Vita religiosa (Religious Life)

A life of activity.

All people, in every part of the world, whatever their way of life, whatever they do, have within them the possibility of spiritual life. All are, more or less according to their development and their good faith, consciences. They can live and understand art, thought, human passions, moral and social problems. All humanity is part of history without limits. I see that moral effort can abide in each man, as it abides in me when I am active, sincerely trying for the best in each action – sometimes with personal sacrifice. That I cannot say, ‘the spirit reaches a certain point, and no further’, is wonderful. Indeed, on many occasions I go beyond Man and I cast my attention on non-human beings, animals and plants all around me. And it appears to me that this life and historical development extends also to them that live and are active, and I hope this happens better and better. However, surely in Man there is much more, when I think of possible acts of Goodness, of Justice, of Beauty, of Thought; of noble feelings and of social structures he can accomplish.

Life is a continual seeking after and discovery of these values (which, indeed, at times are written in capitals: Beauty, Truth, Right). When one lives by these values and is interested in and has a passion for artistic beauty, for goodness, for social justice, for a higher moral ideal, for noble and impassioned impulse and feeling, for truth and the most coherent mental organisation, one does not ask oneself what the purpose of these values is and why we live. They are like a grace that enters us, and that exerts force even on those who would like to close in on themselves. We act in order to put those values into effect, and when they appear they seem superior to our miseries; we feel humble, as it were, before a gift. If it is we who have acted, we say, ‘it is God who inspired and upheld me’. If it is others who have acted, we say, ‘those are men beloved of God’: Dante, Mazzini, St. Francis, Leopardi, or even any ordinary person; but our expression is ‘angel’ of goodness. The more we love those values, the more the whys and wherefores of life disappear: lovers do not question themselves about the reasons for their love.

Are these values all together in a mass, like wheat in a silo? What would total artistic Beauty be in the abstract, and not in the concrete work of art? What would total abstract Goodness be, and not the single act of goodness in a living person at whom we gaze enraptured? So, activity is required - which is to produce and criticise, to create and revise, to speak and listen. The one without the other does not give rise to value. Even the governing body, if it does not meet with criticism or checks capable of correcting it, becomes bad administration, as in the regime described in the “Promessi Sposi” (The Betrothed). Production and criticism, responsibility and freedom, here is the foundation of true human activity, that which comes from Man as conscience, as moral centre. A great deal of work over centuries and centuries of civilization takes shape right here. As one goes on in life’s experiences one realizes better and better that it is right to make the focal point conscience, the interior decision with which in good faith we face up to life (many times abandoned by all as though we were in a desert). Those who relinquish conscience, that sacred whole of thought and feeling, leave themselves open readily to tyrants and vices.

These values, these ideals, do not derive from facts, but tend towards them, to raise and modify them; and if the facts do not respond straight away or if they turn against us, the soul remains in the right, even seeing that the realization of its own ideal and the results of so much work be postponed. No adverse circumstances exist in which there does not remain always something to be done. Is the guarantee of one’s own ideal to be found perhaps in immediate success? History moves forward through those who go and imbue reality in a thousand ways with a profound ideal they have framed in accordance with the best needs and the whole soul. For instance, I am writing a poem, but it lacks in value? The more effort, life and love I have put into this activity, the more other good (be it also not artistic) will be generated in my soul and also in those around me who have seen - almost felt - me work. I want to achieve an ideal of improvement in society, but there is no response from the civil ranks? They deride me, they arrest me? But if that ideal has really existed it produces - though not immediately political victories and social institutions - in myself and in others moral acts, goodness and spiritual elevation, works of art, new thoughts and feelings, and can also pre-announce and pave the way for more complex and longer-lasting, if not forthcoming, social accomplishments.

Each decision I take, each reflection, establishes me as a responsible centre. It is an initiative that I establish, a contraposition in which I am committed, a cosmic cry that rents the fabric of events. When the others, the turn of events, the successes are at variance with the programme that the events in my life, my considered decision lead me to in that moment, then I am the living soul of that programme.

If the affairs of heaven and earth were to mix for some reason that in scientific classification I would call astronomical or meteorological; or a man through his wondrous actions showed me real powers denied to my force, I could not submit absolutely to the law that, after such an unsettling of events, might be issued from the heavens or from the miraculous man. I would say, ‘You, put your strength to the test! What I have to do, however, can proceed only from my conscience, from my decision. The test of duty I find in my persuasion of good, not in your threats, not in your miraculous deeds’. I found societies, I collaborate with institutions and I receive them from history in order that they might help me, powerfully as they can, to actuate good, which is liberation from evil. I will go even further: I love them, since if childlike I relish the sound of thunder, the bold flashes of lightning, and I keep a watchful eye joyously on the many wondrous aspects that by and by the pages of the book of events present, as a mature man I revere the societies, institutions, groups of human beings that checked a tradition, a desire, a programme and who gathered and aroused spirit and passion; and I know the pain and the effort that a man puts into establishing them. But at times the regularity of Nature strikes me with its insensitivity, and a flood covers a stone or a child’s head without distinction. Often it also happens that a human institution in my eyes appears blameworthy. Whatever the case I have but one duty: the initiative - become centre of humanity against the flood, in the face of the institution that disseminates actions I, with all my conscience, would not wish were such.

My decision presupposes that in the activity I do I see something positive, a value to defend, a responsibility. Even in keeping myself alive, in eating, in resting, I recognise, defend, assert that this is what I have to do, I take responsibility for it. At that point, in that moment that is the action to be done, to be achieved. Then I shall pass on to others, as in ten years’ time I will have a different suit from my present one, but that does not alter the fact that now I wear this one, and that today I eat even though tomorrow I will eat again. An exhaustive act cannot be performed, does not exist; one has to perform act after act, the absolute lies in this: that I have to perform this act here, straight away. Is this hard? Do you wish to renounce responsibility - which is, that here and now this act, and not another, must be performed? If so, you will lose the freedom of your decision, the infinity of conscience, all of which lies in this opportunity, joyous and hard at the same time, to decide.

The horizon

Where is my firmament? Until quite late in my life I felt that the sky of the air above me was something absolutely superior, abode of things divine. From the heavens of luminous air could come marvellous and long-awaited things. At night I thought that from between two very distant stars something very important and longed-for might be about to appear. But from the heavens comes nothing if not that which is similar to the earth; in that space there are celestial bodies, matter similar to this; between the heavens and the earth the difference is only one of perspective. As does the earth, the heavens look at me during my existence, and I love them both. The harmony of the earth, the countless stars and in groups above the towers and peaks, the silent dawns, the brightness of the long summer afternoons; wherever I go the sky and the earth go with me. I have an old habit of going up to look for the horizon. I love the windows from which one can see a portion of the mountains. Towers and peaks thrill me, because I can see the whole line between the earth and the sky; but Jove and the angels have vanished.

This is how I have sought and seek always. I apply myself to many things, I do not allow my spirit to be sluggish, I take it to the field of action. I go over human history time and again and I find ever new, beautiful things of value. I am convinced of work, and just as the cult of the horizon, in me the cult of activity in human history is ancient and deep. Since I was a boy I have tended to see human epochs from above, looking for their meaning, asking myself, ‘And today?’ I have acquired a certain level of culture; I did not only learn facts, but I looked for something that would interest more the innermost part of my being, which had beauty, or which were acts of goodness as though stimulating me directly, as it were. I felt that a stimulus came to me from all culture. So, I have sought after and found always something. More and more I have felt all humanity and its historical life past and present as if it were accompanying me. Many times at night between one period of sleep and another I think of the city which surrounds me, of my land, of all humanity. This horizon is always with me, it is not lifeless, there is always something in movement, diverse, more alive. So I no more regard the ancient state or the traditional church as something absolute, which sits steady on an eternal pivot. I see them rise, evolve and fall. The horizon of history and of continuous activity is much wider. History and everyone’s activity is more inside my conscience. I feel better accompanied by history as by the horizon.

How I tormented myself as a boy because of these two terms: spirit and matter! I felt I could not accept the separation, yet it was on the tongues of many. I dreamt of a life that took with it all matter instead of leaving it outside the door, as it were. Why not bring it into joy, into the élan of the spirit? If I look back on my boyhood and my youth, I see some things, I mean inanimate objects, into which I put a great deal of my spirit: the vegetable garden of my schoolmistress when I was five, one of our windowsills, the countryside where I stayed on holiday, nooks in my town, an item of furniture, an article of clothing – in my soul they are so present and exalted that where is the difference between spirit and matter? As I have grown up and my life has unravelled, has become complex, this anguish has disappeared. No more have I said, ‘spirit and matter’, but caught up in numerous problems I have tried to solve them singly, to study, to earn a living, to improve my body, to make friends, to understand the beauty of art, to comprehend philosophy; and so in thought and in continuous feelings I saw that dualism of spirit and matter overcome. Living sincerely and passionately, where was that great contrast any more? I no longer suffered at seeing matter outside the normal life of the spirit, as I did when I was tempted almost to run and become matter with matter, to stay with her because I could not allow her to be excluded. Instead of doing this, it has happened that my life has caught me up in its activity, and I have found myself with matter close by, a companion, inside the light and not outside. In the same way that as a boy I passed near villas, buildings, universities; I thought about newspapers, magazines and books; about associations and ranks of families; and I always dreamed of being able to enter, and it seemed as if I had to stay over here on one side, and all those things on the other; and on some occasions I would have entered straightaway, as it were, to ask to see, to stay. Then, without thinking anymore about it, only following various matters in my life, I have entered, and that separation no longer exists; thus I no more see that great contrast; matter and spirit are overcome in my daily life.

Knowing, opening up

It is thoroughly small that universe in Dante’s Ptolemaic mediaeval conception. He, in the darkness of the night, feels stronger the superiority of God with his heaven - empyreal i.e. blazing - higher than ours. Prayer and the contemplation of the stars are two acts which become more intense in the Dantesque night; science and theology are like a higher astronomical scheme. Much larger has become the universe in Giordano Bruno’s conception, which removes all barriers. The universe is unlimited, and any point, therefore, can be its centre (and not uniquely the earth, cramped like some mediaeval castle with its closed economy). The universe is boundless in all its dimensions, even small ones - to the telescope is added the microscope; and if at first that brings the elation which every open space inspires, in order not to be like the horse which charges here and there, you stoop on a part, on the grass which by and by gives nourishment, with the joy of freedom in your spirit. The universe is without limits, that is, inexhaustibly it offers something. It is always in some way inside my act, either in the form of house, city, continent, earth, galaxy, or like an atom dense with motion and force in its interior. If the universe has no limits, there is no longer an absolute value in the difference between great and small, between starry sky and atom, since both are contained in the act, which draws near to the flower and the moon; this proximity is more important than the lesser or greater distance of the flower and the moon. The universe is limitless because I cannot say, ‘Here suffices for ever’. In the present I always come up against a new problem in space and time.

