Peter's Yes
“Morality sinks its roots into Simon’s ‘yes,’ and this ‘yes’ can take root in the soil of the human person only through a dominant Presence: understood, accepted, embraced, and served with all the fervor of a heart that, only this way, can become like a child’s again. Without a Presence, there is no moral act. There is no morality.”
Luigi Giussani - Simon, do you love me? A new morality is born of an encounter.
“Simon, Do You Love Me?”
Chapter 21 of John’s Gospel is the historical scene where a new ethics is born. What unfolds on that beach is the cornerstone of the Christian conception of the human person—the I, in its relationship with God, with life, and with the world. The disciples are coming back at dawn from a wasted night on the lake. They have caught nothing. As they near the shore, they make out a figure tending a fire, and on the fire, they will soon see, are fish set there for them, to meet their hunger. At a certain moment John says to Peter, “It is the Lord!” Then everyone’s eyes are opened. Peter throws himself into the water just as he is and reaches the shore first. The others follow.
They sit down in a circle, in silence. No one speaks, because they all know it is the Lord. Lying on the ground to eat, they exchange a few words, but they are all stunned by the sheer presence of Jesus, the risen Jesus, who had already shown himself to them several times. Simon—whose many mistakes have made him the humblest of the group—lies on the ground in front of the food the Master has prepared. He looks at the one beside him and, with wonder and a tremor he can’t name, sees that it is Jesus. He turns his face away and stays like that, awkward.
Then Jesus speaks to him. Peter’s thought races: “My God, how much reproach I deserve. Now he will say to me, ‘Why did you betray me?’” The betrayal had been the last and worst of his blunders, but his whole life, even in his nearness to the Master, had been turbulent—his temperament impetuous, his self-importance instinctive, his readiness to step forward unmeasured. He saw himself entirely through the lens of his faults. The betrayal had brought all the rest of his errors to the surface—how worthless he was, how weak, weak to the point of pity.
“Simon…”—who knows what shudder ran through him as that word landed in his ear and touched his heart—“Simon…”—and here he must have turned his face toward Jesus—“…do you love me?”
Who would ever have expected that question? Who would have foreseen that word? Peter was a man of forty or fifty, with a wife and children, and yet he stood there childlike before the mystery of this companion he had met by chance. Imagine what it was to be pierced by that gaze that knew him from the inside. “You shall be called Cephas”: his hot temperament had been identified, once and for all, with that word—rock—and his last thought was to picture what the mystery of God, the mystery of this man—the Son of God—would do with that rock, would make of that rock. From their first meeting, Christ had filled his whole soul, his whole heart. With that presence inside him, with the constant memory of him, Peter looked at his wife and children, his coworkers, his friends and strangers, individuals and crowds. He thought, and fell asleep, with that man inside him—a great, immense revelation not yet made clear.
“Simon, do you love me?”
“Yes, Lord, I love you.” How could he say it after everything he had done? That “yes” was the recognition of a supreme excellence, an undeniable excellence, an affection that overwhelmed every other affection. Everything was inscribed in their two gazes. Consistency and inconsistency receded into the background, behind a fidelity that he felt was flesh of his flesh, behind the form of life that this Encounter had shaped in him. There was no rebuke. Only the same question came back: “Simon, do you love me?” Not uncertain now, but afraid and trembling, he answered again, “Yes, I love you.” Then a third time. The third time he had to seek confirmation from Jesus himself: “Yes, Lord, you know it. I love you. For you is all my preference as a man, all the preference of my soul, all the preference of my heart. You are the ultimate preference of life, the supreme excellence of all things. I don’t know how, I don’t know how to say it, I don’t know what it’s like—but in spite of everything I have done, in spite of what I may yet do, I love you.”
This “yes” is the source of morality—the first breath of morality in the arid desert of instinct and pure reaction. Morality sinks its roots into Simon’s “yes,” and this “yes” can take root in the soil of the human person only through a dominant Presence: understood, accepted, embraced, and served with all the fervor of a heart that, only this way, can become like a child’s again. Without a Presence, there is no moral act. There is no morality.
