target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_583c22c5-3793-5523-8b2d-1a53e501e30b">12. Of course, this concept of reason and truth is only one aspect characterizing “modernity.” Robert Spaemann, for example, indicates the following as the primary aspects: understanding freedom as emancipation; the myth of necessary and endless progress; progressive mastery of nature; objectivism; homogenization of experience; hypothesizing reality; naturalistic universalism (Spaemann, “Ende der Modernität?,” 232–60).
13. Gadamer’s attempt to continue the phenomenological reflection through hermeneutics still accentuates the separation between ontology and history. See Gadamer, Truth and Method.
14. Schleiermacher, On Religion; Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 3–128.
15. Spaemann, “Ende der Modernität?,” 240.
16. Mouroux, Christian Experience, 9–15.
17. “O man!” Gregory of Nyssa wrote, “realize what you are! Consider your royal dignity! The heavens have not been made in God’s image as you have, nor the moon, nor the sun, nor anything to be seen in creation. . . . Behold, of all that exists there is nothing that can contain your greatness” (cited in de Lubac, Drama, 20).
18. “Experience demands an I, an object, a relationship between the I and the object; but this is not enough: [these three elements are to be perceived] within an ideal horizon that colors in different ways the relation that God establishes between me and the thing. This is the mortal sin from Descartes onwards: to speak of reason forgetting that from which one extracts the concept of reason: experience. Doing this one fabricates, pre-fabricates the concept of reason and with it judges the concept of experience. In this way one confuses everything” (Giussani, “Tu,” 84; ROE, 98–102, at 99). This chapter of ROE was originally published as Luigi Giussani, L’esperienza. For an approximation of Giussani’s concept of experience, cf. Scola, “Esperienza cristiana,” 199–213; Scola, “Esperienza, libertà e rischio,” 71–89; Sani, “L’educazione,” 5–27, at 21–23; Konrad, Tendere.
19. For Giussani, esperienza originale (here translated as originary experience), esperienza elementare (elementary experience), and esperienza religiosa or senso religioso (religious sense) are synonymous terms. Although familiar with the solitary work of Jean Mouroux on experience and well-versed in North American Protestant theology, Giussani contends that his understanding of experience is “totally original” (Giussani, “Seminario,” 134). For a comprehensive bibliography from 1951–1997, see Giussani, Porta la speranza, 205–60. For a historical development, see Montini and Giussani, Sul senso religioso.
20. Giussani, USD, 107.
21. Giussani, RS, 9.
22. Giussani, ROE, 99.
23. Ibid. Giussani therefore is not proposing either a naïve realism or a critical idealism as an understanding of man’s access to truth. His concept of experience has little to do with Rahner’s, for whom man’s experience of God and of himself is passive, transcendental, non-thematic, and non-reflexive. For Giussani experience does not have to do with “conditions of possibility” but with actual understanding in which history never comes at a second moment, nor is it seen as history of God. See Rahner, “Experience of Self,” 122–32.
24. Giussani, RE, 130.
25. Giussani, RS, 101.
26. For an account of the ontological movement of beings, see Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, 3.8–9 (PG 3:704D–705B).
27. Giussani, RS, 3–33. The circularity between freedom and reason can also be found in, e.g., Benedict XVI’s Caritas in veritate: “Intelligence and love are not in separate compartments: love is rich in intelligence and intelligence is full of love” (no. 30; AAS 101 [2009], 665).
28. Maurice Blondel’s work is in fact one of the main sources of Catholic reflection on experience. See his L’action (1893).
29. Giussani, JTE, 71. Translation modified. The text continues: “And we would not be able to recognize that life and the cosmos are gift if we did not await the revelation of its meaning.”
30. Giusanni, RS, 111.
31. Giussani, “Ogni cosa.” See also Giussani, TT, 11–35; Giussani, “Mistero e segno coincidono.” For his understanding of sacrament, see Giusanni, WTC, 179–200.
32. Lawler, What Is, 48. Karl Rahner does have an interesting theology of symbol, which nonetheless remains problematic because it does not integrate his Trinitarian ontology with Christology. See Rahner, “Theology of the Symbol,” 221–52; Rahner, Church and the Sacraments.
33. Giussani, RVU, 114.
34. Giussani, AVS, 351.
35. Giussani, ROE, 98. That man depends, that he is “the product of another,” is “the original condition that is repeated at all levels of the person’s development. The cause of my growth does not coincide with me but is other than me” (ibid.).
36. Giussani, RS, 105; Giussani, GTSM, 77ff.
37. Giussani, RS, 106.
38. Ibid., 95–97, 132–40.
39. Ibid., 145.
40. Ibid., 161.
41. Ibid., 101. “Man depends, not only in an aspect of his life, but in everything: whoever observes his own experience can discover the evidence of a total dependence on Another who has made us, is making us, and continuously preserves us in being” (Giussani, “Paternità,” 1–4, at 1). See also Giussani, GTSM, 77.
42.
