Love Forever. Being Is Positivity
Alberoni, D’Alatri, and Cesana discuss Gabriel Marcel: “Love is saying to another: you will not die.” Perception of life as positive and the Christian event as the possibility for eternity

by Davide Perillo

On one hand, we have what experience teaches: love and beauty move man and the world; they are “a factor of great undertakings, both for good and for ill.” On the other, we have a second fact, as real and dramatic as–or even more than–the first: death, the nothingness that remains of these undertakings. “So then, what is valid? Nothingness or what has been moved by beauty? When we fall in love, we want to say to the other, ‘You will not die.’ Can we say this?”
Welcome to the heart of one of the best-attended sessions of the Meeting, introduced by Giancarlo Cesana with a question that started with Helen of Troy and the Iliad and went on to land in front of the two speakers, Francesco Alberoni, renowned sociologist, a member of the board of directors of RAI television network, and an important contributor to Corriere della Sera, and Alessandro D’Alatri, a movie and TV commercial director and the author and director of Casomai, which many consider one of the great films of the year.
Alberoni took experience as his starting point. More precisely, the “phenomenology of feelings,” as he called it, seeing and describing what happens when someone falls in love, recounted using a language that echoes Guardini (“When two people are deeply in love, even the most ordinary everyday acts are transfigured”), a language that speaks of “sacred” and “grace” (“Only religious language is capable of giving an account of this experience”). At a certain point, it goes to the heart of the matter: the profound positivity of reality, which falling in love makes you perceive so deeply as to give a taste of the eternal. “Everything that exists has significance, a positive meaning. The world is, in its essence, good.” True. And yet, the wound is still open, in the form of fear, perhaps of “losing the beloved,” or of questioning, “How can love last?” For Alberoni, this is a key to asking questions also about other things: movements, institutions, politics…. If they do not remain in some way “in the nascent state” of falling in love, they fall apart. But what about the eternal? The “You will not die”? “Only God, only Jesus Christ can say, ‘Everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die.’” (Jn 11:26)
It’s a good question, this “forever.” It is also the real theme of Casomai, D’Alatri’s movie on the crisis, value, and battles of a complicated marriage. For the Roman director, this was the chance to dig beneath many clichés and reveal a given fact, “Love as love between a couple has become outmoded, awkward.” Cheapened, ridiculed. Or even thrown away, like the things that end up in the trash because you think they have no more use, “and then you find yourself madly going through the trash bin to look for them.” But D’Alatri went even further, going so far as to talk about “witnesses,” people who “bear concrete witness through the things they do, the way they live. The most important thing today is to recognize them.” This gives hope.
Different approaches, in a word–but both capable of going “to the positive feeling about life that after all is the root of our experience,” says Cesana, “because there is an original perception of life that is positive. From the moment a baby opens his eyes, he perceives that reality was made for him. Well, in the case of love, this correspondence seeks you out, wants you. It is as though the mountains told you, ‘I was made for you, I want to be for you.’ And in effect, in the case of love, correspondence is discovered precisely as meaning.” Then there is the other discovery, the one that “by ourselves we cannot live; thus we live for an Other, we live for something Other.” But here, too, what about time? Duration? How is it possible for all this to last? “What has value in life? This experience of correspondence or Helen’s skull?” This gives rise to the problem of fidelity. “We cannot live in a positive manner if we are not faithful to the love we have encountered. I am thinking of when we talk about the indissolubility of marriage, which is not merely a moral principle; it is a principle of knowledge. For fidelity is a fundamental part of love (as Miguel Mañara said, ‘Sometimes love is as hard as biting a rock’). But it exists in order to defend being, to defend the positivity of life. It is, precisely, a matter of reason.” This is just as in the case of the great Fact, which happened precisely in order to defend being and affirm this positivity all the way to the root. “The Fact of Christ: Christ is risen. Certainly, He died. But He is risen. This means that everything we have is not for being buried, but for living.” And so we return once again to the drama of the opening question, but this time there is the hypothesis of an answer. “I shall not die and you will not die, because we have been loved. The definitive aspect of life is this; whatever happens, life is made for this. Hope is a certainty entrusted to the Mystery. In other words, I am certain about what I am living, even if I do not know how it will end up. But this is what makes me live.” Forever.