Living Without Fear
English. Italian Video. Spanish.
Julián Carrón - Is Modern Life an Illness? A Provocative Dialogue with Julián Carrón on Faith, Fear, and the Search for Meaning in a Secular World.
Speaker: “Living in Our Time” is the title of a book you will find in the bookshop. We are honored to have Don Julián Carrón here to talk about it with Professor Nicola Campagnoli.
Interviewer: Thank you for being here, Julián; if you don't mind, we can address each other informally. Thank you for accepting our invitation to this festival, now in its seventh year and curated by Valentina Conti. The occasion couldn't be better, given that this year's theme is “Passions.” Let's start with your latest book, Living in Our Time: Living Without Fear in an Age of Uncertainty, a three-way dialogue edited by Alessandra Gerolin. To begin, could you briefly tell us how this dialogue came about?
Julián Carrón: Good evening, everyone. The book came about very simply. For almost random reasons, I found myself at an event with Professor Charles Taylor. Listening to us talk, he recognized a possible answer to the theme he had been studying for years: secularization. Subsequently, we decided to organize an exhibition for the Rimini Meeting and involved another figure of great cultural importance, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.
We started working, but unfortunately, COVID-19 arrived, and we could no longer meet in person. We, therefore, organized a series of written interviews, asking each person questions based on their respective studies and positions. This work first resulted in an exhibition and then the book. When we realized that the material we had collected was much more extensive than what we had used for the exhibition and a video we had made, the idea for the book was born, driven by the desire to share our dialogue with a wider audience.
Interviewer: At the heart of your dialogue is a look at the era we are living in. Pope Francis has called our time an “epochal change.” You, too, in other writings such as La Bellezza Disarmata (Unarmed Beauty), have often spoken of this change, emphasizing how the Enlightenment's attempt to save the fundamental values of society—such as community and the state—by uprooting them from their religious foundations, considered the cause of intolerance and conflict, has failed. This failure is now clear for all to see. In your opinion, where is this crisis of our time, also understood as a crisis of passion for living and a taste for life, most clearly manifested?
Julián Carrón: I think this crisis is a common experience. We see it in the most basic relationships: the difficulty of relationships between parents and children, students and teachers, and colleagues. It is as if that cultural background, that community of shared values that previously allowed us to understand each other, has disappeared. This inability to understand each other has consequences that reach the dramatic extremes we are experiencing today, such as wars. International law is also in crisis, precisely because this common basis, which was the very purpose of the Enlightenment, is lacking. Its aim was to establish a universal way of thinking, free from religious confessions but originating in the Christian faith. After the wars of religion and Protestantism shattered the unity of Europe, the question was, “What can we still share?” The answer was reason. Kant's famous book, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, expressed precisely this desire for a common foundation, which then led to achievements such as human rights.
Today, all these achievements are increasingly at risk. This is our time, the point we have reached. As Charles Taylor states, it is a fact that we live in a world where religion is just one of many options available for interpreting reality, with no single option having precedence over the others. We live in a multicultural society. To give an example, I happened to find myself in a town near Salerno, a place where I would never have expected it, and there I met Buddhists, Muslims, a Protestant pastor, and representatives of faiths I didn't even know. This pluralism is now everywhere. Who doesn't encounter it at work, on vacation, or in any other relationship they establish?
Interviewer: If I may interrupt you, one thing that strikes me about your dialogue is that while many today complain about the collapse and fluidity of the present, feeling terrified, you seem to take a different perspective. I think, in my own small way, of my mother-in-law. She is genuinely frightened by the times we are living in; she feels completely overwhelmed by what she sees.
Julián Carrón: That is precisely why the subtitle of the book speaks of “fear.” Your mother-in-law's reaction is not that of an intellectual or a person in a public role; it is the experience of someone who lives life. This perception is not isolated but is a very widespread feeling. That is why we chose the expression “living without fear in an age of uncertainty” to describe the condition you have just illustrated.