Like this, however, the situation has gone back to being similar to Dante’s in one point. If there the world is delimited, here it is always ‘determinated’ in its manifestations, varied though they be. But if, in order to see it delimited, once I had to take a sheet of paper and draw on it the fable of the fixed earth surrounded by skies and further beyond the empyrean, now it is sufficient that, with all my spiritual life of interests, studies, feelings and research, in thought I look from my ‘open’ spirit and I will see a spatio-temporal complex. And if once, drawing that figure I could have thought for a moment that it did not interest me or that I could gaze at the world and beyond from a neutral angle, now I can no longer do so, because I am firmly at the centre. I can not change facts, time, space, draw nearer the moon, push away an earthquake at will. The world I see is something serious, but not for this extraneous. It is part and parcel of my life, and with my life I understand it, I feel it, I work and live it; and I can live the earthquake now with my body, now with my scientific thought, now with my spirit which rushes to aid the victims, and also with my artistic imagination. The world is always ‘some thing’ to me, and I give my all.

Lovers do not love the statue ‘Love’, but a real person they have picked out; and artistic Beauty is known not by making her a statue, but by knowing beautiful works of art time by time, with spiritual effort and act. There is no point in knowing Truth, Science absolute, except time by time, inside the act, thinking that concrete knowledge which constitutes itself and never exhausts itself. More than seeing the statues of Love, of Art, of Science, it is doing that matters. Not doing simply to move arms and legs, but that higher form of activity that stems from inside, which is the true heaven, where we exist with infinite freedom and good faith; and the absolute is not outside, but in the conscience that in operating actuates. In fact rather than say truth, goodness, beauty, justice, freedom, love, it is better to say: Truth in thought, Goodness in acting, Beauty in intuiting, Justice in operating in society, Freedom in overcoming temptations, Love in interiorizing and saying ‘thou’; verbs which indicate act. But they are absolute for the persuasion they are worth and tally in the conscience. While I read “The Divine Comedy” I do not ask that Beauty be given me, but I recollect myself and I open myself in reading. There is no greater test than, being active sincerely, opening yourself up.

The world of living history

Exactly because the world is not closed, fixed and still, civilization has led me to feel supremely that in living historical reality, common to all, an infinite creativity moves, a continuous upsurge anew for free, central activity - be it only thought. Were I to doubt this (and not to perceive what I have received from civilization, not to feel the complexity in act of my internal dialogue, not to detach myself, at least for a moment, from adverse circumstances when faced with something beautiful: a book, a piece of music, an intellectual problem, an act of goodness), then I would have to imagine having a son. Well, what would I teach him? How would I bring him up, and in what would I feel that he is really better, gladdening me more, worthier of being honoured by men? If I saw him rise convinced of acting according to spiritual values, I would feel, even in my personal grief, more relieved. We can have the ‘storm of doubt’ in our soul, we can lack that drive which from within accompanies the best daily activity. By suffering we can be oppressed if in circumstances too adverse those values do not seem to have the strength to free us, but the thought of a son is enough and straight away the conscience quickens, and about him we have no doubt. We would like him to be not corrupt but pure, not downhearted but active, and we see him (with our paternal imagination) follow social Good, Honesty, gain knowledge of the Beauty of art, develop the continuous structure of Thought, become faithful friend, generous husband and father - and we are filled with joy. Even if we are worn out by our self and we feel empty, but beyond the prison bars we glimpse in a human face a lofty feeling, and we know that that being is capable of good (he is innocent, he has repented if he has erred, he is there for a legal action), or we hear him say something in all sincerity that refers to those values, we feel re-created, comforted, and we go back and examine our ‘emptiness’ feeling sustained, as it were. But our very physical existence, our awareness of being a body which suffers when hit, takes heart again and becomes almost more solid and trustful if we think of a child that continues existence as a living body on the earth, in the light, and as word and act in humanity and in single societies.

When I see the world in this way, I no longer feel the scorn I do if it shows itself to me only as a snare of pain and evil. If on the other hand you present me a world in which this life of the conscience, this creative freedom is lacking, and into which nobody can infuse those values which have always something new and actual, then I shall turn to Nothingness. Of what avail would be an exhortation, affection, and any innermost, social act anymore? Pleasure itself, what is it any more if not inserted in a wider scheme? I feel grateful to every being that has expressed its creative freedom, that has said even only one prayer, indeed that has simply taken upon itself, even in silence, the weight of life. Because it is there that I see the root of this persuasion which culminates in our civilization, that the act opens up reality and prevents it from closing in on itself. As long as there is spiritual freedom in the world, I shall feel any criticism of mine of it not as a reduction to an eternal nothingness, but an adjunction which improves it.

The two principles that have favoured the emergence of this vision of the world, open not closed, are the self and history. As regards the first, nowadays we feel that we ourselves want direct experience of values, and they have value not because of external attestation or imposition, but due to an attestation intrinsic to our conscience. Of course, what is needed is good faith, innermost sincerity like that which the followers of Protestant Reform required from the conscience of the Bible reader who, if in good faith and abandonment to the Word, became directly illuminated by God as to the right interpretation. Extending the principle to spiritual values, they cannot be grasped except by innermost openness. It is not an authority that can absolutely impose on us, for instance, that a poem is beautiful - I have to read it, re-live it, and in my inmost being vouch (if it warrants it) for its value. Thus the self comes to have an infinite importance regarding the ‘world’, if in the self comes about the attestation and the celebration of such lofty values as Beauty, Goodness, Justice and so on.

The other principle is living history, which has vaster dimensions than written history. History has not only opened this road, built these embankments, brought these stones down from the mountains and into the architecture of the square: history has given me a lot directly and interiorly, through the humanity come into me from my parents, and customs, trends, language, mentality which come from history and continue in it. Even regarding elementary things history has changed me, and certainly I do not look upon the dawn, the mountains, the sea with the same spirit with which I would have looked upon those simple events three thousand years ago. At this point I can not and must not rid myself of the interior attestation of the values, since it would seem to me as if I uprooted the raison d'être and development of any human conscience whatsoever; neither can I do without the historical contribution, since I would no longer be able to account for the ever renascent and variform vitality of the values. For this reason nowadays we prefer to say ‘history’ rather than ‘world’ (intending for history the reality which lives and evolves and which we, in our evolving, live on). In the ‘world’ we could have felt even outsiders, with ‘history’ we are compenetrated, and we do not see it as a sequence of inert events (that would still be ‘world’), but as an unfolding which, illuminated by values, includes all reality, takes it up again and again and in new ways, not for the sake of change, but out of inspiration and a need which takes hold of men; in such a way that artistic expressions, problems, feelings, deeds, ever connected inseparably to the world emerge dramatically.

The myths of the beginnings

If I think, ‘The world had a beginning’, I lose myself in this thought since I go back and further back with my imagination and I still find something, at least a void, a silence. From this labour of the imagination, troubled and vain, I free myself by opening up to the world before me, as it is and as it changes, understanding it, but establishing a tension of actual presence between me and it. Here I do not need to use my imagination any longer, rather I must be precise and concrete in what I ascertain from experience. If I am incapable of this tension through which I turn to the world in all seriousness in order to know it in the present, that seriousness can be roused in me by the myth of the world as created once upon a time. But the more my knowledge has this tension towards its content, the less I need to fantasize about the world’s distant beginning.

If I think, ‘Original sin came to pass’, my potential for sinning that I feel today is given a starting point in time, and I forge the myth of our forebears who sinned. But the more I suffer from my potential for sinning, the further away moves and the more faint becomes the image of the first sin. The moral tension of the present resolves that myth right here in my act, in my pain, light and shade that rises from it laboriously. Undoubtedly, if I did not have such immanent conscience of my potential for sinning, the myth of the inherited sin would be enough to shake me and make me diffident of the flesh. But I feel that, Adam or no Adam, this weakness or recalcitrance which is sin swells up in me, and I accuse and weep for myself.

If I think, ‘At a certain moment in history redemption came to pass’, I can not there and then not feel a stirring of joy so much do I suffer from my incarnation amidst sin, and so much am I convinced that good is something lofty and that I cannot create it with my own hands: one always looks towards the part where the sun rises or from where an aura which re-creates reaches us. But the more seriously I reach out in good faith to hope for the best, trusting that something valid will descend into activity, the more distant becomes the thought of that act of redemption in a moment in history. That act spreads and joins all those acts that the conscience performed in the tension of goodness - even bleeding in the world. And inasmuch as also I in my conscience reach out, I too communicate with them and morally actuate that redemption. Absorbing into intensional and active conscience the pain of the potential for sinning and glimpsing redemption, moral life resolves in the dramatic present that fact seen in a historical moment. But how necessary would it be for me to re-evoke it and raise my eyes towards the crucifix, if I despaired of salvation or if (in an equally wrong opposite) I believed it easy and not dramatic, even tragic!

Moral conscience, at the point in which it finds itself historically, can resolve in itself the myths of the beginnings. Free from dogmas and from the traditional institution, I will give no absolute importance to the fact of believing in those myths, but I will try to see in my and other consciences whether they really live in their present and moral resolution, which is what matters. And if they are still spoken of as detached myths, and someone believes it is good for pedagogic efficacy, that is another matter, and of little importance, since it regards moments of transition from one civilisation to another, the scaffolding of buildings that comes down later, but was necessary. The tension of moral conscience is infinite and free if it is such that it can resolve those beginnings in its present.

Historical changes

Against this figure of the moral person, on whom rises the citizen, needs and problems today storm questioningly. We are at a point in which traditions are dying and decisions of universal responsibility can arise. In these first forty years of the century comes to an end a group of European questions and mores (national revivals, cultural traditions which have evidently finished their cycle, peaceful coexistence of various parties, religions and sects), and world themes and apostolic morals arise. Responsibilities and difficulties seem greater, things to oppose painful, even horrendous: power, cruelty, lies, vices have frightening qualities and dimensions. From the inclinations of our body, for instance the smoking habit and sensuality, to a hardened overpowerful society, today’s man is aware of, and complains about, almost insuperable difficulties. Tiredness in the face of society, plus the efficacy and deployment of modern mechanical means which make the powerful even more so make matters worse; and the weight of the ever-growing formless, yelling crowds which listen little, follow facile formulas, idolise those who potentiate their defects. The balance and exchange between thought and action is unsettled.

Two solutions then: sink, i.e. let yourself go, compromise, accept defeat, become gloomy and empty inside, lacking conviction - or gather up the forces of the moral centre. This second solution, which is that of the free man, could give rise to a new stoicism, through which man shows his moral strength, his ‘independence from fortune’ (as Foscolo said), and does not give in to vices, to tyrants, to the disordered crowds, but becomes a statue. But in this there is something sad, how can this sadness be overcome? How can one heal a society that would fall into decline if its best should step back in self-preservation? In the meantime accept interior solitude, it is an act that at least for a moment must be performed. Those who do not do so will not come of age. Whether one decides to get married or to choose an ideal, in any deliberation you have a moment of solitude, and it is right that it be so. Is this not better than putting oneself into the hands of an alien power which gives us commands in continuation? And this interior solitude is no longer such when one is always reaching out with renewed force to communal life. We are part, in one way or another, of historical social groups, of juridical relationships, we are in a game of wills and we can always cooperate or not, but even not cooperating we remain in society. Man has to explicate the creative freedom that he has in his innermost self, take it up again when it seems to be slipping away, defend it if others try to take it away. He has to realize his own humanity solidly, his own thoughts and his own spirit actively. Self-expression is his supreme obligation and right, the doing of which is liberation, superior to considerations of utility. Many do not know that what is simply the administrative side of life (order, well-being) can, and when necessary must, be thrown away if a profound reason of conscience requires it. One eats to live, not lives to eat. In order to live, the reasons of the conscience which make life acceptable must not be annihilated.

