Chapter 11: Experience of the Sign

It could be said that the tug we feel towards an ultimate destiny is like an invitation, or a word. In Greek, "logos" means word, and "ana" means up, therefore giving us "analogy," or a word that lifts us up, that let us come to know something more than what meets the eye.

Reality is essentially an analogy that points to something higher. We could also call it a sign, because it is a rudimentary expression of a greater meaning. When I drive my car to the store and approach a stop sign, I do not simply regard it as red, octagonal piece of metal. By realizing what it points to I grasp both the sign and the higher reality, that is, I risk crashing my car into oncoming traffic if I don't stop soon. "A sign... is a reality which refers me to something else" (112). The world is also a sign, but not one I can easily ignore because it actually provokes me into a response. Reality invites me to search for something beyond.

I can express this reaction with questions: What is this in front of me? Why this? A kind of strange unknown lies within such questions: the world, the real provokes me towards an other. (111)

Reality's way of orienting me to another unseen reality is something that imposes itself on me. I cannot deny it without being unreasonable and denying my own inner experience. It would be as if I heard a voice call "Help! Help!" in the woods, but then merely thinking, "My, what a strange vibration the air made just now. It sounded like a person yelling 'Help,' but I simply can't deduce that it is really a man in need of assistance." As humans we are attracted by the deeper meanings of things, and by ignoring them we actually become dead to ourselves, others, and to all of reality. "This would be... the positivist position: the total blocking out of the human" (112). We would not follow the footsteps of those "great souls" Giussani mentioned in the last chapter who were truly alive in their search for meaning.

Our impact with reality reveals that experientially life is need. The needs we have can be divided into two categories: the need for truth and justice, along with the corollaries happiness and love. Giussani quickly illustrates each category with a pertinent story or analogy; let it suffice for us to say now that without "a perspective of the beyond," without a reality that points beyond itself, all of these needs are unmet and miserably unfulfilled.

Imagine a baby that is shipwrecked on the proverbial deserted island. Suppose that this baby manages to live off the native fruits and nuts that surround him, and finally upon reaching the age of 14 or 15 he begins to feel a need for something that he cannot imagine. Out of all the beautiful sunrises and tropical fish and stars he sees, he yearns for something greater. But none of these natural events or animals, however beautiful and colorful they may be, cannot seem to satisfy his longing. The boy is entering puberty; even though he has never seen a woman he still has this desire for companionship with an 'other' built into the structure of his being.

He would have to conclude: "There is something in the universe, in reality, that corresponds to this want, my need, and it does not coincide with anything that I can grasp, and I don't know what it is." Why does he know that it exists? Because the existence of that thing is implied in the dynamic of his person. (116)

So too is the existence of God implied by reality, which is a sign that demonstrates "God." Reality points to something else, a you that is never exhaustible or finite.

What value does this have, to know that the world is a sign pointing toward something else? If the Other beyond this visible reality is unseen, undefined by our experience, veiled, how are we to reconcile this with our reason? This is the idea of mystery. "Mystery is not a limit to reason. Rather, it is reason's greatest discovery, the existence of something incommensurate in relation to itself" (117). Mystery is manifested in the human being, not as an obstacle but as "a sign of its infinite openness" (117).

All of civilization's authentic religious traditions describe God in linguistically negative terms: in-finite, im-measurable, unknown, the One whose name cannot be spoken. Although certain terms seem positive, like omnipotent or omnipresent, they are "negative from the standpoint of experience because they do not correspond to anything in our experience" (119). No one has ever been able to know everything or exist everywhere, and so we can only strain to wrap our minds around these concepts. God has also been called truth, love, justice, and so on, but he is not truth and love in the way we know truth and love. "However, these are not meaningless, purely nominalistic terms. Rather, they are expressions that intensify the way we relate to, draw closer to the Mystery. they are the openings to the Mystery" (119).

Chapter 10: How the Ultimate Questions Arise: The Way of the Religious Sense

We have described and analyzed the ultimate questions of meaning that well up in our being and cannot be denied without dire consequences, but how do these questions arise? How does the actual process take place within the human person?

The first step begins with an awareness of presence. Take for example, a baby that has just been born. As soon as her eyes are open she would realize that there are things! This would be her first reaction. The awe of perceiving these "things" around is the amazing realization that there exists something outside of one's own being. The baby would over time come to see that these things are a presence that she interacts with, but do not emanate from her.

At a very elementary level, I know that everything around me is not me, that this reality imposes itself on me, and that I am dependent upon this reality. I know that I do not make reality; I find it, and it attracts me. Attraction to reality, or 'otherness' is the human being's first reaction, a seeking, invoking, and contemplating of what is 'other.' Man's original structure is not oriented towards skepticism and speculation.

The enlightenment culture claims that religion is based on fear, but fear is only the danger of losing something that is important. We do not fear losing things that have no interest to us. Attraction always comes first, like how babies are enthralled by new and unfamiliar objects.