Interviewer: Exactly. In your dialogue, however, this historical moment is not read as a failure or hostility but rather as a provocation for you and your interlocutors. In this regard, I would like to read a passage from your book that struck me: "I think that today's crisis is paradoxically bringing out our humanity more clearly. The context in which we are immersed, characterized by a kind of decomposition of the human, brings to light the ultimate irreducibility of the person and triggers all the need for meaning that characterizes it.
Perhaps in a more mundane era with fewer challenges, we would not have felt our humanity as we perceive it today.” Now, I would like to take the discussion to a more concrete level. As a high school teacher—and I see many colleagues here—I observe these same questions of meaning in my students. The crisis you mention provokes very strong questions in them: “What is the point of getting up in the morning? Why do I have to study these subjects? What is the meaning of my life?”
While you see these questions in a positive light, I perceive these young people as sick, almost afflicted with a pathology. A mother to whom I pointed out that these were the same questions Leopardi asked himself replied, “But I wouldn't want my daughter to be like Leopardi, unhappy and sick.” My question is, where is the positive aspect of this crisis?
Julián Carrón: That is a crucial question, one that I have returned to on several occasions. For that mother, her daughter's questions are a pathology. The challenge of our time requires us to face such a provocation and ask ourselves, is the fact that a person rediscovers these questions a sign of pathology or, on the contrary, an indication of their ontology, of the very nature of their person? After years of a crisis that we could define as nihilism, one would expect a flattening of questions, a horizon in which everything is already defined. Instead, we are witnessing the opposite.
We see a surprising irreducibility emerging, especially in ordinary people. I am thinking of rappers, characters who live with the utmost intensity, who sometimes achieve success and everything they have dreamed of, only to find themselves with a dissatisfaction that testifies to their very irreducibility. When Leopardi spoke of this, he felt this inexhaustibility deeply. He expressed it in a way that, ever since I read it, I quote at every opportunity. He said that even though man possesses the entire universe, he feels that everything is “small and insignificant” compared to the capacity of his soul. Jesus also said it succinctly: “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world if he loses himself?”
For Leopardi, feeling boredom and nostalgia is not a symptom of illness but the most obvious sign of a person's greatness. I have had the opportunity to talk to specialists who deal with youth distress, and they themselves admit, and write, that the psychological tools at their disposal are not able to fully understand what is defined as “pathology.” So I wonder, could it be that it is not a pathology at all but the greatest sign of the uniqueness and irreducibility of the person, revealing our greatness, as Leopardi said? I am even more struck by a phrase from St. Augustine that I often repeat.
Addressing God, he says, “You clearly show the greatness you wanted to give to rational creatures: nothing less than You can satisfy them.” If we cannot find satisfaction in anything less than God, does this reveal our pathology or our ontology? Everyone can choose the hypothesis they prefer, but looking at these questions as a pathology or as the profound nature of our being leads to radically different experiences of life.
Interviewer: May I interject? Doesn't this attitude also determine the way we adults relate to our children or young people? Often, it would be more convenient for us if this abyss, this infinite desire they express, were appeased. We prefer to control the situation, perhaps with a small response or by buying them something to calm them down.
Julián Carrón: In this regard, I would like to share the testimony of a mother that I received while preparing for this meeting. She wrote to me, "When we returned home after a wonderful vacation, the routine began again. My eldest daughter, who is eight years old, began to have long crying spells every day. From what she said, it seemed that she didn’t want to live for less than what she had experienced on vacation and that everyday life was too restrictive for her. Our conversations were very interesting, but at the same time, finding myself at home alone with four children, her crying frightened me because I didn’t always have the opportunity to have a conversation that lived up to her desires.
So, one afternoon, I suggested we watch a movie to dry her tears." Her response stunned me: “Mom, don't you understand that watching a movie won't make my crying go away? When it ends, I'll start again.” Trying to dismiss children's questions by offering them a movie means treating them as if they had no irreducibility of their own. It is as if we were not dealing with a unique “I.” We cannot be the ones to decide what is appropriate for their crying or their impatience, treating their desire as an illness to be sedated with a tranquilizer.