Living, I modify my situation continually in order to better it; I look after my body to have a certain physical force at my disposal; I think and am active in order to act on circumstances, to seek for and discover in continuation, to live my life. This is working for freedom. But we have to be careful that in us or in others freedom does not stop there, does not become attachment and that is all. I feel that my freedom is actuated and grows through everything which brings serenity to the human spirit, and which solves the problems around us. As the heart needs to go on beating in order to live, so for freedom we need to continually add new work, perform it and solve new problems. And these problems are real whether we open our eyes on the Asian plain, on the Umbrian hills or on the cities of America.

With the élan of a serene spirit

Man as a moral centre of decision-making, of responsibility and of freedom, is person. Within him a continuous struggle takes place, more or less active and vigorous, between the search for and actuation of an improvement, and the temptations, sins, mistakes. Everyone, through this interior struggle is part of history, of Man’s spiritual suffering in his desire to overcome his limits through activity. He knows he will die but nonetheless tries to do as much as possible as long as he is alive. He knows he can make mistakes, and for this reason seeks to act. In his effort, applying himself to various activities in good faith, sincerely desiring the best, Man redeems himself from his limits. Dante says, ‘Faith without which good works are not enough’. No! ‘good works’ are enough (that is, when done for a good purpose and in good faith). Inmost active sincerity is the instrument of salvation, and Man with his ‘good works’ frees himself in spirit, enters infinity, the intimate heaven that looks on reality. Even those who know nothing of the spirit, of history, are a part – and more active and alive the more keenly the spirit takes shape inside them. Anyone who said, ‘I am a man, the spirit dwells in me’, and it went no further than his boast, would mean less than someone who was unaware of being ‘person’, but was really active as one, as a centre of moral effort.

He who knows that this world of spiritual activity is a lofty reality, and knows that those around him are not things, but moral centres, innermost struggles of responsibility and freedom, is convinced of spiritual value, of the world of ‘persons’. He points out this life all around so that all become conscious of it and strengthen themselves in their infinite task as centres of activity; he defends it against those who would change people into things by exploiting them, oppressing them, ill-treating them; around him he frees and enhances spirituality in all forms (artistic, philosophical, social). This persuaso can be called in many ways according to the times, and Fichte will say that he is the ‘scholar’ who watches over and works for all mankind, who makes himself free and wants to be surrounded by others who are free. Who, in any case, does not act for himself as an individual opposed to others, but universally, for the production and improvement of values, and so that all civilly may raise themselves through these values. Though joining more and more associations, so that they increase the efficacy and joy of diverse works, the persuaso wants them open, he does not want them to close in on themselves and exclude others.

I am a persuaso not only in that I have a conscience, I watch over and work for the unlimited spiritual life of everyone, but also inasmuch as I myself, with constant moral effort, become person. I regain my interior freedom continually with my spiritual grounding making myself better, surmounting errors. Someone that sees the others as persons, that respects and helps them but that does not suffer interiorly and does not fight to realize values, to overcome sins is not a persuaso at all. Making others a moral centre of development does not dispense us from being one. Morality lies in this infinite interior effort which makes one truly a man, truly a person. Sociality lies in feeling and fostering those around you infinitely; so then, morality helps sociality and vice versa. The interior struggle through which I regain freedom of spirit with great effort because I have to overcome so many interior obstacles gives greater value to my encounter with other beings that have in their inmost being, more or less, the same suffering, the same struggle, and I gather this from various clues; indeed because I am already going through it; otherwise how could I notice it?

More than the external, it is the soul that is troubled, uncertain or unsettled. It is in this that doubt penetrates, it is this that has to feel again and again the reasonableness and the intimate power of the ideal, in order to fight and build. We have to become better and be present, accumulating merit, feelings, activity, in order for history to give way. Acting in this way you do not wait for the times, but prepare them. Changes, systems, do not come if not when the ideal is ready, if not when there has been someone that has given himself to them as if they already existed, making them present by his ardour. We have to overcome the tendency to feel our persuasion less sturdy than that of those around us, or of those who have lived before us. The formative process to champion is not only technical. Without a doubt it, too, is important and a study of single problems should be made zealously, as zealously stones are collected for the construction of a temple. Culture for all levels of a system is most important, but it has its deepest reason in the conscience, which establishes and renews the ends. Technique is instrument of the spirit. One can not accept that society be necessarily and always violent and gross, and that only materialistic actions, rooted in the economy, unscrupulous, armed and impatient can reign. We need to go back to the origin of that behaviour and those social movements, and there find a ‘mentality’; modifying this, one influences the social consequences. Framing a mentality, that is doing something concrete: from this come new politics, new types of government, martyrs, poets, administrators, and all of them weaken shallowness. They insert not moralistic exclamations, but concrete humanity.

The persuaso wants to defend personality. But we need to distinguish what we understand by person. The first and great Romanticism gave value to all that was individuality, it sang the nobility of the thwarted self, trembled for the yearning of the spirit and theorized the individualization of the universal, from which came the foundation of modern morality. But Romantic dissolution is quite different, and its extreme fruit is in activity without reason or intimacy, in the individual moved by the sole will to satisfy his own sensibility and to astonish the silence of the cosmos with noise, speed, gunfire, imperiousness. To re-establish the balance and sense of probity, of real devotion (which in military regimes is more intense in the leaders than in the citizens), the persuaso holds out hopes for austere, grey even, quite anonymous groups of administrators. The scope for the realization of the person widens up right then since the active person, creator of religious, moral, artistic, cultural values comes to the fore: those that really lead society from innermost being.

Your own solution needs to be brought forth and presented as that which satisfies, that which is worth dying for. And so that it might live and penetrate human universality, it needs to be brought with tension, ready to shine from the cross. The cross is the tragic from the world’s point of view, God’s presence from the point of view of innermost being. The collision is like the explosion of the infinite innermost being against the obstacle, it is Christ’s scream. Politics not being any longer possible - that is, the study of how to best actuate moral life -, activity made impossible, innermost being presents itself directly. That no one desire this lacerating of technique, of the study of measures and actuations, but each man can find himself in Christ’s state.

Familiarity and tension

If I think about what I am truly, about the make-up of my being and at the same time about my deep need and my most constant ideal, I find these two elements: familiarity and tension. Neither one without the other. Familiarity without tension seems to me an abuse of things, people, life, taking vulgar liberty with everything. It is not even familiarity or confidentiality, fine words, that I dislike seeing deprived of the innermost value given them by tension. Yes, put our arm round the shoulder of the person next to us, but when our togetherness elevates itself to a good thought, by a promise of sacrifice or loving devotion, to the discovery of a truth, to the formulation of a great social design, at the sight of something beautiful. And also tension without familiarity becomes harshness, arduous truth and spirit, solitary and even dangerous to itself, subject to sinking into the void it creates by driving others away. Marvellous is the tension which takes me away from all that is sluggish and slovenly, from reducing everything to gossip, from changing the sacred (like saying ‘adieu’ - I commend you to God) into thoughtless habit; so I save myself in silence, in solitude. I go to look at the mountains, to hear a concert, alone, so as not to lose myself or fade away living a life without reasons that justify it. I am saved by ascesis, too, because you always have to renounce something.

As a reaction against asceticism modern folk have thrown themselves on everything, they have taken liberties with everything, putting their hands on everything. So doing they risk losing the sense of value. They take things as things, and not for a deeper reason. The ascesis which saves is renunciation performed so as to affirm and live a value – something lofty - inside. Thus does the young man who renounces the pleasure of mercenary love, either not to consider the other person (in whose soul and life he has no interest, but whom he simply pays) as a means for his own pleasure, or to save himself to love more intensely the only one to whom he will offer his whole soul, and to whom he will say that divine thou, and they will build together that splendid society of family - or for other reasons. It is always a value that justifies renunciation. And on the other hand you can only really live a value by renouncing something, even if it hurts, especially if you would have the means and circumstances to take on a lot of things but instead you say, ‘I will not’. So in your deep love for someone you forsake looking at others with desire. In this way truly the love for them brings with it all your soul, only in this way do you say a thou full of your whole self. Consider how much more you appreciate music if you betake yourself to it in tension accompanied by renunciation for something. Consider how deep your love for your mother is when in order to watch over her in her pain you go without sleep, without a pleasure or something else which in itself would be pleasurable. In the dramatic moment in which you are becoming convinced of that value, that duty, and you glimpse on the other side what you are forced to give up and it is painful, if you feel that you offer this ‘extra’ to the music, to your mother, you gain strength and joy. If you feel the relinquishment and you relinquish, here it is an ‘extra’ that you offer with your person, you really see your person, which has forgone pleasure, taken into the value of the music, into the devotion to your mother as if it were taken into a temple. And you are conscious of an ‘extra’ that you give, you feel part of a sanctifying initiative fortifying your pain. When in order not to give a bad example to your children or pupils, when in order not to push a girl down the slope of sensuality in some way kindled you take away that repose your body would need, you forgo embracing and kissing even once that face which seems to sum up all your desire and your fibres, you renounce, suffer, and almost cry deep inside; but if you feel religiously that you give your person, as an ‘extra’ to the ideal of not enfeebling the solicitude of those children or to the ideal of not corrupting a pure spirit, you actuate a superior live presence, and the tension that animates it is the real tension, the one which brings with itself a value and forgoes something worldly.

Form from deep within

Modern thought has narrowed the gap between obstacle and work. In ancient times on one side was put the world with all its very solid reality, on the other the work of the man who raised himself to thought. For the Greeks thinking was something superior to doing, and it appeared to be the activity which was freer from the contrast with obstacles. So, pain was set on one side and life, with happiness as its aim, on the other. With the drawing near of obstacle and work, pain and life, the modern morality of man as centre of activity, responsibility and freedom has sprung up. Around such a centre has thus been founded a unity not calm and dead but dynamic, existing on continual developments in which all the elements - obstacle and work, pain and life, matter and spirit - participate, crashing into and clinging to each other. Freedom from matter as obstacle lies in work and the spiritual life, and victory over continual struggles lies in this living them and giving all you have. In action as a moral centre not even a stone is outside me, everything comes together, unfolds, is an element in spiritual effort; and the artist creates, the philosopher thinks, the politician reforms, such living history takes everything on itself. When you act, for the conscience the value does not lie in the content, as the value of a painting does not lie in the fact that a king rather than a beggar is depicted. The infinite lies in the inward form of the action. Throughout the day I may have done very simple things, those things that seem to clog up the day. But if it was those things that I had to do, it is this form of duty, of spiritual life that counts, and this creates infinities. The mother who has had to sustain or look after a suffering child for hours and hours during the day, if this is what she had to do it is as if she had written a masterpiece, listened to music. I am convinced of this, and I know that men are much more than material things, and much more than knots of feelings; they are infinite opportunities for achievement due to their inward form, even if their action, clothes, work and the external result is not much, but form from deep within, in me and in others, is of an irreplaceable nobility.

