Tradition and Authority in Luigi Giussani’s Educational Method

For the past several years, I have assigned Monsignor Luigi Giussani’s The Risk of Education as the final book in a seminar I teach on liberal arts education. One student’s response to Risk of Education echoed what I felt when I first picked up a book by Giussani, just a few years ago. She remarked that “Giussani uses common words in uncommon ways, which is strange.” Pausing, she then continued, “But it’s also compelling.”

Giussani, the Italian Catholic priest and founder of Communion and Liberation, isn’t playing language games. Rather, the unconventional ways that he defines terms like tradition, authority, reason, verification, and provocation are actually challenges to implicit assumptions about the person and community that are expressed in our use (or misuse) of language. Thus, Risk of Education isn’t only a model for educators. It’s also a critique of modernity—and a sketch of a way forward.

Together, students and I unpack the meaning of the key terms in Giussani’s book. His vision of education awakens students to the greatness of the educational endeavor, the nobility of the mind, and the desire for authority and tradition to guide and ground one’s freedom. This grounding enables students to make further explorations while still feeling connected to something bigger than oneself.

Embodying a Tradition

Take, for example, one of the recurring words in Risk of Education: “tradition.” For the students I teach, tradition evokes something static, maybe even sterile or sterilizing. But Giussani describes tradition as an initial explanatory hypothesis. This beginning point becomes the grounds from which a student can explore and test new information. Tradition gives meaning and coherence to information as it is learned and tested.

“Authority” is another term that Giussani uses in a surprisingly compelling way. Rather than being something imposed on a passive recipient, Giussani explains, authority is a coherent embodiment of tradition. For Giussani, authority isn’t abstract; it’s personal. A humanistic, person-centered education begins with the teacher himself or herself being aware that to teach is to bring one’s entire personality into the classroom. When a teacher steps into a classroom, he or she is not just transferring content to passive recipients. Teachers do not simply facilitate discussions among people who already have the truth inside themselves, or measure learning outcomes on particular skills. Teachers personally embody a tradition, a way of seeing and thinking about the world that guides students in how they experience and test out ideas in their own lives.

It’s important for teachers to acknowledge that we communicate with our students through our being, our presence, our gaze, our wonder, and our excitement at the educational endeavor. To take that responsibility seriously is to embrace the most important part of education: awakening the desire in our students to embark on the quest for truth. This awakening must be truly personal, a communication of desire from teacher to pupil.

The Integration of Living and Knowing

Because humans are made to desire the truth, Giussani explains, we must exercise our reason to examine the totality of human experience. Some students have been told that their personal experience always gives them unmediated access to truth without the necessity of authority and tradition in a lived community of persons. Other students have been told that their personal experiences are irrelevant to what they are learning—that learning the scientific method must somehow be separated from questions of meaning, being, purpose, and our final ends as human beings. Both extremes deprive students of experiencing a coherence between thought and action, being and doing, facts and values.

Giussani’s understanding of experience is not subjective in a strict postmodern sense of the term, which would imply that every person’s experience is so unique and different that it is incommensurable with others’ experiences. Nor can Giussani’s understanding of experience be reduced to simply the sense perception of material objects. Rather, experience matters for Giussani insofar as students must seek to know the truth for themselves, verifying in their own lives what authority and tradition teach. Without this personal verification, one can’t reach certainty about knowledge. Examining the totality of one’s experience is thus crucial for assenting to the truth.

Teaching students to use their faculty of reason as a tool for endless theorizing or abstract word games distorts the very nature of reason, which is meant to lead us to assent freely to the truth. When the knowledge produced by the scientific method becomes divorced from truths about the final ends of the human person, students have no tradition from which to judge the proper use of human discoveries and inventions. Morality and ethics become divorced from reason, and are therefore seen as subjective, arbitrary, and imposed.

Students who have been exposed to a deconstructionist view of truth-seeking, a strict fact–value distinction about knowledge, or a relativist view of all morality, feel enlivened by Giussani’s understanding of reason as combining tradition, authority, and experience. As Stanley Hauerwas notes in his foreword to the 2019 revised translation of Risk of Education, all knowledge is supposed to shape how we live, and how we live our lives should shape how we think. Morality, ethics, and science aren’t strange bedfellows; they are great conversation partners.

The integration of living and knowing produces internal coherence. It allows students to stand in a tradition and communicate to others with wonder and joy the truths they have learned, using their knowledge to further the human good.

The Risk

According to Giussani, provocation is another necessary element for education. If students don’t question the coherence of a tradition, then they can’t go through the process of verification of knowledge necessary to know the truth and to commit one’s life to living according to those truths. Criticism is a drive to discover what is valuable in an idea and to explore what about that idea corresponds to one’s own experience of reality. Allowing students to engage in this provocation is why Giussani calls his educational method a risk. Teachers must love the freedom of their students as they engage in this educational process of verifying a tradition, and students must love the embodied authority—a person or a living tradition like the church—that breaks open (but does not break down) their way of reasoning to make it coherent with a way of living.