Thank God, today we are faced with the irreducibility of our children and young people, and we should be the first to rejoice because we cannot reduce it to a convenient solution. When we offer an answer that does not meet their needs, we are not only deceiving them; we are putting ourselves in a corner. And this raises a question: that mother will never understand her daughter unless she first takes her own personal, unyielding nature seriously. Then we complain about certain news stories involving young people that leave us speechless. But if a girl like that cannot find someone who understands what is happening to her and her needs are continually dismissed, she is forced to live through this situation alone. We can give her everything, even the superfluous, but if we deny her the company of someone capable of perceiving the depth of her question, it is a dialogue between deaf people. We deny her the essential.
This is the trepidation of our moment, and that is why we talk about “living without fear.” This challenge calls on each of us to come to terms with our own irreducibility, without wanting to erase it. It is in dialogue that we verify whether we find someone capable of understanding us or whether we are capable of understanding those we meet. Otherwise, as is often the case today, the dialogue is only between deaf people. After the collapse of the most basic evidence, how can we recover it? Not because we were taught them at school but because they spring from the depths of experience. That little girl will never forget, for the rest of her life, the nature of her need. The real question, for young people and adults alike, is whether they will find people who can answer their questions. The difference between us and any other being, from a stone to a dog, is that they already have within them everything they need to live their nature. Humans do not.
As Dostoevsky had already intuited, the bee knows its formula, the ant too, but humans do not know the formula of their being; it is a mystery to themselves. We are talking about our nature, not a pathology.
Interviewer: Speaking of a “dialogue between the deaf,” I was struck by another characteristic of our age, which tragically emerged in the recent murder of an activist. It is a limitation in the conception of freedom and public debate: freedom is understood not as listening but as the possibility of using one's own positions as a club against the other, without what the other says having the slightest effect on us. Entering into the nature of the other, and not into their presumed pathology, requires time, listening, and patience, as you say in the book.
Julián Carrón: Above all, it requires loyalty to oneself. The little girl in the story is not satisfied with an attempt at an answer that does not satisfy her. It is obvious. Think of how many rappers, starting from humble family backgrounds, achieve everything they have ever wanted, yet still find it insufficient. But how many are so loyal to their own experience that they admit it? The first question is fidelity to what we perceive in our experience and cannot deny. I think what saved me was precisely this loyalty to my humanity. I didn't want to sweep under the rug what I saw as unresolved in myself, and I had this tenderness toward myself so as not to deceive myself. This set me to work, pushed me to seek answers for my humanity. This is where freedom comes into play, right from the start.
Interviewer: Can you give an example of how you used this loyalty to your humanity to find answers?
Julián Carrón: Of course. When you have an image of fulfillment in your head and you finally achieve it, you realize—and I haven't found a more adequate expression than Leopardi's—that “everything is small and insignificant compared to the capacity of the soul.” I couldn't deny this. The real problem in life, for me, didn't start when things went wrong—there I could always think, “This time it went badly; next time, it will go very well”—but when life said yes to you, when you achieved a goal, and it wasn't enough. I remember the story of an actor from Mad Men who won an Oscar at 27.
When he returned home after the celebrations, he stood in front of the statuette and couldn't sleep. He thought, “I could have spent my whole life, until I was 90, looking for this statuette, only to find that it's not enough for me. At least I found out at 27.” This is the same thought I've had many times. Or think of Taylor Swift, who, after winning two Grammys, asks herself, “What now?” It's the same experience as Pavese, who on the day he received the Strega Prize, at the moment of his apotheosis in Rome, felt completely empty.
What do we do with this experience? It is universal, from children to adults. Everyone can verify how loyal they have been to this reality. When you begin to realize this, you understand that the answer cannot be just any answer because your desire for fulfillment is irreducible. This is where I began to perceive the reasonableness of the Christian response. As Wittgenstein says, if you only deal with the things of the world, it is not enough, unless you are “visited” by mystery. Pavese gives a name to this irreducibility, to this infinite desire that man cannot formulate: “Man seeks the infinite in pleasures and will not settle for less.” Realizing this made me understand even more what was at stake in what Jesus had said, the only one who had the audacity to pose the problem so succinctly: “What good is it for man to gain the whole world if he then loses himself?”
