Dissatisfied Vitality in The Religious Sense
By: Cecily Lawless
Tags: Spirituality, Religion, Books, Philosophy, Catholic

Dissatisfied Vitality in The Religious Sense

Athena appearing to Odysseus, Giusepe Bottoni, Wikimedia Commons

Introduction

Luigi Giussani’s The Religious Sense was presented to me with a ten-star review by a close friend who insisted seriously: ‘This is the deepest gift I can give’. His life had been transformed by the writings of the Italian theologian and the movement he founded, Communion and Liberation, and he knew many others who’d had the same experience.

Ultimately, I did not find that the book enriched my life very much (and I would even say that it impoverished my spiritual life). My hope in this article is to express why this is and why others have found it so compelling, so far as I am able.

I only intend to look at the text of the book The Religious Sense without reference to the CL movement or Giussani’s other writings, but I think it’s worth pointing out that this book is often read in the context of the School of Community, weekly meetings that involve reading a short portion of the text followed by a discussion tying the reading to one’s daily experience.

The Core Ideas

The fundamental concept behind The Religious Sense is that human nature possesses an inherent need to search for the answers to the ultimate questions — a ‘religious sense’, that is, that must be educated in order to fully live out one’s humanity (to use a Giussani-ism).

Giussani opens his book with elaborations on three premises that define the method with which we should approach the religious experience. These are:

Realism: “the urgent necessity not to give a more important role to a scheme already in our minds, but rather an entire, passionate, insistent ability to observe the real event, the fact” and therefore that way of understanding something must be determined by the object, not imposed by the subject. When it comes to religion, this means considering religion an existential inquiry where the human heart is the object under consideration. Reasonableness: “the distinctive characteristic of that level of nature that we call man, that is, the capacity to become aware of reality according to the totality of its factors…the capacity to become aware of reality” and therefore choosing the correct, appropriate procedures to approach something. When it comes to religion, the method is moral certainty, the procedure we use to judge relationships. Morality: “the attitude of the person”, where human feeling affects our processes of reason. Here the challenge is “loving the truth of an object more than your attachment to the opinions you have already formed about it” — but not detachment, which Giussani argues is impossible when dealing with important questions, also noting that you are able to understand something fuller the closer you are to it (someone who has no interest in bees will know less than a passionate melittologist or beekeeper).

Therefore, to properly study religion, one must study oneself — not a preconception of oneself, but instead one’s self seen in action — in deep involvement with every factor of life, including but not limited to the religious experience. The rest of the book centers around the argument found here:

The religious factor represents the nature of our “I” in as much as it expresses itself in certain questions: “What is the ultimate meaning of existence?” or “Why is there pain and death, and why, in the end, is life worth living?” Or, from another point of view: “What does reality consist of and what is it made for?” Thus, the religious sense lies within the reality of our self at the level of these questions: it coincides with the radical engagement of the self with life, an involvement which exemplifies itself in these questions.

Giussani argues that these questions lie at the core of our being, an inescapable call to a quest that can never be completed, but can also never be set aside. “If it is human nature to indomitably search for an answer,” he concludes, if the structure of a human being is, then, this irresistible and inexhaustible question, then one suppresses the question if one does not admit to the existence of an answer. But this answer cannot be anything but unfathomable.” And so it is the task of every human being to find in the ultimate what corresponds to his heart.

He goes on to express that the human being is first moved by the sense of awe at a presence and claims that the religious challenge is to interpret the ‘signs’, or symbols, that call us towards the elusive ‘Other’, towards the Unknown — charmingly dubbing this ‘the adventure of interpretation’. He concludes that reality itself is a parable, a revelation.

The Appeal of The Religious Sense

What is the factor that makes certain people react so strongly to Giussani’s writings? What was the ‘deep gift’ my friend perceived lurking within the pages of The Religious Sense?

First, there is the matter of quality. It isn’t a long book — a little over a hundred pages — but it is dense. I took up the exercise of reading the same chapter several times over the course of a week, making notes about my questions and doubts, and I found that nearly every question was in fact addressed in the same chapter, hidden out of view on an initial reading. Although part of a ‘trilogy’ of books that progress from the basic religious sense to the Gospel message to the Catholic church, The Religious Sense is a complete argument that leaves very few holes. The writing, though idiosyncratic, is beautiful, and Giussani draws on poets and great thinkers to illustrate his points.

Secondly, there is something compelling in Giussani’s invitation to a radical engagement in life. He uses the example of Ulysses in Dante’s Inferno who sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules ‘beyond which nothing is reliable any longer…they were, in fact, the moment of the unleashing of his true nature…he did not make a mistake in doing so: to venture forward was in his nature as a man.’ To be fully human — not to sleepwalk through life, to respect the potential within yourself. ‘I have never met yet met a man who was quite awake,’ Thoreau observed. Who does not want to accept this challenge to be fully human, fully awake, fully alive?

