the religious sense, verification of the faith

No 2 2011 I

Presentation of the book by Luigi Giussani The Religious Sense. Milan, January 26, 2011.

by Julián Carrón

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THE RELIGIOUSSENSE,VERIFICATIONOF THE FAITH

Antoon van Dyck, The Apostle Judas Taddeus, 1619-21, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien.

TEH RELIGIOUS SENSE, VERIFICATION OF THE FAITHPAGE ONE

II No 2 2011

BY JULIÁN CARRÓN

Presentation ofthe book by

Luigi GiussaniThe Religious

Sense.Milan, January

26, 2011

1. THE RELIGIOUS SENSE, VERIFICATION

OF THE FAITH

“[When I] watch the stars that shine there inthe sky, | Musing, I say within me: | ‘Whereforethose many lights, | that boundless atmos-phere, And infinite calm sky? | And what themeaning of this vast solitude? | And what amI?’”1 This poem by Giacomo Leopardi ex-presses splendidly the experience in whichour religious sense reveals itself. The impact ofthe “I” with reality unleashes the human ques-tion. An inborn structure within us is inex-orably set in motion by the impact with real-ity, and it mobilizes the whole dynamism ofour person.

To the degree to which we live seriously, noone can avoid certain questions, whatevertheir ethnic or cultural background. “What isthe ultimate meaning of existence? Why isthere pain and death? Deep down, why is lifeworth living?” Or, from another point of view:“What does reality really consist of and whatis it made for?” The religious sense–Fr. Gius-sani always taught us–is the nature of our “I”inasmuch as it expresses itself in these ques-tions; “it coincides with the radical engage-ment of the self with life, an involvementwhich exemplifies itself in these questions.”2

But why should we read The Religious Senseagain now, making it the object of our worktogether? I’ve heard this question many timessince we made this decision. The idea cameout of the experience of the last Spiritual Ex-ercises of the Fraternity, in which I re-readtwo chapters of The Religious Sense “fromwithin the faith,” as I had occasion to observe.

Everything was born of the observation of afragility of faith as knowledge (that we calledthe “break between knowing and believing”),and not just in others, but in us, too, eventhough we have the grace of being immersedin a certain history. We, too, participate in thereduction of faith to feeling or ethics. Fr. Gius-sani observed that this happens not onlywhere Christianity no longer is proposed ac-cording to its nature as event, but also be-cause of a lack of the human in us. In fact,there’s a big “hitch” to Christianity: it must beacknowledged and lived by women and men.In last year’s Spiritual Exercises, I re-read some

chapters from The Religious Sense to try toshow the nature and dynamic of that “hu-manity” that is missing in us, that is lacking, isblocked. Many were struck by how pertinentthose chapters were to the journey we aremaking and asked that we re-read the entirebook together from this perspective.

What does it mean to tackle The ReligiousSense from within the faith? We’re accustomedto understanding “religious sense” as a simplepremise to faith, and therefore it seems al-most useless to us, once we have reached faith,as if it were a staircase for going up to thenext floor: once we’ve gone up, we can dowithout the stairs. No! Not only is a constantlyalive religious sense needed for Christianity tobe acknowledged and experienced for what itis–as Fr. Giussani always reminded us, quotingNiebuhr: “Nothing is more unbelievable thanthe answer to a question that is not asked,”3 orthat we don’t ask any more–but, in the secondplace, it is precisely in the encounter with theChristian event that the religious sense is re-vealed in all its original importance, reaches adefinitive clarity, is educated, and is saved.Christ came to educate us to the religioussense, as Fr. Giussani always told us (I’ll comeback to this later). A lively religious sensetherefore means a verification of faith.

Very meaningful in this sense is Fr. Gius-sani’s answer to a question posed by AngeloScola during a noted interview: “The fulcrumof your pedagogical proposal,” said Scola, “isthe religious sense of the person; is this so?”“The heart of our proposal,” Giussani re-sponded, “is rather the announcement of anevent that happened, that surprises people inthe same way the angel’s announcement twothousand years ago in Bethlehem surprisedthe poor shepherds. An event that happens,before whatever consideration of religious ornon-religious person. It is the perception ofthis event that resurrects or empowers the el-ementary sense of dependence and the com-plex of original ‘evidences’ that we call ‘the re-ligious sense.’”4 Therefore, the Christian eventresurrects or empowers the religious sense,that is, the sense of our original dependenceand of our original “evidences.”