Lasting judgement

If I recollect myself in my innermost being and consider my actions, that is where lasting judgement comes about. That I may grasp it, I take up this sincere, intent reflection: ‘Did I give what I believed to be good against bad? I saw a wrong and I gave justice? A perverse deed and I tried to give what I believed to be goodness?’ And so on in all other particular situations? In judgement everything has this aspect. If on some occasions I have even taken the inititiative of goodness, if I have opposed energetically, this is something firm in my life, and judgement brings joy deep within. The relationship between me and life should be like that of a husband towards the wife whom he loves deeply: what you do not do, I will.

Inmost judgement saves and comforts me entirely each time I reply to the question whether I proffered a good action, a good intention, good faith against evil. If not, and I feel distressed at not having taken a good courageous initiative, in the suffering I feel, in the reddening of my face, the hope is restored that in some way I can replace the bad with something good: sincere contrition. And, on the other hand, what seemed negative, a vexation or lack of discipline, my non-cooperation, how positive and good it appears in innermost judgement! The good I have done to one or more people, which they disavow, in my inmost judgement I can offer it as a response to the question whether I did good instead of bad: this comforts me about the world.

From my spirit persuasion operates, it carries out ideals, resolutions, directives; but how great is the difficulty, how terrible sometimes the temptation! Help to overcome this should come to me from persuasion, yet it does not. How can it be made as strong, as fortified as is necessary? I say, ‘Yes, goodness is a struggle,’ and I understand all the reasons for it, but when it is I who have to struggle, I would prefer not to, I would prefer not to be faced with the temptation, and if I look around after feeling all this sadness in me, I would prefer that others, too, did not suffer so.

Ways of acting out of persuasion are possible, I know, but when I lack the strength I look at those ways with a sigh; they are reality and joy. And the more passionate my feelings for them before, the bitterer I am now in the midst of temptation, out of fear of losing them. The simple command ‘Thou shalt not sin’ has no compulsion because it does not stop me from seeing how attractive sinning is. It has been that complex life of those ways of acting which has justified on other occasions the command not to sin, and so I have been saved. Innermost persuasion instead of the law; not of the kind that descends inexplicably on my head from above, be it even accompanied by lightning, threats and promises. Persuasion of that way of living, if it were deep and alive in me, would help me overcome sin.

At the height of persuasion I was glad. Every thing and voice from the ‘world’ was a call, as if a solicitation, an agreement, and a confirmation of my innermost being in act. I replied with gratitude and lived as though in an infinite harmony and joy one of Jesus Christ’s sayings, one of St. Francis’ acts, a piece by Beethoven, a social ideal; and the sound of a bell, a landscape, a gust of wind, apart from being what they were singly in the classifications and the values with which we characterize reality, meant something to me as if all these parts of the world, apart from being what they are, actuated a beauty and feeling which tallied with my deep feelings, with my innermost being’s desire for serenity. To the core of my persuasion in act was added an ‘extra’; I only needed to look around, to open up my soul, so that, there and then, a simple object, a cloud, any event whatever replied to me, spoke to me, confirmed me. All I needed to do was overcome temptation and, behold, the smallest thing that happened said, ‘Well done!’; that I had worked intensely in the good faith of a truth value and, there and then, the smallest object appeared joyous, close, corresponding to me. All that was needed was persuasion in acting, with absolute initiative, that is from a more intimate part of the world and, lo and behold, from the world of living history, from every point of reality came to me accents, openness, unrequested elements of joy, brought about by an ‘extra’.

But the first thing is that I do not cling totally to sin as if it were something good. I fight, at least. I do not lose sight of the light, I do not curse with my innermost being. I do not sin against the Spirit (the gravest sin, says the Gospel) even if the flesh is weak; not peace, but torment. And so sin will lose its appeal of fullness, beatitude. Blest be thou, o innermost persuasion, that you make bitter to me even alluring temptation. If I resist it, what joy in the return of triumphal persuasion to my spirit! I delight in the pain suffered in not having given in, as if it were a trick played on the weak self that was on the point of yielding.

What are the prospects if instead I sin? Suffering - since in suffering I am better persuaded of how lofty and upright is the good I should have done. And in suffering I recollect myself, I feel that it is I who have done wrong; I who (in my conscience) do an act of penance and goodness and reformulate the decision to act according to good, if I have the opportunity. From the moral standpoint I will act more decisively, and with the good faith that comes from the intention to make reparation, with that sincerity in my eyes that the world perhaps does not recognise, but which is known by those who have sinned, who in their becoming incarnate commit a sin, slight or grave as it may be.

If that deed I have performed is an act which is surpassed by my contrition and by my moving towards new better acts, it is still something that belongs to me as a person. And I will not hide it, I will keep it with me only because I cannot annoy the world with stories about my personal affairs. But it is there, open, and those occasions in which I say I did it will not lack, and I shall never lie about it ; moreover, in this opportunity to confess the sin I add religiously something serious which is also an expiation, a profound joy of redeeming myself right from deep within: the courage of feeling ready to be derided, criticized, attacked by the world rather than lie about my sin, accepting it as mine humbly before all and everybody. This adjunction of non-mendacity, in the moral torment of remorse, is my religious ‘extra’, my contribution to lasting judgement.

Values and my person

That all events follow a course, have a reason, is a belief that is more or less clear in Man’s soul, however much or little he does. But he who believes more is more active, keen and fervent in matters of conscience. This belief is not disinterest in events, as if it did not matter which turn they might take, but it searches passionately for a reason for events. It is restless, like love. The spirit gives its all, it is also interested that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. Here is zeal for Truth, there is ardour for artistic Beauty which can attract to its world and transfigure everything; elsewhere is fervour for social Justice, for Freedom, for compassion. It is always a value of the conscience that absorbs facts, illuminates them, sees them having a reason (but sees them with this light of the spirit): the fac that this stone rolls down a slope, how many reasons of my onlooking spirit it enters! In the study of falling objects, of weight, of the shape of bodies; in beauty, in the rhythm with which I can intuit it; in the pity I feel in advance for that person it could collide with; in the lowliness I feel in thinking of all the events that happen out of my control, of my personal initiative. There is no event, tiny or great, which is not enwrapped by a value of the conscience, which is like a sky that keeps the small earth in its custody. This is the true astronomy of the spirit; it enfolds the universe, too, with the value of its open interiority.

The ancients, mediaeval man, saw the rising of the moon, stars, sun and had the sensation of a precise, superior law (and of a pure substance, up above). We observe events from our inmost conscience - which is the real heaven - and, more or less, cause the influxes of truth, beauty, justice, goodness, which the spirit in one way or another lives by (Man does not live by bread alone), to rain down on them. Interior infinite freedom is a firmament which comprises the ever-flowering and renascent constellations of the ideals of Goodness, Justice, Truth, Beauty. How marvellous it is to see conscience labouring to apply this firmament to events! I esteem myself and others if we try, if we do not give up, because peace must come, at worst later, and not sooner. Man as artist, thinker, politician, scholar, master, father exerts himself in applying his conscience to the contents of life. In that moment man is ready to disappear, to lose himself so long as this intimate heaven might triumph. The poet in the central moment of his inspiration stakes his all on this. This is the struggle of concentration, tension, where the infinite lies. I am convinced of tension in order that values be realized, moving from infinite interior freedom, from good faith.

If you take one value, you take the others, too. One ideal, fully alive in the spirit, calls the others; you are already in heaven, not on earth in the midst of vile events. The specks in the sky are different according to the circumstances, which could be prevalent artist, politician or other, but they always come together in good faith, in the liberty which illuminates events, understands them and brings them together in a reason. There is no need to create a cult around this reason; it is enough to live working in good faith, always trying to interpret events around us with the movement of our conscience, convinced that they find their reason in us, indeed for we persons who decide and are active. Value does not lie in the crude fact that I may turn blind tomorrow, but in the spirit with which I shall live this circumstance, which could be in patience, humility, activity, calm towards others, intimate feeling of life (much more valid than the world’s appreciation and which may be more important than the whole of Charles the Fifth’s Empire).

And I see my person present to this firmament which illuminates events, I seize the uniqueness of my person, which modest though it may be can not be taken for another. Others may be more cultivated or intelligent, luckier, better, more upright, in short he who is this, he who is that. But I do not put on the scales of comparison or envy what I am, the unique voice that I have. I am what I am, a person, a soul, a quality not a quantity. This is not pride or self-satisfaction, it is grasping one’s own self in a religious act and seeing it present to the framework of reality.

Thankfulness

What absolute difference can I find among the following quotations? ‘Much shall be forgiven you because you have loved much’ (Jesus Christ); ‘The moral law inevitably humiliates each man when he compares with that law the sensible inclination of his nature’ (Kant); ‘ The history of humanity in its essential features is nothing but the story of God and Woman’ (De Sanctis); ‘Poetry is a colloquy with God; oratory is a conversation with men’ (Croce); ‘Every virtue, all good is from him, and not from his creature, and no one can glorify himself in his presence’ (St. Francis); ‘To make yourselves abidingly less unhappy is beyond you, unless you improve yourselves’ (Mazzini).

I see them, even with their different historical stress, on the same plane: they all move my spirit which harmonizes deep down with them and my heart beats on hearing them again. As my life unfolds they seem to grow and become more true, above all those which serve less for making a fortune in the world and much more for loving, having faith, not losing hope, having strength in temptation, comfort in suffering, light in the mind. Hitherto I have spoken of the moral and social life of the persuaso, I have raised the question of the divine thou, the religious ‘extra’; well, what I have said about values and the ‘extra’ is confirmed by those citations and I find them truly made of the same substance as that intimate firmament that observes and illuminates the troubled life of the world. They are truly real. I cannot make any absolute difference between those phrases (apart from the one which is relevant to the position I find myself in or to the circumstance in which they were said). That I feel in my soul stirrings of affection and attention for those who enounced them is not only inevitable, but I feel it as a duty, too, for those expressions were uttered by a conscience in a moment of suffering, they arose from a dramatic situation, from an effort, from a tension; and I interiorize he who lived and suffered it. As much as I can be, I am grateful and attentive, I say thou (but I could cite expressions said by those men, every single one, that do not touch the unfolding of my inner being. Indeed, it would reject them, disapprove of them. And even if there were no such expressions, I could even think of deeds, known or unknown, performed by those people that I would not like to perform).

