Mahfoud’s main source: Luigi Giussani’s The Religious Sense

The bee knows the secret of its beehive, and ant knows the secret of its anthill, but man does not know its own secret – the structure of a human being is a free relationship with the infinite, and therefore, it has no limits. It bursts through the walls of any place within which one would want to restrain it (Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense, 79).

465. Mahfoud, Experiência Elementar em Psicologia, 31.

176

3.2.1.1 The Religious Sense as a theological response to a changing culture

Luigi Giussani (1922-2005) was an Italian theologian and founder of the movement Communion and Liberation (CL), a relevant voice in the Catholic Church during the twentieth century. His legacy was cherished by prominent figures in the Catholic world.

Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), at Giussani’s funeral, suggested Luigi understood Christianity not as an intellectual system, nor as a collection of doctrines and dogmas, neither a moralism; but Giussani comprehended Christianity as an encounter, a love story through an event.⁴⁶⁶ Jorge Bergoglio⁴⁶⁷ (who would later become Pope Francis), was an admirer of Giussani’s work The Religious Sense. Bergoglio points out that Giussani’s thought has been both a source of personal inspiration for him and shows signs of an original thought as a phenomenology that reaches the most intimate elements of human longing. As Bergoglio would recall it,

The writings of Monsignor Giussani inspired my reflection. The Religious Sense is not a book for the exclusive use of those who are part of the Movement; not even for Christians or for those who believe. It is a book for all men who take humanity seriously. I dare say that today the question that we must mainly face is not so much the problem of God, the existence of God, the knowledge of God, but the problem of man, the knowledge of man and find in man himself the mark that God left in him to meet him [...] for a man who has forgotten or criticized his fundamental 'whys' and the yearning of his heart, speaking about God becomes an abstract, exoteric discourse or a stimulus to devotion with no incidence in life. You cannot start a conversation about God unless the ashes that suffocate the burning ember of the fundamental 'whys' are not blown away.⁴⁶⁸

In the 1950s, Luigi Giussani’s personal journey took the unusual path of resigning from his position as professor of theology in Venegono: he ventured to regenerate Christian witness among high school students, when the existential problématiques in post-war Italy were at its peak and Christian presence was diminishing. Giussani’s influence upon this first group of students was so remarkable that this first group grew and became a world-wide movement in over 70 countries. Even though Giussani had previously resigned as a professor

466. Joseph Ratzinger, “Funeral Homily for Msgr. Luigi Giussani,” Communio Winter 2004: 685. At Luigi Giussani’s funeral, Cardinal Ratzinger suggested that Giussani was “wounded by beauty”, an existence that fixed his eyes fixed on Christ: “he understood that Christianity is not an intellectual system, a packet of dogmas, a moralism; Christianity is an encounter, a love story; it is an event.”

467. Bergoglio, quoted by Massimo Borghesi, in Bergoglio e Giussani, “As sintonias profundas”, in http://arquivo.revistapassos.com.br/default.asp?id=344&Pagina=6&id_n=3885 accessed Nov. 15 2018.

468. Ibid.

177

of theology in favor of bringing witness among teenage students, Giussani also built his movement alongside his theological reflection. From 1964 to 1990, he was a professor of fundamental theology at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. As Angelo Scola points out, Giussani’s thought is generative and creative, skillful at giving a systematic and critical reason to man's elementary experience.⁴⁶⁹

Although the corpus of Giussani’s writings is itself wide and relevant, our interest relies on his work The Religious Sense, and particularly the concept of elementary experience stemming from it. In 1986, when Giussani formulated the third and definite version, Miguel Mahfoud spent a year in Milan and received firsthand knowledge; twenty years later, as a professor of psychology, Mahfoud proposed elementary experience as applied to psychology.

There is obviously a unique trajectory from Giussani’s ideas to Mahfoud’s appropriation; the following discussion will then pave the way to understand how a theological concept from Luigi Giussani has found a place in psychological work. This section will focus on the theological anthropology roots of EEP, considering Giussani’s concept of elementary experience as a creative appropriation of the anthropological idea of the religious sense.