Guercino, St. Peter(1624), Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence.

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If the work on Fr. Giussani’s book Is It Pos-sible to Live This Way? in these years has madeit possible for us to see the human newness thatis born of faith, enabling us to verify the perti-nence of faith to the needs of life, what we areabout to undertake with The Religious Sensewill enable us to explore this pertinence moredeeply. In fact, the pertinence of faith is docu-mented in its capacity to reawaken the “I,” tomake it become itself, to maintain it in theright position for facing all of existence, its tri-als and problems.

Here, then, is the perspective from which wewill read the text: re-reading The ReligiousSense, and comparing its ideas with our expe-rience, we can verify how much the experiencewe’ve had these years has influenced our lives,or, in other terms, “in what thing is Christ use-ful for the journey that people make in their re-lationship with things, walking toward theirdestiny. Otherwise, if He doesn’t have this in-fluence as real presence, Christ is a thing thathas nothing to do with life, that wouldn’t haveanything to do with life. He would have some-thing to do with a future life, but He wouldn’thave anything to do with this life; which is theprecise position of Protestantism.”5 In fact, ifChrist is present, it isn’t because of our words,but through His signs that we can acknowledge

Him. “He is, if He changes”6–this is the rule wehave always heard. I can discover that Christ ispresent by the signs of human reawakening Isee happen in me or in others. His presence isas objective as the signs that document it.

Engaging with The Religious Sense, then, wecan verify whether the encounter with Christhas “resurrected or empowered” the sense oforiginal dependence, the complex of originalneeds and “evidences” (of truth, justice, hap-piness, love) that Fr. Giussani calls “religioussense” and that are awakened in the impact ofthe “I” with reality. Now, if it is true that theemergence of these original needs and “evi-dences” is in a certain sense inevitable, it isequally true that the awareness of them is nor-mally reduced, obfuscated, or silenced. This iswhat can be grasped in the weakness or ab-sence, even among us, maybe after years ofbelonging to the Movement, of the sense ofmystery in the perception of our “I,” that is sotragically reduced–much more often than werealize–to the sum of historical and biologicalantecedents, to the product of circumstances.This is why a lively religious sense, without re-pression or censure, constitutes a sign and ver-ification of the encounter with something be-yond that is greater than me.

The same can be said of reason, which ex-»

perience reveals as “operative need to ex-plain reality in all of its factors so that the hu-man being is introduced to the truth aboutthings.”7 Challenged by the impact with real-ity to be truly itself (“unexhausted openness”)and to set itself into motion in the search for itsexhaustive explanation, reason reaches its au-thentic apex intuiting the existence of a beyondfrom which everything flows and to whicheverything points. “The summit of reason’sconquest is the perception of an unknown un-reachable presence, to which all human move-ment is destined, because it depends upon it. Itis the idea of mystery.”8 Those who do notblock that dynamism will come to live with theawareness of the mystery. The more intenselythey live reality, the more the dimension of themystery will become familiar to them.

But, here too, we are almost irresistiblytempted to reduce, to use reason as measure,instead of having it like a window thrown open“before the unexhausted call of the real.”9 Theinevitable consequence is the reduction of theperception of reality, void of mystery. This iswhat can be observed in the “destitution of thevisible,” in the way we normally flatten orempty circumstances and what happens: real-ity, which presents itself originally to our rea-son as sign, is reduced to its perceptively im-mediate aspect, deprived of its meaning, of itsprofundity. For this reason, we often suffocatein the circumstances–each of us can verify thisin our own experience. When reality is reducedto appearance, it becomes a cage.

As then-Cardinal Ratzinger observed yearsago, “By no means the least important practi-cal function of faith is to offer healing for thereason as reason, not to overpower it or to re-main outside it, but in fact to bring it to itselfagain.”10 The exaltation of reason, freedomfrom its reductions, is again the verification ofa real faith.