In many of the educational settings in which I have taught or studied, authority and tradition in education were hardly ever discussed. Reason, provocation, and verification were implicitly or explicitly expected to guide education, but no concrete embodied tradition was upheld as an authority or a set of guideposts for the use of my reason.

Long before I read anything by Giussani, I sensed that the fields in which I earned my credentials (psychology and sociology)—fields dedicated to studying the human person and society—were insufficient to guide me in deciding how I wanted to live. Without yet having the vocabulary to describe what I was doing, I was seeking tradition and authority.

Through years of study and reflection, I discovered through my own experience the very tradition I had been raised in. I found the intellectual coherence and personal coherence I so desired through my reading of the Catholic intellectual tradition—especially Catholic figures like John Henry Newman, Jacques Maritain, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI. Like Giussani, all of these figures attempted to take the good from the modern understanding of human freedom and integrate it into a coherent Catholic tradition that emphasizes community, truth-seeking, beauty, and our final purpose: to know and love our creator and his creation.

Person-Centered Education

Giusssani’s view of the human person as mysterious, connected to the infinite, and worthy of dignity was the central guiding concept behind all of his life, writing, and teaching. Giussani’s method of education seeks what Jacques Maritain called the true end of education: the awakening of the inner dynamism of each person. In our burnout culture, characterized by creative fatigue, we need hospitality and charity in the search for truth. We seek the certainty needed to stand in a tradition and speak with an authority that respects the freedom and mystery of each person.

Many students are attracted to Giussani’s notions of authority and tradition in education simply because it’s more authentic to stand before a young person and humbly say, “I’ve found something I’m eager to share with you, and I want to provoke you to go on your own journey for the truth,” than to implicitly or explicitly deny that teachers, mentors, and other role models are speaking from tradition with authority. This kind of authority—the kind that loves the mystery of each human so much that it wants to guide each soul in the use of the great gift of freedom—is not a burdensome imposition. Rather, it’s a helping hand on the arduous journey of knowing one’s own purpose and place in the world.

If the end of education is the formation of the whole human person—awakening our amazing capacity to know, calling us to live fully immersed in reality, and instilling in us a love for truth—then freedom, risk, mystery, charity, and hospitality must be the pillars of the educational process. We must reject deconstruction, word games, virtue signaling, political correctness, scientism, and empiricism.

Today, the powers of fragmentation in American society are affecting all institutions of civil society. Politics, the family, education, and the church are all suffering. Perhaps that is why Giussani’s bold assertion of the need for tradition and authority resonates so much with the generation of American students I teach. A liberal arts model of education acknowledges that our knowledge begins from somewhere, from some tradition: a core body of ideas and authors that is like what James Bernard Murphy calls “Velcro.” This core enables us to venture out into new areas of study and have those ideas stick to something, not shoot off in endless unconnected directions.

Giussani was clearly speaking from the Catholic intellectual tradition, as do I. But in my own work as a teacher with students of diverse Christian faiths, other faiths, or no faith at all, I have seen again and again that to acknowledge my own tradition as a starting point for dialogue is a much better way to connect to people from different traditions. To deny that I have a starting point at all, or only to admit so-called neutral visions of the human good that really come from Enlightenment philosophy as my starting point, is not authentic.

All of our talk about diversity, inclusion, and tolerance in education may flow from an appreciation for the inner mystery of each person and a longing for communion with all other humans. But that communion can’t flourish if we deny the centrality of the search for truth. In our burnout culture, characterized by creative fatigue among so many high achievers, we need hospitality and charity in the search for truth that will lead us to the certainty needed to stand in a tradition and speak to others with an authority that nonetheless respects the freedom and mystery of each person.

This article was originally published online by Public Discourse.

Fátima and Perseverance in Trials

Standing on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City on May 7, 2019, I hugged the mother of a former student I had taught at Yale, John Aroutiounian, who died tragically of cancer at the age of 26. When I delivered John’s eulogy earlier that day, I clutched a rosary from Medjugorje in my hand as I told John’s friends and family that I fervently believed that if God would allow the tragic death of one of the most brilliant students I have ever taught, he would work miracles in other ways.

Less than 11 months later, on March 31, 2020, John’s mother Rouzan told me that her husband Aris had died of COVID in New York. I clutched my phone in disbelief and wept, alone at home. Aris’s death was not the miracle I had so firmly expected. As John neared his young death, I told him I do not have a perfect answer to why God might let him suffer and die so young. Nor can I explain why God would allow a second tragic loss to the same family in under a year. 