In 1957, Luigi Giussani published the first version of his work The Religious Sense, responding to the works of the Jesuit Jean Daniélou and the pastoral call from Cardinal Giovanni Montini to recover the meaning of religious sense in a changing culture. In the post- war years, militant atheism was on the rise, suggesting that religious belief was destined to dissolve itself with the advent of technology and progress. After Europe experienced totalitarian regimes, such as Nazism, and under the increasing influence of dialectical materialism of Marxism, faith was being regarded as a useless passion, and the religious influence in life was relegated to parishes and to the “weak” and “simple. The Church, however, was unable to aptly respond to this new context with the theological apparatuses of the beginning of the century. As Massimo Borghesi pointed out, in the Catholic conservative reaction to modernism in the first half of the previous century the role of human anthropology in Christian theology had been downplayed. A certain type of conservative Neo-Thomism

469. Angelo Scola. Luigi Giussani, un pensamiento original (Madrid: Encuentro, 2006). See also a series of essays in English from a diverse group of contributors in Elisa Buzzi, ed., A Generative Thought: An Introduction to the Works of Luigi Giussani (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003). Buzzi agrees that Giussani’s approach is generative, for “getting directly to the origin, that is, to the fundamental questions of meaning in the human experience and the Christian Event, with a deep awareness of their wide-ranging existential, theoretical, and cultural implications, it generates thought, in a constant passionate dialogue with the most varied of interlocutors.” Elisa Buzzi, ed., A Generative Thought: An Introduction to the Works of Luigi Giussani (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003), x.

178

absorbed itself in the rational premises of faith, neglecting the religious dimension of human nature.⁴⁷⁰ In the fifties, however, with the challenge of Marxist atheism to Christian anthropology, there was an opening to recover a Thomism in dialogue with the Augustinian tradition and the longing of a return ad fontes, and an anthropology that could understand humanity in a biblical way, intrinsically oriented towards the search for God. In the fifties, through the work of theologians such as Cornelio Fabro⁴⁷¹ and Jean Daniélou, there was a resurgence of the question about the religious dimension being a pre-philosophical tendency towards an absolute.

In 1956, Jean Daniélou, one of the names in the emerging Nouvelle Théologie, published Dieu et nous, which discusses in its first chapter the religious dimension of ancient paganism. God has spoken to men and women of all times through the cosmos and conscience, as a kind of first (still to be completed) revelation.⁴⁷² The text, translated to Italian in 1957, would have a significant impact in the first draft of Giussani’s The Religious Sense.⁴⁷³ While recognizing the limits of paganism, Daniélou’s important contribution was to positively appreciate the religious dimension of all of humanity, including non-Christian cultures.⁴⁷⁴

About the same time (1957), Giovanni Batista Montini, then cardinal of Milan, wrote a pastoral letter reflecting about the need to recover the religious sense in post-war Europe. The letter suggested moderns were losing the religious sense, understood as an opening of humanity towards God, a tendency that is part of an essential shape of being human. Montini’s emphasis enlightens the importance given to an encounter, which is how Mystery reaches humanity, touches him in the space and time of history with signs that provoke him to respond. The encounter is the tangible modality through which the religious sense passes from latent to manifest. The innate tendency towards God inscribed a priori, does not so eliminate the novelty of the a posteriori, the unpredictable manner with which God's action, grace, manifests itself. ⁴⁷⁵ Furthermore, the letter explicitly recuperated Augustine’s cor inquietum as an inspiration to the discussion of his times, which also may

470. Massimo Borghesi, introduction to Sul senso religioso, Giovanni Battista Montini and Luigi Giussani (Milan, BUR Rizzoli, 2009), 9-10.

471. Cornelio Fabro, L’uomo e il rischio di Dio (Roma: Editrice Studium, 1967).

472. Borghesi, introduction to Sul senso religioso, 15.

473. Ibid., 13.

474. Ibid., 18.

475. Massimo Borghesi, in “Bergoglio e Giussani, as sintonias profundas,” accessed Nov. 15, 2018, http://arquivo.revistapassos.com.br/default.asp?id=344&Pagina=6&id_n=3885

179

have marked an Augustinian accent to Giussani’s writing of The Religious Sense. Montini’s call to recover the religious sense, which inspires Giussani’s first version in the 50s, includes an association between Confessions and the core of his call: “and our hearts are restless until they rest in you… and that is the religious sense.”⁴⁷⁶

In the third, revised and final version of The Religious Sense, written in the 80s, Giussani maintains an Augustinian inspiration: even though the Augustinian restless heart is not explicitly the main topic in Giussani’s approach, it still lies in the background as a force exerting a significant influence in Giussani’s understanding of the idea of a religious sense.