Now, why is the reawakening of the religioussense so decisive today? Why do we feel the ur-gent need for this? It is decisive because the re-ligious sense is the ultimate criterion of everyjudgment, of a judgment that is true and au-thentically “mine.” If we don’t want to be

“cheated, alienated, enslaved by others, or ex-ploited,”11 we must become accustomed tocomparing everything with that immanentand objective criterion that is the religioussense. After the Christian encounter, we con-tinue to live in the world and are called likeeveryone to face the challenges of life. We mustface them in this particular moment in history,dominated by confusion and the “drop in de-sire,” by a suffocating rationalism, on the onehand, and by spreading sentimentalism, onthe other; by the reduction of reality to ap-pearance and the heart to sentiment. If Christis not incisive in our life, reawakening our hu-manity, broadening our reason, and not re-ducing reality, we find ourselves thinking thesame way as everyone else, with the same men-tality as everyone, because the criterion of judg-ment we originally possess, the “heart,” whichis reason and affection together, is wrapped inthis confusion. This means that we can con-tinue to affirm the “truths” of the faith but notbe protagonists in history, because there is noappreciable difference in us. As Benedict XVIsaid, “The contribution of Christians can be ef-fective only if knowledge of faith becomesknowledge of reality.”12

In addition to rendering us useless for history(increasingly dominated by a “power” that aimsto throw man into confusion, to reduce his de-sire, and to promote a reduced use of reason),this provokes the question of the reasonablenessof the faith. Why is it reasonable to be Chris-tians? Why is faith to our advantage, humanlyspeaking? The reason many abandon the faithis that they discover no trace of this advantage.Thus, the “power” can continually expand theirinfluence, finding people increasingly disarmed.“It is as if ‘power,’ that is the dominant men-tality, forced our educators, parents included, toalter the simplicity of our nature [“the originalevidences,” we said before] ever since we werechildren. Therefore, we need to recover the sim-plicity of our nature. This School of Commu-nity on The Religious Sense is simply an invi-tation and prompt to recover the simplicity,the authenticity of our nature (there is a reasonthat the third premise defines the morality nec-essary for knowing as ‘poverty of spirit’).”13

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We can be accomplices in the influence of“power” if we presumptuously think we canmake it on our own, without an intelligentand affective sequela of the one point that theMystery has given us to tear us away fromnothingness. Even among us, the confusioncan be so deep that when we try to indicate asolution to the situation we live in, we find our-selves repeating the same answers as everyoneelse: some think the solution is to come to anagreement (“stay together”), others think it isfound in politics, in greater participation in the

distribution of power, or in a career, or in anew love adventure, and so on. After two thou-sand years of Christian history, after years ofgrace of the charism, we could find ourselvesin the human situation before the arrival ofChrist: an unbounded variety of ultimatelyimpotent attempts, in which people emphasizetheir prejudices or the aspects most conso-nant to their nature.

“Who will deliver me from this mortal con-dition?” we will ask with St. Paul. What is nec-essary for us? What experience? Christ saves»

Diego Velázquez, St.Thomas (1619), Muséedes Beaux-Arts d’Orléans.

No 2 2011 V

us from this variety of ultimately impotentattempts. Let’s try to return to the origin.

2. CHRIST CLARIFIES THE RELIGIOUS SENSE

Inviting us to identify with the events inJohn’s Gospel, Fr. Giussani describes magnifi-cently how this fact happened.

“At last came this John, called the Baptist, liv-ing in such a way that all the people were struckby him and, from the Pharisees to the humblestpeasant, they left their homes to go hear himspeak, at least once. That day, we don’t knowwhether there were many or a few, but twowere there for the first time, and they were en-tirely eager, open-mouthed, in the attitude ofpeople who had come from far away, and seewhat they had come to see with boundless cu-riosity, with a poverty of spirit, with a childishsimplicity of heart. […] At a certain point, aperson left the group and went off along the

path leading up the river. When He moved off,the prophet John the Baptist, suddenly in-spired, cried out, ‘That is the Lamb of God,who takes away the sins of the world.’ Thepeople didn’t take much notice […] but thosetwo, open-mouthed, with eyes wide open likechildren, saw where the Baptist’s eyes werelooking: at that man who was walking away. So,instinctively, they set off after Him, followedHim, timid and a little embarrassed. He real-ized that someone was following Him. Heturned around. ‘What do you want?’ ‘Master,’they replied, ‘where do You live?’ ‘Come andsee,’ He said kindly. They went ‘and saw whereHe lived, and stayed the whole of that day withHim.’ We can easily identify with those two sit-ting there, watching that man speak of thingsthey had never heard, yet so close, so fitting, soresounding. […] They did not understand;they were simply captivated, drawn, over-

» Abraham Bloemaert,St. Matthew and the Angel, 1621.