Thirdly, I suspect that Giussani’s writings have an especial appeal for scientific minds who have trouble rationalizing faith — my friend was a student of the sciences who was led away from agnosticism through Giussani’s writing, and I think this is not an uncommon story. Not only is Giussani’s approach unsentimental and rigorous, he portrays the religious dimension as something accessible — and even primarily accessible — through the mind, as corresponding to the part of human nature that needs to know. He lists the ‘need for truth’ as the primary human need and defends the desire to answer existential questions with some pathos: “If nature has placed within me an impulse even more powerful than a rocked, a drive so deeply rooted that it actually constitutes my very self, then why must the answer to the questions generated by this impulse represent a goal so impossible that it is useless even to speak of it?”

Where I Disagree

With reference to the last point, I do not have a scientific or even a philosophical bent, and so it is unsurprising that an argument shaped around the ‘need for truth’ — which was never strong in me — would fail to strike a dominant chord in me. I wouldn’t consider this a weakness of the book: there is a door to Christianity for everyone and the fact that this approach isn’t for me doesn’t mean that it isn’t a powerful tool to draw others towards God or important contemplation, and I would certainly recommend it to those who find that these themes resonate.

But I do have some reservations that I don’t think are based on personal preference. Giussani’s ‘inexhaustible human movement searching for the ultimate depth of things’ which he believes in so passionately feels like an exhausting waste of a short life on an emotional level. Looking further, does he forget that Dante placed Ulysses in the eighth ring of hell, that he was not stopped by ‘affection for my son, nor piety for my old father, nor the love that should have gladdened Penelope’ in his passion to sail into the open sea which then ‘closed over him’? Giussani is certain that plunging into a tireless quest for the unknown is the ultimate expression of humanity, but in his example, Ulysses turns his back on human love and duty for the sea ‘where no other man might go’ and sails to his death, which is damnation.

This elevation of dissatisfaction as a profound good strikes me as dangerous: an attempt to write man into something he is not and something he should not be. (Thoreau had never seen a man who was fully awake because this is not how man is made.) Dissatisfaction is not a Christian virtue. Giussani claims that “life is hunger, thirst, and passion for an ultimate object, which looms over the horizon yet always lies beyond it”. Jesus Christ does not. Rather, he says that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled.

The chronically dissatisfied may be pleased to discover that there is something holy in this dissatisfaction, that it can aid them in ‘loving the Lord with all your mind’ but embracing this dissatisfaction as a virtue and the seat of humanity distracts from true virtues — patience, humility, gratitude — and reduces the definition of humanity to a flat something that is essentially a mood or a personal characteristic.

Meanwhile, I feel that there is a danger in Giussani’s insistence that we use the human heart to judge religion — to use the self as the criterion, that we recognize something that corresponds to ourselves in God. On the one hand, it runs the risk of insisting that the infinite corresponds to us and therefore creating God in our own image instead of understanding that we were created in God’s image — in short, in my view, God should be the criterion, and not ourselves. On the other hand, Giussani’s arguments feel disingenuous. He was a Catholic priest and all his ‘tireless seeking’ was going to land on Christianity and the specific manifestation professed by the Catholic Church. The hypothesis here, of course, is that if the Catholic Church holds the truth, the earnestly-seeking human heart will find it. From a Christian perspective, is this not ‘putting the Lord your God to the test?’ Giussani insists on a starting point (the self) and an end-point (the Church) and does very little to bridge the gap. The result is confused, like train tracks being built from either end, hoping to meet in the middle. Am I verifying the truth of God or is God verifying the truth of me?

Finally, although it is not the fault of The Religious Sense, which does not pretend to be anything more than part of a method for approaching religion, the writings of Giussani, focused as they are on religion through self-discovery, do not do much to encourage a moral, pious, or loving life. They are interesting philosophy, and I believe that they can be spiritually enriching, but taken by themselves they do little to inspire good Christian life. Normally this would be little cause for concern, but because the books are often read in the context of the School of Community, every week or every day, I think there is some danger here, and some might find themselves opening their Religious Sense more than their Bible or Lives of the Saints or religious works by other writers. This I think is bad practice.

(I noticed that reading C.S. Lewis after a long stretch of Giussani was like a breath of fresh air — just as rigorous but friendlier to English speakers, he never lets me forget that beyond believing, I also have to act well. I would recommend him as a good counterweight, but there are of course countless writers — what’s important is that Giussani does require a balance).

Conclusion

Luigi Giussani’s The Religious Sense is ultimately an interesting and sometimes beautiful book which can be extremely valuable when approaching religious and existential questions, especially for those of a philosophical and scientific bent, but it should be treated carefully — man’s search being elevated above its object (God) is potentially idolatrous, a surrender to the sin of dissatisfaction and envy of God’s power masquerading as virtue and vitality. Much of this is open to interpretation and I wouldn’t try to dissuade anyone from reading it and engaging with its ideas, which at the very least provide fresh food for thought, but I would warn anyone attempting to pursue a Christian or religious life against using it in too central a place in your faith.

All quotes are taken from The Religious Sense as translated by John Zucchi.