But why is Simon’s “yes” to Jesus the source of morality? Aren’t the criteria of consistency and inconsistency more fundamental? Peter had done all kinds of things, and yet what he felt for Christ was a supreme affection. He understood that everything in him tended toward Christ—that everything gathered itself in those eyes, in that face, in that heart. Past sins could not stand as an objection, nor could every imaginable future inconsistency. Christ was the source, the place where his hope rested. Even if his actions, past or possible, were thrown back at him as accusations, Christ remained, through the fog of those objections, the source of light for his hope. And Peter prized him above everything, from the first moment he felt himself fixed by his gaze, looked at by him. He loved him for this. “Yes, Lord, you know that you are the object of my supreme affection, of my supreme esteem.” Morality is born here.
The expression is general—“Yes, I love you”—but it is as general as it is generative of a way of life that can actually be pursued. “Whoever has this hope in him purifies himself just as he is pure.” Our hope is in Christ, in that Presence which, however distracted and forgetful we are, we can no longer remove—not even the last crumb of it—from the soil of our heart, because of the entire tradition through which he has reached us. It is in him that I have hope, before I have even counted my faults and my virtues. Numerical calculations have no place here. In the relationship with him, numbers have no place; measured and measurable weight has no place; and even all the evil I may yet do has no place either—none of it can usurp the primary title held, in the eyes of Christ, by Simon’s “yes,” which I have made my own.
Then a surge rises from inside us, like a breath from the chest that intoxicates the whole person and moves them to act, that makes them want to act more justly. It bursts up from the depths of the heart—the flower of the desire for justice, for true and authentic love, for the capacity for selflessness. Just as the beginning of every move we make is not an analysis of what the eyes see, but an embrace of what the heart awaits, so perfection is not the fulfillment of laws, but adherence to a Presence. Only the person who lives this hope in Christ keeps going, all life long, in asceticism, in the effort toward the good. Even when he is plainly contradictory, he desires the good. This always prevails, in the sense that it is the final word about himself, about his day, about what he does, about what he has done, about what he will do. The man who lives this hope in Christ persists in asceticism. Morality is a continuous striving toward the perfect that arises from an Event in which a relationship with the divine, with the Mystery, is marked.
The Ultimate Reason for the “Yes”
What is the true reason for Simon’s “yes” to Christ? Why is the “yes” spoken to Jesus worth more than the enumeration of all one’s errors and the list of all the future errors that human weakness implies? Why is this “yes” more decisive, and greater, than every moral responsibility translated into its particulars, into concrete practice? The answer to these questions reveals the ultimate essence of the Mission from the Father. Christ is the One sent by the Father; he is the One who reveals the Father to humanity and to the world. “This is true life: that they may know you, the only true God, and the One you have sent, Jesus Christ.” The most important thing is that they may know you, that they may love you, because this You is the meaning of life. “Yes, I love you,” Peter said. And the reason for this “yes” was that he had glimpsed in those eyes that had fixed on him the first time—and so many other times in the days and years that followed—who God was, who Yahweh was, the true Yahweh: mercy.
In Jesus, God’s relationship with his creature is revealed to him as love and therefore as mercy. Mercy is the Mystery’s attitude toward any weakness, error, or forgetfulness on the part of the human person: God, in the face of any crime committed by a man, loves him. This is what Simon felt; from this springs his “Yes, I love you.” The meaning of the world and of history is the mercy of Christ, Son of the Father, sent by the Father to die for us. In Milosz’s play, when Miguel Mañara goes to him every day to lament his past sins, the Abbot, at a certain point, almost impatient, says: “Stop with these whiny complaints. None of this ever existed.” What do you mean, “never existed”? Miguel had murdered, raped, been unjust… “None of this ever existed. He alone is.”
