Generative Thought by Buzzi Elisa;

Author:Buzzi, Elisa;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press

To sum up: the significance of Giussani’s religious sense for our present situation consists in its essentially ontological, dramatic, and aesthetic character. For Giussani religion comprehends the order of being in a way that integrates the true, the good, and the beautiful. His religious sense at its core thus indicates a new culture in which being takes precedence over having, and the significance of this becomes particularly clear in light of Pope John Paul II’s discussion of a growing battle between a culture of life on the one hand, and a culture of death on the other39. For at the heart of the culture of death lie the problems of abortion, poverty, and homelessness, and so on, all of which derive from the primacy of having and the relations of power bound up with this primacy.

It is, on the other hand, the renewed sense of God and of the being of the true, the good, and the beautiful that makes possible and demands and, indeed, constitutes the priority of being over having that is the essence of the culture of life. The claim is stunning: America’s most serious social problems are problems most fundamentally of the existence and nature of God and, consequently, of the reality of creatureliness, and the task of eliminating them is, anteriorly and most fundamentally, the task of retrieving a renewed sense of the intrinsic truth, goodness, and beauty of all creatures, of the entire cosmos. The Christian’s missionary task, in other words, is spiritual and ontological before it is moral or political or, in terms of John Paul II’s “new evangelization,” it is social precisely as theological. Or so, at least, this is how I read Giussani.

In a word, Giussani’s religious sense reintroduces a sense of being as gift that is summed up in his assertion that “prayer is the only human gesture which totally realizes the human being’s stature.”40 The religious sense, in short, consists most fundamentally in reinserting the order of being into prayer. It is just here, in the reintegration of the orders of being and knowing – and not only the order of willing – into prayer that the problem of peculiarly American atheism is met, the atheism that, as Pope John Paul II puts it, constitutes the spiritual drama of our time.

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