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whelmed by Him speaking. They watched Himspeak. Because it is by ‘watching’ […] thatsome people realized that amongst them therewas something indescribable: a Presence notonly unmistakable but incomprehensible, andyet so penetrating; penetrating because it cor-responded to what their heart was waiting for,in a way beyond all compare. Their fathers andmothers had never told them with such evi-dence and efficacy what made the years of theirlife worth living. They hadn’t been able to,couldn’t have known how; they had said manyother right and good things, but like fragmentsof something they had to try to grasp in the airto see if one matched with the other. A pro-found correspondence. […] Little by little asthe words came to them, and their eyes, full ofwonder and admiration, penetrated that man;they felt themselves changing, felt that thingswere changing: the echo of things changed,the meaning of things changed.” The accountdoesn’t end here, because Giussani imaginesJohn and Andrew as they went home after thatmeeting with Christ. “And when they wenthome that evening, as the day came to an end–probably walking most of the journey in si-lence, because they had never spoken to eachother as they did in that great silence in whichan Other was speaking, in which He went onspeaking and echoing within them, and theyreached home, Andrew’s wife saw him andsaid, ‘What’s happened to you Andrew?’, andthe children, too, looked at their father aston-ished: he was himself, but ‘more’ himself; hewas changed. It was himself, but he was differ-ent. And when–as we said once, moved, withan image that is easy to bring to mind becauseit’s so realistic–she asked him, ‘What’s hap-pened?’, he embraced her, Andrew embracedhis wife and kissed his children: it was him, buthe had never embraced her like that! It was likethe dawning of a new, different humanity, atruer humanity. It was as if he were saying, ‘Atlast!’ without believing his own eyes. But it wastoo clear for him not to believe his own eyes!”

This scene describes better than a thousandwords how the religious sense was clarified be-cause it had found its true object. Meeting Je-

sus, Andrew was himself, but “more himself;”he was different. For, “The object of the reli-gious sense is ultimately the unfathomablemystery; so it is understandable that manshould think of it in such a way as to have athousand thoughts about it. But the truth isone. However, it is impossible for man to reachit, so the Mystery became a human fact, be-came a man, a man who moved with his legs,who ate with his mouth, who wept with hiseyes, and who died. This is the true object ofthe religious sense. So, in discovering this factof Christ, the religious sense is also revealed tome, clarified for me in a marvelous way.”14

And thus it frees me from all my attempts.This is nothing other than the application of

a universal law, since the time human beingswere human beings (“A person rediscovershimself in a living encounter”15); but here, inthe encounter with the presence of the Mysterybecome a human fact, this law is fulfilled, be-comes true definitively: “When I met Christ Idiscovered myself a man,”16 said the Romanrhetorician, Marius Victorinus, as he publiclyannounced his conversion. But “it is in an en-counter that I become aware of myself. […]The ‘I’ awakens from its imprisonment in itsoriginal womb; it awakens from its tomb, fromits sepulcher, from its closed situation of originand–as it were–‘resurrects,’ becomes aware ofitself, precisely in an encounter. The outcomeof an encounter is the kindling of the sense ofthe person. It is as if the person were beingborn: he is not born in the encounter, but therehe becomes aware of himself, so he is born aspersonality.”17

This encounter enables us to discover themystery of our “I.” “He was himself, but evenmore himself,” he had never been so muchhimself. Thus, during a conversation, referringto the text of The Religious Sense, Fr. Giussaniwondered, “Why were we the ones to write abook about the religious sense? […] Becausewe encountered Jesus and, looking at Him andlistening to Him, we have understood whatwas inside us: ‘Whoever knows You, knowshimself,’ St. Augustine said. […] Because in or-der to know the religious sense and develop»

