When experience is not an Opinion 

For Christianity, experience is the locus where the truth is communicated. This is why every reduction of it is perceived as a threat to faith. Abstraction, sentimentalism, moralism. Is this a time of heresies? In an era of uncertainty and indecision

By GIANCARLO GIOJELLI

There are three images imprinted on the eyes of the world, of the Christian world and the world that was once Christian, three images that accompany our history, everyone’s history, believers and non-believers alike. The Nativity, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. This crowd running up, hard-working, devout, curious, stretching out to know what had happened, this crowd that is also the most hard-hearted, sets resonating in every soul the question asked by the Unnamed One in Manzoni’s The Betrothed, as he looked down from his castle onto the people running to see Cardinal Federigo: “What is there that is good, cheerful, in this accursed town?” At the center of the Nativity scene there is always a stable, and a mother rocking a baby. And the Crucifix, Death nailed to a board, God nailed to a board, a real, true man, pierced and nailed to that wood. There is nothing symbolic, abstract, in that death, no imagination. It is all real and very concrete, like the grief of that same mother who held that baby. And Easter, the open tomb, the fallen guards, and Christ triumphant over death. Images repeated so many times, treated in art in so many different ways. Images dear to the hearts of Christians because they are the sign of something that happened, something true, simple, and real. A fact. Extraordinary, astounding, unexpected, unimaginable, but simple. Easy to recount. Something that happened and that these shepherds, these Kings, these soldiers, these people, poor or rich, humble, petty, and great made part of their experience. And that so many others, like them, make part of their own experience and can tell about, just as–this is only an example–the letters in the opening pages of this magazine testify every month. So many facts, so many real experiences, that possess the same light, the same concreteness, the same beauty as Caravaggio’s paintings.

Magazines and newspapers
They are the story of real experiences, which touch and move, which have created and create the Movement. Let’s try to compare them–this is only another example–with so many other letters that fill newspapers and magazines. Most of these–this is not a negative judgment, just an observation–tell of states of mind that are often depressed, for the most part demoralized, sometimes lacking morality, just like the answers that just as frequently urge people to follow their instincts, what they like, to be free and not torment themselves too much, because life is short and it is worthwhile to collect… experiences. It is a terribly sad moment when the most concrete word given to human existence, experience, what gives substance to every instant of every day, is colored with ambiguity. There is a movement here too, but a very sterile one: a movement that starts to build but then continuously abandons and starts again, a movement that scatters ruins about rather than building places where people can live.

What is
This is the suggestion made by Screwtape to the Tempter Wormwood: Do not let man have a gaze open on reality; fill his head with confused thoughts, with opinions on “his” God, “his” time, “his” life, “his” woman, “his” dog. That is, on everything that he considers ridiculously “his,” on what should be or could be. Never let him dwell on what is, because it is the only thing, the Being that too clearly does not belong to him, that could call him back to the Other who gives him everything, and who makes him. “The assumption which you want him to go on making is so absurd that, if once it is questioned, even we cannot find a shred of argument in its defense,” says the Devil. “The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift” (C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters). But the important thing–from the Devil’s point of view–is that man never look at what is, at reality, but that his gaze always be deflected. The Tempter must never let down his guard and allow man to live a real experience: “Even in things indifferent it is always desirable to substitute the standards of the World, or convention, or fashion, for a human’s own real likings and dislikings…. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two pence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favor of the ‘best’ people, the ‘right’ food, the ‘important’ books.”

Collection of experiences
In short, it is the Devil’s task to keep man from having real experience and comparing it with his own heart, with what Fr Giussani calls “original experience.” One fragment of true experience is enough to give God the chance to enter and open wide the tomb of our existence wounded by original sin. Even evil can work toward good: this is the thing that is most feared by the Tempter. All we need to realize this is a simple but attentive look at life and what is being experienced. A curious look. Like the way children look at things. And precisely because of this, capable of comparing what he is living and encountering with what he “really” desires, not what advertising, TV, those in power–in short, the immense encrustation in which we are immersed (in which those in power immerse us)–makes us think we desire, and which pushes us to collect false experiences.

