Reflections on Luigi Giussani’s Trilogy, Part 2: At the Origins of the Christian Claim

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Christ, Christian, Giussani, God, Gospel, incarnation, Luigi Giussani, Pharisee, Religious Sense

They had Christ right there – with them – and they missed it. How could they not see? Why were they so blind? How could they not recognize him? It is typical in Christian circles to ask such questions, with the implied assumption that we, had we been there, would have recognized him right away. We, the good Christians of the twenty second century, would have flocked to him, praised him, where the stupid people in the Bible – the Pharisees, the Romans, the keepers of the law – failed.

But I have always wondered about this. Of course, we hope that our place in the story is with the disciples, those who recognized Him, but how can we know? When I look in my heart – and see the piles and piles of problems there – I certainly want to be one of those who would have recognized him, but find myself fearing; what if, instead of one of the “good guys,” I would have been one of the bad guys? I would after all make an excellent Pharisee, fastidious and proud as I am. I also see in myself the figure of Pilate, agnosticism hiding behind a sensible-looking but false neutrality. Moreover, even when one doesn’t account for these proclivities to evil, there are still questions. From the perspective of hindsight, we feel we can of course “see” the outcome – Jesus was of course the messiah – but one wonders if it can have been at all clear at the time. There were after all all kinds of pretenders to messianic claims around Christ’s time, and the correlation of the Old Testament prophecies with Christ’s life – while certainly not false – nevertheless often require a somewhat counter intuitive interpretation of such prophecies. Put another way, there was, I think, another reason besides hardheartedness that people expected a military messiah – left with just the prophecies, it would be very difficult to hypothesize without divine guidance a messiah that takes the form Christ takes.

I preface my reflection on Luigi Giussani’s At the Origin of the Christian Claim with these matters because it is exactly such questions Giussani deals with in his second book. What kind of encounter would it take to convince an ordinary person, with all his/her virtues and flaws, of the divinity and messianic function of someone one initially mistook for just another generally wise man? Put another way, what kind of encounter had to happen for those curious – encountering Christ in all his curiously simple complexity – to transform from ambivalent onlookers to disciples of Christ? This question – what Giussani describes as Christ’s pedagogy – is the matter of the second book, which seeks to demonstrate that Christ is a concrete answer to the questions and problems raised by the human religious sense, outlined in his prior book.

Anticipating critics who suggest that Christ’s incarnation hardly accords with the kind of tough questioning and seeking involved in pursuing the religious sense, Giussani suggests that no seriously proposed hypothesis should be dismissed as out of hand before it is considered. The problem that the religious sense will have with the Christian incarnation is that it is not something one can figure out or hypothesize on one’s own; the path of such searching, left to its own devices, leads perhaps to Socratic irony at best and sophistry at worst. But, as Giussani points out, that the Incarnation cannot have been “figured out” by human searching alone does not necessarily indicate its falsehood – it is after all unreasonable to exclude out of hand the possibility that God could take initiative and propose an answer to the religious sense that humans could not have come up with on their own. But in opening ourselves to this possibility, one raises the difficult question of determining how one might verify it – what rubric do we use to verify the claims of someone who claims in fact to be the source of any and every such rubric? Hypothetically speaking, if one were to appear on earth from a realm beyond worldly experience, this person would presumably defy what we consider reasonable in many ways. Yet how does one tell if this person is telling the truth – if their claims of beyondness are actually real – or if their incoherence is in fact something that should be judged false when gauged by human experience?

For Giussani, we are left with a problem. If Christ is the messiah – God-made-man – then his very confusion of our sense of rationality and common experience will in fact constitute part of the proof that he is Other to us. Yet such confusion might equally suggest that he is a pretender using obfuscation as a cloak to conceal a scam. Is he hard to grasp because he is beyond us, or because he is simply incoherent?

This for Giussani is where the issue of method becomes important, that is, the issue of determining means of gauging a phenomenon appropriate to that phenomenon. This may sound complicated, but it is really a very fancy way of saying something that Christians have always insisted upon – that the whole person matters, as does the entire capacity of his/her judgement, and the most fitting answer to the problems raised by human existence is not that which simply answers a single niche problem confined to a single experience or criterion. Rather, the answer will be that which holistically answers in a way that does not do violence to the understanding of human nature as a whole, defined as generously as possible to include reason, emotion, psychology, relationships etc. – in short, all that constitutes human experience.

