Chapter 14: Reason's Energy Seeks to Penetrate the Unknown

"Reason's highest achievement is the intuition that an explanation exists exceeding the measure of reason itself" (132). This explanation is defined as mystery, an Other which is infinitely greater than I. Even though I can realize this, I still am driven to satisfy my thirst for God, the 'unknowable.' Without this drive, all of life is boredom and meaninglessness.

This paradox, that man is compelled to search for what cannot be known, creates a very precarious situation. On the one hand, if he ignores the questions of destiny that spring out of his heart he will never be satisfied. He would be living a life of quiet desperation, where he shuts out reality and creates a fantasy world of preconception. On the other hand, if he claims to know the mystery, to understand what it is, then he gives in to his impatience and corrupts the religious sense. The infinite knowledge of God, mystery, is exchanged for something fake, an idol. This is idolatry, when man says "This is what history's destiny is..." "The meaning of the world is..." he "inevitably goes on to define what this is: it is the blood of the Aryan race, the struggle of the proletariat, the competition for economic supremacy, etc" (135).

We want quick solutions and easy answers. It is dizzying to keep ourselves suspended at each moment, living in a tension, being pulled in different directions, exhausted and impatient. It would be so easy to latch onto something and substitute the comprehensible (the idol) for the incomprehensible (God). This is why idol worship is vehemently condemned in the Bible, because it is easy for the human being to make himself "the measure of everything, or in other words, it means to claim to be God" (137). Idols, whether they be false gods, pleasurable things, or people, will never satisfy reason's quest for the fullness of truth.

Ideologies that are built upon the idol become all-encompassing. Otherwise, they would not be convincing; ideology is by definition the distortion of one aspect of experience into the totality of experience. When two ideologies come in contact they "cannot avoid generating total conflict. This explains why, for the Bible, the idol is the origin of violence" (138).

To recap:

Man, from time immemorial, as he matures in history, tends to identify god, that is the meaning of the world, based on a particular aspect of his own self. (139)

Reality is a sign of a greater reality. Though unseen, reason can intuit that it exists. Man's intuition is flawed because of a condition that makes his reason impatient and restless, "Our relationship with mystery becomes degraded into presumption" (140).

How can we know the truth? How can we prevent ourselves from falling into the slavery of idols?

St. Thomas Aquinas writes in the beginning of the Summa Theologiae:

The truth concerning God that reason is able to attain is accomplished only by a very few, and this only after much time and not without the inclusion of error. On the other hand, the entire of the human being depends upon the knowledge of this truth, since this salvation is in God. In order to render this salvation more universal and more certain, it would have thus been necessary to teach men this divine truth with a divine revelation.

"The human religious genius has cried out, in so many ways, to be liberated from this inextricable captivity of impotence and error" (140).

Chapter 13: An Education In Freedom

If we are to realize our destiny then we must be educated in freedom. If we do not know how to respond to the "sign" of the world then we become frustrated and confused about our existence. It would be like a man who lives in a house expecting his friend, and the doorbell rings constantly, driving him mad. Yet, he cannot welcome the guest, because he is blind and does not know how to find the door.

An education in freedom means to be attentive to reality, and unfettered by preconception. This attention must be open to examining every aspect of reality and comparing it with one's elementary experience, not simply what is immediately plausible or in line with the prevailing mentality. Although this sounds simple in theory, it can be very hard to put it into practice.

An education in freedom must also teach a capacity for acceptance of new proposals. My experience is not very free if I have to build walls to ward off novel ideas or feelings. I would be fortifying myself against the entire world.

To summarize, educating one's freedom to attentiveness, that is, to be wide open toward the totality of factors at play, and educating it to acceptance, that is, to the conscious embrace of what it finds before it is the fundamental issue of the human journey. (126)

Skepticism, like stoicism, is often seen as admirable. How strong one must be to be wary of everything! But this attitude is not in accord with how nature places the human being. Our original position pushes us to search for a real, positive answer. Children act this out in their boundless curiosity. They do not look at their surroundings and say, "I don't think this is real," or "But maybe it isn't a horse," or "Perhaps, but, however...." A child has a positive hypothesis about things, and even though he may be mistaken about whether an animal is actually a horse or a cow, they learn to refine their thinking and surge toward a definite answer. If all I do is doubt, then I will never know, because I will never want to know. "If one begins with a negative hypothesis, then even if there is something there to find, it will not be found" (127).

The skeptic is not to be admired, but to be scorned, because instead of being open to reality, to something, he chooses to retreat from life (even his identity) and any affirmative meaning that exists. "There exists nothing more pathological and unproductive than systematic doubt" (127).

