Reading Luigi Giussani, even through a particularly good translation, scrambles one’s pre-conceived categories. Terms that ring familiar—such as “event,” the “I,” “experience,” “encounter”—take on a different, deeper dimension. As Gregory Wolfe, who has published several posthumous translations of Giussani since his death in 2005, puts it, his is “not the normal language of Christian piety.” Yet what is also unmistakable to readers of Giussani is a perception undoubtedly parallel to that of the crowds who heard Jesus, who were “astonished at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority.” In Search of the Human Face is a magnificent précis of Christian anthropology and a sound explication of how God’s self-revelation in Christ anchors our humanity and transforms it. 

“What Is Man That You Are Mindful of Him?” 

In his extraordinary essay “The Sistine Madonna,” the Jewish-Soviet writer Vasily Grossman reflects on seeing the eponymous painting, which he terms “immortal”: 

Grossman—whose works Giussani commended to friends—captures something essential to Giussani’s starting point: that, structurally, the human subject is a person with an “I” who is imbued with freedom, whose desires and needs are infinite. Giussani wagers that a path to fulfilling who we are rests on the paradoxical fact that “the ideal is the most concrete thing that exists.” 

This might seem a strange emphasis in our self-centred era. In their hunger for stability and the transcendent, many young people speak of the liberation of being relieved “that it’s not just about me” when they discover traditional forms of worship. And yet Giussani begins his book with this: “An interest in our own I—here lies the first step on a truly human path.” So, what exactly does it mean to be interested in our “I”? 

T.S. Eliot’s memorable lines from Choruses of the Rock, “They constantly try to escape / From the darkness outside and within / By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good,” capture the moralism (far too common among Christians too) that mistakenly presumes that ethics precedes ontology and that our performance procures salvation. Giussani, rather, proposes a recovery of a Christian view of the human. A person is truly fulfilled, he argues, when, like the disciples, they run “into a presence that corresponded in an unexpected and clear way to the desire for truth, for beauty, for justice which constituted their simple and humble humanity.” Such encounters “establish a connection between the finiteness of their human face and the infinite mystery of their destiny.” 

Christ’s Presence as an Event 

In Peter’s speech to the people at Solomon’s portico after he has healed a lame beggar (Acts 3:11–26), he identifies Jesus as the fulfillment of several prophecies: as the suffering Servant foretold by Isaiah, as the Messiah from the Davidic line, and as a prophet in the line of Moses and Samuel. Peter concludes this section by invoking Abraham, the one through whom “all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” 

In one of Giussani’s several exegeses of Scripture, Abraham becomes a prefigurement of Christ in the sense that Abraham’s following of God’s voice, in having “his consciousness . . . woven together with that presence,” was so total that Abraham’s discovery of an absolute dependence would become “the prototype of all those whom the Lord would one day choose.” For Giussani, the awareness of this absolute belonging is the beginning of morality: 

He adds that “in order for us to become truly wise, to desire, to be free—in order for us to become a true personality, which is the reason God created us—we must follow another. There is no other way, no intellectual effort or human cunning, that has the value of this method.” 

Theologian Aaron Riches states that according to Giussani “it is no longer the man of genius who is preferred but it is the one who is lowly, who is simple, who is pure of heart, who is able to recognize this event, this encounter.” For Giussani, an “existential awareness of what faith truly is” does not emerge from “a reasoning process nor of our study.” Rather, it is fundamentally “the fruit of an encounter” that elicits one “to make a total response” and becomes an event, leading to a life that dramatically gains an inner cohesion, which in turn changes how we perceive our relationship with others, with what has been given to us in our time, talent, and treasure, and transforms even how we look at our sins and limitations. 

Christ Exalts the Limit 

One of the principal ways that Christ transforms our humanity for Giussani is not simply in extraordinary gestures but in experiencing a redefinition of the everyday, the banal. He writes that “the most minute things in our daily life acquire dignity, have a vast horizon, are no longer a source of tedium and suffocation, and become above all a peaceful responsibility. . . . The banal is not what is small or habitual but that which denies the infinite, a forgetfulness of the God through whom we exist.” 

