culture

Philosophy: the Study of Being, not Nothingness

The four pages of the “Letter to the Fraternity” “subvert” four centuries of Western thought, the parabola of which seems to end in nihilism: from Being to nothingness. A professor of theoretical philosophy rereads Father Giussani’s text together with Traces, bringing out its cultural force as a judgment on modernity

edited by Alessandro Banfi

There is always an aspect of the words of truth said by Father Giussani that conveys a judgment on the times we are living in, contemporary culture, and even the prevailing “fashions.” His letter of June 22nd to the members of the Fraternity falls fully within this logic, and indeed constitutes to a surprising degree a reading of the great cultural and philosophical topics of the past four centuries. The relationships between the “I” and reality, between Being and time (to quote the title of a famous book by Heidegger), between Being and nothingness (to use Sartre’s words), are described and molded in a simple, profound way. In an attempt to begin to fathom some of these themes, we talked about them with Massimo Borghesi, Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Perugia.

The letter concerns Mary: “The personality of the Mother of Christ,” Giussani writes, “plays a role and I now understand how decisive it is.” But the letter starts from a description of the relationship between the “I” and reality. What concept of reality emerges? And why is it so closely bound up with the idea of freedom?
Freedom, as Giussani emphasizes elsewhere, is the capacity to separate the true from the false, good from evil, being from nothingness. This capacity finds its complete fulfillment in recognition and embrace, in being embraced by Being. In this “separating,” freedom can either move into action or destroy itself, choosing the false, evil, nothingness. The “I” is the drama of freedom. This is achieved when the desire to be (of Being), which is at the root of every man’s heart, finds satisfaction. There is a profound tie uniting freedom to desire, to the deepest desire that dwells in the human heart, the desire for happiness. A man feels free when his desire for happiness does not encounter obstacles, when it is satisfied. Happiness is freedom’s achievement. It brings with it, at least for an instant, the perception of being “saved,” being subtracted from death’s cold shadow. In its dynamic, happiness cannot be separated from the object, or the subject, which makes it possible. We are not happy by ourselves, or free by ourselves. This sets in motion the desire to find in the world a reality that fills its emptiness, that frees its “I” from its limitations. This “other,” which the heart ardently and confusedly seeks, is only partially satisfied by the “others” it encounters. This “other” is the code of the infinite. Freedom is, in man, the capacity for infinity.

“ The supreme drama is that the Being should ask to be recognized by man,” Giussani writes, and later on he adds, “God destines you to eternity, because he destines you to understand who you are.” The contemporary mentality denies the vertiginous nature of this relationship and tends to close man up in the unhappiness of “directions for use”…
“ The real drama of the Church which likes to call itself modern is the attempt to correct the wonder of the event of Christ with rules.” These are John Paul I’s words, quoted by Giussani in È se opera [He is, if He Changes], which correspond to what you call “directions for use.” The reduction of Christianity to a mere moral doctrine, which has marked the ecclesial climate of the most recent decades, does not go beyond a Pharisaic position. In this way, it is not understood that authentic morality is always the result of an affection, a gratitude, a recognition of the positivity of Being. This recognition is hindered because Being is taken for granted, as happens to so many in the ecclesiastical world, or is sunk in nothingness, in the abyss of negativity, as is the case of the prevailing culture. In both instances, this recognition does not manage to grasp the mysterious heart that takes stock of our experience of the world; the quest for meaning that springs forth from the reason and the heart remains unfulfilled, stunned, violated. In Renato Farina’s interview with him in Libero a year ago–an exceptional piece for the new things he said and what he emphasized–Giussani stated that he realized every day more and more that “Being is Mystery.” This perception accompanies not only the reality of God, but also that of the world and the “I.” The gratuitousness of existing, the fact that it is not a necessity, sinks into the unfathomable divine Mystery, in its freedom which finds its reason, devoid of reasons, in an inconceivable Love. It is this perception that makes possible the “wonder” in front of a Being perceived as “event.” Contemporary philosophy also speaks of Being as Event, as Heidegger does, but it separates the Event from desire. Being is event if it is perceived as a loving gratuitousness that corresponds to the desire for happiness and freedom, if it is experienced within an experience of love. To introduce us to the “ontological mystery,” to the discovery of how Being asks to be recognized by man, is the element that Giussani has felt to be urgent in recent years. His passion for education has become a loving tension toward reawakening the gaze, beyond the formalism and nihilism prevailing today, to the surprise of a gratuitousness, a positivity that exceeds all expectations. We understand, in this perspective, his closeness to von Balthasar, to his theological aesthetic. We understand why Giussani speaks of “Being as attraction,” as he does in L’uomo e il suo destino [Man and His Destiny], and can publish a book entitled L’attrattiva Gesù [The Attraction of Jesus]. This attraction is called Grace. There is nothing more powerfully persuasive and beautiful than a gratuitous, uncalled-for love. To paraphrase von Balthasar, “Only love is credible.” This is not only always true, but today, in the general devastation of affections and reason, it takes on a special historical value.

“ Our Lady totally respected God’s freedom,” Giussani says. “She did not oppose it with her own method.” Conversely, the prevailing philosophical culture, from Descartes on, has emphasized an autonomous method that, at the end of this parabola, has shown itself to be reduction, not opening…
If God exists, it is God who established the method by which He wants to be known by man. Knowledge arises from conformation to the object: this is the principle of realism, which is opposed to idealism that wants to establish the shape of the object a priori. Mary is the method, the road toward God, because she was shaped by God in accordance with a humanly unique method. She is the being created as God has always wanted her to be, as He imagined her. She, who is mater Dei, is the filial being par excellence, she is the daughter of her Son. This is the virginal heart of Mary, virgin and mother, a child’s heart, a human heart that submits to God in everything. Mary is God’s method because she did not oppose her own method to Him. She is the method because she is without a method. She is, in human terms, the highest instrument and expression of God’s freedom.

