Fideism, gnosticism, spiritualism, clericalism, alienation

The Invisible Enemies Yet Tangible

edited by Maurizio Crippa

Today we claim to have left the era of ideologies and utopias, but it’s not true.” The warning we heard at the Opening Day for the adults of CL at Assago, Italy, touches one of the most dramatic cultural themes of our age and of our daily experience. Ideology and utopia are weak as regards their content, but as regards the human attitude they are more widespread and incisive than before.” No more strong ideologies that deny religion. A recent book by Rodney Stark and Massimo Introvigne, Dio è tornato–Indagine sulla rivincita delle religioni in Occidente (God is back–an inquiry into the comeback of the religions in the West), using sociological data, demonstrates that the number of those who believe in and practice some form of religion is constantly on the increase. That’s good, we would say. Yet what Péguy said almost a hundred years ago rings out much more dramatically today: “Materialism has a mystique, but it is a mystique that is not dangerous. It is incapable of offending precisely because of its grossness… it’s almost certainly not dangerous to deny heaven…. To deny the earth, now that is tempting… we get to the point of these vague forms of spiritualism, idealism, immaterialism, ‘religiousism,’ pantheism… to deny temporality, that is the end of ends.” In the last edition of Traces, taking Fr Giussani’s “Letter to the Fraternity” as a starting point, Massimo Borghesi helped us in a cultural judgment on “four centuries of Western thought” dedicated to nihilism. Borghesi recalled that “freedom is distinguishing good from evil.” These days, apparently nobody denies anything, so, in the end, everybody denies everything. There is “a nihilism that plunges every human effort into indifference, into cynicism,” as we heard at Assago.

We can be helped to spot these “invisible enemies” in our day-to-day life by the “five ‘without’s” deriving from rationalism that characterize what Fr Giussani some years ago called the “present day bewilderment.” These points can be found in the booklet The Miracle of a Change, notes on the meditations by Fr Giussani at the Spiritual Exercises of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, 1998, pages 32-38.