Those voices are in tune with what really in my soul aspires to good in a unison of humanity and civilization, a clear circle where there is no need for prodigies and mysteries to intervene. The same happens for certain events appertaining to religious suggestion that I found at birth, which now combine with others that would be called non-sacred. On the morning of a feast-day from my bed I hear the ancient bells of certain well-known churches pealing, to my soul returns an inexpressible emotion which rekindles much of my life. Even if I recall a certain road dear to me as a boy, even when I go into the local cemetery, or I see again that line of mountains, or I hear that voice once more or I listen anew to the opening of the Fifth Symphony, they are all impressions which move me and at times seem almost to ask something from me. There is a more or less, but there is not an absolute difference. Even less among objects, the so-called sacred ones and the others. Only one difference is now absolute, and here I can make no concessions: that which determines good faith, sincerity, moral demands of the moment, cooperation or non-cooperation. In this regard, as I refuse those acts and expressions of the above-mentioned people which do not concur with my present need - for instance, I do not accept St. Francis’ obedience to the Pope of Rome, while in the heaven of my conscience is included his attention for the sick and his desire to bring calm with his spirit; so of the impressions which come to me I fight against those which remind me of sin, and I open myself up defenceless to the others. Regarding objects, only those that would be means for acts I cannot in all conscience perform are profane and foreign to me. Thus, the sacred which has come to me from tradition and from the surrounding world finds its end in the vast life of moral conscience.

But the religious element, actual and inmost, rises when - in the presence of those people’s expressions, of those emotions for facts and objects - I turn my gaze on my small person encircled by its finitude, on its anxiousness to know a reason why, to search always for a deeper reason, on this sometimes bitterness sometimes devotion of the spirit, as if it went back to being a ‘tiny thing that nothing knows’. Then one of those expressions, or an event or an object seems to call me, and I turn round in a religious ‘extra’, as if it were a voice for me alone, a comfort for my heart. In this ‘extra’ I feel, without saying it, grateful for that calling me. How unhappy would I be if no expression kindled harmony in my spirit, if no event moved me! Truly I have been called to something and I reply with an impetus and an ‘extra’ over and above daily moral life. From the bottom of my being I say, ‘Here I am’, for me reality turns into a feast-day, my person can give itself to something. Instead of superstition and magic I give the ‘extra’ offered by my innermost being to that which is consonant with it. It attracts it like a special sign looking towards me as person. In the state of bitterness, unrest, inertia, mistrust in which I found myself, that expression, that emotion, that object called me. The holy is celebrated in the offer of my heart, which is festive at that. Thankfulness is a feast-day.

Not that I disparage the world and its events and results. Without a doubt it saddens me that justice does not triumph and in a given situation the reign of the bully is established. This event is what it is, in the suffering that it produces for the moral conscience; but nonetheless I am thankful that I have the concept of justice in my soul, even if it does not triumph on that occasion. I am truly saddened that repeated attempts for days at writing that poem did not work out, but at the same time I am thankful to my aesthetic conscience which gave me the severe judgement of the page that was not successful. ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’, said Keats; but also an ideal of freedom, justice, also a truth, an emotion, an object, when in all these things my innermost being offered itself in thanks as if it said, ‘I was waiting for you so that I could give myself to you, to offer you all my candour of human spirit’. ‘For ever’, as we say in the joy of gratitude. And my thankfulness has no shadows, because I am sure that there is no being, no corner of reality where this call does not appear, where an ‘extra’ of thankfulness, added to the world’s events, cannot be actuated with élan.

At the centre of activity are persons

Slowly the history of humanity up to the present moment has acquired decisively certain moral positions, and we interiorize human history, which is the history of morality in development. Traditions, laws, examples of most noble spirits are a heritage we do not refuse, which, indeed, we search through and discuss continuously creating our actual action. Everyone more or less does this. Do they have to perform a deed? They question history in its customs, laws, example: they decide. Surely, there are some who do this within a narrower horizon, like a common person who does not follow all the stages of, for instance, the moral development which leads to monogamy. And so greater importance is gained by the institutions, the laws, the examples (and myths) that surround him, showing him the way to interpret his marriage. The more cultivated man can better realize how a certain point has been reached, even if the result and his decision is the same as that of the common person. Both of them can elude custom and innovate, that is, follow an inspiration that seems to them, in all sincerity, superior to the custom, norm, written law. Man is Man because he can obey and create, his life is this unceasingly. The common man can be worth more than the cultivated man because, even within his horizon of limited culture, he can put more good faith and sincerity with himself into the decision; and the other, with all his knowledge of the history of moral problems can be sluggish and devious with himself. As poetry is founded on feeling, but is elevated when civilisation gives it form, so moral life is founded on sincerity, but is elevated when fortified by awareness.

Basing himself on conscience as each man as a moral centre must do, cannot be a closing in on himself. All of sociality, morality and religion’s efforts are directed exactly at preventing this closing of the conscience in order to enrich it instead with new elements. When conscience closes in on itself too much and cuts itself off we clearly see that sociality becomes violent and religion revelatory so as to shatter that shell. On the other hand, the more conscience in deciding listens to problems, considers itself capable of error, and thus works in order to cast doubts, assimilate elements and listen and reflect, the more egoism, dogmatism and social tyranny are overcome. Then arises waxing interior morality, open and not immobile in defending the past. Every time we feel the urge to say that we acted according to conscience, let us ask ourselves if it was closed, not considering various factors that thought and the circumstances themselves suggested.

The feeling that Man’s decision moves from the infinity of his conscience, that there within is intention, the value of the action which counts for good faith and the thrust that the spirit gives it, brings me back to freedom. Others and I are free in our moral effort, and what counts is the inspiration that each one contributes in that moment. How much morality there is in my or in others’ actions I will never know definitively, because the drama, research, élan can never be stopped, neither by me nor by others. It is exactly in this research and élan that I can single out evil and say, ‘Yes, doing it like that, I would make a mistake, commit a sin. I must not do it’. It is an unceasing fight between more or less. The best you can actuate is a step higher, and you have to step up. Here one feels, time by time, how the paltry administration of life, pleasure for pleasure’s sake, vice, becoming brutish are overcome by stopping our attachment to them through a moral act.

It is true that each action of ours comes back on us, body and spirit (each action also modifies our body). Rather, it comes back on everything and everyone, since each act we perform places itself at the root of reality. Well, this thought may at times keep us from sin, but other times it is not enough, so uncontrollably resolute are we. We are convinced, through history and through our elaboration that performing certain deeds is bad; that in the union between the intimate heavens and our body which performs the actions a particular deed would darken and bring pain, yet in ourselves and in others around us we see the fall. I know I am free inside, that if I make an effort I establish good, yet I do not find the strength and can be defeated. This defeat of my freedom and moral strength is sin. Why on earth did not my will attempt the greatest tension if it is free? Men choose two roads, then: they make evil lawful and lead a low inhuman life, like Semiramis, that queen of whom Dante speaks, who so as not to be blamed for her vices decreed that there was nothing wrong in them (as though kings or their subjects could wipe out certain conclusions from the unfolding moral history of humanity!); or they are aware of the wrong yet fall, suffer and groan inside.

A struggle unravels continuously inside the spirit of every man truly man, and it is not enough at all to know that remorse, doubt, pain, desperation are the elements that accompany life and which alternate, negative with positive.

‘So you’ve come into the world? Do you want to act? Well, you’ll find hurdles and defeat. This is life. Would you like the sun to rise without casting shadows, darkness that exists inasmuch as light exists?’

I know all this, but it is not enough, there is more. There is the individual, that one and not another, in the moment of his struggle, determinated in space and time; and from that solemn unit of the real which contains all, from that inevitable law that explains all, from that historical whole which absorbs all as it unfolds I lower my gaze, in the name of a God that does not devour, on my and others’ born individuality, I focus on this limited being. I do not want to judge him, I do not want to define the office of that action in the unfolding framework of history. I draw close absolutely to that individual, to his struggle, his suffering, I am presence to him. Inside the action I see the person, that soul come into existence to struggle, and looking on his struggle I say: thou art.

For me there is a religious act which cannot be erased, which does not need shoring up nor means closing one’s eyes to all the rest of life, which is not myth in an imaginative sense; it is reality; it is Man (myself or others) with his struggle, to whom presence intervenes and says thou. Even those who are unaware tend towards this, to say a disinterested thou, of presence, of loving unity. In all human thought and discourse there has always been implicit or expressed a thou to your own or another’s soul, a passionate focussing there. Today the tragic passion which sees many things fall and change, and so many men overwhelmed or taken by activistic frenzy, concentrates itself in this thou, more intimate than noise and motion (‘thou art, I am present to thee’). The religious eye looks on the single man, in his struggle, in his limits; and this change saves us from mythology.

Religion as adjunction

There is no need to describe Man’s life, to enunciate his struggles; his word touches them continuously. His soul, even in silence, constantly lives them: struggles, disputes, developments, falls. It is this same first seeing the light, this existence which tries to maintain the integrity and development of the body, that tries to overcome physical illness; all of it a continual drama, mostly subconscious, but in which we participate anyway with deliberate acts: eating, taking care of ourselves, resting. It is the unremitting strain of living, of having to take so many decisions, of going on even when at times tiredness and disgust would draw us to a halt at the edge of the road. It is the capacity we all have for making mistakes, and which we ascertain for ourselves and others, recollecting ourselves and meditating in the morning and evening. It is total proof of human limits and finitude.

Religion is drawing infinitely near to people’s struggles, interiorising. It is spontaneous adjunction, a giving of oneself from within and thus gratuitous increment and pure offer, not violent substitution that I might want to make to the infinite capacity for decision that consciences have. It would seem inhuman and morbid to me that with my religious life I should take away from any being whatsoever even a tiny part of freshness, spontaneity, freedom; that I should weaken his placing himself as centre. I want to add, not subtract. I want history to live, as I would like to have children, not paper people even though created with my ideas and my dreams about them. Religious life for me is not an element that should be reproached if absent, praised if present. Religiously I do not judge: I join in and make my personal contribution - presence. For these religious things I do not associate myself with other ‘religious’, because this offer is absolutely from deep within, absolutely through me. If I join up with others it is for moral, social, intellectual work, and I seek out others in order to carry out commitments socially; but the religious life is an adjunction I make, pure and absolute, untroubled about being alone, there being two of us, or more.

If you think of reality as a block, a system, you end up imposing domineering dogmas, tyrannical absolutisms. But if you think this block is simply an appearance, and that instead reality opens itself continually in novelties, you understand what this pure religious giving of yourself is; this neither asking nor imposing anything; this saying thou to souls disinterestedly, in an infinite presence. Thinking of someone is becoming presence, it is truly the discovery of a deeper intimacy. They say that Christianity has affirmed the value of interiority both by urging the spirit to an about-turn, to an interior conversion in its dispositions and evaluations of the world in the imminence of God’s reign, and by giving fundamental value to intention which, if bad, is already itself a sin. This interiority is now in our common way of understanding, and this is why we speak about spiritual life and the different values that, from an interior moral centre, it creates with its activity which unfolds in living history. The religious act of the thou posits a deeper interiority: it lives infinite presence to all souls, inside history, inside activity. This religious act is given with purity, not urged by anything and not wanting anything, gratuitous adjunction ‘freely-given’ to Man in his struggles, but from innermost being.

Wherever there is a moral centre, a struggle, that is where living history takes place. Meeting persons, seeing them as such and not as things or shadows I encounter the spiritual life, I celebrate it through the act of seeing around me other persons, other consciences. This spiritual life constitutes living history, the one from which we receive and give as centres, as consciences more or less active. Some are conscious of this spiritual life, they know what it is and what it should be. They are those who, even when caught up in their own personal struggles, think about events from a universal point of view, they see that every single action of theirs has, as it were, an eye on everyone else. They hope that this action counts for everyone. They rouse themselves and others, form associations, urge and actuate, reform societies so that Man might have more numerous occasions and means for his development. Inside unlimited history, inside the associations and active groups religious life is gratuitous adjunction, the ‘extra’, the presence that the religious person offers.