During his battle against cancer, I promised John that if he miraculously lived, I would go with him and his parents on a Marian pilgrimage. When he died on May 3, 2019, I felt called to keep my promise anyway. I spent my birthday on August 25, 2019, at the Marian pilgrimage site of Fatima, Portugal, keeping that promise.

More than just a student of mine and a collaborator, I thought of John like a son, someone with whom I could share intellectual jousting but also the ups and downs, joys, and sorrows and big questions of life. When I wrote him a letter of recommendation for a full scholarship to study law at Columbia University—one more of a long list of prestigious awards he won—I never dreamed that less than a year later, and just two weeks after he turned 26, I would be delivering his eulogy.

My first day in Fatima, I arrived early to the Chapel of the Apparitions to attend Mass. In case I had any doubt that God hears my prayers (which I often do), someone walked up and asked if I would read the prayers of the faithful at Mass. I was escorted right next to the altar built at the exact spot where Mary appeared six times to the young Portuguese peasants in 1917, asking them to pray the rosary for world peace and to offer their suffering for the salvation of sinners.

As I shed tears during the Eucharist, I knew I had received a special sign that I am not alone in my suffering. God hears my cries. God wants to give me his comfort.

On my birthday only three years earlier in 2016, John showed up at my new home in Princeton with a gift: Augusto Del Noce’s book, The Crisis of Modernity, which had recently been translated by Carlo Lancellotti. Why did he passionately insist we launch a program through the nonprofit I started, Scala Foundation, to discuss what Del Noce calls the death of the sacred and its impact on culture, politics, and identity? John got so excited about Del Noce because, having studied philosophy and law at Yale and Oxford before going to Columbia Law, he recognized in his own experience the social impact of a shift in philosophical anthropology—the basic question of who we are as humans—that Del Noce describes.

Drawing on the work of philosopher Max Scheler, Del Noce describes the consequences of as a shift from homo sapiens to homo faber in how we understand our humanity. In his essay Man in History, Scheler wrote that from the view of the human person as homo sapiens in the ancient Greek philosophy, what makes us different than animals is our rationality. Our very rationality that leads to the very idea that something other than us exists, something transcendent—not something in us, but something greater than us and also capable of interacting with us.

This rational openness to transcendence contrasts with what Scheler calls homo faber, a view of the human person as essentially made up of drives to satisfy one or another basic need for survival, power, money, or sex. For homo faber, we are not dependent on anything but ourselves. Even our spiritual experiences are somehow contained within us. Our religious rituals are really just more tools we create to get what we really want in this world. In my own research and teaching in sociology, philosophy of social science and practical theology, I am concerned about what happens when we describe human experiences of suffering and resilience without a metaphysical language of transcendence.

As he neared death, I reminded John what we had read together from Del Noce in the Scala summer seminar: without a metaphysical language of transcendence, human hope loses its connection to something sacred, other and unbounded by human nature. Our culture so often uses the word hope without the vertical dimension of dependence on God. Hope then becomes synonymous with changing oneself, self-control, or creating tools to master our environment. My own experiences of suffering have broken my illusion of self-mastery. When I acknowledge my dependence on a creator, I awaken to the reality that joy and beauty can be experienced even in the midst of suffering.

I reminded John that our faith tells us that with human hope comes the reality that we are destined for eternal life and our suffering is not meaningless. As his suffering grew worse, John told me he experienced that piercing beauty that is the presence of Jesus and he would accept his young death if God took him. John’s acceptance of his early death and his powerful encounters with Jesus as he suffered were a witness to his loved ones of the reality of our eternal home. In my eulogy to John, I reassured John’s grieving loved ones that we shall see John again and he will call us by name. Together we shall rejoice with him in the presence of our creator.

Shortly after John died, I read the papal encyclical Spe Salvi, on Christian hope, by Pope Benedict XVI. He writes that Christian hope is not a promise we will avoid suffering or triumph over evil; Christian hope in a God who promises to walk with us through the valley of death (Psalm 23). The death of a young person like John, and now the death his father and tens of thousands of others due to COVID, calls out for the language hope grounded in faith, transcendence, presence, awareness, and love; not a hope that is grounded in our modern illusions of progress, control, and efficiency.

Christian hope is not the same as progress, understood as overcoming dependency and achieving greater and greater autonomy by using reason, strategic rationality, and manipulating things with technology and science. Christian hope is grounded in faith that we are creatures of God—that he loves us, and by depending on him, we can walk through the darkness of life.

When a loved one dies, our hearts long for the future reunion to become real in the here and now. Christian rituals are so powerful precisely because they open our hearts to a deeper reality that is present now. The many rituals I participated in at Fatima—the Mass, Eucharistic adoration, the rosary, acts of penance—are all enactments of my connection to a reality that exists already but it is beyond immediate appearances. At times my prayers will seem to go unanswered and I will be sorrowful. But the answer is already there in my heart—my faith gives me hope in eternal life and with that hope I can always grow in love. As Benedict wrote, faith brings the future into the present:

Faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent: it gives us something . . . Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a “not yet.” The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality.