He, Jesus, turns to us, makes himself an Encounter for us, and asks us only one thing: not “what have you done?” but “do you love me?” To love him above everything else, then, doesn’t mean I haven’t sinned, or that I won’t sin tomorrow. How strange. It takes infinite power to be this mercy—an infinite power from which, in this earthly world, in the time and space we are given to live, in the years, few or many, that we have, we borrow, we draw joy. Because a man, conscious of all his smallness, is joyful in the face of the announcement of this mercy: Jesus is mercy. He is sent by the Father to make us know that the essence of God has mercy as its supreme characteristic toward humanity. “You have bent down over our wounds and healed us,” says a Preface of the Ambrosian Liturgy, “giving us a medicine stronger than our wounds, a mercy greater than our guilt. Thus even sin, by virtue of your invincible love, has served to raise us to divine life.”
From this joy springs peace, the very possibility of peace. Even in all our misfortunes, in all our wickedness, in all our inconsistencies, in all our weakness—in that mortal weakness which is the human person—we can really breathe and long for peace, generate peace, generate respect for others. And to respect another is to look at him with another Presence in mind. “Christians,” the second-century Letter to Diognetus says, “treat one another with a respect toward others that is inconceivable.” The word respect (respectus, from re-spicio) shares the same root as aspicio (“to look”), and the re- means that one keeps one’s gaze turned toward the object—as a person walking forward keeps the eyes fixed on what lies ahead. Respect means looking at one person while keeping another in mind. It’s like the way a teacher looks at a child when the mother is standing nearby: she handles the child with more care, supposing she has any modesty left at all (perhaps even this has been lost today).
Without respect for what one handles, for what is supposed to serve me, for what I take hold of so that it may serve me, there is no proper relationship with anything. But respect can’t arise from the fact that what I have in front of me serves me—from that angle, I dominate it. No, respect breaks through what I use. So work itself takes on a nobility, a greater lightness of spirit, even amid all the troubles we get out of bed with. The renewal of this awareness is morning prayer. A man who looks at his wife perceiving and recognizing the Other, Jesus, within and beyond his wife’s figure, can show her respect and veneration. He can hold her freedom in high esteem, because that freedom is a relationship with the infinite, a relationship with Jesus.
The Beginning of Human Morality Is an Act of Love
Simon’s “yes” to Jesus cannot be considered the mere expression of a feeling. It is the beginning of a moral path that either opens with that “yes” or does not open at all. The beginning of human morality is not the analysis of the phenomena that crowd the existence of the I, nor the analysis of human behavior in view of the common good. That can be the start of an abstract secular morality, but not of human morality. As Saint Thomas notes, “the life of a man consists in the affection that principally sustains it and in which he finds his greatest satisfaction.” The beginning of a human morality is an act of love. For this, a Presence is needed—the presence of someone who touches our very being, who gathers up all our energy and stirs it by drawing it toward a good that is unknown yet desired and awaited: that good which is Mystery.
The dialogue between Jesus and Peter ends in a strange way. Peter, who is about to follow Jesus, is worried about the younger disciple, John, who was like a son to him. “When he saw him, he said to Jesus, ‘Lord, what about him?’ Jesus replied, ‘Don’t worry about him. You follow me.’” That “yes” is given to a Presence who says: “Follow me. Hand over your life.” Jesu, tibi vivo, Jesu tibi morior, Jesu sive vivo sive morior, tuus sum. Whether you live or die, you are mine. You belong to me. I made you. I am your Destiny. I am the meaning of you and of the world.
The protagonist of morality is the whole person, the whole I. And the person has as its law a word that we all believe we know, and whose meaning, after a long time and with a modicum of fidelity to what is original in us, we begin to glimpse: love. The person has love as its law. “God, the Being, is love,” Saint John writes. Love is a moved judgment about a Presence connected to Destiny. It is a judgment, the way one says, “This is Mont Blanc,” “this is a great friend of mine.” Love is a moved judgment about a Presence connected to my Destiny—a Presence I discover, glimpse, and sense as connected to my Destiny. When John and Andrew saw him for the first time and heard him say, “Come to my house. Come and see,” and stayed listening to him for hours, they did not understand, but they sensed that this person was connected to their Destiny. They had heard everyone who spoke in public; they had heard the opinions of all the parties. But only this Man was connected to their Destiny.
