The West True Religiosity and Power Notes from a conversation between Luigi Giussani and a Communion and Liberation group in New York, March 8, 1986 Question: What is your opinion of Western culture? This question is important for us because we live in a country that seeks to be the fulfilled expression of the West. Fr Giussani: It seems to me that this is a question that takes in everything. I believe that, first of all, Western culture possesses such values that it has imposed itself both as a culture and operatively, socially, on the whole world. There is a small consideration to add, which is that Western culture has inherited all these values from Christianity: the value of the person, absolutely inconceivable in all the literature of the world, because the person is conceivable as dignity solely if he is acknowledged as not deriving wholly from his father’s and mother’s biology–otherwise, he is like a stone in the stream of reality, a drop from a wave that breaks against the rock; the value of work, which all of world culture, ancient culture but also Engels and Marx, conceives of as enslavement–it is likened to slavery, while Christ calls work the activity of the Father, of God; the value of matter, that is to say, the abolition of the duality between a noble and an ignoble aspect of the life of nature that does not exist for Christianity–the most revolutionary statement in the history of culture is St Paul’s, “Everything God has created is good,”1 which is why Romano Guardini can say that Christianity is the most “materialist” religion in history; the value of progress, of time as charged with meaning, because the concept of history requires the idea of an intelligent plan. These are the basic values of Western civilization, it seems to me. I did not mention another one, because it is implicit in the concept of person: freedom. If man derives everything from his biological antecedents, as the prevailing culture claims, then man is the slave of chance encounters, of good or bad luck, and thus is the slave of those in power, because the reigning power represents the temporary emergence of luck in history. But if man is something that derives directly from the origin of things, of the world, the soul, then man is really free. Man cannot conceive of himself as free in an absolute sense–since before he was not and now he is, he depends, whether he likes it or not. The alternative is very simple: either he depends on What makes reality, i.e. on God, or he depends on the chance movements of reality, i.e. on those in power. Dependence on God is the freedom of men from other men. The terrible failure, the terrible error of Western civilization is having forgotten and denied this. Thus, in the name of his own autonomy, Western man has become the slave of every power. And all the shrewd development of the instruments of civilization increases this enslavement. The solution is a battle to save–not the battle to block the shrewdness of civilization, but the battle to rediscover, to testify to man’s dependence on God. What has been, throughout time, the true meaning of the human struggle, that is to say, the struggle between the affirmation of the human and the instrumentalization of the human by those in power, has now reached an extreme. As John Paul II has warned so many times, the greatest danger today is not the destruction of peoples, killing and murder, but the attempt by the reigning power to destroy the human. And the essence of the human is freedom, i.e., the relationship with the Infinite. Therefore, it is mainly in the West that the great battle must be fought by the man who feels himself to be a man: the battle between authentic religiosity and power. What limits power is true religiosity–this limits any power, be it civil, political, or ecclesiastic. (Traces, vol., 4, n.2, 2002)