Spe Salvi pushes us to ask: Why do we have hope at all? Having traveled to a holy place for my birthday, the “why” I live seemed to be exactly what I was doing in Fatima because I encountered a “who”: a loving God, whom I can serve and praise in this life, and who consoles me in my sorrow. As Benedict explains:

God is the foundation of hope; not any god, but the God who has a human face and who has loved us to the end, each one of us and humanity in its entirety . . . his Kingdom is present whenever he is loved and wherever his love reaches us. His love alone gives us the possibility of soberly persevering day by day, without ceasing to be spurred on by hope, in a world which by its very nature is imperfect.

People of faith must do what we can to reduce suffering, and to console people who suffer. But people of faith have something more to offer to those in sorrow. Our faith and hope as Christians are neither naïve progressivism nor a pessimistic nihilism.

When I hugged John on his deathbed and sobbed, when I hugged his mother on the steps of St. Patrick’s and sobbed, and when I clutched my phone and sobbed with Rouzan as she told me her husband had died, my love and pain were simply tiny signs of a love we all participate in that is greater than all of our suffering. It is that love I went to Fatima searching for; it is that love my life and my work has to give witness to or else I will fail in my role as a teacher and scholar; it is that love I depend on to have hope.

Signs of that love have come to me in the many gestures of hope and comfort from my loved ones in the past year. The sublime joy of love even in the midst of sorrow reminds me that there is a place where our tears will be no more. I have also had moments when I have felt John’s absence acutely and I find it hard to have hope. I hang my head in disbelief, and the tears return. But because I have the gift of faith, eventually I feel John’s presence return in my heart.

In Fatima on my birthday last August, in a mysterious but real way, my desires were fulfilled: John was present with me. Since then, I had several moments where I am certain John is with me somehow, mysteriously. One of them was the day his father died. The day John’s father Aris died, after crying most of the day and laying all alone on my couch in Princeton, I joined a nightly COVID Zoom call with my mother and siblings to pray the rosary. My brother’s youngest child, five-year-old Gabby, normally skips the rosary.

But that day, Gabby walked up to the camera of her dad’s cell phone and with a giant smile held up the rosary from Fatima I had given her for her birthday. Then she sat next to her mother, asked instructions on how to make the Sign of the Cross, offered to lead us in the Our Father, and tried to repeat the 50 Hail Marys while counting on the rosary beads.

Although miracles that suspend the usual laws of nature can happen, the everyday miracle of a child’s love is a sign that even when we feel alone, God’s love abides in us. Although she had no idea how sad I was, her gestures were a sign of John comforting me, as he knew that her love made me happier than anything else.

When I came back from Fatima last year, I told Gabby I was there because I was sad that my friend John died.  “After someone dies, will we all be together again?” Gabby asked with fervent curiosity and solemn seriousness. “Yes,” I explained. “When we die, we all go home to God, and he brings us together again. But even here on earth, I told her, God is always with us.” “And we all have a guardian angel,” she piped in. Her face lit up with wonder when I told her, “When my friend John was near death, an angel visited me and told me he would pray for me and my friend who was dying. If you are ever alone and feel scared, don’t forget Gabby, that you can talk to your guardian angel and to Mary, the mother of Jesus.” She held the rosary I had given her and asked me if I had told her mommy I had seen a real angel. If such a wonderful thing had occurred, she must have thought, why would I not tell everyone the good news?

Another time I have sensed John present was on Holy Saturday in 2020, when I organized a video conference call to pray for the souls of John and Aris and for anyone else grieving a loss. Faces popped on to the screen from Armenia to London to New York to Kentucky to California and many places in between. We were all in isolation, and suddenly all together to mourn without touching. We were strangers many of us, we were different ethnicities and faiths, but we were united by the love of John, Aris and Rouzan. We could see each other to share in our grief.

Bishop Daniel Findikian of the Armenian Orthodox Church in the United States started the call chanting the traditional Armenian rite of prayer for the dead. Then one by one, friends shared memories of John and Aris. Both father and son had accomplished great things in their lives, but what everyone remembered them for was their humility, warmth and hospitality. Their love extended not just their own family and friends, but also to the least in this world, the outsider, the homeless, the newcomer, the struggling. Just like the disease spreading all across the world, but in the opposite direction, their love knew no boundaries.

Although the grief of a woman who has lost her only son and husband in under a year is unspeakable, Rouzan told me she is consoled by a vision of John and Aris hugging each other in heaven, rejoicing to be together again. Although we cannot go on pilgrimages right now, prayer conference calls are just one of many ways we make present the love we each received from John and Aris and all of our loved ones, spreading that love faster than this disease can ever move.

Article originally published online by Church Life Journal.