The Religious Sense.

Monsignor Luigi Giussani is the head of Comunione e Liberazione (CL), an "ecclesial fraternity" officially recognized by Pope John Paul II in 1982. The movement, as it is often called by its members, developed out of a student association Giussani inspired and led while he was teaching high school in Italy in the 1950s. Mostly lay, mostly "youth" between the ages of twenty and forty, CL is now active in sixty-seven countries, including the United States and Canada. The group's mission, as its sophisticated website attests (www.comunioneliberazione.org), is "education to maturity in the faith." Animated by Giussani's charisma and prolific writing, it has taken a leading role in the pope's "new evangelization."

This background is relevant to understanding Giussani's book. Its publication history is also telling. After appearing in Italian in 1986, it was published in English in 1990 by Ignatius Press. McGill-Queen's edition is in fact a reissue of this translation, though there is no such acknowledgment in the book's publicity. Yet, despite having already appeared in English, the "new" book has been greeted as an event. It has been the subject of two conferences: the first, last November, attended by some thirty bishops and cardinals in Rome for the Synod of the Americas; the second in December at the United Nations. This renewed attention may be explained by McGill-Queen's plan to publish two further books by Giussani that develop the argument of The Religious Sense. But a reading of this book suggests a less academic interest, for Giussani's book is no ordinary work of foundational theology.

There is a grave need for what Giussani does: write an invitation to faith. Theology, he saw even before Vatican II, cannot belong only to the theologians. In a culture where faith is no longer a given of life, where the church is no longer coextensive with society, it is something of a trick, if not self-deception, to be a believer without understanding what one believes. But Giussani's book is an example not of faith seeking understanding, but of faith seeking uncritical - even unearned - affirmation.

Against the positivist reduction of life to mathematical equations or biochemical reactions, Giussani argues for openness to the "ultimate questions" - whence? why? whither? As he puts it, "What is the meaning of everything?" For him, this question arises out of "the radical engagement of the self with life." That engagement is at once existential and religious. Living life fully leads to religion and to a belief in God. According to Giussani, this existential argument is the most realistic, reasonable, and respectful of human longing. "If I truly wish to know [an object]," he writes, "I have no choice but to look down and fix my eyes on the object itself." Applying this principle, he argues that "the world is a sign. Reality calls us on to an Other. Reason, in order to be faithful to its nature and to such a calling, is forced to admit the existence of something other underpinning, explaining everything." This "education in freedom" presupposes only a community, the church, to make it happen. From communion follows liberation. Over and against atheistic humanism, Giussani concludes that religion is not a denial of human life, but an affirmation of its deepest tendencies.

Giussani's book is short and its argument correspondingly short on substance. "What is the meaning of everything?" sounds like the most radical question one can ask. But finally this question is grasping at air. For example, people often ask "why?" when they're suffering, or when a loved one is suffering. For Giussani, "the very existence of the question affirms the existence of an answer." But is it really that easy? For Giussani, apparently it is. "The human being cannot avoid this alternative: either he is the slave of men or a subject, dependent upon God," Giussani writes. Encountered in high school this rhetoric of either/or may have been .thrilling, but finally it is manipulative and reductive in its own way.

To make his argument, Giussani quotes not only Aquinas, Kant, and Wittgenstein, but novelists and poets. Typically he is satisfied simply to quote, without interpretation, as if it were possible to understand a poem, or anything, by merely looking down and fixing one's eyes on it. Giussani does not bother with interpretation but instead uses poetry as mere illustration on his way to a predetermined end. Lost is the density of life - its complexity and ambiguity - poetry exists to defend. Caught "between yes and no," God or not, the reader is cut off from not only the reality of doubt, but from questions about who or what God is. What's more, the reader who has known suffering is deprived of the language to ask another essential human question: Why, God, have you forsaken me?

Giussani's style of argumentation also leads to dubious conclusions. "There must be a revolution," he writes, "for the defense of what is human, and this revolution can have only one characteristic: it must be authentically religious, and therefore, genuinely Christian." What exactly is the force of the "therefore" in that sentence? Does Giussani want to say that only Christian faith is "authentically religious"? Unhappily, his claim that "the church alone, in its tradition, defends the absolute value of the person" appears to cut this way. Giussani's echoing of the rhetoric of the culture of life (the church) and the culture of death (everything outside it) not only makes for terribly simplistic and reactionary politics, but confuses the Holy Spirit with the church.

On the Comunione e Liberazione website, the description of the book's French edition warns against getting stuck on the movement's "most visible, read most political, aspects" and failing to understand "what could move thousands of youth to change their life so radically and durably." Doubtless it happens that CL changes people's lives, and that's why it's important. It answers a thirst for meaning. But Giussani's book is no unshakable foundation. Try as one might, it is difficult to suppress the suspicion that The Religious Sense has been reissued and hyped precisely because of its politics: old-style theological triumphalism in new-age dress.

Bernard G. Prusak is a graduate student in philosophy at Boston University.