The reality of being human is characterized by a religious tendency, which expresses itself not only in terms of organized religion, but is in its essential aspect an “intelligent intuition and dramatic emotion”.⁴⁷⁷ It is an openness for inquiry and searching that raises questions about the ultimate meaning of existence, such as the problem of pain and mortality or the purpose of life. These are evidences that we are made for transcendence and pointers to the enigmatic character of life. As questions attached “to the very core of our being”⁴⁷⁸ they are not able to be extinguished; they cannot be rooted out, but could be substituted, denied or emptied, resulting in a non-authentic human position. These fundamental questions provoke humanity to move continually, to wander in search for ultimate answers, those that will always linger at the deepest core of what it means to be human:

What is the ultimate meaning of existence? Or why is there pain and death, and why, in the end, is life worth living? (…) the Religious Sense lies within the reality of our self at the level of these questions: it coincides with the radical engagement of the self with life, an involvement which exemplifies itself in these questions.⁴⁷⁹

3.2.1.2 From the “religious sense” to “elementary experience”

In the 1986 revised and updated version, the notion that every human being contains some innate sense of divinity is understood alongside an additional nuanced concept:

elementary experience. It describes the center and the dynamic movement that sets the heart in motion in a restless journey: “I identify this heart with what I have called elementary experience, that is, something that tends to indicate totally the original impetus with which the

476. Giovanni Battista Montini, Sul Senso Religioso, Lettera pastorale all'arcidiocesi ambrosiana per la Quaresima, 1957., accessed Feb. 20, 2019, http://www.gliscritti.it/blog/entry/3732.

477. Giussani, Religious Sense, 46.

478. Ibid.

479. Ibid., 45.

180

human being reaches out to reality, seeking to become one with it. He does that by fulfilling a project that dictates to reality itself the ideal image that stimulates him from within.”⁴⁸⁰ Elementary experience, an anthropological term connected to the idea of a religious sense, describes an imprint that stirs human life from within, or an inner centre that expresses itself by enticing humanity to seek transcendent realities, in the form of “evidences” and “needs”

that are aroused by an impact with reality. In Luigi Giussani's formulation, elementary experience designates the original impetus that underlies every human gesture or position, by which the person can recognize his fundamental “exigências” (of happiness and justice, for example) and also recognize central evidences, as in one’s own existence and that of a reality that transcends oneself. Elementary experience is understood as the heart, which involves both an objective subjectivity (original needs and evidences) and a movement to imprint in reality this original mark that sets humanity in a restless search.

The most comprehensive definition of elementary experience given by Giussani is the following:

What constitutes this original, elementary experience? It can be described as a complex of needs and “evidences” which accompany us as we come face to face with all that exists. Nature thrusts man into a universal comparison with himself, with others, with things, and furnishes him with a complex of original needs and “evidences” which are tools for that encounter. So original are these needs or these “evidences” that everything man does or says depends on them. These needs can be given many names. They can be summarized with different expressions (for example, the need for happiness, the need for truth, for justice, etc.). They are like a spark igniting the human motor. Prior to them, there is no movement or human dynamism. Any personal affirmation, from the most banal and ordinary to the most reflected upon and rich in consequences, can be based solely on this nucleus of original needs.⁴⁸¹

The conceptual formulation of elementary experience gives the religious sense an experiential accent, for it underscores that the human dynamism is aroused by an existential encounter, an impression awakened by the impact with reality itself. The engine of the human heart towards transcendence is activated in the pathway of reality, in experience, with its dramas and tensions, as reality itself provokes and evokes the human dynamism. In The Religious Sense, through the concept of elementary experience, Giussani conducts the idea of religious sense towards an existential turn while retaining the integrity of both subjective

480. Giussani, Religious Sense, 9.

481. Ibid., 7.

181

experience and objective reality. In doing so, Giussani paves the way for a theological anthropology that reintroduces its interest in the idea of experience, a move from the dogmatic to the experiential and also present in theologians such as Schillebeeckx;⁴⁸² and even though neither articulating nor elaborating a psychology, it creates space for further dialogues, such as the one Mahfoud would conduct.