No 2 2011 VII

the religious sense we had to encountersomeone: without this ‘master’ we would nothave understood. Thus I can say to Christ: ‘Youare really me.’ I can say, ‘You are me’ to Him be-cause, listening to Him, I have understood my-self, whereas those who try to understandthemselves by reflecting on themselves get lostin a thousand paths, a thousand ideas, a thou-sand images.”18

3. CHRIST EDUCATES THE RELIGIOUS SENSE

Precisely because Christ reveals and clarifiesman’s religious sense, He can also educate it.Someone might think–even someone who hasalready encountered Christ or lives in a Chris-tian context–that, since the religious sense is anoriginal endowment, there is no need for it tobe educated or that, once it has been awakened,it works on its own, spontaneously becomingthe dimension of every instant. The followingpassage by Fr. Giussani helps us understandhow abstract this is. “During a conversation Ihad with a leading university professor, he let

slip this remark: ‘If I didn’t have chemistry, Iwould kill myself.’ Something like this is alwaysat play in our interior dynamic, even if we areunaware of it. There is always something thatmakes our lives worth living in our own eyes,and while we would not reach the point ofwishing to die, without it everything would becolorless and disappointing. Man offers all hisdevotion to that ‘something’ [the ‘god’], what-ever it may be. No one can avoid a final impli-cation: whatever it may be, in the moment inwhich human conscience corresponds to it,living, what is being expressed is a religiosity;what is being attained is a level of religiosity.The characteristic proper to the religious senseis that of being the ultimate, inevitable dimen-sion of every gesture, of every action, of everytype of relationship. […] The proof that the re-ligious sense is not adequately educated can befound in this precise point: there exists a re-pugnance in us, a repugnance that has becomeinstinctive, towards the idea that the religioussense might dominate, might consciously de-


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Claude Vignon,St. Paul,Sec. XVII. GalleriaSabauda, Turin.

VIII No 2 2011

termine our every action. This is the symptomthat the development of the religious sense inus is atrophied, partial: the extensive, tiresomedifficulty, the sense of extraneousness we feelwhen we hear that God is all determining, thefactor we cannot escape, the criterion by whichwe make choices, study, produce in our work-ing lives, join a political party, carry out scien-tific research, look for a wife, or a husband, orgovern a nation.”19

We can judge for ourselves the extent of thisrepugnance towards letting the whole of one’slife be determined by God. In this way, we willunderstand how much we need to let our-selves be educated to the religious sense. Infact, “Education of the religious sense, on theone hand, should foster the awareness of thefact that an inevitable and total dependence ex-ists between man and what gives meaning toman’s life. On the other hand, it would helpman, through time, to expunge that unrealis-tic sense of extraneousness he feels towardshis original situation.”20

One understands, then, the reason for the In-carnation: “God’s aim in becoming man was toeducate people to the religious sense, becausethe religious sense is the exact point of depar-ture that people have for traveling towards allof reality, and the Mystery Himself who makesreality. Therefore, following Christ means be-ing in the best condition for dealing with real-ity and walking toward destiny in the best ofways: it is called salvation, as we have called ithere, not in the definitive sense of the word, butin the operative sense of the term. Those whofollow Christ are in the best condition for deal-ing with reality and dealing with the problemof destiny.”21

How are we educated today to the religioussense? By participating in the life of that real-ity where Christ remains contemporary–theChurch. “The Church’s function on the worldscene is already implicit in its awareness that itis the protraction of Christ: this means that ithas the same function as Jesus in history, whichis to educate all men and women to the reli-gious sense, precisely in order to be able to‘save’ them. In this context, the religious sense

or religiosity means […] man’s exact positiontowards his own destiny in terms of con-sciousness and his attempt to live it in practi-cal terms.”22

This shows the need for the Mystery to con-tinue being present in history. For if Christdoes not remain contemporaneous, if He doesnot go on challenging man, man returns to be-ing irremediably alone, and each of us knowshow far we can fall if we are alone.

How can we free ourselves from this inex-orable decay?

4. CHRIST SAVES THE RELIGIOUS SENSE

None of us, by our own efforts, can keepourselves in the right position, even though theencounter with Christ opened us up to it. Theonly response to our fragility is the real per-manence of His presence.