Religiosity is, first of all, the affirmation and development of the attraction. A true seeker's disposition is laden with a prior evidence and awe: the wonder of the presence attracts me, and that is how the search within me breaks out. (102)

At a certain point in my psychological development I realize that I do not make myself, or hold myself in being. I understand myself as "I" and then come to know that I am distinct from other things. "It is from this that the idea of life as gift originates" (103).

Furthermore, this attraction becomes known to me as beauty, as having some sort of harmony and order that is favorable to me. Throughout time religions have made providence central to our relationship with the divine. The rhythms of night and day, the four seasons, and womanly fertility are signs of rejuvenation, refreshment, and gift.

Man is grateful for the beneficence and providence of this presence. He "becomes aware of himself as I, recovers this original awe with a depth that establishes the measure, the stature of his identity" (105). I realize, if I am mature, that I do not hold myself in being, but rather than I emerge from something else. "I am you-who-make-me — except that this you is absolutely faceless" (105). The pronoun you is the only adequate term for this faceless other, but in the religious tradition we call this you God. Although our dependence on God seems at first like a constraint, it is liberating once we understand that only in existing as God's creations do we have peace.

Similar to how the world is imposed on us in our first moments outside the womb and we come to realize how we are held in existence by an Other, there is another thing which imposes itself on our experience: good and evil. We have an awareness that things are either good or evil, "that certain things must be either approved or rejected" (107). Some schools of thought in sociology and philosophy hold that concepts of good and evil are really just constructs of the mind, but when man makes himself step aside from all his material comforts and barriers of indifference he can see good and evil as plainly as night and day. When you are betrayed by a friend, when those you love are brutally slain for love of power or greed, when bread is stored up in castles as your whole nation dies of starvation outside the walls, then you cannot deny the difference between good and evil. It is set upon the human heart.

The distinction of good and evil is "used by the Creator to draw to itself all of our existence" (107). In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul writes that there is a law written inside out hearts, and that even the Gentiles testify to it when they keep the law by instinct, even if they do not have the complete, revealed law of the Jews. Along with the realization that we do not hold ourselves in being, this "natural law" is also part of the emergence of the ultimate questions of the religious sense.

Now the question is this: How can this complex, yet simple, this enormously rich experience of the human heart — which is the heart of the human person, and therefore, of nature, the cosmos — how can it become vivid, how can it come alive? How can it become powerful? In the "impact" with the real. The only condition for being truly and faithfully religious, the formula for the journey to the meaning of reality is to live always the real intensely, without preclusion, without negating or forgetting anything... The mark of great souls and persons who are truly alive is an eagerness for this search, carried out through their commitment to the reality of their existence. (108-109)

Chapter 9: Preconception, Ideology, Rationality, and the Religious Sense

We have seen how the elimination or substitution of the questions leads to desperate consequences like the loss of identity, solidarity, and freedom. If these are so contrary to our desires and our nature, then why do we hold these unreasonable positions? Giussani claims there is only one adequate answer: "the domination of preconception, the tyranny of prejudice" (94).

As we have already discussed, preconception can be positive. It allows us to quickly evaluate things and ideas. The problem comes along when we make this initial reaction, or first impression, the final criterion for judging reality. By holding on to preconceptions, we lose the ability to truly analyze something and be open to new possibilities of understanding.

Ideology is the accumulation and synthesis of preconception. It is a "theoretical-practical construction that is based upon an aspect of reality," (95) instead of accounting for all of reality's factors. Ideologies are deceptively destructive because their origins lie in experience but eventually isolate some factor of reality without considering others. One example is that we can theorize about the problem of "poverty" and still forget about the real person who is suffering. Then "poverty" becomes just an issue or marketing tool for a political candidate to use. Rose Luxembourg wrote of the "creeping advance of the theoretician," which Giussani says, "gnaws at the root of and corrupts every authentic impetus and change" (96).

Reason is the antidote for both preconception and ideology. Preconception, at a basic level, holds us back from knowing reality as it truly is. Ideology does the same thing, and allows dangerous philosophies to persuade entire societies and cultures to impose restraints on what reason is capable of, choking our knowledge and understanding. The religious sense "appears as a first and most authentic application of the term reason because it never ceases responding relentlessly to reason's most basic need, for meaning" (99). It lets us be open to what is different, unforeseen, and infinite.

Chapter 8: Consequences of the Unreasonable Positions Before the Ultimate Question

The six positions discussed in the previous two chapters carry with them cultural consequences, three of which are the break with the past, melancholic solitude, and loss of freedom.

The Break With The Past

Without meaning, man is tossed about like a ship in a storm. He becomes paralyzed, unable to understand or use anything, and eventually the past means very little to him. He interacts with the world by sheer reactivity, without aim or purpose. "Reactivity as the criterion for a relationship with reality burns the bridges linking us to the richness of history" (81).