Creation

When I consider the world of things and people contained in my experience, I see that life takes on diverse aspects, from the white sheet to the black ink, from the animal to my neighbour, all living a life of their own. This stopping to think of things one by one, seeing how they all have their singular existence makes me happy. It is dear to me to examine things one by one, for in this way I feel a closeness to objects and to beings. It is not the species dog (as described in books on zoology) that interests me as much, much more this dog individuated here, alive - and even dead - as remembered by myself or others: the individual interests me much more than the species. Even a machine, a motor: I am interested in that motor there in its singularity, more than the description of its workings as in a book on mechanics.

Individuality seen and considered - that flower, that house, that eagle - is a joy, noting the sublime attitude of the spirit in grasping individuated objects and beings. It would be enough that I saw the individuality of just one leaf of grass, which is that one there, humbly with others on the grassy track, but it is precisely him, individuated, and I could name him with a proper noun, with something that was rightfully his only, were it even a serial number. Considering individuality is something I undertake, and I do it without thinking that others might do it with me, or that it be done by the object or being to whom my attention is drawn. It is absolute initiative, pure offer, gratuitous adjunction, an ‘extra’ from my innermost being that I insert into the world. At the root of the ‘extra’ lies this seriousness and concentration in doing it with absolute free initiative, though the whole world knew it not.

The divine thou

Many things may be lacking in me, but the thou, no. It is an opportunity within my life, bound to it. What does space and time matter? As in the empyrean of the Dantesque Paradise distance takes away nothing, in the same way I can equally turn my whole soul to you and say thou, wherever you may be, however you may be, o single person. If I said it in a limited way, with conditions, then it would be a contract, and I would remain within the bounds of the world. But I say it to you from infinite innermost being, with absolute initiative, as a gratuitous offer I add to your life, and which, through an ‘extra’ which springs from within, is added to mine. I could stay inside my individual limits and instead I address you with the thou. This is the unconditioned, and which is not explained either by that which I am, or by that which you are: it is not a need, a necessity, an imperative. For if I look at what I am by myself, and what you are by yourself, I see two limited circles, two movements closed within boundaries, but lo and behold the ‘extra’ and I say thou. Do not believe that the merit is mine, as if I had made an effort towards you and you should reward me for it. Do not attribute it to my person with its modest body, poor face, its tormented unworthy soul. Do not look for the reason why, as I do not search for it. But in offering you the thou, in this gratuitous adjunction, I see that it is more than my whole person, and from this derives the intimate solemnity in which I find myself.

When a baby is born it has already had the meeting of the spirit in its parents’ act of love, when they knew that from their unlimited devotion a life could come forth. And this act happens anew in the flow that the spirit, through the parents and others, brings to the new life called and roused in thousands of ways to be part of living history. That child will be a new member of humanity, already known as humanity. Its coming is a happy confirmation of this humanity and will be occasion of enhanced life in everyone, in that free history of innumerable humanity without masters or servants. Even within a child human struggle can unfold in all its forms. In the thou I say from the ground of my innermost being I add to its life an act which is joy to me, whoever that human being may be. Even he whom I had never met, but who comes to me now for the first time, in the impetus of the thou I say, I see him rise and as though I knew him already.

In the deepest sadness everything releases itself from the tension of being and having. My spirit is sad unto death. Like a latent illness it comes on and all my body is bitterness. I am marked. Perhaps something takes shape inside me which makes me among those who have to know, who have to act from innermost being. So, in a divine tension, in order to say a thou infinitely I look for someone nearby. I create a bond of closeness. Friendship is marvellous: it converts sadness, listens to a confession, prompts one to live presence. Such a deep friendship, saying the divine thou is the religious ‘extra’ added to simply knowing others.

Love is much dearer the greater the wish is to live (in preference to any other proximity) each other’s life side by side, with affection for all aspects and sides of living in reciprocity, and with that feeling of freedom in which there is no reciprocal demand for perfection, but mutual respect for the spirit with a certain of life of its own, just as it is, with its tone, its unfolding; happy to be close, to go on together. This devotion and moral will already makes love a most lofty act. Religion (educated in the meaning of presence) makes the other feel that ‘I love you infinitely’ has in every case a divine value. In love we say that expression in particular to a person with whom we wish to build our life (which will also be training ourselves with affectionate feelings, work and patience, for a concrete interiorization of every other person outside the family), and this renders the joy of love religious.

Your happiness

Whatever I do well comes back directly or indirectly on others, whether I clarify a thought, keep my home clean, improve my way of speaking, even if I look after my physical well-being, since if I keep well, apart from being able to work better and perhaps help others, I will not be a burden on them if they have to look after me (and it could also be even a joy for them to know I am well, for that happiness which the health of those close to us generates in us, and that not feeling assailed by suffering. This is human. If I can give this joy, apart from the advantage I have for my activity, why not give it?). Sometimes, however, the question of others arises and becomes distressful, pressing: persecuted workers, battered children, an innocent condemned, a just person not listened to, a poor woman - like Manzoni's ‘femminetta’ - battered by the world and scorned in her pain, not listened to as she groans. In cases like these I have to carry out a plan of action which is human, moral, social, and personally or with others work to eliminate this injustice, to create better conditions. Am I not flesh and blood? Am I not part of the world? Do I not find myself in a context? Do I not have strength or can I not get it from somewhere? I have a mind, arms, means, a heart which revives my social inspiration should it languish.

Apart from these ways, which on the whole make up human moral, social, political activity, in me there is the need, the religious thrust of the ‘extra’. Through this ‘extra’ I feel those people worthy of being happy, of having the joy which they lack, so as though from a deeper part I live this need for them, this giving which I offer with my inmost being. Peace, joy, serenity, the triumph you do not have, I feel deeply, infinitely, that I give it to you as a blessing without external sign, as though only I could and should give you it, and I did not entrust it to another. From an inmost ground my ‘extra’ arises towards you - happiness. Here modesty is not permissible because, through an impulse of this ‘extra’, I take on the need for your happiness. And since it does not come to you from the world, I become intimate centre for you in the thou I say.

Ways of acting on you

Man as moral centre, having directives and ideals, moves to realize them in the world around him, and to this end uses the means he possesses or procures; among these strength: he chops down trees, for instance, to make himself a home, he founds iron and makes stronger beams from it. However, I can avoid the use of force on certain occasions when it might strike other beings equal to us. So, I will multiply the other activities, I will come up with thousands of other ways in which I do not use physical force on you. I want to come out only with arguments which appeal directly to your thought and feelings. Considering you as spirit and thought, I try not to act on you with deeds which strike your physical person painfully, aiming to change your spirit and thought. I do not try, for example, to make you understand Dante’s poetry by dint of punches. Regarding what I think is good for you or for everyone universally, as a way of carrying out a certain action I choose these means:

1) my inner persuasion which, being already deep and experienced, sets up in the spiritual world - where inmost conscience listens to everything - an interior force which sooner or later will count externally, even though it is not brought out straight away;

2) the influence which example produces: that is, the exterior and public demonstration of what I believe to be good;

3) direct expression to you through words.

And if I do not kill you, this does not mean I accept your dominion; indeed it is exactly because of this that I have the right (since I do not stifle your opportunity to change) and the duty (since he who does not kill has to do as those small animals who reproduce and become more numerous, and the gigantic animals disappear from the face of the earth!) to increase my activity and to prove your error in a thousand ways.

The more I use direct physical force, the more I make it difficult for the soul and thought to reach a position, and even more, all told, I make it difficult for the life of the conscience to unfold. You may achieve a result in one part, but you lose in the others. If by beating him I make a son more servile, it could be that I suffocate in him a flourishing life which may have brought him to studies, friendship, respect for others, to an enthusiasm and lyrical abandon, which is a great value, a lofty quality.

Others’ existence

I am aware that my existence, which I conduct daily, can cease to be (that is exactly why I look after it). Simply because we exist, myself and all the rest - inanimate objects and living beings - are on the same level. According to which law would I have the right to maintain and defend my existence and to transform inanimate objects and even destroy living beings for it? Only the law of the jungle. Which is not a law (because a law presupposes always that others have the duty to respect it), but simply and crudely a vital act, like that of a stone which rolls and crushes or a sheep that tears away grass leaves. But on the level of simple existence arises a set of instances which are exactly my real life, through which I live in every moment. This complex of my real life is what directs everything and subjugates vital acts as though they were instruments (I tried to sleep tonight thinking that as a result today I might be able to work). I look at my existence and at that of others as from above and from this vantage point I see these existences - both mine and others’ - subjected to the law of spending their energies, if it is right, for good, a value, affection, or for an ideal.

When another human being’s existence and mine is at stake, rather than bringing myself to the point where I consider which in fairness should perish, I can bring myself to that deep, solitary, innermost centre to offer my existence and save yours, o human being whoever you are, just because you are human being - and not wanting to know any more. In this absolute and profound act I have the joy of seeing you as living person, of approaching you boundlessly. Using objects, on the other hand, I only subject them to changes, since the graphite of a pencil ends up on the page, on the floor or elsewhere, always undergoing change, like water, like atoms, in short. Here I do not follow any other law than personally bringing about change for some purpose, a value, a justification. These are inanimate objects, but as regards people, through a religious ‘extra’, I can take their existence into myself, giving my existence wholly, and, if necessary, to the root, from this deep innermost centre of absolute engagement.

Your existence joins my spirit, my inmost act. It is not an external event, something that is fine whatever happens. I am happy to interiorize your existence, respecting and loving it. The thankfulness for having met it, the joy that you are alive, changes thus into religious presence. But if respect for human existence were a simple matter of indifference or weakness, it would have nothing to do with the religious interiorization of humanity. Better then that in doing your all to educate, stimulate, restrain, if necessary lives be lost, since I do not have a low opinion of anyone who rationally, and driven to it, as it were, out of absolute necessity, takes another human being’s life. I also realize that I owe some things of my present historical life to those who, for example, fought for the independence and freedom of my nation and probably also killed tyrants and foreigners. I respect the father who kills whoever might threaten to kill his child. But I also admit that a father can stand in front of his child’s breast and allow himself to be killed before and with the child, interiorizing the existence of the wretched assassin with a loving religious act. I do not wish to detract anything from the rational decision taken by a person who, after reflection and with pain, takes another’s life. What offends my inmost being is the enjoyment of the act; the addition of passion to the rational decision. If something need be added to rationality, my religious persuasion is that boundless love be added, and so that decision will always be more cautious (and this is one of the aspects of human progress: respect for others’ existence is a gain). When delight and gratification is added to the act of killing, inside I feel the drive to counter with the religious adjunction of boundless respect for the existence of any human being whatsoever, putting aside all judgement of their greater or lesser value and of their possible sinfulness.