Christian morality is the revolution on earth, because it is not a list of laws but a love for being. One can fail a thousand times and will always be forgiven, will always be corrected and will resume his step on the road, if his heart starts again with the “yes.” The substance of that “Yes, Lord, I love you” is a total commitment of the whole person, driven by the awareness that Christ is God and by love for this Man who came for me. My whole being is shaped by this, and I may fail a thousand times a day, to the point of being ashamed to lift my head, but no one can take this certainty from me. I simply pray to the Lord, I pray to the Spirit to change me, to make me an imitator of Christ, so that my presence may become more like Christ’s.
The moral is love—love for the Being who became man, an Event in history, who reaches me through the mysterious community historically called the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, the People of God. I love him within this community. They can hold a hundred thousand errors against me, they can drag me into court, the judge can send me to prison without even examining me, with blatant injustice, without checking whether I did it or not. But they cannot take away this attachment that keeps making me leap with desire for the good—that is, for adherence to him. Because the good is not “the good,” it is adherence to him. It is following that face, that Presence. It is carrying that Presence everywhere. It is telling everyone about it, so that this Presence may rule the world—the end of the world will come when this Presence becomes evident to all. This is the new morality: it is love, not rules to follow. And evil is to offend the object of love, or to forget him.
One can certainly then, by humbly analyzing all the twists and turns of a man’s life, say, “This would be evil, this would be good,” listing in order all the errors a man can fall into. One can, that is, write a book on morality. But morality is inside me, who loves the One who made me—and who is here. If this were not so, I could use morality only to assert my own advantage. It would be, in any case, a thing of despair. To understand this, one would have to read Pasolini or Pavese; no, it’s enough to remember Judas.
The Endurance of the New Morality
If the beginning of the new morality is an act of love, of commitment, and this requires the Presence of someone who strikes us and draws all our strength—as Jesus drew Simon—then it becomes essential to answer this question: how does this Event remain vividly present in our existence? The answer establishes the possibility of the new morality in the present, here and now; otherwise it would begin for us only in an intellectual, abstract, discursive way. The answer lies in that Christian word that belongs to the experience of the present, without which we could not even know whether our experience is concrete or fanciful: memory.
In memory, the Event I experience in all its richness is immersed in the flow of time and space. It becomes part of a story. The first condition of the new morality is to remember that Presence which exceeds the limits of human knowledge—that is, to recognize, here and now, the Presence that cannot be reduced to any human hypothesis. This Presence is a reality that stands before us and, by the power of his Spirit, within us. It is permanent in our lives, and it is so powerful that, through our adherence to it, it makes possible the unfolding of a new creation in us. So one can rise again after imperfection and error, at the end of every action that is always disproportionate and always imperfect, with a more just step, because his gift continues, like a fresh spring, without any limit of ours being able to stop it.
The permanence of this Presence is grace, a pure Event, to which we cannot resist adhering here and now. We recognize it and we adhere to it. It is grace, just as the Encounter is, the wonder, the continuity of the wonder, the impulse of adherence; and that grace becomes ours because we accept it. Accepting this absolute novelty, which happens a thousand times a day, is the supreme aspect of freedom. As with John and Andrew, with Simon, with Zacchaeus, the beginning of our change is a grace, a gift. We have had an Encounter whose purpose is to change us and to fulfill us. And we have adhered to this Presence, which Corresponds in an exceptional way to our expectation, with a steady adherence—as in Zacchaeus, who was no longer defined by the imperfection he had fallen into, because that Presence was there to pierce, like a fresh and pure stream, all the muck of the forest of his humanity. The wonder of the Encounter, the continuity of that wonder, and the adherence to that Presence which endures imply an embrace and a unity with all those whom this very Presence places near us. It has made itself the object of our gaze so that, through us—through our flaws, the pain those flaws cause, and the strange impulse that arises out of them—it may be better known and loved.
From Luigi Giussani, Generating Traces in the History of the World (1998), pp. 82–93. Translated and edited by Epochal Change editing staff.
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