The Experience of Risk

Giussani asks why admitting the existence of God can be so difficult, even when reality obviously points to mystery. What is at the root of this problem? The answer has to do with the experience of risk. Risk is not an action taken without adequate reasons. Such an action would be called irrationality or foolishness. Rather, risk is a disconnect between reason and the will. To illustrate this, Giussani tells the story of a particular hike. He and a few other men are connected by ropes. The guide at the front of the line hopped over a gap in the rocks. Beneath was a very deep ravine. Although the gap was only about three feet wide, and even if he did miss the jump the other climbers would have hauled him back up by the ropes, our friend Luigi could not bring himself to make the jump. Instead he grabbed onto the ground and refused to budge.

Even with plenty of safety precautions and good reason to believe he would make the jump, he could not find the energy to do it. This is risk. It is similar to a situation presented many chapters back, when after a very reasonable and logical presentation a person says "You are right, but I am still not persuaded." Risk is: "a hiatus, an abyss, a void between the intuition of truth... and the will... a break [that] occurs between reason and affectivity" (129). (Note the parallel between this and the idea of original sin).

Only a massive amount of sheer willpower can overcome this gap. In most cases, the energy to do this cannot be mustered by one's self. Thankfully, nature has equipped us with a tool to conquer this strange fear: the communital phenomenon.

A child runs down a hallway, pushes open with his little hands the door, which is always open, to an unlit room. Frightened, he turns back. His mother arrives and leads him by the hand. With his hand in his mother's, the child will go into any room in the world. (130)

By virtue of the special experience of being with another we can overcome the experience of risk. An old adage says 'there is power in numbers.' Just as a seed will not grow unless it is put in fertile ground, being in a community does not replace a person's willpower, but becomes the condition for it bearing fruit. Giussani adds that "the most intelligent persecution is not [Nero's] ampitheatre of wild beasts or the concentration camp," but it is "the modern state's attempt to block the expression of the communital dimension of the religious phenomenon" (131).

The structure of the person and the world as a sign work together to point us towards the infinite, the Other, called God. Even when we are educated in freedom and are open to reality we are still paralyzed by our lack of willpower. When a person lives reality with even one other person it is as if he received not just two times the energy, but a thousand times. The communital phenomenon is so important that the Church says that man needs to live in society. Let us remember the words of Christ, "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there also shall I be" (Matthew 18:20).

Chapter 12: The Adventure of Interpretation

Most of our analysis so far has focused on reason, but now we approach another aspect of what makes us human: freedom. As described before, freedom is "the capacity to possess one's own meaning" (121). My ultimate destiny, which is connected with the seemingly enigmatic Other, traditionally called God, cannot be my own destiny if I am forced into it. Although freedom is the end and completion of my personal meaning, it is also the path that takes me there; freedom plays a crucial role in the discovery of my meaning.

One of the life lessons taught in grade school is that life is full of choices, and in the end the choice is up to you. Although we are constrained in many situations by limits like money, distance, and time, everyone possesses a will to decide whether they will try or not try, keep going or turn back, face a new day standing up or stay in bed until noon. We all make these fundamental decisions of our own accord every day, and we also have a fundamental choice regarding our ultimate destiny. "The human person is responsible before his destiny; the way he attains it is his responsibility, the fruit of his freedom" (121).

Thus man does not recognize God solely by science or philosophy, but by his free choice. You can choose to not acknowledge God, even though it is an unreasonable decision that contradicts your nature. Louis Althusser, when discussing the existence of God and Marxism, held that "the problem is not one of reason, but option" (122).

Here is the decision before me: I can either face reality as it is, without preconception, and acknowledge that within the structure of my being I have a longing for the infinite and an insatiable question about my meaning. As Giussani says, I can 'call a spade a spade.' I can embrace reality and let myself be drawn to everything that touches me. Or, I can set myself against reality, with "arms flung in front of your eyes to ward off unwelcomed and unexpected blows" (122), and in ignoring the real that is before me I deny the real "I" that is myself.

The World As Parable

"Freedom is exercised in that playing field called sign" (123). The last chapter introduced the way that the world is a sign pointing to a higher reality. This sign is to be interpreted in the proper way, in accordance with one's free choice to be open to reality. Giussani relates Christ's use of parables. Although the crowds would not understand the parables and walk away, the apostles would follow Christ and ask him to explain. He said, "I speak in parables so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not hear." Christ was testing their freedom, drawing out the decisions made in their hearts. Some did not want to know. Some did. The world is a parable.