The indubitable fact that with non-human living beings, i.e. animals and plants, it is not possible to establish that fullness of rapport which can take place between people leads to a difference in attitude (religious included) towards them. I am intent on doing a lot for them, and I greatly respect their existence. I take interest in their life, and feel them close with affection, very often overcoming a utilitarian approach. I insist on the phrase ‘I am intent on doing a lot’ since I do not behave like those who think the matter has been settled and undoubtedly treat those lives as means, without scruple. So I do not eat meat, I try as much as possible to save animals from being slaughtered, and also try as far as possible not to deprive plants and flowers of life (however, their existence is more limited). Is not doing a lot already something? Taking it to heart, being scrupulous, is it not already enriching religious presence towards those beings? Is it not a pure offer, a gratuitous adjunction which, like all pure offers that ask for nothing, increase joy in life? It should also be mentioned that this act reflects on the act which, rightly so and with absolute superiority of importance, respects human life. I love animals, but I confess that I decided to stop being a carnivore when it occurred to me that by slaughtering fewer animals, diminishing the easy-going attitude towards them, a deeper conviction of the importance of human beings’ existence would be gained.

Closeness without falsehood

Another adjunction, another religious ‘extra’ could be the impulse of non-mendacity. In saying thou to you, laying the foundations with you, therefore, of a religious closeness, even from afar, I can feel that I would not lie to you, that all that I am and do I could justify to you, is open to you; as if you saw me here with your very own eyes. I do not need to tell you, to run after you and tell you everything I am thinking or have thought; it is enough that I am resolved not to lie to you. Through this act my thought approaches yours infinitely, it adds an absolute presence. Thinking is not intriguing in hiding, it is something open like the sun and the sky, and I affirm its solemnity exactly by not lying to you. Objections and arguments are on a different plane to religious non-mendacity, which is ‘gratuitous adjunction’ that comes from deep down; and like non-killing, religiously I do not consider it meritorious if present in others, a fault if lacking.

Religious presence of humanity

The divine thou to others, the intimate ‘extra’ with the offer of your very person constitute religious persuasion; that is, the structure of an innermost open church which has its place in the history that I live and unfold. How could I not acknowledge that wherever I turn my gaze - it would indeed suffice that I hear, think or speak - elements of lived and living history are found in that synthesis which is my life? I feel society, I feel this grouping together of elements, my participation in them, perspectivising them, choosing them. Historical society actuates itself in me in continual decision-making, though I simply go down one road in the town where I live rather than another, that I choose one book rather than another, one occupation rather than another. Even in those specific forms of society like family or state my spirit of decision, which draws on an inner engagement, comes into play, thus I press on in one direction and not another, precisely because historical society in its various forms needs perspective, classification, authority, intrinsic laws. These laws are brought down into the acting which decides, chooses; and whether it chooses A instead of B, it is a sign that implicitly affirms that particular law which chooses object A rather than object B. This happens in every case of activity in historical society.

The structure of religious persuasion opens itself instead to the infinite reign of free people, dead and alive, society of absolute presence, of implicit exchange among all, near and far, dead and alive, big and small, in such a way that those who are left out or oppressed or who count for less do not exist. It is not one of those societies flourishing through Man’s ethical activity, and which the more you delve into history you see ever arising - since wherever Man is, thence rise up ethical ideals which draw people close. Religious presence is not subordinated to a particular ethical activity on the part of Man, nor can its origin or historical characterization be spoken of. It is humanity seen not in space and time as a sort of physically living being, but humanity felt in its very innermost being, united in all its countless beings to my intimate fibres, that humanity which makes me say, ‘Even though you be a fool or treacherous, better it is that you were born’. Sacred humanity linked to the sacredness of my innermost being.

This humanity arises if I leave aside the divisions, discriminations and judgements. In that place there are no oppressor and oppressed, nor reprobates nor elect, nor sage nor fool nor madman; action there is not personal attribute. Something in someone, a trait, a movement in others, could be in me and vice versa. There is an exchange of analogies, of similarities. Here where I stroll, could be similar to Leopardi’s secluded hill, and Jesus Christ’s austere act is in some way in the act of someone who speaks to me. There is a kind of continuous echoing of humanity. In this humanity where no-one has the upper hand, everything is positivity. Here I see the fact that I can have something similar to everyone as a joy, and here I no longer form those perspectives of value. Here, through this adjunction of the religious ‘extra’ I find the summit of free humanity, countless, like a republic where each being has infinite validity.

Anyone who knows the value of living history into which, through an act of love between their parents, they were born, anyone who knows how many values of goodness, thought, justice, good-natured feelings can be affirmed in life, be it even brief, makes no absolute difference between living a short or a long time. Even one day of life brings with it the eternal, even only having opened oneself to life for an instant is something incomparable which is not measured by duration. The fundamental thing is not to live fifty years instead of twenty. Hegel comforted in this way a person who was crying for someone dear who had died, ‘Would you prefer this person had never been born?’ We would never prefer this; and exactly for the people whose death we lament more, we are strongly attached to the fact of having known and loved them. The individual performs an assignment (short or long, it does not absolutely matter), were it even a toddler that never spoke a human word and stayed a short while on the shores of this light. It is not all action; presence is an ‘extra’ to action. The nearness of everyone is absolute and sacred, and there is no absolute difference between the dead or the living, because presence is in the one and the other, and the one and the other are in the solemnity of countless humanity.

Everyone that has ever been born lives in the religious presence of humanity without ranks or differences. This is not so for an imaginary individual where not even briefly has a real drama of physical existence unfolded, where life has not arisen upon a seed. I have always been reluctant to take imaginary beings seriously, immoderate mythological multiplications where I could not presume the foundation of a real existence. History, the birth of individuals is a necessary element. For individuals that have not existed, what can be lived religiously regarding them (be it Vulcan or don Rodrigo) is the respect for the person and name of a human being, for the analogy that it suggests of a real man and struggle. It could even displease, because of this resemblance, to tear away the image of human being, even though the difference between the image and being is absolute, and the confusion is superstition. Immortal presence in countless humanity is an ‘extra’ to action.

Activity made impossible

The impossibility of being active had a great effect on me, in particular since for a certain period I felt it personally (so important was it that it was worth more than anything else I could have done, learnt, read in that period). Seeing others going about their work, producing, improving their culture and judgement, and keeping myself to myself, inert or going around the town, empty! And I began to understand the limit of my activistic civilization, since if I looked at what had been created, they must have had a value, be something accomplished: a poem as beauty, a house as habitability, but people?

Right then I started truly coming close to people, right when I saw them in danger of not doing, and I cured myself forever of the scholastic way of seeing people simply as bearers of works and masterpieces. It was then that my religion came into being.

Religion is an ‘extra’ added to conscience and activity. When I am active and caught up in activity, my sights are on the content. If, for example, I am building a house, it is the house I give my attention to, look at, put up; first drawing up the plans then laying brick on brick. When I bring up a child, it is for him that I hurry to buy food, to call a doctor; it is the baby that I wash and lift up in order to see him happier. A house, a child, a written page are the content of my activity, and I fulfil and deny myself in it (deny because I do not think of me), and should I see the house, baby, page in danger I become anxious. But if they prove vain or do not work out, I, as a form of activity and living, have nothing to do with the negative: form is always positive; it is a sign that my problem changes and what I have to do is something else. The persuasion of the positivity of form is the fundamental morality in each person, without which they are truly atheistic. Of course, moving from one content to another has its price, for you always become fond of what you give yourself to. The contents are the world, you have to work for them, otherwise it is senseless to speak of being active; but the positivity which is not of the world because it does not cease, is the form, conscience. So, imagine I become blind - it is painful that I shall no longer see so many things, that I shall have to give up so many activities, but what remains is that form which can give rise to new vital acts: the spirit presents me with other opportunities, and what truly counts is not the quantity of things I can do, but the quality, the tone. And even blind I am right rich in the sincerity and passion of my soul. The ancient command said, ‘Know thyself !’; the modern one, ‘Be thyself ! Actuate thyself !’. This I can do even if I am blind. Only that the contents and the occasions change, and I cheer myself up in the morality of thinking of their form: I did what, within my power, I had to do. Wisdom is not given by the world, or the index of world production, or the number of books read, houses built. There is that wisdom which is the spiritual form in the moment in which it lives, in that present, and which makes one reflect on one’s life, since we can be good even meditating, even stumbling and feeling your way.

To this positivity I add religion; with it I take upon myself the impossibility of being active, I live it, suffer it and become real and not rhetorical closeness to all those like me. I draw near to those who cannot do, I feel a boundless closeness and penetration to their innermost ground, and, leaving aside those who do for the sake of doing, I am with those who cannot be active and who suffer or have suffered for this in one way at least. This ‘extra’ I perform with the impossibility, failures, rejection that more or less for a long while I have suffered as a person, though moving on to what the spirit called me to do afterwards. This absolute closeness to the unfortunate does not arise if I do not give this religious ‘extra’, out of central engagement, from the depths of afflicted incarnation in a situation which became adverse to me.

I see that many times, yes, the person frees himself from his limits and lives in the boundlessness and absoluteness of moral strength: so why does he not have? Why to the impetus, devotion, boundless passionate abandon that comes from an impulse of the spirit does the ‘world’ many times give scorn in exchange? Why at times does one feel that his life if it were with you, o dreamed-of beloved, would be ‘like that which in heaven godlike makes’ (as Leopardi says), yet you do not respond? There are those who do not wish to be either higher or lower, but on the same plane, speaking to, listening to, looking at the close-by loved one’s profile, and the world does not give it them. Why does one have less intelligence, health, beauty, strength? From his conscience, yes, he gives what he must, lives his life in the values of work, goodness - but this is not enough for me. I draw near to his condition of want, I go down to the level of he who does not have, I deny an absolute value to intelligence, health, beauty, strength, to everything one can have, yet there are those who have not. I deny an absolute value also to life, the world. I feel on the same level as he that does not have, I feel something in common between me and a worm ripped apart in the middle of the road; refusing with my spirit everything that is fortune, withholding homage of absoluteness to happy results. I take revenge on this world of results which tries to seat itself on its concatenations and its rights. And if I am told there is a lower level, I shall go there, that there is a more strenuous reduction to nothing of all that is fortune, I shall do it; and if there is a poorer form of life, more modest than the organism, than a molecule of earth, and I am told that the atom, too, is complex, I shall go where there is less. This is the innermost adjunction I make, the gratuitous gift to he who has no strength, the ‘extra’ I offer.

Reality

Through the thou addressed inexhaustibly to people, I add a boundless social and religious development. A reality involved eternally with my soul arises. I do not limit myself any longer to feeling that in the act I fulfil the duty that History, the Spirit, the universal, creative Freedom trusts me with in that moment and at that point. The expressions ‘that is my responsibility’, ‘my task’, ‘my mission’ are very frequent; we find it in the Gospel (When you have done all you have been told to do, say: We are merely servants: we have done no more than our duty); we find it in the modern concept by which the Spirit is realized historically in the individuality of the acts. Religious persuasion gives me a reality which corresponds to my deepest needs, and which I see moving dynamically forward in history and overlooking it infinitely. It is the reality that comprises also those who have not and those who are not. In this way anything intellectual and isolated there might be in the concept of spiritual values, thought of as products of sublime and desperately solitary minds (a new stoicism, of Euro-American mentality), is overcome. Solidarity with those who have not, can not, are suffering, elderly, dead does not remain a benevolent and melancholy vow, but a concrete dynamic reality, foundation of boundless action, and in which everyone, really everyone, can see and have some thing that regards, understands and comforts them.