Turning to the gospels, then, Giussani discusses the way we see Christ encountering humans such that these humans are brought to a point of crisis where they either must acknowledge Christ as who he is and trust him – even beyond their understanding at times – or must decide against him and turn away. For Giussani, it is of the utmost importance that Christ’s appearance is never coercive; there is enough about him to invite further those who are curious and freely choose to explore, yet belief in him is never absolutely compelled or completely incontrovertible, as might be the case, say, in a mathematical equation. Giussani sees this as God’s way of honoring the free will he has given humans. There is enough evidence to go on for those who seek truth. But God will not compel anyone to follow him by the violence of a too narrow syllogism – those who wish to reject him can, and do. God will not compel stubborn hearts.

The shape of Christ’s answer to human experience – what is invoked in humans by the religious sense – is thus the matter of the book, and the book’s burden is defining and nuancing this answer such that it is mistaken neither as simplistic or completely incomprehensible. In my prior post, I described Giussani’s conception of human existence as a great riddle to be solved by as many legitimate means as are available to us. Conversely, Christ, for him, is a divine riddle posed as an answer to the human riddle. As such a riddle, Christ gives his followers just enough of himself to keep them following him – just enough of himself that they can know he is trustworthy – but there is always a part of Him beyond the bit of Him they see and measure, the part that continually challenges them to open themselves to the mystery of heaven beyond themselves, toward which He is the way.

The rest of the book is a sketch of how this Divine Riddle that answers the human riddle interacts with those he meets in the gospel accounts. I say “sketch” because the intention is hardly to exhaust what could be said on this matter, but rather to offer tantalizing glimpses of this interaction and so invite readers to further consider these gospel accounts for themselves – an intention in which (I feel) the book succeeds admirably.

But the series does not end here, and this in itself is a significant thing. I could list off any number of authors who might have ended here; the first book introduces the human need, and the second book shows how Christ answers that human need. What more can remain? What in fact remains is the question of how Christ’s life- a life lived historically two thousand years ago – is mediated to us in the present. It is, after all, one thing to say that Christ was such that he was sufficient as an answering riddle to those in the first century, but their experiences are not ours – say what we will about our personal relationships with Christ, we cannot say – at least in the strictly literal sense – that we have put our fingers in the holes in his hands, or that our hearts burned within us while he talked to us on the road. But if we have not done these things, how can we in fact evaluate Christ’s answer, if that very answer is a person – in flesh and blood – rather than a proposition? How can we encounter One who has not been present – at least in the full physical manifestation described in the gospels – for the last two thousand years? Is there another way that we might encounter Christ, not as a detached idea or historical artifact, but as His full Person, the very Person proposed as the answer to the religious sense? Is there a way of encountering this Person, not secondhand through accounts written thousands of years ago, but in such a way that we can evaluate him via our own experiences and judgements? This question – whether Christ can be encountered in the present as in the past – will be the matter of my third review, dealing with Giussani’s Why the Church?

Reflections on Luigi Giussani’s Trilogy, Part 1: The Religious Sense

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Chesterton, Christianity, church, Giussani, Human, Luigi Giussani, Religious Sense, Thought

I do not want to call this a review of Luigi Giussani’s trilogy (The Religious Sense, At the Origin of the Christian Claim, and Why the Church?), because the term “review” seems to imply some kind of comprehensiveness. There is a lot to say about these books, and I am not even going to pretend to do them justice. What I will do, though, is relay some of my impressions from them, particularly those that struck me, challenged me, and reoriented my thinking. I will begin at the beginning, with The Religious Sense.

For those unfamiliar with the book, The Religious Sense deals with the innate human search for spiritual truth; at this point in the book, Giussani does not so much deal with specific theologies and religions as with what he conceives of as a drive, in all humans, to discover their destinies as humans. For Giussani, the world – existence itself – is a large riddle that humans have been left with, and it is in our hearts to decipher it. Even as I describe this I can think of two points that many of my secular colleagues would raise about this, and I want to deal with them briefly, as I don’t think they should be insurmountable barriers to appreciating this book.

First, a discussion of destinies – ultimate happiness, final truth, and all that – sticks a bit in our postmodern throats. Didn’t we leave all that behind with our abandonment of metaphysics and metanarrative? Can we actually use the word destiny seriously without evoking a cheap knock-off adventure movie with a title like “H. Ford and the Stone of Destiny”? To suggest an answer to the first question, I would say that we tried, but weren’t quite successful. We tried, allegedly because we outgrew these things as humans, but in fact because people without a metanarrative are remarkably pliable and easy to manipulate socially and economically. It is a political disaster when people start taking stories seriously, as if they might actually matter in real life; people might actually start thinking for themselves, and so it is always safer to stick with the wonderful liberal lie that poetry makes nothing happen – and if the readers believe it, nothing will happen. So, yes, there has been the suggestion that we are moving away from metaphysics and metanarrative, but it seems to me hardly a settled matter, and perhaps it is in fact a propaganda that pairs well with the convenience of nation states in helping people forget they have free will.