To draw a parallel, let us look at how a baby interacts with the world. Given any object, a baby will play with it, and, even if it is extremely valuable, will throw it on the ground and break it into pieces. A cardboard box and a music box are both as easily destroyed by pure reaction; the baby has no understanding of meaning or value. In the same way, when man has lost his sense of the past, of history, of tradition, he merely 'plays' with things and ends up destroying his surroundings, but "you cannot say that this person is merely playing... because the situation is simply too dramatic and tragic for that" (81). Indeed, lives, civilizations, and relationships are at stake.

Even so, the rejection of the past is viewed as an ideal philosophy today. The further-reaching consequence of this is that the future will be emptied of anything good. The future is constructed by an action in the present, and although the energy for construction is manifested in the present, "the richness of the present comes from the past" (83).

Incommunicativeness And Solitude

Communication and dialogue are also crippled when the past is forgotten, since these are the fruit of experience, of memory. The more experience I have, the more I engage in life, the more I have to share with others, and the better I can relate to and establish a connection with another.

To summarize: we have pointed out that assuming an unreasonable position before the ultimate questions results in a loss of meaning, which concomitantly, blurs, annuls the personality. (84)

If we are unable to communicate with each other, we are isolated. Desperate solitude becomes the overpowering mentality. Man without meaning walks through crowds of people on the street and blabbers on about the 11 o'clock news but feels totally alone. "We live together failing to recognize what unites us... solitude becomes an exasperating social climate, sadly the characteristic face of today's society" (85). The greatest disaster that can befall humanity is not famine or earthquake, but spiritual emptiness, in which man has no taste for life.

Loss of Freedom

Before talking about freedom, we need to grasp what freedom really is, because the current mentality and culture have certain preconceptions in place which may or may not be true. To have freedom means to be free, so let us begin by describing the experience of feeling free with our elementary experience.

You, an employee of a corporation, are planning to take a 3-day trip to the beach with your family. Your generous boss has always let you miss work on Friday for family vacations, ever since you worked under him when you started ten years ago. But this time, he emphatically says "No, I can't let you go, there is too much to be done!" You would not feel free; "it would be impossible for you not to feel oppressed, imprisoned, suffocated, without freedom" (88). If your boss were to happily grant your request your feeling of freedom would have greater since you greatly desired to take your spouse and your children to the coast.

"Experientially we feel free when we satisfy a desire" (88), which can be in the form of a hope, a dream, or a need. Yet, even if we have moments of being free, we do not have total freedom; there are always desires we cannot seem to satisfy. We are never perfectly fulfilled in what we long to possess and who we want to be. Freedom then, is:

the capacity for the end, totality, for happiness. Complete self-fulfilment, this is freedom. Freedom, for the human being, is the possibility, the capacity, the responsibility to be fulfilled, that is to say to reach and confront one's destiny: it is the total aspiration for destiny. Thus freedom is the experience of the truth of ourselves. (88)

This truth exists in God, the ultimate answer that the heart seeks. The structure of the human person testifies to God's existence through his insatiable longing for the infinite, but since we do not yet have full satisfaction through God our freedom is an ongoing process, "a state of becoming" (89). By faith and prayer we reach out to God, our destiny and freedom.



The next section Giussani describes as "freedom's precarious condition." Let us say that the circle on the left represents all of reality. There is nothing inside the this figure until your existence emerges at some point in time. The point is you, or it could be I. Now reality looks like the circle on the right.

If you exist as only the product of certain material and biological occurrences, a small and temporary protrusion in the enormous flux of the the world and all of history (which is the circle), then why should you have any rights? Who are you to demand any sort of freedom when you are so insignificant? It is like a shrimp asking the entire ocean to agree with its demands.

On a human level these circles also represent humanity, or, in concrete terms, society. Society has order, and it is maintained by those in power. As long as you are simply a fleeting collection of atoms, you have absolutely no rights, because "power is the prevailing expression of a determined instant of historical flux" (90). A government, an army, or a parent needs no justification in using you as a means to an end or even killing you. This is easily seen in various governments throughout time who have arbitrarily decided on who deserves human rights. In Rome it was the Roman citizen. And who decided who was a citizen? Those in power. In Nazi Germany it was the racially-pure Arian, once again defined by the State.

Man can only have innate dignity when there is God, when he has "a direct relationship with the infinite" (91). If man is just a transient blip on the earth, a meaningless point in reality, a consequence of mere biology, then "freedom" and "human rights" are just empty words. Religiosity is the one defense man has against living under domination. It shows man his dependent relationship with God, without which there is only slavery to the ruling powers. Those in power abhor true religiosity because it restricts their dominion over others.

Only this hypothesis [of God] allows me to proclaim that the world can do what it wants with me, but it cannot conquer, possess, grasp on to me, because I am greater than it is. I am free. (91)

The paradox is that we depend on God. Our freedom is intrinsically linked to God, the Other that created us and the structural desire to reach out for the infinite and possess fullness of being, complete happiness.