Introduction—The Author and the Situation from Which He Emerged

Luigi Giussani’s doctoral thesis, written in 1954, starts with a look at the cultural situation of the time in which Reinhold Niebuhr’s reflections are to be located. The religious imprint that had defined the beginnings of the United States of America was marked by two main currents—Methodism (social messianism) and Puritanism (moralism and legalism). In response to these expressions, characterized by rationalist and naturalist optimism, the Christian milieu had reacted with forms of “Christian Humanism” and with the “Social Gospel” movement as its most significant expression. After initially joining it, Niebuhr had to admit this utopian vision had failed; he was thus prompted to a new and systematic reflection on the connection between humanity and history in the light of Christianity, which would be the subject, among others, of the two major works analyzed here by Fr. Giussani—The Nature and Destiny of Man and Faith and History.

Part One—The Human Problem. The Means of Its Solution

1. The Human Problem and Its Elements

Part One of the thesis analyzes the human problem from an “essential” point of view. Human experience reveals a series of antinomies that can be attributed to the two antithetical elements subsisting in man—nature and spirit. They manifest themselves as experience of limitation and, at the same time, as capacity for transcendence. In its highest degree, the spirit—as self-transcendence and freedom—can overcome the limit of “rationality” and reach its own self-awareness. The dynamic between nature and freedom is reflected in history, as a tension in the present between necessity and the possibility of its transcendence. A tension about which the responses offered by the idealist, naturalist rationalist and romantic currents eventually result in three reductions—the elimination of individuality, the reduction of evil to good, and utopia of progress. Even those solutions offered by a Christian perspective—such as the Catholic synthesis and the Reformation, merging into the disillusioned optimism of the Renaissance—are not sufficient in Niebuhr’s eyes. Therefore, the role of the Christian faith in history needs to be understood more specifically.

2. Christian Revelation

A distinction is made by Niebuhr between private or general Revelation and public or socio-historical Revelation, interrelated and performing revelations. The first is the testimony that comes from our being aware of our own limitation, from perceiving a judgment we are facing; a testimony, though, that is inevitably exposed to subjective interpretations and reductions. The second is based instead on specific events through historical contingencies, according to a line of salvation whose culmination is Christ, His cross and resurrection. These events were defined by Niebuhr as “cues” for faith, in which “God’s intervention is not so much a datum that arouses faith as a faith aroused that enhances a datum. […] The Word was manifested in the flesh, but the Word did not become flesh.” In other words, the liberal distinction between the God of history and the God of faith prevails; and according to this distinction, the historical revelatory events are symbols to be interpreted by faith, making salvation history more of a “cultural history.”

3. Faith and Symbols

According to Niebuhr’s conception, faith is defined as the ability to fully grasp the meaning of revelation, to reach the truth beyond the limits of reason. Faith understood as the culmination of freedom, consciousness and transcendence of limitation; faith as overcoming the reduction of reason as pure rationalism, faith as the experience of an “unsatisfied need” that, however, does not undermine the need for a meaning of things. Thus, what matters for faith is such a “two-fold experience” of limitation and need to overcome, called the “natural foundation” of the experience of faith, “the embryo of the religious sense,” as Giussani would then say, the nucleus of “natural religion.” The specific events, the symbols that faith is called to interpret are in this sense necessarily always exposed to reductive readings; they represent the steps of a salvation history that have the value of a sign and not an ontological value.

Part Two. Section One—The Human Situation

Part Two of the thesis, this time from a biblical perspective, addresses the human problem in its “existential” aspect.

1. The Symbol of the “First Adam.” The First Essential Connotation of the Human Person. Fr. Giussani analyzes Niebuhr’s biblical reading of the human structure by identifying two essential aspects—the human person as creature and as imago Dei (image of God). Our nature as creation that manifests itself as the experience of our own finiteness and dependence, of the mystery of being created out of nothingness, and with death as its incontrovertible sign. At the same time the human person, as imago Dei, is marked out by a need to overcome such finiteness, by a capacity for infinity beyond the limits of rationality. A capacity whose main connotation is to be primarily a need for “meaning.” The human person as unity of divine likeness and creatureliness experiences a dynamic of constructive tension between death and the need for a total meaning.

2. The Symbol of the “First Adam.” Second Connotation—The Fall as First Act. Human existence. In the myth of Adam, such tension between need and freedom, after the serpent’s intervention, is existentially manifested as a state of anguish, as a quest for perfection and a feeling of insecurity. A state of mind that can lapse either into the sin of pride or into the exaltation of a specific detail of life.