The historical situation in which we findourselves today in the West is, in this sense, atrue challenge for Christianity as well, forced toshow the truth of its claim that it answers theneeds of the human being. Not just any versionof Christianity will be capable of reawakeninghumanity (we know this well). Neither a Chris-tianity reduced to ideas (“notional” in New-man’s term) nor a Christianity reduced toethics will be able to bring people out of theirtorpor (in his address to the Roman Curia lastDecember 20th, Benedict XVI spoke of the“sleep of a faith grown tired”), out of the evermore egregious flattening out of their desire, oftheir original impetus, of their gusto in living.It is in Christianity’s capacity to continuallyreawaken the human that its authenticity willbe shown.

Only a Christianity that preserves its originalnature, its unmistakable traits of contempora-neous historical presence–the contemporane-ousness of Christ–can be equal to the real needof men and women, and is therefore able tosave the religious sense. It is not a question ofaccepting a postulate but of discovering a hu-man newness in action: the Christian an-nouncement submits itself to this test, to thetribunal of human experience. When, in the lifeof people who accept belonging to Christ

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through the reality of the Church, con-cretely and persuasively emerging in their ex-perience (charism), something happens thatthey could not achieve by their own powers–anunforeseeable reawakening and fulfillment ofhumanity in all its fundamental dimensions–then Christianity is shown to be credible and itsclaim is made verifiable. “For every tree isknown by its own fruit”23–this is the formida-ble epistemological criterion that Jesus Himselfoffers us. The change generated by the rela-tionship with Christ present is such that St.Paul cannot but exclaim, “So whoever is inChrist is a new creation: the old things havepassed away; behold, new things have come.”24

The new creature is the person in whom the re-ligious sense is realized in its–otherwise im-possible–fullness: reason freedom, affection,and desire.

“Christ is so beautiful that He draws me to-tally!”25 exclaimed Jacopone da Todi. Thisbeauty, as splendor of the truth, is the onlything able to reawaken people’s desire and tomove their affection so powerfully as to makecontinually possible the openness of their rea-son to the reality before them (“The conditionfor reason to be reason is that affectivity investsit and so moves the whole person”26). The at-traction of Christ facilitates the openness thatwould be impossible without Him (it doesn’tachieve it automatically). Christ’s contempo-raneousness thus allows reason all its openness,enabling it to reach an intelligence of reality un-known before. All things, all circumstances,even the most banal, are exalted, become signs,“speak,” are interesting to live. The personawakened in this way and sustained by thepresence of Christ can finally live as a religiousperson, can endure the vertigo of life, circum-stance after circumstance, because she or he isable to “enter any situation whatsoever [in anycircumstance], profoundly tranquil, with apromise [or capacity] of peace and joy,”27 saidFr. Giussani. Thus, Christ’s contemporane-ousness is indispensable for living the religioussense fully, that is to say, for having the right at-titude before reality.

If, on the contrary, Christ is not lived as con-temporaneous, the consequences are not long

in coming. The lack of experience of Christ’scontemporaneousness makes us return to thesituation before the Christian encounter and,even if we keep talking of Christ (as often hap-pens), we reduce Him de facto to one of themany variants of the religious sense: “To themodern person [this is a truly acute observa-tion by Fr. Giussani, that makes us keenly awareof the situation in which we live], ‘faith’ wouldgenerically be nothing other than an aspect of‘religiosity,’ a kind of feeling with which to livethe restless search for one’s origin and destiny,which is precisely the most appealing elementof every ‘religion.’ All modern consciousness isbent on uprooting the hypothesis of Christianfaith from man, and on reducing faith to thedynamic of the religious sense and to the con-cept of religiosity. This confusion unfortu-nately also penetrates the mentality of theChristian people.”28

