Luigi Giussani: a teacher in dialogue with modernity
View/ Open
word thesis.zip (2.040Mb)
Date
01/07/2011Author
Di Pede, Robert Joseph
Pede, Robert Joseph Di
Metadata
Abstract
This thesis submits Luigi Giussani’s theological writings to philosophical
analysis. Giussani (born in Desio, 1922; died in Milan, 2005) was a prominent
Italian author, public intellectual, university lecturer, and founder of the international
Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation (CL). My enquiry is motivated
by the experience of readers who find Giussani’s texts marked by vagueness and
seeming inconsistencies despite his attempt to respond decisively and sensitively to
real human problems. It also presents ideas from those works available only in
Italian to an English-language readership for the first time. Rather than criticize the
author’s style of exposition, or restate his arguments in a manner more suited to my
audience, I treat the texts’ burdens as symptomatic of the author’s deeper,
unarticulated concerns. I reconstruct Giussani’s implicit concerns using history,
intellectual biography, sources, and the logic of enquiry itself. I then re-read his texts
in the light of the explicit rendering of those concerns and, where the texts’ burdens
still persist, I suggest repairs corresponding to those concerns and to the errant
behaviours his writings were generated to correct.
Three themes are examined: judgement, freedom, and beauty. These were
prominent in Giussani’s dialogue with students from the 1950s onward and integral
to his idea of the religious education of youth. My analysis is conceived as a
contribution to philosophical theology, rather than to the philosophy of education.
The areas flagged for repair, however, may nonetheless serve educators. I conclude
that Giussani’s account is indeed shaped by his implicit concerns; that their nature
provokes the essentialist arguments he mounts; and that his attempt to expound
intrinsic, universal, and timeless claims runs against the pragmatic thrust of his
writing. My repairs call for a better account of 1) practical deliberation, 2) discursive
reason, 3) obedience in relation to autonomy, and 4) habits related to the formation
of virtues. I argue that the practical grounds of his project are best anchored in
robust solutions to the problems of ordinary life formulated from the deepest sources
of repair from Giussani’s tradition (sacred scripture and sacred tradition, including
the liturgy) rather than what he calls the “needs and exigencies of the heart,” which
address a different problem (namely Enlightenment rationality or Neo-Thomism).