Enchained Evil

Notes from a talk at the CL University Leaders Meeting on February 3rd. The initiative of Mystery in man’s life, the consciousness of our “I” and of limitations. The certainty of a call

BY GIANCARLO CESANA

Father Giussani has recently dwelt insistently on the word “mystery,” as a description of life (I even once heard him say “a great confusion”). Our life, first of all, is not ours, because we did not give it to ourselves and, even if sometimes it seems so to us, we do not control it. It is what happened to my family, and what happened to Enzo… I don’t know what more could be needed to demonstrate this. Life does not follow the paths we foresee. Life is dominated by something greater, that we absolutely do not possess.
Mystery does not indicate something that we cannot see or touch, but something that we can see and touch, but do not possess.
Life is mystery, it is dominated by mystery, and man rises up confused in the face of this mystery that dominates his life, and it makes him dizzy (we studied this in The Religious Sense). It makes him dizzy, and so he gets frightened, he pulls back, calms down, sits down, slows down. But the mystery was revealed in Christ, that is to say, Christ is the name of the mystery, of the One who dominates life, the name of God.
However, Christ, too, is mystery; we cannot look at Christ as something that we possess, like the solution of our sums and calculations. Christ Himself is the Son of a Father who makes the sun to shine and sends the rain on the just and the unjust, who makes no distinctions. Even the apostles themselves wondered, “Why are those people who are so bad so lucky? And what will there be for us?”
All this history, the history of the revelation of God, of the initiative of Mystery which enters into the life of man, started with Abraham, with this man from the land of Ur (an area that is now part of Iraq), who suddenly stands out from all the other peoples and the confusion of the gods all around him. There were the gods of the Egyptians, the Assyrian, Babylonian gods, and there were the gods of poor people. There was a very great confusion in the attempts man made to try to understand the Mystery. Suddenly, Abraham stands out, he entrusts himself to a God who is one, a sole Being. Why? Because he was touched by this God. It is not that he understood this; he was called, by the intervention of the One who possesses all things. He was given something new to which to belong and he and all his sons, his women, his slaves, the people he had, his servants, everybody, became a distinct people in the midst of a confusion of peoples.
Abraham was touched by Mystery, by Him who is Mystery, but it doesn’t mean that afterwards his life was no longer a mystery; he had a very troubled life, he too like everybody else.

Where the difference lies
Father Giussani was describing these things, and I asked him, “If life is Mystery for those who are not touched as Abraham was, and if Mystery continues to dominate the life of Abraham who was touched, because he was not relieved of any of the labor of living, then essentially what difference is there?” And Father Giussani–I remember, he was sitting in front of me, with one of those brilliant phrases of his that make you understand the genius (in the true sense of the term, that is, the one who says what everyone else would like to hear or think, but can’t)–said, “It is the passage from the ‘non-I’ to the ‘I.’” That is to say, the difference between Abraham and all the others–all those others who were living this mysteriousness of life but were not touched by God–is that the others did not know what their “I” was, that is, they were inside the confusion of things, inside the confusion of the earth, of the world, a confusion dominated by gods, idols, money, lust, power, and everything that surrounds us, because it is like today, it is the same thing. And what was the “I”? It was a bundle of needs, a quest, a desire, a tension, but it did not detach itself from the rest, it did not come away from the rest, it drowned in the rest. As he says in The Religious Sense, the more ingenious man was, the more he managed to perceive Him who dominates everything, the dizzier he became at never getting there.
For Abraham the situation is the same, the same level of mysteriousness in life, the same level of tension in life, but a task–a task, because vocation, being called, is a task. Vocation is for a task, vocation is for building something.
What does this mean, a task? It means that you become necessary, that you are wanted. It means that without you the world is missing something, that you are no longer mixed up with the earth, the stars, the sand, that you are no longer something that in the end, ultimately, is going to rot, but that you are you, you are “I,” you are the new figure, a different consciousness of existing, a different consciousness of yourself, of things: you become the master of things, you are a protagonist not because you possess and manipulate them as you like, but because nothing can knock you down any more, because you were built up for a reason.

The appearance of the “I”
With Abraham, the “I” appeared, the person with his reason, his freedom, his capacity to adhere. For us it is exactly the same, because we too have been touched. We live in mystery and have been personally touched by Mystery, and our little bit of consciousness, of awareness of ourselves is founded on this. So I said to Giussani, “Well, then, the difference between me and an atheist lies not so much in the idea that I have of God and he doesn’t have, but in the idea I have of myself, in the consciousness I have of myself, in the consciousness I have of my task, of why I am in the world, in the consciousness I have about being.”
We have been touched, we have been made to belong. This presence which has marked us will not be taken away from us again, because it is not something we wanted ourselves. You can leave the Movement, you can go anywhere you like, but this will never be taken away from you.
This vocation, this call, is the foundation of our self, and it is continually confirmed in the experience of a truer humanity, i.e., a humanity that, faced with difficulties–faced with evil, faced with enmity–does not get discouraged, but reaffirms good, reaffirms positiveness.
We continually have this experience, dominated by God’s mercy, when we make mistakes or when what seems to fall away is put back, and even the worst kind of loss does not take away your hope, does not take away humanity, does not take away the courage to live. Certainly, it can break your soul, but it cannot keep you from seeing that there are people who live, who have hope, who help you; there are people who stand by you. That is to say, the chain of good is not broken; we have been called to witness to this.