There is an essential and irreducible differ-ence between the dynamics of faith and thoseof the religious sense. “While religiosity is bornof the need for meaning awakened by the im-pact with reality, faith is the acknowledgmentof an exceptional Presence that corresponds to-tally to our destiny, and adherence to this Pres-ence. Faith is acknowledging as true what a his-torical Presence says of itself.”29 This differencecan be seen above all in the way reason moves.In Christian faith, there is no longer a reasonthat explains, but a reason that opens itself–per-ceiving itself at last fulfilled in its dynamics–tothe self-revelation of God Himself. One un-derstands, then, why Fr. Giussani said that “thewhole problem of intelligence [not of feeling ormood] is there” 30 in the episode of John andAndrew. Faith is an act of reason moved by theexceptional nature of a Presence: “Christianfaith is the memory of a historical fact: a Mansaid of Himself something that others acceptedas true and that now I, too, accept because ofthe exceptional way in which that fact stillreaches me. Jesus is a man who said, ‘I am theway, the truth, and the life.’ He is a Fact thathappened in history: a child, born of woman,registered in the Bethlehem birth registry, who,once He had grown up, announced He wasGod: ‘The Father and I are one.’ Paying atten-


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tion to what that Man did and said, so as tocome to say, ‘I believe in this Man,’ adhering toHis Presence and affirming what He said as thetruth: this is faith.”31

So, “just think what a challenge the claim offaith represents for the modern mentality: thata man should exist–to whom I can say“You”–who says, ‘Without Me, you can donothing,’ that a man should exist who is Man-God. We can never measure ourselves com-pletely against this claim; today, neither thepeople nor the greatest philosophers tackle thisproblem any longer, and if they do so at all, itis in order to consolidate the negative precon-ception inherited from the dominant mental-ity. In other words, the answer to the Christianproblem ‘Who is Jesus?’ is deduced from pre-constituted conceptions about the human per-son and the world. Yet Jesus’ answer is, ‘Look atMy works;’ in other words, ‘Look at Me,’ whichis the same. Instead, people don’t look Him inthe face; they eliminate Him before taking Himinto consideration. Unbelief is therefore acorollary deriving from a preconception; it isan applied preconception, not the conclusionof a rational inquiry.”32

But what interests us above all now is to fo-cus on the consequence of refusing the modeGod chose to respond to the person’s need fortotal meaning, a need inherent in the religioussense. “Without acknowledgment of the Mys-

tery present, night advances, confusion ad-vances, and–as such–at the level of freedom–rebellion advances, or disappointment so fillsup the measure that it is as if we no longer ex-pected anything, apart from the furtive satis-faction or the furtive answer to a brief re-quest.”33 Without acknowledgment of Christ’scontemporaneousness, the true humanity, thedrive of the religious sense fails. Instead, thosewho acknowledge it see their humanitybrought beyond their wildest imagination:“Saying that our consciousness, our way ofthinking and our affection, our way of lovingare converted to Christ means that this con-sciousness and affection are continuallybrought, transported where they would nothave imagined, continually solicited to go outof themselves, they go beyond themselves, arecontinually brought into a terrain, a territorybeyond anything conceived or felt before. It isalways into the unknown that they are intro-duced; it is a measure that broadens: con-sciousness and affectivity are introduced con-tinually into an unforeseen horizon, beyondtheir own measure,”34 and life acquires breath-ing room, import, and intensity never beforeexperienced.

With this, each of us has the criterion forverifying our journey of faith, our educationto the religious sense–the exaltation of ouroriginal humanity. “Amen, I say to you, »

Eugène Burnand, Peter and John Runningto the Sepulchre (1898),Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

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unless you turn and becomelike children, you will not enterthe kingdom of heaven.”35 Thiscould be the summary formula fora true education of the religioussense. And this is why Christ callsblessed those who have it: “Blessedare the poor in spirit, for theirs isthe kingdom of heaven.”36 Thesepassages show us the true purposeof this education: to throw us sowide open that we can be filledwith a thing we ourselves cannot


