Exploring a Sixth Sense
Luigi Giussani's The Religious Sense
S. Joel Garver
July 1, 1998
Not long ago I sat talking with a student on the steps leading to the main quad. In class we had been analyzing one of Augustine's arguments for God's existence. The student did not think we could know that God exists, and wondered how so many apparently reasonable people could put their faith in such an unknown being.
In his new book, The Religious Sense, the first of a trilogy, Monsignor Luigi Giussani seems convinced that in some way we all already know God. This conviction is the basis of his defense of the reasonableness of faith. Giussani's is not a mere natural theology, based on a human reason standing neutral to God and setting aside any uniquely Christian claims. And it is just as well, for, among others (most notably Karl Barth), I do not find such projects very helpful. Instead, Giussani presents a distinctively Christian picture of the human person as created by God, for God, in whom knowledge of God and self are inextricably joined.
Though often phrased in the terms of twentieth-century existentialism and phenomenology, Giussani's discussion has an informal simplicity and general clarity familiar to readers of Francis Schaeffer, whose writings, like Giussani's, grew out of extensive discussion with young people. Moreover, Giussani's text effectively pulls in snatches of poetry and other literature that illuminate his central points.
The theme is an exploration of what he calls the "religious sense"—the uniquely human sense of openness to God. To Giussani, we are a question to which God alone is the answer. He begins with the nature of reason and knowledge, broadening the concept of reason to embrace the diversity of its objects, the multiplicity of its own procedures, and its essentially ethical component. He ...
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