Giussani writes, “Our Lady is the method we need for familiarity with Christ.” Necessity. How would you interpret this necessity?
“ Our Lady is like a royal invitation,” wrote Giussani in his “Message for Loreto.” She can invite the guests because in her there is an attraction–“the attraction of Mary”–that enables her to enter into man’s heart. She is the Mater misericordiae who, like Piero della Francesca’s Madonna of Mercy in Sansepolcro, envelopes with her cloak the supplicants and the poor.
In this sense, she is the eminent “form” of Being, the privileged form. There is a latent concept of form in Giussani that, analogous to Balthasar, supports his reflection. Being is; it is more “being” the more it becomes form, the more it corresponds to the image with which God conceived it. The more man pulls away from this plan, the more he slides toward nothingness. In Mary, the form of Being shines with unparalleled intensity. This is why she attracts, since in her, the merciful one, her Son’s face is even more glorified. A Christianity without Mary, as is the case in Protestant northern Europe, is a dark, gloomy Christianity. This, together with the wars of religion, explains modern atheism better than any number of subtle philosophical analyses. In the divine economy, Mary makes manifest the maternal face of God. For man, this is a gratuitous necessity.

For a long time, the emphasis has been on companionship, and now it is on the figure of Mary. It is evident that there is no contradiction, but why today, why here, this emphasis, which has cultural consequences as well?
This is true. There is in Giussani, recently, an insistence on the figure of Mary that does not have anything to do with a predictable pietism. This emphasis is parallel to that of “Being as charity” which also prevails in his latest reflections. These are important passages that enable us to measure the limits of every possible sort of “group mysticism,” which, as Giussani states in L’attrattiva Gesù, [The Attraction of Jesus] does not deviate from a sociological, merely naturalistic point of view. Ever since 1980, since his conversation with the Italian intellectual Giovanni Testori, published in Il senso della nascita [The Meaning of Birth], Giussani has insisted on the fact that it is no longer the time for “organized crusades,” or “organized movements.” Obviously, this does not mean the end of the idea of movement. Rather, it means that a Christian movement must not concentrate emphatically on itself, as though a militant belonging to it constituted a gnostic guarantee of salvation, but must help people to look beyond it. A Christian companionship is a vocational companionship. Otherwise, it swings back and forth between militants and superficial companions with whom to spend one’s free time. The emphasis on Mary is, in Giussani, an historical judgment. Today, in the age of nihilism, it is not the magic of a discourse that can persuade, as much as showing, witnessing to Being as mercy, the loving face of Being. In the wasteland where we are living, influenced by the Manichaean attempt to conceive of the world and life as evil, only the experience of a true love, as Guardini suggested in the conclusion to La fine dell’epoca moderna [The End of the Modern Age], can reawaken the “I” to the affection of Being. This is why, in the Libero interview, Giussani indicates Mary as the present opposition to nihilism, Mary about whom he would like to write an article since “whatever she touches becomes human and at the same time she places it in the Mystery.”

The great consequence of the encounter with Christ through Mary is called charity. “The essence of Being is love, this is the great revelation. Thus the whole moral law is totally defined by the word charity.” “The whole moral law”–this too is subversive with respect to Kantian morality, for example, which is the dominant one, at least in the hypocritical façade of the contemporary establishment…
“ The essence of Being is love”–this is a true statement that has to be experienced in order to be understood. Whoever has lived an instant of charity and devotion can intuit it. Conversely, Kantian morality shows itself to be completely powerless in the face of today’s nihilism. The Christian experience has its consistence in the introduction to the Father’s mercy as the face of Being. Starting with his 1994 dialogues, collected in “You” (Or: On Friendship), Giussani insists, starting from Trinitarian ontology, on the nature of Being as “relationship,” “communion,” and he does this against any sort of monism that tries to dissolve the many into the One. This nature of Being, which does not carry death and conflict within it, as the gnosis and today’s fundamentalisms would like, becomes visible as charity. In his interview with Libero, Giussani states, “God as Mystery of charity, this is the only letter I’d like to write, to the people in CL, to everyone.”

The form of charity is a “living” hope. Rereading Ariosto, I found that Orlando, when he discovers the love between Medoro and Angelica, starts to cry and cannot stop weeping. He himself is amazed because, the poet says, his tears are a “living fountain.” This quotation from Dante lights up the meaning of the word. “Living,” in the sense of inexhaustible, the opposite of death, but also the opposite of habit, of settling down into a routine…
We have settled down… so many people, laymen and ecclesiastics, run to occupy the front rows of the theater, the “Christian” theater. Very few are left to love the nameless people of which today’s society is full. The pathos in Giussani is striking, a Testorian pathos, which leads him to speak in his interview with Farina of a “whirlpool” and in the “Letter to the Fraternity” of an “explosion.” This is against formalism, the repetition of a soul-less rituality, the extinguishing of a desire that mechanically grabs onto habitual gestures. Only charity, in which wonder and sacrifice live side by side, opens up to hope, to the hope that Being will triumph over nothingness, love over death. It opens to joy, to the certainty that Being is good, that He loves me. Christianity is the experience that introduces us to this perception of Being. Otherwise, it is an ideology that, like all ideologies, contributes to making the burden of existence more burdensome.