i/1, Writings Similar to the Canonical Gospels, Gnostic Compositions.]Marietti, Casale, 1975, p. 101.
16 Cf. H. Ibsen, Peer Gynt, Einaudi, Torino, 1959, p. 131.
17 R.M. Rilke, Second Elegy, in The Duino Elegies, Translated by A. S. Kline  © 2001, www.tonykline.co.uk/PITBR/German/Rilke.htm. 
18 Cf. Gen 32:23-32.
19 Cf. 1 Cor 10:31.
20 L. Giussani, Si può vivere così?, op. cit., p. 219.
21 Ibid., p. 218.
22 Ibid., p. 250.
23 Ibid., pp. 219-220.
24 Cf. L. Giussani, “Moralità: memoria e desiderio”, in Alla ricerca del volto umano, [“Morality: Memory and Desire,” in Searching for the Human Face], Rizzoli, Milan, 1995, p. 235.
25 Cf. L. Giussani, Si può vivere così?, op. cit., p. 273.
26 Cf. Jn 1:35-41.
27 Cf. L. Giussani, Si può vivere così?, op. cit., pp. 420-421.
28 Cf. L. Giussani, The Religious Sense, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997, Montreal, pp. 100-108.
29 Jn 15:11.
30 Cf. Sevillanas del adios, in Canti [Songs], Cooperativa Editoriale Nuovo Mondo, Milan, 2002, pp. 269-271.
31 L. Giussani, Realtà e giovinezza. La sfida [Reality and Youth. The Challenge], Sei, Turin, 1995, p. 80.