Second, many of my colleagues will worry about problems with positing anything innately human, including a common religious sense. On the more extreme end are the post-humanists, who believe that the idea of the human itself is completely a social invention; more moderately, there are those – say from a postcolonial perspective – who worry that speaking about something innately human in fact leaves out various cultures because those humans taken as models of typical humanity are racially and socially inflected such that humanism reifies culturally specific particulars rather than universals. To the post-humanists, I can’t say much, and in some ways I mean this very literally – what can we say to each other? – everything we think we have in common (even language) must be illusory and arbitrary. It is hard to talk to someone person to person when we begin by denying the hypothesis of persons. A face to face conversation is hard when there are no faces.

I am though more sympathetic to the post-colonial side of things, and I do think Giussani is particularly adept in this regard, and this can be seen through comparison to an author such as Chesterton. My own read on Chesterton follows that of Ralph Wood (The Nightmare Goodness of God), who argues that there are some problems in Chesterton – that in fact demand a critique via nouvelle theologie – and also some wonderful and necessary truths, which can be better appreciated once we have addressed the problems. And one of these problems I think is that, when Chesterton talks about the common man, or the common Christian, he is usually using a fairly narrow rubric for gauging this – he is in fact very often talking about a man (rather than a woman), and this man is very often quite British (though with some beautiful exceptions, like the childlike monastic hero of The Ball and The Cross). There is of course nothing wrong with appreciating either the British or men (though I personally often have trouble appreciating the latter), but when Chesterton speaks in his aphoristic way, the effect can seem totalizing – the only way to be a Christian is to be a British or at least Anglophilic male. This in turn makes things problematic when one wants to consider being a Christian when one is of other another culture, a woman, or a man whose masculinity does not always quite resonate with a Chestertonian spirit of warlikeness.

Here particularly is where Giussani’s approach shows its strength, for one of his prime emphases is experience. For Giussani, all our experience – all the things that have shaped our understanding of realiy, our emotions, our passion, our reason etc. – must be brought into play when looking for our destinies. The point for Giussani is achieving the greatest possible honesty when it comes to experience – to look it in the face, so to speak, and not cut corners in anything. A less confident apologist would probably omit this emphasis as a dangerous cipher that could blow up in one’s face at any moment – after all, what if one encourages others to engage their experiences only to find that these experiences lead these others elsewhere? I think Giussani might answer this in a twofold way, first that if we do not trust our faith to stand up to the measure of our experiences as humans, we probably do not in fact trust our faith. Second, he insists often on the role of free will – God will never impress himself so totally on a person that that person cannot choose otherwise, and so simply turning a person on to experience is not a mechanical guarantee of making that person a Christian.

To return to the main point, though, this emphasis on the discovery of what it means to be human by experience rather than by preset assumptions makes Giussani’s approach much more amenable for any culture or sex than Chesterton’s approach. We do not come in from a place of Archimedean detachment and just displace a culture’s understanding of humanity with our own. No, we listen to where that culture is also catching glimpses of what it means to be human and begin there.

Most surprising for me though was the way this applies to one’s own self. I am a historicist-type, particularly annoyed with most modern things, and particularly annoyed with myself for being one of these modern things. I do not care very much if something is relevant to me – when the modern “me” is so undeniably shallow, what can be the use of catering to it?  It is a bit like translating the gospel into a language called “Stupid.” This is perhaps exaggeration, but you will get the point – I am one of those who think that instead of speaking in simple ways that a person with a lobotomy can understand, we should maybe stop lobotomizing people. And so I find most of my kinship in the past, or with those who love old things, or at the very least embody old values.

But Giussani insists that I do the opposite. Rather than situating my heart in a distant historical time capsule and vacating the present as far as possible, my duty must always be to the present, and must begin with my immediate experience. Giussani does not of course say that it should stop there, but the way he begins here is remarkably different from the way I begin – I fancy a historicism that will squelch the modern self. Giussani, I will here add, is right where I am wrong, because what he is saying is more in accord with the Christian vision of incarnation – we always deal first with what our eyes see and our hands touch rather than some distant idea or concept. Not that such ideas or concepts are for Giussani innately bad, but it is our business to begin with experience – understood in the broadest possible sense – and build bridges toward such prospective answers. In Giussani’s read, the most sensible of these prospective answers to build toward is Christ and His Church. But that must await my discussion of the second and third books.