3. The Symbol of Adam. Third Connotation—The Meaning of the Doctrine of Original Sin. The Aspects of Sin. Thus, this fall highlights two “ethical” aspects of sin—its structural inevitability and, at the same time, man’s responsibility before it. Again, a tension that is defined as original existence and prior to sin—the sin of the devil precedes the sin of Adam. An inevitability of sin that man tends to solve “quantitatively” as a continuance, as disordered self-love. A losing answer to a desirable “qualitative” solution, which Niebuhr points to in an obedient subjection to God. Unbelief, lack of faith, is in fact what undermines one’s own will, which right from the beginning proves to be defective. But it is above all the experience of guilt that confirms, also psychologically, the inevitable condition of sin. At the end of the action, the human person notes an insufficiency in which, however, the experience of shame is not annihilation. Indeed, the acknowledgment of one’s own insufficiency, while demonstrating the inevitability of evil, also represents the triumph of freedom itself; a freedom acknowledging that its will is not totally free to choose between good and evil, that “Man is most free in the discovery that he is not free.”

4. Original Justice. Fourth Connotation—A Positive Value of the Symbol of Adam. There is a positive element in this dramatic statement—the perception of the ideal by which man is measured, “The need of what man should be, in his ideal purity, precisely mirrors original justice.” The restless human conscience recognizes the existence of an ideal that introduces itself to man in a dual form of natural law and law of love. A natural law that, because of the relative condition of human reason, cannot be fully contained in any norm “except the norm defined by the needs of the self as a free spirit—faith, hope and charity.” These theological virtues, as supreme law of our being, give voice to the commandment of love. In this respect, the biblical view of love completes the picture of human existence in which sin, while corrupting its true essence, is not the final word on man.

Part Two. Section Two—Human Destiny

1. Preparing the Final Symbol. When confronted with the unanswerable questions of existence, waiting for Christ stands as the discriminating factor of human culture. For many cultures (anti-historical cultures) of a naturalistic or idealistic inspiration, the idea of waiting for Christ is judged as sheer “madness.” Whereas for “historical” cultures there is the risk of a reductive image concerning the modality of His coming—according to a “selfish nationalism,” an “ethical universalism,” or a “prophetic messianism.” Two aspects were ultimately defined by the coming of Christ—the human awareness that we are all sinners before Him, and His triumph over evil by succumbing to it, through the “vicarious suffering,” sacrificial love. The human-divine agape of the Cross is the answer to the structural, essential and existential tension of man.

2. The Symbol of Christ. The Second Adam. The vicarious atonement is not only the mode of Christ’s saving intervention but represents the standard of human nature itself—“the revelation of the true human type.” Christ is the “second Adam” who embodies, in His boundless love on the Cross, the way to original innocence.

3. The Symbol of Christ. The Cross. Thus, the Cross is the beginning of a new “wisdom” in which the self is no longer focused on its own self but on the other. A love that is no longer mutual but sacrificial; a love that cannot but appear contradictory to reason, a “foolishness” which nevertheless represents the only ethical norm that is proper to humanity. So, as “divine judgment,” the Cross is punishment and redemption from the inevitability of evil; but as “mercy and forgiveness,” it reveals that justice and mercy coexist, representing God’s final word, the manifestation of His freedom above His own law.

4. The Symbol of Christ. Resurrection. In that sense, the announcement of the mercy of God is like the resurrection of the self on a journey that goes from contrition to reconciliation with the divine; an initiative of God that the Holy Spirit makes possible as it is grasped by the self through faith. A possession that culminates in grace as wisdom and power, but which—as Fr. Giussani repeatedly says—is only “in principle” and not “in fact.” In this respect even the resurrection reveals itself as only the existential symbol of a completion of the human at the end of history, an eschatological symbol in which God’s triumph and final judgment on history itself will be manifested.

5. Summary. Biblical anthropology sees the idea of God as the catalyst for all the elements of the human structure as a unity of tension, where the finite element is represented by natural law and the spiritual element by the law of absolute love. A tension, however, that cannot be solved in existence, but only in faith and abandonment to God. Christian teleology will see in grace as wisdom and power the possible solution in what lies beyond existence. Thus, the solution of the human problem in a biblical-Christian reconstruction allows Niebuhr to point out again the different aspects treated—from a dialectic between its structural elements to the awareness of existence and consequences of evil, up to a conception of history and its ultimate meaning—finding there a sense of completion and serenity for human existence.

Part Three—A Critical View

In the third and final part of the thesis, Fr. Giussani’s critical view starts from the key problem of the entire work, that is, relating to the consciousness of the constitutive truth of Christian Revelation. To Fr. Giussani, Niebuhr’s work appears to be not so much a testimony “to the truth of Christ, that is, to the truth as Christ brought it, but to the truth as one man thought he would see it by drawing inspiration from Christ.”

