La réciprocité; Nédoncelle, Vers une philosophie.
43. “Try to imagine a baby who has just come to life in the womb of its mother, just conceived. To make an unimaginable paradox, if that small fetus knew that all that he is, everything, each tiny drop of blood, each cell from its newly begun structure, everything in him, comes from the body of his mother . . . if this small fetus could be aware, he would feel everything flowing from the organism of his mother. . . . Think of the kind of total dependence—total in the absolute sense of the term—his self-awareness must be” (Giussani, PLW, 3:25). This example is also used to clarify the nature of morality.
44. Testori, Il senso, 38.
45. A rather lucid example of this opposing view was written by Gregory Stock: “IVF still accounts for fewer than 1 percent of live births in the United States. Improvements, however, may transform the procedure enough to integrate it into routine procreation. With a little marketing by IVF clinics, traditional reproduction may begin to seem antiquated, if not downright irresponsible. One day, people may view sex as essentially recreational, and conception as something best done in the laboratory” (Stock, Redesigning Humans, 55). See also Ratzinger, “Man between Reproduction and Creation.”
46. Balthasar, New Elucidations, 221.
47. Ulrich, Mensch als Anfang, 140.
48. We refer to the child in the singular, but we include within this reference the relation among siblings. The multiplicity of children is, in fact, an important sign of the fecundity proper to love (beyond its quantitative value), because every child is an expression of the novelty and similarity proper to otherness—both because every sibling is a new expression of the same love and because each one has a different task and unique relation with the same origin.
49. John Paul II, Theology of the Body, 429–32; Granados García, La carne; Scola, Nuptial Mystery.
50. See Balthasar, TD, 3:206–14, 220–29.
51. Giussani, RS, 7. Translation modified.
52. It is perhaps clear now that “desire” for Giussani does not mean an élan, a Schellingian force that drives the human being forward without having been initiated by anything, nor does it mean just any type of desire. It is inappropriate, for example, to identify desire here with cupidity.
53. Giussani, RS, 113.
54. Ibid., 97.
55. It is important to see that Giussani is proposing a renewed sense of mediation, which brings together truth’s particular evidence and man’s access to it without confusion. Through the encounter with the dual unity of the sign (gift and logos in a third) and through one’s own original needs, it becomes clear that “the proper characteristic of man’s being is that of being transparent to himself, aware of himself and, in him, of the horizon of the real” (Giussani, RS, 97).
56. Ibid., 99.
57. Ibid., 47. The four categories are not drawn from any anthropological or eschatological system that might tend to downplay the integrity of human nature for the sake of shoring up the primacy of God’s salvific will. Nor are they an expression of Rahner’s supernatural existential; they do not indicate an original bestowal of grace. The “needs” delineate human nature’s twofold being given and openness to the mystery. The human end of seeing and being in communion with God does not lead Giussani to reduce history to the categorical, or religious anthropology to an athematic orientation toward God.
58. See also Aquinas, ST, II–II, q. 68, a. 4.
59. The ground of Giussani’s treatment of Augustine and Aquinas on man’s constitutive desire to see God—a theme we cannot explore here—is creation in Christ.
60. Giussani, RS, 116. Translation modified.
61. Benedict XVI, Church Fathers, 86. The discontinuity between revelation and man’s affirmation of the mystery is also why the original needs by which man judges the truth of everything should not be understood as potentia oboedientialis. Indeed, they indicate man’s creaturely dependency. As Balthasar says, “obediential potency” does not give God the priority that is proper to him, and it would be better to dispense with this term. See Balthasar, ET, 3:40. It is better, then, not to think of the original needs in abstract terms (nature’s capacity to receive grace) but rather in personal ones, i.e., these needs are an expression of the relation between God and man that is always initiated by God and within which man’s existence (and nature) comes to be understood.
62. The expression “knowledge in love” is from Augustine, Trin. 9.10.15 (PL 42:969). This cum amore notitia is also expressed by Aquinas as sapida scientia. See Aquinas, ST, I, q. 43, a. 5, ad 2.
63. Giussani, ROE, 99.
64. Giussani, VNC, 20–22.
65. He writes that “without religiosity man is used by man and destroyed by man. The power that operates in this way is not only the power of multinational companies or well-known dictators: it is mainly the power of man over woman, of woman over man; it is the power of parents over children, and of friends over friends” (Giussani, “Esperienza cristiana e potere,” 18). If understanding means to grasp the link between something and reality, Giussani means “the whole of reality.” Since this wholeness is always beyond man’s grasp, to understand something means to begin “a very long search in order to reach that threshold from which—participating in the eye of Another, in the heart of Another—one can see and love everything” (Giussani, SPVVC, 59).
66. Giussani, SPVVC, 36–49. In this regard, Giussani’s understanding of judgment (and therefore reason) has its truth in faith.
67. Giussani, AC, 277; Giussani, SPVVC, 58–64.
68. Giussani, “Per lo sviluppo,” 39.
69. Giussani, JTE, 20.
