Riedizione di Il senso di Dio e l’uomo moderno: [La «questione umana» e la novità del Cristianesimo], nella nuova collana “Saggi”. La prima pubblicazione del testo risale a maggio 1994 nella collana BUR “I libri dello spirito cristiano”. Nell’ottobre dello stesso anno il volume esce in edizione speciale allegato al mensile 30 Giorni, corredato della Prefazione appositamente redatta dall’allora cardinale Joseph Ratzinger (BUR, 1994, pp. 3-4; BUR Rizzoli, 2010, pp. 3-4).

L’opera include due testi: Il senso religioso (Jaca Book, 1966) e La coscienza religiosa nell’uomo moderno: Note per “cattolici impegnati” (Jaca Book, 1985), che avevano già conosciuto una diffusione editoriale autonoma.

“Il senso religioso” (pp. 7-75)
L’edizione, pubblicata nel 1966 da Jaca Book, è qui riportata integralmente e senza modifiche (imprimatur in Curia Arch. Mediolani, die 21 martii, anni 1966, Can. Caesar Gilardi Vic. Deleg.). Secondo la dichiarazione dell’Autore nella “Nota introduttiva” (pp. 5-6), il testo è nato come raccolta di appunti stesi dai primi scolari al liceo Berchet di Milano (negli anni 1954-60 circa), le cui tematiche verranno poi sviluppate nei volumi del PerCorso editi dalla stessa Jaca Book e poi da Rizzoli.

“La coscienza religiosa nell’uomo moderno” (pp. 77-135)
Il testo è riproposto nella versione Jaca Book del 1985. L’opera nasce da un ciclo di conferenze tenute dall’Autore in alcune sedi universitarie italiane ed estere, poi raccolte nella sintesi qui proposta (vd. nota p. 9; per approfondimenti cfr. Alberto Savorana, Vita di don Giussani, Rizzoli, 2013, pp. 660-665).

Si segnala qui un errore editoriale. In “Una premessa” (Jaca Book, settembre 1985, p. 9) Giussani cita la frase: «Gli uomini raramente apprendono ciò che credono già di sapere», che in nota è erroneamente attribuita allo scrittore Evelyn J. Waugh, definito nel testo: «Una scrittrice inglese degli anni Trenta»; nella ristampa del febbraio 1986 si tenta di correggere l’errore: nel testo non si parla più di «scrittrice» ma di «scrittore». Nelle edizioni BUR de Il senso di Dio e l’uomo moderno (1994-2015), invece, la frase è attribuita a Reinhold Niebuhr (BUR, 2010, p. 79). In realtà, la citazione appartiene a Barbara Ward, come giustamente riportato nelle edizioni Rizzoli del Senso religioso dal 1997 in poi.

Nel 1995, per iniziativa di Fabbri Editori e Corriere della Sera, l’opera è ripubblicata nella collana “La Biblioteca del Corriere della Sera”. A differenza delle due precedenti edizioni BUR (1994 e 1995), è stata espunta la “Nota introduttiva” dell’Autore, che viene però erroneamente elencata nel sommario. Prefazione del card. Ratzinger (pp. 3-4).

Nel 2015, BUR ristampa il volume senza variazioni, rinnovando la veste grafica della copertina. [C. C.]

 

Copertina dell’edizione BUR, 2015

The Religious Sense 
The text, offering notes from the Author’s lessons at the Berchet High School in Milan, briefly anticipates the contents that were later developed in the three volumes of the PerCorso (The Religious Sense; At the Origin of the Christian Claim; Why the Church?).

Part One—The Essence of the Question
The religious sense regards the ultimate questions that arise—what is the exhaustive meaning of life? What is the ultimate meaning of reality? Every principle or value that provides an answer to these questions expresses a religiosity, asserts a god. The religious sense, by its very nature, is an ineradicable factor of existence—human beings cannot avoid it even though they may try to reject or contradict it.

Part Two—Knowledge and Mystery
Just as a car needs to be started by someone in order to run, so the religious sense needs an external call to come into action. The call comes from God through created reality—that is why the mark of great souls and persons who are truly alive is eagerness for search and commitment to reality. 
By making Himself present to humankind through a sign, that is reality, God does not impose Himself on man but discreetly respects his freedom. Reality thus appears as half-light—you can choose to look, but you can also choose to turn your back to the light, that is, to the meaning you perceive in things. Yet, man has a strange fear of affirming being, and only in a human community can the energy of his freedom be sustained. 
The sign unveils, but at the same time it veils. In front of it, in fact, reason is forced to admit the existence of something incomprehensible, a mystery—life is tied to a God that man is unable to know. This takes human awareness to the edge of an abyss, and it is quite natural to feel dizzy; we are most commonly tempted to reduce the object of our search, identifying it with something we choose within the sphere of our own experience, and so corrupting the religious sense into idolatry. But an idol can never fully respond to our demand for the infinite. Noting this difficulty, Saint Thomas affirms a need for revelation, describing it as a hypothesis that is “suitable” and corresponding to man.