1. Niebuhr’s Protestantism. Niebuhr’s Protestantism is revealed first of all in the interpretation of the essence of Christianity. In wishing to break free from the reductive or false interpretations of the past, already present in the consciousness of the first Christian communities, the Protestant spirit tries to read it in an ever new and more accurate way. So, if every Protestant is a prophet, what will be the criterion, what will be the elements constituting their approach? Two elements are listed by Fr. Giussani—the first is Innerlichkeit, that is, inner immediacy with God; the second is biblical exegesis. Even if at first they were complementary, an increasingly irretrievable dichotomy took shape with the advent of rationalism. On the one hand, there is a pietistic exaltation of this interiority reaching forms of autonomous claim to immediacy with the divine, and the culmination of which is represented by Schleiermacher; on the other hand, there is a pure historicist approach to scripture focusing not so much on the extent of a biblical event but on its value. What results according to Fr. Giussani is the fact that two objectivities are lost—in the first case the objectivity of the transcendent, in the second the objectivity of the biblical foundation itself. As a victim of its own naturalism and rationalism, Protestantism sees the need for a return to metaphysics, where traditional ontology is replaced—mainly at the hands of Karl Barth and the neo-Orthodox or dialectical current—by a new “existential metaphysics.” This marks the unbridgeable gap between an unconditional God and the creature both epistemologically and ontologically, “The only possibility for the human being to understand the divine thus lay in that radical intimacy in which the self is created by God.” The mediation of the concept is replaced by the immediacy of the encounter, and biblical exegesis itself is determined by one’s subjective point of view, by one’s personal experience. Niebuhr substantially falls into the strand of dialectical theology slipping into two limitations, namely that existential intuitions lack the necessary objectivity—the id quod, as von Balthasar would call it—with the consequent inability of conceptual communication.

2. Existential Experience in Niebuhr. Where dialectical theology saw the content of a new existential metaphysics as the “word,” for Niebuhr it resulted into that “Beyond” upon which the self in action “impinges,” as Judgment and as Law. An impingement described with the idea of tangentiality, of a tangential intervention of God to which, according to Niebuhr, man is predisposed. Therefore, there are two antinomies that Fr. Giussani detects—on the one hand, the divine could not be assimilated by the existent and yet would be part of the human essence; on the other hand, the perfection of agape in the eschatological self would not make it compatible with the existing self that consists of spirit and nature. Whereas for Catholic doctrine, Fr. Giussani explains that in man there is no unambiguous element with the divine, but the divine element is, so to speak, discovered by human nature in its own existence thanks to its capacity for obedience that expresses the radical availability of the created spirit before the creator. This openness is natively proportioned to that destination, an infinitely expanding angle, like a round angle that makes human essence a great expectation. By eliminating the gratuitous and supernatural dimension of grace, Niebuhr eliminates the discontinuity between the existent and the divine by imagining the contact with God as a homogeneous “continuum” with some element of the human structure; and the qualitative leap between the two metaphysical orders is transferred within human nature itself. Super-nature and nature are two distinct orders, while Niebuhr conceives of them as a totum naturale (a natural whole) that lately does not even guarantee the freedom of love, agape.

3. The Bible in Niebuhr. This subjective experience is reflected in the criteria of biblical exegesis. Insofar as the Bible is the place where man encounters God, it basically and only “says” what it arouses in human consciousness. Human consciousness becomes the ultimate criterion for interpreting, a philosophicum inventum (philosophical invention) that reinterprets the concepts of Revelation and Redemption and replaces ontological certainty with psychological experience, “redemption is the psychological influence of revelation.” Freedom and will do not consequently have ontological consistency; the will is like the organ through which spiritual vitality flows. The Church itself is devalued in its givenness and uniqueness in time and space, whereby these latter categories are also read in their mechanical becoming, emptied of their consistency as “present.”

4. Conclusion. Concluding his dissertation, Fr. Giussani concisely lists the negative and positive elements emerging from his research. From an anthropological-teleological point of view, man’s structural contradiction presents itself as unsolvable, and from a theological point of view, “one cannot speak of a Christian sense of existence.” Not willing to rely on the historicity of an Event, the Niebuhrian construction develops essentially as ethics in the presence of a Law and not as charitas, as love in the presence of a Person. The contribution of any single human action to building history, immersed in the action of Christ, becomes relative in the face of a fulfillment that will take place regardless of man himself.

Nevertheless, Fr. Giussani ascribes many positive aspects to Niebuhr’s work—first of all, the ability to synthesize the most current and complex spiritual, philosophical and theological currents; the affirmation of a “realistic” spirituality as opposed to the positivist approach or naturalist optimism; the testimony to the relevance of the Reformation’s contribution with respect to the theme of evil and the ambiguity inherent in the structure and action of man; but, above all—as Fr. Giussani concludes— Niebuhr’s contribution consists in his attempt to answer the ever-present question and a goad coming from the category of “possibility.” Niebuhr, as Fr. Giussani concludes, “is a great voice ascribing to contemporary problematicism that ambiguity and contradiction as the too unknown core of any problem—as the problem.”