Caffarra

An Urgent Challenge
Reality is denied, freedom is nothing more than freewill, time no longer has any meaning, the other person doesn’t matter. From where do we start over? Passages from the speech at the Italian Sports Center Convention, Bologna, April 29, 2004

by Carlo Caffarra

1. Diagnosis of the situation
I would like to start off from a fact that I think we all agree on. “Never before has the environment, understood as a mental climate and a way of living, had at its disposal instruments that so despotically invade consciences as it has today. Today, more than ever, the sovereign educator, or ‘diseducator,’ is the environment, in all its expressive forms.” (L. Giussani, Porta la speranza. Primi scritti, Marietti 1820, Genova, 1998, p. 16). I think that the environment, so understood, is today making the educative act impracticable since it has made it inconceivable....
Education means “introducing a person to reality” (cf. L.A. Jungmann, Christus als Mittelpunkt der religiösen Erziehung, Herder, Freiburg i. B., 1939, p. 20).
You don’t introduce a person to reality if you don’t introduce him to the meaning of reality. “Meaning” here indicates the answer to the two fundamental questions that are born in the person in his simple “contact” with reality (apprehensio entis, to quote St Thomas): What is this thing (the question on the truth of reality)? What value has it (the question on the goodness of reality)? A person is introduced into reality when he knows the truth and the value of reality; when he is able to give a sensible interpretation of it.…
Only if you think that a relationship can exist between man and reality, a relationship established by our intelligence and by our reasonable desire, a relationship made possible by both the constitutive openness of the person to reality and by the generative intelligibility and goodness of reality, only if this is the generative relationship between a person and reality, is an educative action, understood as “introduction to reality,” conceivable and therefore practicable.
Now, present-day culture (the so-called post-modernity) is dominated by the denial of that generative relationship: there is no reality to interpret. There exist only interpretations of reality, interpretations on which it is impossible to pronounce a judgment of verification, since they do not refer to any objective meaning. We are closed up in the cage of our interpretations of reality, with no way out to reach reality itself.
The true challenge of education is thrown out to us exactly on this point. Therefore, no true education is possible today if it doesn’t take up this challenge, and doesn’t present itself as a radical and total alternative to that position, that is to say, the position that denies the existence of a generative relationship of the person with reality.…
First implication. Since “there are no facts, but only interpretations” (F. Nietzsche), it becomes impossible to give a judgment of truth about them. Every interpretation and its opposite are equally valid. Reality is simply this collection, this game of interpretations. In other words, it is perfectly pointless to pose the question about truth.…
Second implication. The loss of the sense of freedom: We relinquish its dramatic and grandiose consistence, because freedom is lived reducing it to freewill (I don’t mean to give this term an ethical meaning).
Freewill means freedom that exhausts itself totally in the choice between infinite possibilities, all of which have the same value, since they are bereft of all foundation in an objective meaning. This dissolution of freedom into pure choice generates in our youngsters a sense of spiritual “weariness” (the desert Fathers call this “sadness of heart”). And every educator sees it stamped on the faces of so many of our young people.
Third implication. People lose the sense of their own life as a history. The sense of time is corrupted. Time, as it passes, is no longer lived as an opportunity (the New Testament term is kairos) for you to mature, to grow in being....
An alternative educative project to the definition of education given above has in fact been proposed. This is reassumed in Gianni Vattimo’s affirmation, “See if we can manage to live without neurosis in a world in which ‘God is dead’” (in Al di là del soggetto. Nietzsche Heidegger e l’ermeneutica, Rizzoli, Milan, 1981, p. 18)....
It is education that must introduce the person to a human existence lived as an answer to two irreconcilable needs.
On one hand, we have a human existence lived by a person who, unhinged from every link with reality, wants to be free in the “abstract” meaning of the word. People prefer to put off the most serious decisions for as long as possible, and every definitiveness in decisions is subjected to ridicule. The reality of existence is emptied, and with it the reality of freedom. To be free is now synonymous with absence of commitment. “I am free” means, even in current language, “I have no commitments.”…
On the other hand, such a subjectivity, affirmed by means of the de-legitimizing of every normative meaning based on reality, must, however, pose the problem of how to relate with others. Is it possible to educate people to live a true human community starting off from that experience of freedom? Once again, only to live a “light” community, one without a real consistency.…
The existence of a real universe of values is inconceivable; the definitive gift of self to the other is inconceivable. So what is meant by educating for life in society? Teaching people to be tolerant. Let’s reflect carefully on this fundamental social code. What does it mean? What kind of relationship does it connote? That otherness, diversity, is something neutral: the fact that others exist has no meaning in itself and of itself. Tragic nihilism maintained that otherness is an absolutely negative fact. “L’enfer c’est les autres” [hell is other people],” said Sartre. Holy Scripture maintains that it is an eminently positive fact, since “it is not good for man to be alone.” Contemporary light-hearted nihilism judges this fact to be simply meaningless.…

2. Answering the challenge
Since this is the way things are,… the educator must inevitably ask himself the question: is it possible to educate without introducing to reality? Or, better: is it reasonable to educate without introducing to reality? In this second point I will attempt to answer this question. The central idea of my answer is that the only reasonable educative proposal is that which consists in introducing the human person to reality.
Before proving the truth of this thesis, I must first explain what I mean by “reasonable.” I mean, quite simply, corresponding, convenient to human experience as a whole, with nothing left out.
Already, Aristotle noted that all human spiritual life is born of wonder, of awe. One of the greatest Fathers of the Church, St Gregory of Nyssa, wrote, “Concepts create idols, only wonder gets to know things” (The Life of Moses PG 44, 377B). Wonder at what? Awe at what? Before reality, at reality; at the fact that there is “something” and not “nothing;” at the fact that I am.
Why does the real which I experience arouse wonder and awe? Why does the very fact that I am arouse wonder and awe? Because there is no reason in myself for which I should be; no one is necessary.…
Is it possible to extinguish this radical question that dwells in man’s heart? Do we do man justice if we frustrate this question or censure it? Should we not, rather, take it up and begin to move towards an answer?
This feeds what we could call the fundamental desire of our life: that desire which defines us (St Augustine says that man is desire). We could call it desire for reality, desire for being.…
But why does that question feed the desire for being? Because at the same time it affirms the limitation of my being there and the unlimitedness of Being. Each of us exists as a limited being in a limited world, but his reason is open to the unlimited; to the whole of being.… The dissatisfaction we continually feel is proof of this. Thus, the human person’s “position” is paradoxical. He is placed in a “fragile” (contingent) ontological condition, he tastes, as it were, how good being is, that being that he does not possess. Hence, his desire for reality, for beatitude. Introducing a person to reality (educating him) means guiding him towards beatitude.
The opposite educative proposal judges precisely this desire of reality to be quite senseless, blocking the research of a reality that is adequate and corresponding to it. What is being questioned in this challenge is, in the end, how we conceive of man, the measure of the esteem with which we weigh his value.