Debate

Fighting Abstraction

BY LORENZO ALBACETE

After the discourse on the “Bread of Life,” when Jesus lost a great number of His followers, He asked the apostles whether they, too, were going to leave Him. Peter answered, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that You are the Holy One of God” (Jn 6:68-69).

“Eternal life” is the life for which we were made, the destiny inscribed as an often-tormenting restlessness in the human heart. Life makes sense when it corresponds perfectly to those desires, when it moves us closer to this destiny, to the fulfillment of our humanity. The reasonable response to everything that happens to us, to the particular circumstances that challenge us (“Do you also wish to go away?” Jesus asked them) is to choose that course of action that seems to correspond to our past experience of moving closer to our destiny. This is what Peter did. He did not understand the words of Jesus anymore than those who left Him, but he knew Him and from experience knew that he could no longer live without Him, knew that without Christ he would never reach the destiny for which he was made. Peter’s response was an act of faith and not of deductive logic, but it was reasonable because true faith is reasonable; it corresponds to our experience of destiny. What happens when what we “know” does not correspond to the experience of the destiny for which we are made? First, note that it means that we don’t know it at all! When our experience of the destiny to which we are called is not the source of our knowledge, what we think we know is just an abstraction that has no power to move our hearts, to move our liberty to action. Such is the case, not only with our “faith” in Christ, but also with our “belief” in God. According to Fr Giussani, what masquerades as religion today is actually moralism–that is, regarding God as an abstract source of moral imperatives, not having experienced Him as inseparable from our desire for the destiny that will fulfill our heart’s humanly defining desires. We are facing a problem at the level of knowledge itself, prior to action, prior to behavior (which is in the order of “doing”). The dominant mentality in the culture that surrounds us cannot grasp the truth behind the statement: “God is all in all” (1 Cor 2:12). It cannot grasp how God is present in all that exists (without everything being divine). In order to avoid this conclusion, it denies the presence of God in reality and makes reality the creation of the human mind. “God” may be held to exist, but He too remains an abstraction. This, of course, is a step toward nihilism: nothing exists independently of human thought; nothing has a consistency, a sense, other than the one we give it.

The influence of this mentality on those who believe in God is disastrous. Believers call “God” the mysterious Presence that gives sense to life because He is the Creator of all that exists. But when God remains an abstraction, this sense of life is detached from the experiences of reality. Experience is the relation between my freedom and the reality in which I am immersed by the particular circumstances of my life. My experiences guide my reason and move me to action. When God is only an abstraction and not a Presence in the experience of reality, then we face a choice: act either according to experience, or to the “will” of a God totally beyond my experience of life. This latter case is what is called moralism. God has nothing to do with what is happening as it is being experienced. Moralism is a moral code that has nothing to do with what moves us to action, to that action through which the “I” expresses itself as a human subject, as an acting person. An authentic morality emerges, so to speak, together with the experiences that move us to act freely in a certain way. So moralism is morality detached from those actions that express our humanity. When morality is detached from experience, when it no longer has the same roots as human action, it can only appeal to those “common values” that express pure “feelings,” feelings that are easily manipulated by powers that seek to impose their will.

Nothing is more important to escape from this dangerously-enslaving moralism than to grasp adequately the relation between reason and experience. This understanding, this knowledge, however, cannot be the outcome of a purely intellectual operation that remains enslaved to the world of abstraction. This is what ideology means. Ideologies are fueled by a morality derived from abstraction. Ideology can only be overcome by the experience of an Event through which we become aware that “God is all in all.” Indeed, the ultimate revelation that God is all in all is Jesus Christ, through whom God enters into the world He created to share its life and destiny. The encounter with Christ is the Event that breaks the power of ideology, of moralism, and generates a new morality expressed in actions that correspond to the destiny for which we are made. This is why faith is said to always generate a culture.
Faith is the affirmation of the presence of Christ as inseparable from our experience of life, and culture is born from the experiences of life to which faith gives birth.

An authentic human culture is born out of Peter’s confession of faith: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life!”