Collecting experiences. These in reality are not experiences, but only instincts clumsily and laboriously pursued. Reality is always somewhere else, and even sin becomes a state of mind: how many confessors say they spend their time listening to more senses of guilt than real sins!

Monophysitism: a grave danger
It is striking that the Church born of these real facts, of these experiences really lived, saw immediately as a grave danger, a heresy, what distracts from the fact, the experienced real, from experience. Paul urges us not to be wrapped up in our own fantasies, puffed up with vain pride, and to cling to Reality, which is Christ. The Church blasted the Monophysites who saw in Christ only His divine nature and relegated His humanity to appearance, which is the opposite of experience. The Church condemns those who read the Bible as a collection of allegories, facts that are not real, pure symbols, and not as real figures and facts that refer to other facts that are just as real and that give the former their full significance. The New Testament is the truth, the coming true of the Old, not its cancellation. The Church condemns iconoclasm, which does not tolerate the call to concreteness and the carnality of facts. Christianity inaugurates in literature the most concrete of languages, the most realistic of styles, condensed to the facts, little commentary, no fantasy. It was the Gnostics who embroidered on the ambiguities, who sought out and considered the secret, hidden meanings. The facts recounted by the Gospels are facts, and the early Christians clung passionately to those facts, as events that they had experienced, that they could judge by comparing them with their own hearts and what they felt to be right, beautiful, true. There was a Man and that Man gave man’s heart the meaning of everything. It was evident, even–above all–to children. Those were not easy times, not even then, especially then. But that experience spread quickly to other experiences, overcoming the resistance of those who wanted to reduce it to a myth, to abstraction; to a wise, Gnostic, Manichean archetype.

Man or symbol
In the end, in the same violence we are seeing today,: the root is the same, abstraction. When the Red Brigade in Italy killed the economist Tarantelli in 1985, his wife said something very beautiful: “I want to talk about my husband so that whoever shot will realize that he shot at a man, at his affections, his love, his flesh, his concreteness.” “We never shot at a man, but at a symbol,” one of the terrorist leaders, Franceschini said at the time. John Paul II’s first speeches were all centered around the concreteness of man, his body, his reality, in a period when ideologies had erased the concrete person. The new idolatry is made up of abstraction, of unrealistic gods, who promise and do not maintain, and the experience of which is illusory: money, power, appearance, ideology.

But there is something good and cheerful, even in the most accursed town.

“The mountains were half covered in fog; the sky, more than cloudy, was all one ashen cloud; but in the faint light that was nonetheless slowly growing stronger could be seen, in the road at the valley bottom, people passing by, others coming out of their houses, and headed all in the same direction, towards the opening, to the right of the castle, everyone dressed in their best clothes and walking with great alacrity. ‘What the devil has got into them? What is there to be cheerful about in this accursed town? Where is all that rabble going?’ And shouting at one of his trusty bravoes sleeping in the next room, he asked him what was the reason for all this movement. The bravo, who knew as much as the Unnamed One did, answered that he would go immediately to find out. The lord stayed leaning against the window, intent on the moving spectacle below. Men, women, children, in groups, couples, alone; one, catching up with the person in front of him, walked along with him; another, coming out of his house, joined the first one he came upon; and they went along together, like friends on an arranged journey: their actions manifestly indicated haste and a common joy; and the uncoordinated but simultaneous booming of the various bells, some close, others far away, seemed, so to speak, to be the voice of those gestures, and to take the place of the words that could not reach up there. He watched and watched, and growing in his heart was something more than curiosity to know WHATEVER COULD IMPART THE SAME RAPTURE TO SO MANY DIFFERENT PEOPLE” (A. Manzoni, The Betrothed, Chapter 21).