Part Three—Revelation
When faced with God’s revelation, which emerges as a fact in history, the only question is whether this fact really happened.
News of a revelation is first documented with Abraham. God addresses Abraham in terms he can understand—this is the first aspect of revelation—and arouses in him an even deeper awareness of the unknowability of the mystery. The figure of Abraham also shows that man becomes worthy of God when he assumes before Him one only true attitude—utter readiness.
The news of revelation, with its bright point of reference in the figures of the prophets, finds its full realization with Jesus Christ. After being asked from many people, when He answered that He was God, the ones who followed Him could not understand His answer but kept hold of it—though mysterious, this answer was the one that suited that man more than any other. This revelation brings knowledge of the most secret nature of Being—no human discovery will ever reach a deeper and more definitive object. Not only does God’s supreme and ultimate disclosure to man not lessen his awe of Him, it also gives rise to the most complete dependence one can imagine—a love that gives man’s personality the very face of the beloved. “Yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20).

Part Four—Presence and History
How do we get to the encounter with Christ today, who walked the streets of Galilee and Judea two thousand years ago? By living in the community of the Church, the continuity of Christ in time and space. The Church is to the religious sense what Christ is—the “cornerstone,” the rock upon which we can build. 
Revelation is not mechanically preserved and requires a constant commitment of reason, invested and elevated by the virtue of faith, infused through baptism. The more we make the truth of Christ familiar to ourselves, the more it penetrates into our way of conceiving all things and approaching life. This familiarity takes place within the Church—the sacraments are Christ’s gestures that are prolonged through the centuries, while the liturgy ensures a pedagogy that would let the infantile and involuted human spirit grow to that mysterious encounter.

Religious Awareness in Modern Man
As Reinhold Niebuhr observed, “Men do not learn when they believe they already know”—this is true about the religious fact in general, and about Christianity in particular.

Part One—“Has Mankind Failed the Church?...”
Today, man’s religious sense is continually devalued and deleted, as if it were not a living, life-determining factor. This forgetfulness shows three historical stages—the spread of the idea that the meaning of life consists in success (Humanism), an absolute trust placed in nature (Renaissance), and the certainty that reason can bend nature to any of its nods and commands (age of scientific discoveries). In this approach, God is not eliminated, but people more insidiously think He has nothing to do with concrete man, his interests and problems. This is a secularism that is not theorized but lived. 
Four “reductions” result from this position. Reason, an open gaze on reality, becomes the “measure of all things”; freedom, the energy of adhering to what is real, becomes absence of all ties; consciousness, conceived in the Christian tradition as the place where an order given by an Other emerges, becomes the place of subjective interpretation; culture becomes a human projection upon reality in order to possess it, and no longer a path of realization that concerns man’s being. 
The syndrome of optimism introduced by Humanism, expanded by the Renaissance, and sanctioned by rationalism, was frustrated in the 20th century by the two world wars—man, the new god, had been dethroned by his own hands. 
As a result of these historical contingencies after the Second World War, a cultural bewilderment spread throughout Europe and the world. Modern man has developed a deep anguish at the enigmatic nature of meaning and an ethical despair over the impossibility of an ultimate loyalty to himself. The anthropological consequences of this attitude are a loss of the taste for living; a desperate search for meaning in systems of thought and ideologies; the destruction of time’s usefulness; loneliness, affirming the impossibility of all relationships; and the frantic search for a meaning of life in a stoic voluntarism. 
But man’s position is always a choice, an option—at all times he is faced with the possibility of closing himself off from things, choosing not to look at them, or of abiding in that original openness that launches him into a universal comparison.

Part Two—“...Or Has the Church Failed Mankind?” 
Nowadays the Christian fact, and Catholicism in particular, is proposed to the world in a profoundly reduced form, and it is consequently weakened in the fight against the mentality that God has nothing to do with life. The reductions consist of a subjectivism in the face of destiny, as conception and as praxis, a heightened moralism in the face of the values exalted by the dominant culture, and a weakening of the living unity of the people of God with their tradition, gathered around the Bishop of Rome. 
On the contrary, Christianity can be a dramatically decisive factor for man only if it is “conceived anew” in its originality. The Christian fact is first of all an objective fact—it is not a matter of imagining it or inventing it, but of following it; secondly, precisely because of the affirmation of the objectivity of the path to our destiny, all moralism is replaced by our certainty in Grace. 
There are two characteristics of Christianity thus conceived—the awareness that the encounter with Jesus is an all-embracing fact that transforms every last detail of life, and the birth of a new culture that originates from this encounter. 
The Christian fact is present today in the unity of believers, in the people of God, the Church. In the Church the historical concreteness through which Christ reaches man, provokes him and educates him is called “movement.” It is in this sense that John Paul II said, “The Church is movement.”