If Jesus had not answered the question he himself had asked, he would not be credible. And he did not begin to answer this problem in an abstract way but by responding to hunger. After the multiplication of the loaves, the people, exalted, seek him again to make him king. I cannot say this without being moved, thinking of Christ's passion for the fate of those people. He looks at them and says, "Friends, man does not live by bread alone.
This is not enough for your irreducibility.” And with an even greater gesture of passion, he challenges them: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, unless you let me enter into you, you cannot have life." Faced with this provocation, instead of recognizing that finally, there was someone credible because he addressed the only issue of interest to man, many abandoned him. And he did not spare even his closest friends this question: “Do you also want to leave?” Without delving deeply into my own unyielding nature, I would never have grasped the reasonableness of faith. Then, each person must verify whether what He says is so true that it satisfies all the hunger and thirst in their heart. For this reason, it is shocking that someone had the courage to say that this hunger and thirst are not a pathology but the opposite, a blessing—“Blessed are you who hunger and thirst, for you will be filled.” Do we realize this?
The One who made us so great calls us “blessed” because we have this hunger, so that He can fill us with His presence, and we treat it as a disease. Perhaps we have lost something along the way, we who have received the Christian message. When one realizes this, then one understands that history, with its secularization and multiplicity of responses, is perhaps not a misfortune but an enormous possibility. It is an opportunity to rediscover the true nature of the Christian event, freely, not out of cultural habit. If we had censored the question, a reduced “I” would be satisfied with anything. But it is precisely because our need is irreducible that we can finally come to terms with it, knowing that there is One who has looked it in the face and challenged us, saying that if we let him in, we can have that life that nothing else can give us.
Interviewer: In this regard, I was struck when you stated in the book that the problem with Christianity today is not so much the proclamation itself as the care of one's own humanity.
Julián Carrón: Exactly, which is why the point we were talking about is so decisive. I was struck by a comment by Fr. Luigi Giussani in which he observed that we have been deprived of our religiosity. By this, he meant that we have been deprived of all those questions that would make faith reasonable because we have been educated only to repeat gestures, formulas, and rituals. I remember attending a school when I was ten years old where, by definition, we had to go to Mass. We were all obliged to do so.
The result was that the majority of people who left that school were vaccinated against faith for the rest of their lives; they never went again. Why? Because if faith is not presented as a response to one's own humanity, allowing all its problematic and irreducible aspects to emerge, its meaning is not perceived. God is not an intruder who meddles in life; he wanted to be involved in our existence to the point of sending his Son precisely because, as St. Augustine says, “You made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Our irreducibility is not a pathology but our ontology, the very nature of our being.
The Mystery created us for a fullness that we could never achieve on our own but which we can receive by grace. It is a deeply human experience: when you meet the person you love, you touch an intensity of life that you and the other person could not have given yourselves on your own, with your own energies alone. Accepting such a presence in life is not an intrusion but the most beautiful thing that can happen. And this is only a prelude to the true encounter with God made man, the only one capable of keeping the promise: “Whoever follows me will have a hundredfold here below and eternal life.” The other decisive issue related to our irreducibility is death.
We tend to censor it, but if we do not face it, we live constantly with a sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, full of fear. I was very surprised, in a conversation with President Luciano Violante, to hear him say that the problem of death is actually the problem of life: not having an adequate reason to live, we are unable to face death. It occurred to me that the most concise answer to this question was given by St. Paul, pointing to a presence so significant for life that it can also respond to death: “For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”
Who can say this about their loved one? No human “you” is capable of bringing us through death. For someone to say, “For me, to live is Christ,” and for this to prove true even in the face of death, to the point of being able to look upon it as a gain, means that they have encountered the only one who has conquered death, passing through it without sparing himself, precisely to take away our fear. If we do not resolve this, we will always live under the weight of this tragic anguish. Each person, according to their own availability and journey, must see how they respond to this question and verify whether their solution is such as to take away their fear of death. Otherwise, they will have to continue to deal with it.