Giussani articulates the book The Religious Sense based on three premises, namely, realism, reasonableness and morality. Through these premises, Giussani seeks to counter reduced rationalistic approaches present in modernity that believe if one knows about a fact, it is understanding through a system of thought rather than experiential knowledge. In that regard, he considers Augustine to be a realist and suggests that his own position finds reference in Augustine’s conception of knowledge, for in it relationality precedes thought and ideas:

Saint Augustine, however, warns us that the contrary is not true. To think something is an intellectual, ideal and imaginative activity regarding the object and often, in giving too much weight to thought, without even realizing it – or, in reality, even justifying it – we project what we think onto the fact. The sane man, instead, wants to know about the fact, to know what it is, and only then can he also think it.⁴⁸³

Realism, Giussani’s first premise in The Religious Sense, takes us on a path that leads to the concept of elementary experience. Realism is the attitude of not privileging an already-made preconceived scheme, but ascribing to reality a passionate and insistent observation. Realism is a premise that places the method of existential inquiry as imposed by the object, not produced or randomly created by the subject;⁴⁸⁴ it respects the dynamic of experience that was not defined by human subjectivity but given to it by its relational structure. Giussani argues that the proper method of knowing is not defined by oneself, but dictated by the object; likewise, religious experience has a dynamic that was not created by me, even though it still involves my subjectivity. By emphasizing realism, Giussani seeks to avoid a kind of subjectivism that does not find an objective criterion to understand

482. Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ: The Christian Experience in the Modern World, trans. John Stephen Bowden (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). According to Schillebeeckx, Christianity is not primarily a creedal doctrine in which one must believe, but an experience in faith that is then embodied and transmitted through a message. For a dialogue between Giussani and Schillebeeckx, see Paulo Alves Romão, “A estrutura sacramental da história salvífica: estudo comparado de Edward Schillebeeckx e de Luigi Giussani” (PhD Diss., PUC-Rio, 2012).

483. Giussani, Religious Sense, 4.

484. Ibid., 5.

182

transcendent meaning; and also to escape the taming of reality through preconceptions that block the authentic religious quest.⁴⁸⁵ The preconceived ideas of a moralist eventually undermine an engagement with knowledge and do not foster the passionate search that accepts the provocations and callings of what is encountered.

True non-biased realism leads us to a proper notion of experience: to realistically experience something in Giussani’s view is within the logic of accumulating sensations, feelings or facts, but “coincides with a judgement we make about what we try.”⁴⁸⁶ Experiencing involves discovering the meaning that lies at the foundation of what is lived. It contains a criterion on which a judgement about what is lived can be drawn. This criterion is not “borrowed from the outside”, risking alienation, but found within humanity, it is a given:

“now, to state that this criterion is inherent within us is not to argue that we alone provide it.

Rather, it is to assert that it is drawn from our nature, it is given to us as part of our very nature. […] the criterion for judging this reflection on our own humanity must emerge from within the inherent structure of the human being, the structure at the origin of the person.”⁴⁸⁷

This immanent criterion to judge what we live, the mechanism that undergirds the passage from trying to experience, is what Giussani calls elementary experience. It is also the heart, the judging center of human subjectivity containing at its nucleus needs and

“evidences”. Elementary experience is pronounced as the complex of needs and “evidences”

which follow humanity as it comes to face reality. Human nature is endowed with needs and evidences as gifts, tools for encounter, pushing humanity towards a universal comparison with himself, others, and things, in order to experience and imprint in reality this inner mark that constitutes life.⁴⁸⁸ This “original experience” involves a duty to learn that it is possible to judge what is tried and compare every proposal with this elementary experience, this interior stamp that fosters a criterion to relate to exterior aspects of life. It is to become a habit to pay attention to the complex of needs and evidences which accompany us. These original needs and evidences are the essence of interiority but also instruments for an encounter. They are a spark igniting human motor setting what is properly human in movement.

485. Giussani, Religious Sense, 109.

486. Ibid., 6.

487. Ibid., 7.

488. Ibid., 7.