St. Catherine
Among my wife’s notes, I found a quotation from St. Catherine which says, “The devil is like a mad dog, but he is chained up. To get bitten, you have to get close to him, and what brings you close to the devil is vice.”
The devil, i.e., falsehood, the negation of what exists, is another beautiful thing that Father Giussani explained: it is not that this bottle exists because I see and touch it. It exists because it has a meaning, it is within the order of the universe, otherwise the fact that I touch it and see it would not be enough. It is within the order of all things; if we take the meaning away from this bottle, if we take away the relationship it has with me and with you, it is no longer necessary, and thus I am no longer even sure of its existence. The laicist intellectuals of today have taken away the meaning from bottles, glasses, tables; there is no longer any sense in anything and so we are no longer sure of anything.
Falsehood is this and is a mad dog, because it is violent, it eats you, tears you up, destroys you; it is when power is at its greatest that you reach the greatest factor of unhappiness, it is the festered soul.
The devil is a mad dog, but he is chained; he does not conquer, he does not win out over good, he does not take us away from good. All the hardships that we live, all the labor we do, all the evil we see, all our contradictions, all our incapacity do not take us away from good. Rather, our vocation is as it were built on our limitations. Perhaps we have been called because we are so limited.
In Mann’s book Joseph and his Brothers, it is shocking to see Jacob the betrayer, who cheated his brother out of his birthright with the help of his mother, and then ran away because he knew that otherwise he would be done away with. And again, it is shocking to read the description that Mann gives of Isaac: he was a man who was so afraid of reality that he used his weak eyesight as an excuse; he covered his eyes and stayed always in the dark of his tent so as not to see things and not to have to intervene.
Falsehood works on the limits, it makes you feel guilty, it makes you capricious and doubtful (“I was able, I was unable”), to the point of making us think that since we weren’t capable of doing a certain thing, that thing does not exist. It is a mad dog, but on a chain, so it doesn’t have much range of action. Even the devil is a creature; the one in charge is God, not the devil, not evil.
To get bitten, you have to come close, that is, you have to back away from your freedom, you have to move away, maybe only slightly, just like when you come to a meeting and sit in the back and think, “What’s wrong with sitting in the back? Nothing wrong.” Or you say, “Ugh, I don’t feel like doing this.”
When you pass from certainty to uncertainty, to doubt, it is not a fact that happens like “today I won playing Lotto, tomorrow I won’t”–your freedom takes part in it. Slowly you start out for the dark part of yourself and you let yourself go into the dark part of yourself; that is, you are not decisive in your adherence, in acknowledging What you belong to.
You don’t decide; that is, you don’t break off, and so you get yourself bitten. I say this because I believe that we should not succumb to what is, in my opinion, dominant in modern culture, i.e., the affirmation that freedom does not exist after all, that everything is a question of genetics and psychological precedents–being like this because your mother made you this way is always a justification. Instead, there is a factor in us that is decisive, which is what enables us to adhere to Being, to God, to recognize What is positive. This factor is called freedom, and if we don’t use it we fall, we get close to the biting dog, and we get bitten.
We live in a culture that no longer talks about these things, it no longer talks about them because it does not propose. What they say is, “Whether you think white or black is all the same, because we all have to be tolerant!” Really, there are some things on which this society is absolutely intolerant, is moralistic, according to the definition that Father Giussani gave in The Religious Consciousness in Modern Man; that is, it glorifies a value as a social custom to which everyone must subscribe.
We live in a society that from the point of view of what is thought and of the factors that make up life, tends to justify everything and does not make proposals, does not hit you. Instead, all vocations, all callings, are blows, something that makes you turn (you were going straight ahead along a certain road, at a certain point someone taps you on the shoulder and you turn around), and says to you, “Change your direction.”

The rich young man
My son Giovanni was greatly struck by what Father Giussani said to him about the rich young man. The rich young man, faced with what Christ said to him, was called to adhere. Morality, i.e., the true use of freedom, was for him–and is for us–adhering to good. The rich young man had understood who Jesus was, to the point that he went to Him saying, “Rabbi, what must I do to be perfect?” He is the one who got himself into this, and Jesus said to him, “Listen to your mother and father, study, take your exams, etc., etc.” “But I already do these things.” “If you would be perfect, leave everything and follow me.” That is, belong to me, because “leave everything” means belong to me also with what you have; what you have is for me. The young man lowered his head and went away sad, because he was very rich, because he had many things and was afraid of losing them.
This is it, we live in a society where no one is ever hit, where everything is all the same, in a society that no longer thinks that man is free, because it is a society without God, and if there is no God there is no freedom, because if there is no God there is only the power of the strongest. Only if there is a God does even the strongest have to submit to God, thus there is a question of freedom, there is a question of good and evil, a question of truth and falsehood, a question of proposing or not proposing.
We live in a society like this, so that we too tend to fall: “What happened?! I was so happy and now I’m not anymore!” My child, pick yourself right up, have some self-esteem. It is perfectly possible that you are not happy anymore; so what? It’s hardly engraved in stone that you will always be happy in life. However, you have to know where you stand, because you might perhaps be “emotionally warm,” but you will never be truly content. Life is not an emotion, it is not solved with a pill, or with the disco, or with anything else, it is a tough matter, in a word. We–I too–watch a lot of movies. I invite you–and I invite myself too–to do this: instead of watching them, or also watching them, let’s live the films, but playing the lead!