The Gift of Self
Costantino Esposito - To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the death of Don Luigi Giussani, I believe the most useful and, above all, the most appropriate way is to highlight the contribution of his thought to the understanding of the human condition in the dramatic and fascinating journey of culture, society, and the Church from the post-World War II period to the present day.
And when I speak of his thought, I do not mean only his theoretical perspective or his doctrinal approach, but above all the way in which his encounter with Christ became a real experience for him and, at the same time, clarified what it means for human beings to experience being—that is, to have awareness of reality and self-awareness.
An analogy may perhaps help to understand what is at stake in this discovery. Think of when the Christian event burst onto the horizon of late antique paganism, in many ways similar to our own time, although the latter has the characteristic of being a paganism reborn after, and often within, a culture of Christian origin. Contemporary pagans are post-Christian, perhaps no longer in dialectic or antagonism with Christianity, but because they have come to regard the Christian tradition—or rather, “Christianity”—as the moral canon of a past that is no longer relevant to present-day life.
In both historical periods, however, Christianity reveals an inestimable advantage: that of being able to rely solely on the humanly surprising novelty of its historical occurrence and, by virtue of this, to touch and conquer the lives of people. And in fact, it may happen that it is precisely in a pagan or post-Christian (or nihilistic) context that it becomes easier to realize this.
There is a passage by Don Giussani that expresses this encounter in a truly vivid way. It is worth reading it in its entirety: “Christianity is an event in which the self encounters and discovers that it is ‘blood-related’ (2 Pt 1:4); it is a fact that reveals the self to itself. 'When I met Christ, I discovered myself as a man,' said the Roman rhetorician Mario Vittorino. For man to be 'saved' means that he recognizes who he is, that he recognizes his destiny and knows how to direct his steps towards it. (...) It is an event—the irruption of something new—that initiates the process by which the self begins to become aware of itself, to take note of the destiny toward which it is heading, of the path it is taking, of the rights it has, of the duties it must respect, of its entire physiognomy” (L. Giussani, S. Alberto, J. Prades, Generare Tracce Nella Storia Del Mondo, Rizzoli, 1998, p. 13).
This kinship between the self and God is striking: they are of the same “nature” (the Greek word is koinonoi, the Latin consortes); they have the same “blood,” the same “flesh.” The flesh of the self is not only its biological body but its irreducible experience, its relationship with the infinite. In Christ's gaze, the great possibility opens up of becoming aware of 'what' the self of each human being is ('and I, who am I?', Leopardi will ask himself in Canto Notturno), at the very moment when the person feels and understands that they exist because they have been torn from nothingness, and not only at the beginning but continuously, in every present moment. The nothingness to which men are inevitably destined, either because their power sooner or later fades from the “political” scene of the world or simply because nature takes its course, leading them towards the end.
Like Christianity, the human self also has the nature of something that “happens,” and when the former reaches the latter, it reveals its irreducible substance: the relationship with the one who gave it being, that is, its existence not only as the outcome or “product” of the biological laws of nature but as the “child” of a father who generated it for itself and made it capable of being “itself,” unique. From that moment on, the human subject is more—much more—than “subjective,” because it discovers an ontological “objectivity,” or to use the most appropriate historical terms, it discovers, like a tenacious trace within itself, the company of another other than itself.
As Alexandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote: “Sometimes I feel clearly that I am not all me. There is something indestructible, something very high! A fragment of the universal Spirit. Don't you feel it?” (Reparto C, Einaudi, 1969, p. 526). But it was the same experience as Augustine, who found his self inhabited by a presence that he himself could not account for or reduce to his subjectivity: “In reality, I myself cannot understand all that I am. So is my soul too narrow to understand itself?” (Confessions, 10.8.15). And it was the same ‘modern’ experience of Descartes' ‘I think,’ which finds in itself, through the idea of infinity, something that precedes it, and without which it could neither doubt nor desire.
Giussani takes up and relaunches this discovery of the self that is inhabited by another self—an I that is more me than myself (again Augustine: “you were inside me and I was outside,” Confessions 10.27,38)—and which, despite all its continuous reductions to a subject-measure of itself and of the world, reaches the point of exploding once again in the age of contemporary nihilism. There, where the need for an ultimate meaning for existence can no longer be forcibly pigeonholed or resolved in the presumptions and performances of a subjectivity that suffocates or neglects its desire for infinity.
But if it is the encounter with Christianity that allows the self to be “liberated,” if it is that encounter that is “the adequate catalyst for knowledge of the self, that which makes possible a clear and stable perception of the self, that allows the self to become operative as self” (L. Giussani, In Cammino, BUR, 2014, p. 106), then this experience constitutes the privileged way to recognize Christianity as a “presence” that happens: “Christ, in fact, presents himself as the answer to what ‘I’ am, and only an attentive, tender, and passionate awareness of myself can open me up and dispose me to recognize, admire, thank, and live Christ. Without this awareness [of what I am], even that of Jesus Christ becomes a mere name” (L. Giussani, All'Origine Della Pretesa Cristiana, Rizzoli, Milan 2001, p. 3).
Rediscovering Christianity as an event of the self—of that which, in me, is infinite and infinitely greater than me—is the opportunity that Giussani offers us so that it may be perceived for what it has always been: responding, by embracing it, to the question of meaning that dwells in the heart of man. But it is an answer that never silences this question; on the contrary, it intensifies it—I would even say it exalts it. Because, ultimately, this question is the gift of the Mystery within us, and it is the sign of the partnership that makes us who we are.
"The Gift of Recognizing Christ as a Presence That Happens and Responds to the Self" - Costantino Esposito
