NewWorld

Do We Really Believe
This is Possible?
Launching Is It Possible
to Live This Way?
in the Nation’s Capital
In the John Paul II Center in Washington, DC, the English philosopher Roger Scruton relates Giussani’s text to his experience. Fr. Antonio Lopez of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family also gives his impressions

by Dino D’Agata

The title of Giussani’s current book in English, Is it Possible to Live this Way? has been subtitled “An Unusual Approach to Christianity” for a reason, and it was this “unusual” approach that, more than ten years ago, set me off on a relentless quest to live this life, forsaking marriage, forsaking money, forsaking autonomy, because nothing was more attractive to me than the correspondence I had perceived through a friendship with someone I had met in Memores Domini–someone who was free, happy, and, most importantly, fully human–meaning that nothing in her humanity had been cast aside in the attempt to live a life of virginity.

Faith and Truth
 On October 1st in Washington, DC, at the John Paul II Cultural Center, the question of just how unusual Giussani’s approach is came before a public audience of over two hundred participants, when Roger Scruton, writer and philosopher, Research Professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia, with Father Antonio Lopez, Assistant Professor of Theology at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family Studies, discussed the book and what it means for a Church that has largely forgotten–and sometimes forsaken–this link between Christ and human life as we live it.  His Excellency the Honorable Pietro Sambi, Apostolic Nuncio of the Holy See to the United States, introduced the evening, and the ensuing discussion was moderated by John McCarthy, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Catholic University.
“One of the lessons that Father Giussani wished to convey,” Scruton told the audience, “is that you don’t arrive at faith simply by acknowledging, in however mechanical and dispassionate a manner, that God exists, or by accepting this or that doctrine of the Christian tradition.”
Scruton went on to state that faith was not something particular to Christianity, and he underscored Giussani’s insistence on the correspondence to one’s deepest human needs as that which persuades one to follow Christ. Comparing this to an Islamic position, for instance, he spoke of how, in Christianity, there is “the personal relation that underlies Christian commitment. While a Christian could repeat some equivalent of the Muslim shahadah, testifying to his belief in the Trinity, for example, and in the divinity of Christ, his faith consists in moving on from those propositions, by incorporating them into his personal relationship with Christ. The Christian, as Father Giussani makes clear, is a disciple, and his discipleship is not simply a matter of accepting the validity of certain precepts or laws, such as those so relentlessly laid down in the Koran. It is a matter of putting his trust in another person–the Supreme Person who shows, through His example, that this trust has been fully earned.”
Scruton further clarified that “the personal relationship that lies at the heart of the Christian faith is not regarded as an alternative to the belief in God, but rather a form of it, and the only form that will guarantee the real benefits of faith.”

“What we love most, and what still needs to be improved”
Father Antonio Lopez echoed this later in the evening during his own speech, when he said, “Faith is not the blind assent to incomprehensible truths uttered by an authority ultimately perceived as hostile, as modern thinkers like Lessing and Spinoza taught us. It is the encounter with the person of Christ, with the ‘person-truth,’ as De Lubac would say.”
In addition, the consequence of that encounter, which, according to Giussani, is the virtue of obedience, is reasonable. “I mentioned before that the Apostles were reasonable when they remained with Christ,” Lopez stated. “This indicates another counter-cultural element of Giussani’s thought. Reason is the category of possibility and, as such, has in faith its truest expression.”
The book itself, which is a transcript of a series of talks Giussani gave to those entering onto the path of Memores Domini, a life consecrated to Christ as a layperson within the world, is peculiar in its approach because it does not offer advice on how to maintain one’s chastity or tolerate the sufferings of poverty. Instead, its starting point lies in the fact that before any commitment to this type of life, one is first moved by an entirely reasonable and persuasive human encounter with Christ that holds out the promise of everything if it is followed (“obeyed”). In Lopez’s words, “Faith, very much as it is for Benedict XVI, is the recognition of God’s presence contained fully in the body of Christ. It is true knowledge, because if we are to follow Scripture and the Fathers of the Church, what man ardently desires is to know God, the source from which everything comes and which mysteriously cares for everything and everyone, a knowledge that is nothing but a participation in God’s life.” Thus, in Giussani’s eyes, embarking on a life of virginity is an assent in freedom and love that derives from a sense that only Christ can fulfill one’s deepest longings and, furthermore, that He is immediately present to our experience through the phenomenon of the Church.
Scruton echoed this when he referred to St. Paul’s view that faith contains within it two other mental conditions: hope and charity–which, mediated through the thinking of Aquinas–recasts these virtues that “secure the Christian in right relation to Christ. I think this tradition of thinking is what is deepest in the Christian legacy. It tells us first that faith involves trust in a person,” he said.
It is exactly this trust in a person that is perhaps the most groundbreaking–and the most glossed-over–in Giussani’s thinking, even by well-meaning admirers who, despite both Giussani’s and Memores Domini’s witness to the contrary, persist in seeing a young person’s desire to live a life of virginity as something he heroically flings himself at with great nobility and determination in the face of a distant God who will one day judge him, rather than as something that occurs in his experience because, through the method of the Church, it is actually possible to have a human relationship with Christ here and now. This is a rather audacious claim in light of the modern reality of the post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment thinking that does its best to separate God from the immediacy of human experience.

“The path for us
in these dialogues”
 It was the sense that one can know Christ with certainty through a witness that Fr. Antonio Lopez stressed when he stated, “The witness, whose truth can be perceived by man after one has lived with him and looked at him with sympathy and not with suspicion, is not someone to be cast aside once we reach our goal (as modernity claims). The witness re-presents–i.e., makes present–the truth one seeks, for he who welcomes the Holy Spirit, sees in Christ the merciful face of the Father.” He later added, “Christian existence is thus defined first of all by what we love most, not by what still needs to be improved.”
An interesting corollary here is that Giussani rarely speaks of a life of virginity in terms of mere chastity, i.e., simple abstinence from sex, but in terms of looking at reality and possessing it in the same way Christ possessed it–knowing that the Father is active and alive in everything and that this knowledge is the most scintillating of all knowledge. As Lopez explained, “For Giussani, the supernatural is the true depth of the natural. Earth is inseparable from heaven. Faith is that divine grace that enables man to contemplate the true depth of reality. It is not therefore the elimination of reason, but the only way of preserving it. If, as Aquinas said, one implicitly knows and loves God in whatever one knows and loves, reason finds its truth when it is brought to see that reality is the sign of a dialogue with Another.”
In his introduction to the evening, His Excellency Archbishop Pietro Sambi quoted then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s homily at Fr. Giussani’s funeral in 2005, in which he stated that Giussani had grown up in a house “poor in bread, but rich in music,” and how Giussani was seeking “the pearl of definitive beauty, which is Christ.” In Lopez’s words, “To recognize Christ, the beloved Son of the Father, as the truth of being, i.e., of oneself and the world, is the loving adhesion to the one who loves us. This adhesion brings with it the surprise of the experience of the liberation of man to real freedom.”
Sambi cited the importance of Is it Possible to Live this Way? by mentioning the precariousness of commitment in modern relationships. “I love you as long as I feel like it. I consecrate myself to you as long as I feel like it,” he stated ironically. “The difficulty in making definitive decisions is the reason for our lack of joy, and it is here where Don Giussani offers help.”
He later added, “We do not follow the happiness for which we were created. Tonight, we are here to see how Don Giussani points out the path for us in these dialogues, thereby demonstrating the joy people have in making those final decisions.”