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[The “I” is Reborn in an Encounter], BUR, Milano 2010,p. 162.14 L. Giussani, Time is short. Exercises of the Fraternity ofCommunion and Liberation, 1994.15 L. Giussani, L’autocoscienza del cosmo [The Self Aware-ness of the Cosmos], BUR, Milano 2000, p. 17.16 L. Giussani, L’io rinasce in un incontro (1986-1987), op.cit., p. 182.17 Cfr. Mario Vittorino, In epistola ad Ephesios, II, 4, 14.18 L. Giussani, L’io rinasce in un incontro, op. cit., pp. 206-207.19 L. Giussani, L’autocoscienza del cosmo, op. cit., pp.17-18.20 L. Giussani, Why the Church?, McGill-Queen’s Uni-versity Press, Montreal, 2001, pp. 7-8.21 Ibidem, p. 8.22 L. Giussani, L’attrattiva Gesù, op. cit., pp. 286-287.23 L. Giussani, Why the Church?, 147.24 Lk. 6:44.25 2 Cor. 5:17.26 Jacopone da Todi, «Lauda XC», in Le Laude, LibreriaEditrice Fiorentina, Firenze 1989, p. 313.27 L. Giussani, L’uomo e il suo destino [Man and His Des-tiny], Marietti, Genova 1999, p. 117.28 L. Giussani, The Religious Sense, op. cit., p. 106. 29 L. Giussani - S. Alberto - J. Prades, Generare tracce nellastoria del mondo [Generating Traces in the History of theWorld], Rizzoli, Milano 1998, p. 22.30 Ivi.31 L. Giussani, Is It Possible to Live This Way? Vol. 2:Hope, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 2008,p. 105.32 L. Giussani - S. Alberto – J. Prades, Generare tracce nellastoria del mondo, op. cit., pp. 22-23.33 Ibidem, p. 23.34 L. Giussani, Tutta la terra desidera il tuo volto [All theEarth Desires Your Face], San Paolo, Cinisello Balsamo(Mi) 2000, p. 124.35 L. Giussani, La familiarità con Cristo [Familiarity withChrist], San Paolo, Cinisello Balsamo (Mi) 2008, p. 135.36 Mt. 18:3.37 Mt. 5:3.

1 Giacomo. Leopardi, “Night Song of a Nomadic Shep-herd in Asia”, in Selected Prose and Poetry, translated byIris Origo and John Heath-Stubbs, Oxford UniversityPress, London 1966, p. 275.2 Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense, McGill-Queen’sUniversity Press, Montreal, 1997, p. 45. The religioussense is “man’s natural movement towards his First Be-ginning and Final End; a vague intuitive awareness thathe is both responsible and at the same time dependenton Another; a natural, inchoate utterance of the soulabout its mysterious relationship with the Supreme Be-ing; a spontaneous gesture by human nature, in an atti-tude of adoration and supplication; the soul’s urgentlonging for a personal Infinite Being, like the eye’s long-ing for light or a flower’s need of the sun.” It was in 1957wh en, in his pastoral letter for Lent that the then arch-bishop of Milan, Giovanni Battista Montini used thesewords. A few months later, Luigi Giussani published thefirst edition of his text The Religious Sense; exactly 40years later, Fr. Giussani completed his last and definitiveversion of this work (which is also the first volume of hisfundamental Trilogy).3 Cf. R. Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man. AChristian Interpretation, vol. II, London-New York 1943,p. 6.4 L. Giussani, Un avvenimento di vita, cioè una storia [AnEvent of Life, that is, a History], Edit-Il Sabato, Roma/Mi-lano 1993, p. 38.5 L. Giussani, L’attrattiva Gesù [The Attraction that is Je-sus], BUR, Milano 1999, p. 287.6 L. Giussani, Letter to the Fraternity, October 7, 1997.7 L. Giussani, The Religious Sense, op. cit., p. 97.8 Ibidem, p. 117.9 Ibidem, p. 97.10 J. Ratzinger, transl. Henry Taylor, Truth and Tolerance:Christian Belief and World Religions, Ignatius Press, SanFrancisco, 2004, p. 136. 11 L. Giussani, The Religious Sense, op. cit., p. 10.12 Benedict XVI, Address of His Holiness Benedict XVIto the 24th Plenary Session of the Pontifical Council forthe Laity, Vatican City, Friday, May 21, 2010.13 L.Giussani, L’io rinasce in un incontro (1986-1987)

produce, but must accept, wel-come, and embrace as gift. Onlythose with this simplicity of achild, this poverty of spirit, havethe disposition to welcome it.

The work that awaits us this yearon the text of The Religious Senseis this crucial. Our seriousness intackling this work will determineour realization as persons and thecontribution we can give to ourfellow men and women.

The cover of the book.

Notes

the religious sense, verification of the faith

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