The Christian sense of man according to Reinhold Niebuhr

Vittorio Mathieu in his introduction to an edition published in the 1970s of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason wrote that to understand a philosophy one must understand the problem it intends to answer. Edizioni San Paolo published Luigi Giussani’s 1954 doctoral thesis in theology: The Christian sense of man according to Reinhold Niebuhr. A weighty volume on the American Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, proponent of an existentialist theology born as a response to the disillusionment with the Christian-social idealism of the Social Gospel, a thought steeped in optimistic irrealism, uncritically driven by the economic progress of which the America was the protagonist, advocating a social reform of which Christ should have been the soul. “The keynote of it – writes Giussani – was an absolute faith in the fact that the development as such of social life carried within itself the principle of the solution to all problems. The Social Gospel almost gave a theological consecration to this faith.” Niebuhr knew this social idealism “not as an abstract principle, but as a pathological human process, as something that made men anxious”, in direct contact with the workers of his parish.

Well. Giussani studies it, as he would say he “meets” it, with an openness of thought that makes the Ambrosian priest one of the pioneers of Catholic ecumenism. An ecumenism – as the curator Monica Scholz-Zappa underlines – “understood first of all not as an interconfessional problem, but rather a cultural and educational one: as a dimension of the ego”. An ecumenism that is not “generic tolerance”. In fact, Giussani criticizes Niebuhr, but precisely because he knew him without prejudice, applying to his theology the concept of criticism that he would later teach to his students: certainly the ability to recognize the limits, but above all the value of every reality. And so, in fact and finally, he writes: “The value of Niebuhr’s work lies in the fact that his approach and his response are extremely topical for the type of thought that dominates the entire Western world today. At the end of his History of Philosophy Abbagnano concludes: ‘Possibility is truly the fundamental category of contemporary philosophy… It is possible to elaborate this fundamental category in such a way as to lead to a positive and founding understanding of man and the world of him? ‘. Niebuhr’s work is an answer to this question.”

How many times have those who knew him heard Giussani say this phrase from Niebuhr: “Nothing is as incredible as the answer to a question that doesn’t arise.” She repeated it until the end, even in the speech written for the XXI Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for the Laity of November 2004, three months before his death.

Luigi Giussani
The Christian sense of man according to Reinhold Niebuhr
San Paolo Edizioni, 288 pp., 20 euros