Interviewer: T.S. Eliot comes to mind when he writes that “we may lose our life in living it.” We are so full of things to do, engaged in a thousand tasks that we often simply endure, without, however, undertaking that journey of experience, comparison, and questioning that you speak of. I think of a song by Guccini, “Gulliver,” in which the hero, after traveling the world and living countless experiences, concludes with resignation, “For a long time now, nothing can be learned at sea.” It's like saying, “I've seen everything, but I haven't experienced anything, and so I'm afraid.”
Julián Carrón: That's the tragedy. If we adults don't take this journey first, we won't be able to introduce young people to it. One of the things that struck me most, having recently returned to teaching, is the example of a girl named Giorgia. One day I asked her to tell me something nice about her weekend, and she said, “Yesterday, I got a tip.” I asked her why that was so nice, and she replied, “Because I worked hard and was very attentive.” She worked at a vocational school where they do internships. I asked her again, “And while you were there, busy serving customers, were you looking at the clock hoping it would end?”
She replied, “No, I was completely immersed in what I was doing.” I was moved to see a 16- or 17-year-old girl who had already begun to find joy in life. I said to her, "Think of all the hours you will have to work in your life. If you start enjoying them like this, you've already won before the tip even arrives. The tip is just the icing on the cake because the work has already fulfilled you.” But then she said the decisive sentence: “Teacher, the problem is that everything in me is reset, you know?
Nothing remains." And she was right. Two weeks later, I brought up the subject again, and she didn't remember anything about that experience, which I had told half the world about in the meantime. This is the point: if you don't learn to treasure the experience you have, if you don't realize its significance by judging it, everything is reset. You can do many things and feel satisfaction but without learning anything. And you come to the conclusion you were talking about: after so many experiences, nothing remains.
Interviewer: This brings me to a very practical example. In high schools, we receive constant circulars and decrees. The latest, which is in all the newspapers, is to remove cell phones from the classroom. On the one hand, it may be right to say, “You can't use your cell phone for five hours.” But a friend of mine who is a neuropsychiatrist made a keen observation: “Have you ever tried asking kids what they experienced during those hours when they weren't using their cell phones?” It's something we adults don't do. We impose the rule, but we don't value the experience that comes with it. Do you agree?
Julián Carrón: Of course. If young people don't perceive the good that comes from that rule, they will only experience it as an imposition. If, on the other hand, as someone told me, they begin to notice that during breaks without cell phones, they talk more to each other, then they begin to see the reasonableness of the rule. Too often, we put the rule before the event that arouses interest and love, from which the rule then follows as a consequence. No one has to impose a rule on a person in love to walk with their beloved; they do it because they want to.
The point is that if we don't offer young people something more attractive, in the end, all that remains is the rule. And when we have to resort to rules, it is already a defeat because it means that we have not managed to offer something more interesting than what a cell phone offers. The problem of education is always the problem of adults, just as the problem of children is the problem of parents. It is a matter of reversing the method. How did God begin in the history of salvation? With the Ten Commandments?
No, he began by bringing his people out of Egypt. Only after the Jews had experienced his faithfulness, his passion for their freedom, only then did he give them the commandments. It was like saying, “To a God who has done you so much good, who has given you a freedom you did not have, what could be more interesting than loving him with all your heart?” Even if there had been no commandments, anyone who had had that experience could not have acted differently. A lover does not need a rule to be with his beloved.
Interviewer: Well, the format of the Festival of History allows for one hour, which has now passed. We thank Professor Carrón and remind you that at the book table you can find Abitare il Nostro Tempo: Vivere Senza Paura Nell'età Dell'incertezza (Living in Our Time: Living Without Fear in an Age of Uncertainty). Julián will also be signing some copies. Thank you, Julián, and thank you to the festival.
The following notes are provided for educational and informational purposes only. They have been transcribed, translated, and edited by the staff of Epochal Change from a publicly available YouTube video. The author has not reviewed or approved this material. All rights to the original content remain with the respective copyright holders. This transcript is shared under the principles of fair use, with no commercial intent, and solely to foster study, discussion, and cultural exchange.