This perspective is not solipsistic but involves “the limit par excellence,” which is “the person next to us, whoever he or she may be.” We see here a reversal of Sartre’s maxim: Heaven is other people. In regaining our “I,” we learn how to truly say “you” to others, a deficiency that Giussani diagnoses as “the ultimate and hidden root of violence” in human relationships. 

The Positive Pedagogical Function of Sin in Salvation 

Any self-aware person has observed how often we err and stray even from standards we set for ourselves. In this volume, Giussani spends much space examining the effects of sin, which he defines as “our disinterest, distance, our infidelity to the fact of God among us.” He is surprisingly optimistic, however, about the potential of sin to lead us outward to something positive. First, he notes that in our awareness of sin, “we verify our own ineptitude and weakness . . . our incapacity to be ourselves” and “sense our nothingness.” Second, he writes that 

As we request and receive forgiveness, our “personal unity and the energy to keep walking are born again,” giving us the ability to “value everything in the light of Christ’s presence.” Thus, “sin is not the last word.” Instead, we receive a mercy that repairs and restores us now, and we are helped to “recognize our misery, as beggars whose richness comes from asking and depending.” 

A helpful illustration of Giussani’s point can be found in Shūsaku Endō’s work of historical fiction The Samurai—one of the great Catholic novels of the twentieth century. In it, a small group of low-ranking samurai and a Catholic priest in the seventeenth century undertake an arduous journey from Japan across three oceans to the New World, to Europe, and ultimately back to Asia and Japan after four years. What begins as a diplomatic mission to secure trading rights for Japan with European powers in exchange for an expansion of Christian missions in Japan completely changes as the samurai return to a Japan that is now closed off from the West and in which professing Jesus as Lord carries a death sentence. The leader of this Japanese group, Hasekura Rokuemon, is confronted with the question Is Christ of any use now that every external sign presses him to renounce this crucified King and save himself from a martyr’s death? Here is a brief excerpt of an exchange between Hasekura and his interlocutor: 

Here, in Hasekura’s gradual conversion, we see that he identifies so closely with Christ that it is no longer he who lives but Christ who lives in him (Galatians 2:20). We also glimpse a vivid example of what Giussani means when he writes, “Salvation means that we are loved to the point that even our greatest misery is useful for ourselves and for the world.” 

A Serious House on Serious Earth 

A central aspect of Giussani’s emphasis on Christ’s accompaniment is his stress on ecclesiology: “the Church, born to secure our relationship with Christ.” Giussani underlines the primacy of memory in his understanding of the human person, not as a simple recalling of a past event, but as the preserving of an event through time. History and memory, therefore, are not divorced but inextricably linked—a link that is guaranteed through the sacramental reality of the church, which is the continuation of the incarnate Word in history. Through our participation in this reality, we are called to make the journey of Mary and the disciples, who meet the gaze of the Word made flesh, so that like them we too can gain a certainty of him who is the substance of our life. Theologian Samuel Klumpenhouwer has noted that Giussani favours the meaning of memory as a present experience emerging in a relationship that is offered within and through the communion of the church. 

Giussani echoes the church fathers in presenting the church as the “pillar and bulwark of the truth,” which unmasks and unseats the idols we make with our hands and enjoins us to the divine life. Melkite theologian Khaled Anatolios, one of the most astute modern interpreters of Athanasius, notes that “the force of the Christian message can only be felt once our attraction to idolatry is unveiled and healed.” He adds that 

“Holiness as Desire for Life” 

As we ponder Giussani’s proposal of a Christian anthropology in full—our very being made to encounter the exceptionality of Christ’s presence, who transfigures our limits and sins, and accompanies us fully through the church—our task consequently becomes one of finding and keeping a posture of patient and expectant waiting while resisting the cult of busyness. 

In our practical lives, we expend so much time and energy on projects, activities, and institution-building that it’s hard to untangle and detach from the false notion of Martha, who is “anxious and troubled about many things.” We think that it’s all somehow up to us, the indispensable agents who will help God and others do what they could never otherwise do. As we get older and the vim and vigour of youth slows, my peers and I tend more and more to make the same observation: “I have far less time and energy to waste these days. I just want to spend it on something that lasts and means something.” So, what lasts? What is meaningful? 

Giussani writes that in 

In the final analysis, the “work of life becomes patience,” becomes “adhesion to a presence” and a labour of love as we await the coming of Christ, not just in its fullness at the end of time, but here and now.