If I take the schematic concept of the individual that produces in his own name and enjoys wholly the fruits of his activity as a point of departure, I see that on the other hand countless are the events (tradition, family; state, social, religious institutions etc.) which compenetrate and dissolve this absolute individualism; events which are summed up in that ‘history’ through which, especially today, the individual recognizes a backdrop, a reason, a support and an outlet for his individual activity. Between the ‘individual’ that says, ‘I created this wealth, and I am going to enjoy it without restrain’ or ‘I created this work of art, and it will bear my name for ever’, and the ‘person’ who says, ‘My work is only the execution of a task I set myself in the conscience of a universal value’ we glimpse a difference which helps us understand that the second concept already creates a vaster setting for our action, and that it is the means to a reality which arises ‘in the guise of a horizon at daybreak’.

Production is not for the individual, but for society (which comprises also those who have not). To the family, the nation, humanity itself, it appears legitimate to extend ever more participation in production and the benefits of the fruits. The question of giving to each ‘his own’ becomes more complex (and permanent) in understanding the fruits in correlation with society, not because the fruits pass from the ‘haves’ to the ‘have nots’ as a substitution of possession or power, but in order that (in ways which are first interior, later constituted in institutions and laws) those who produce feel they are working publicly in potential and, as far as possible, effective union with everyone. Doing is not only of those who do, but of everyone boundlessly. In what I do, or believe I do individually, I see present all beings who are and have been.

The ‘having’ point of view is linked to the existence of beings and to the world’s commodities. In contrast to the individualistic way of feeling (‘I have’ because I have produced, bought, inherited etc.) is the condition of those that have not (because they have not produced, bought, inherited etc.) leading to the attribution of those resources to human society, more than to the individual. If the possessions I have are with me in order that I use them for an end which is on the level of spiritual values, I will have the continual problem that a part be put aside for the benefit of others, knowing that intrinsically my possessions are everyone’s, since everyone has contributed visibly or invisibly to their production, and all deserve them for their development. So I say, ‘I, together with all existing beings, have’, and under the influence of a similar impulse I say, ‘I am, together with all beings present’ (by presence I mean having appeared in history even only a moment - which is infinite). To my being active according to values even those who seem no longer to be active are intrinsically present. In the same way that having economic goods links me to all those who exist, so being active for values links me to all beings that are or were able to do the same, be they even dead, because they, simply because they were born, bore a value in their inmost being, and a value does not die: they live together with it. Out of ethical social persuasion I desire that all existing beings benefit from existing economic goods; out of religious persuasion I feel that all are boundlessly present in the continuous creation of spiritual values, even those who seem no longer to be with us.

In this way I find myself before an eternity which does not consist in the vision of a point which satiates, in the solving of one or more mysteries, but in the infinite presence to the world of history which unfolds in conformity with values. To Beauty, to music, to ever-rising artistic visions, to thought which is continually systematized into issues, to Goodness and Love, to Justice founding better societies, to Freedom fighting against sin are present not only those who seem to produce such acts or benefit from them by virtue of existing, but all beings. The self-consciousness of the Greco-European civilization opens itself up to understanding the intrinsic multiplicity of the presence of all beings. Values are not the production of an absolute Oneness which reflects on itself, but of all beings that come into existence. The world of the individual in this way extends towards the infinite; it raises itself, and does not vanish. The beatitude that values give is infinite and for all.

Thus my exigencies are satisfied and I feel that:

1) in that world of values in continuous development not only I am present, but everyone;

2) the presence of the suffering, the losers, the dead (the non-active, in short), is innermost creative form - not content - of those same values;

3) to the beauty of a poem, a piece of music, an example of architecture not only Dante, Beethoven, Michelangelo have contribited, but thousands and thousands of sufferers, thousands and thousands of dead, all present to the world of values;

4) acting in good faith for values I draw near to everyone, the dead included.

How true it is that to working for Justice, for instance, are present Count Ugolino’s sons, innocently condemned to suffer in that awful prison! How true it is that to artistic Beauty in continuous arising is present that poet who regretted dying because in his soul he bore a new poem! That to my repentance and my impulse of actual charity is present that dead person towards whom I did not have the charity I should have had! Intimately to the creative freedom of history I see satisfied the need that there be this boundless triumph of presence, participation, contribution by everyone, no-one excluded. The music I listen to is intimately the heavenly hymn of all the living and dead.

From silence

With the divine thou addressed to people, enriched by these impulses of the ‘extra’, of gratuitous adjunctions (multipliable according to open religious inspiration), I find myself inside humanity without the need for an ecclesiastical institution as go-between. It may prove useful in certain historical epochs, in certain circumstances (and I have a deep respect and a gratitude, as it were, and a fraternal familiarity for each one of them); but I cannot help but see them more limited than boundless history, and linked to particular moments. Absolute, instead, is being face to face with humanity. For instance, the commandment to love your neighbour and the example of a saint who has followed it, these two things merge together (and surpass the institution which would like to be their depository) in the concrete act, in deed, in love for one’s neighbour. The gratuitous adjunction is exactly the dissolution of the ecclesiastical and theological structures in the life in act of the religious persuaso. Each thou I say with this engagement, each existence I interiorize, nearness I establish unfalsely, here is a person that I include in this ever-open Church of humanity and I. It is a church I continuously create actuating religious persuasion concretely and immerging myself in the various forms of surrounding historical life.

Once more an ‘extra’, still more boundless others. If from the world as things I have raised myself to the structure of persuasion in act, and from there I have seen the central value of acting for values which from conscience open up to the world and form it, and I have seen how the religious ‘extra’ can be added to the freedom of ethical conscience, these ‘extras’ should not be understood as fixed in a certain number, and that’s that. If I am inside persuasion and yet I dare do this, it is a more serious sin than if I were outside, as it is a graver sin to profane the idea of God in church. The structure of persuasion is as I have described through what I have described; but the addition of countless ‘extras’ according to inspiration only confirms and continues those touched upon. Religious experience is inexhaustible, and many ‘extras’ can continually be added from inmost being. But the persuasion I have of those ‘extras’ already mentioned and the persuasion I have of this possibility of other ‘extras’ which are added from infinite innermost being, is one only in an open unfolding oneness, in a concrete monotheism, in a religion to which everyone can add something of their own, an inspiration, as a new attribute of God.

This religion of the gratuitous adjunction gives without asking or imposing, it is inspired presence which reveals itself in this being able to effect an ‘extra’. I prepare myself for this state of grace through some ‘extras’ at times perhaps child-like, but this is how I better draw near to the religious ‘extra’, living it sincerely from within (whatever it be, and always on the basis of moral conscience); here institutions, associations, buildings are of no count. It is a gratuitous adjunction I make to history, be it only for one moment. One moment of sincere ‘extra’ remains eternal, stays in my innermost being. As Kant says that we should not force children to do good, but show them it, actuating it ourselves, that it is possible to actuate it (extend that to other fields and you will understand what countering bad with good means), so in life, which may be tired and insufficient, an ‘extra’ in action has shown that it was possible, it broke the greyness, it redeemed me from believing myself outside any engagement, it helped me feel a possibility, a presence, a new event.

Everything resounds in innermost being and makes me live a solemn act. In all of reality each thing can be the occasion for the unfolding of an act of persuasion: suffering, death, storms, others, work, institutions, inanimate objects; and lo and behold from the innermost being something positive which can give form to all these things in a boundless élan. If I see that I cannot and I am at the end of my tether, I believe in it, at least. With this persuasion inside me, precisely for me, I will try not to be mocked, not to fail, not to fall by the way, not to lose anything sacred; but and if these things happen? I will say, “Through an ‘extra’ I have offered myself to be person among persons, living among the living, dead among the dead, and this central value compensates me for painful elements. I know that there is not only the world and I am not its prisoner, instead I am free son of presence”. As though supported by mind I see an order in reality because I put a thing in a place, I remember and I find it again, and I connect events, in continuous dialogue with myself, understanding and giving (what would happen if reality had no harmony with mind, and what I remember then became as if it were nothing or the complete opposite, and when counting the number of objects changed?). So, with this persuasion of the value of being incarnate person among persons, what happens to me is in line with my innermost being.

I have to be careful that the element reality, which is every living being’s continual need, is not a snare. I know that if I have this element of reality, and I see a part that harmonizes with what I am thinking about and what I want, something real that corresponds, happiness is mine. But I know I would sin if I wanted that part of reality at any cost, at the cost of all ideal reasons that are on the side of innermost being and which constitute persuasion in act, unfolding. Otherwise, better nothing, and every part of reality vanishes.

Let us look at the East and the West. In the East they start from meditation, speculation and religious experience; it is the glory and the main activity of that civilization for whom religious inquiry has constituted the centre of life and on not few occasions has overwhelmed everything else. There today men are active more than at any other time in social and political life, in problems of civilization, diverse precise activities, manifold techniques. And they try to see everything (the best of them) from a religious point of view. In the West, instead, it is exactly from the crisis of individual techniques, from the recognized insufficiency of activities taken too singly, too many-sided and idolized for what they are; it is from the crisis of art for art’s sake, thought for thought’s sake, economy for economy’s sake, the rendering politics absolute, that we move (at least deep within if still not very evident externally) towards the religious moral question. The glory of the West, that of defining itself, specializing, of sharpening, with unending rationalistic impulses, its propensity for dominating reality, has become, through the exasperation of these same propensities, a limitation of the soul, a threat of aridity. So the European-American West and the East are moving towards the same crossroads of civilization and interiority, of living history and gratuitous religious adjunction.

But all these questions and activities which my life is caught up in, my life which has the rights and obligations to unfold in activity, to search tirelessly, to call others to be part of its own unfolding world in a boundless free humanity of persons, and to offer the sacrifice of itself for a better common order (how much I have received from history and how little I can give!); let all of these questions move into the background for a moment. I have to recollect myself in silence, see whether they really are all that I am expressing.

Epictetus says that ‘the sheep do not bring grass to the shepherd so he can see how much they have eaten, but having digested the herbage inside, externally they give wool and milk’. In silence I withdraw from words so that they do not flow external and unconsidered, I look for the sobriety of reality. And if I go to see mountains, stern lines, solemn aspects, something I know and I maintain means harmony and severe sobriety in contact with the events of the air, high climes and the heavens, this is form and silence, if that sobriety, loftiness, solemnity are not words and episodes, but I live them springing out from me, not description but innermost act; if I describe it, sobriety is not in the word, but in the line I place inside the description and that constitutes it lyrical truth of the soul, classicism in act.

In silence others too move towards the religious life of the thou, they teach themselves the ‘extra’, they give themselves to the gratuitous adjunction. It is not in a spectacular change, in the noises of meteorological or historical elements, that today the movement of the single person, in whatever historical situation their spirit may live, towards the gratuitous adjunction comes about. In silence, from whence shall come a whole new life, you here and now draw near.