Sequeri on Faith

Sequeri on Faith

Extracts from article published in

Irish Theological Quarterly, vol. 73, 2008, 3-31

Truth and Trust: Pierangelo Sequeri’s Theology of Faith

Michael Paul Gallagher SJ

A farewell to surefootedness, a pitch

Beyond our usual hold upon ourselves.

Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things.

Although the theology of Pierangelo Sequeri is practically unknown in the English-speaking world, the thought of this leading Italian theologian offers a richness and originality that this article will seek to describe. Born in 1944, Monsignor Sequeri is a priest of the diocese of Milan, and in addition to his many books and articles in theology is well known as a composer of hymns and also as founder of a method of musical therapy for mentally disabled people. As well as being professor of fundamental theology, he teaches aesthetics in a prominent art academy in Milan. One reason why his writings have not been translated into other languages (a Spanish translation of one of his books is due to appear) is quite simply the density of his thought and literary style, a difficulty that he himself honestly admits.

Here the main focus will be on his theology of faith, a theme that is central to his whole corpus. It is in this field that we can find his most creative and challenging synthesis, not only for theology but for an anthropology that seeks both to dialogue with and discern the cultural sensibility of today. The aim of this article is introductory, and as such it limits itself to summarizing some of the main themes of Sequeri’s theology – even at the risk of over-simplifying his vision. It cannot hope to do justice to the complexity of his thought, nor will it attempt a chronological account of his development over the years. The impossibility of a more complete treatment becomes obvious from the very fact that over the last thirty five years he has published some two hundred articles and at least seventeen books. His major work, Il Dio Affidabile: Saggio di Teologia Fondamentale, published in 1996, runs to over 800 pages. Although even Italian readers with a background in philosophy and theology complain about its complexity of style and content, it remains his fundamental work. In 2002 Sequeri published L’Idea della Fede: Trattato di teologia fondamentale, intended as a manual for students and revisiting in a somewhat more lucid manner the themes of his 1996 volume. Although this article will necessarily give attention to these two works, it will also draw on Sequeri’s other books, including some of a more meditative approach where he often expresses his theology in a more accessible manner (in particular Il Timore di Dio, 1993 and Senza volgersi indietro, 2000). I also quote some of his many articles but will not venture into his books or writings on music.

Discerning the modern and the postmodern

Perhaps the easiest entrance into Sequeri’s theology is through his critique of some of the dangers that he diagnoses. Even though he is far from being a negative thinker, and indeed remains in active contact with such fields as psychoanalysis and philosophical sociology, he offers a powerful exposure of the distortions and forgetfulness of the dominant cultures, whether religious or secular. In particular he remains distrustful of any theology of faith mainly influenced by the old battle with the Enlightenment or with the version of ‘reason’ born of scientific modernity. This narrow agenda has damaged not just theology but anthropology. It has, in his view, produced a shrunken image of who we are and of how we approach the question of truth. Too much concentration on combating modern rationalism hijacked theology into neglecting crucial areas of religious experience and spirituality. Sequeri suggests that fundamental theology gave so much attention to the problems born from the Enlightenment that it practically ignored the impact of idealism and especially the Romantic revolution, movements of sensibility with far-reaching implications for the personal quest for meaning in today’s postmodern world. Where the prejudices of the Enlightenment caused a split between analytical thinking and the feelings people live by, Romanticism rebelled by exalting the ‘egotistical sublime’ and the ‘blessed mood in which the affections lead us’ (Wordsworth). This whole movement was an authentic, though often ambiguous, attempt to defend the spiritual quality of life, and as such, according to Sequeri, its pervasive influence has to be taken seriously. Indeed, he often insists that only through the mediation of feelings do we learn what is really decisive for our lives. If so, theology cannot blithely dismiss the Romantic inheritance as mere subjectivism or sentiment: its resistance to a merely utilitarian world represented an intuitive desire to protect the religious potential of people. In this light, and as will be seen in more detail, one of the main concerns of Sequeri’s theology is a retrieval of affectivity as a key zone for any theology of faith, but he will also want to connect it with the interaction of truth, justice and freedom involved in any recognition of Christian revelation. Thus, in the introduction to Il Dio Affidabile he speaks of seeking to explore the ‘historical experience of truth’ where faith is seen as ‘a particular form of knowing truth/justice.’[1]

Although Sequeri is frequently critical of what Lonergan used to call the ‘truncated subject’, his critique is intended as a prophetic clearing of the obstacles to positive spiritual openings in today’s culture. Introducing his 2001 book on religious humanism entitled Sensibili allo Spirito, he summed up his approach in these words:

The question of the spiritual dignity of the human – and of the Christian quality of faith, respectively – seem to me a theme of enormous challenge facing western culture. The challenge is inseparably religious and cultural, because the spiritual dignity of humanity is the point where the quality of religion and of reason are inextricably linked.[2]

Elsewhere, he voices his agreement with the Italian writer Umberto Galimberti on the need to moderate the effects of technical progress: ‘we are living materially above our cultural possibilities but we think rationally below our spiritual needs.’[3] In a recent essay on uncertain identity in an age where God seems dead, he lists various forms of socially imposed unfreedom and fragility in the self. In terms reminiscent of Charles Taylor, he notes a lonely depression in the postmodern ego, adding that the cultural disappearance of God could be a hidden cause of this sense of being separate or isolated. In the background of today’s vulnerable identity is the sad story of how ‘theology threw itself into an exhausting task of using secularised philosophy as a means of demonstrating the existence of God’, to the detriment of any serious attention to the nature of revelation.[4] If the image of God promoted by this line of thinking was one of ‘blessed indifference, the virtually despotic origin and end of all things,’ the fundamental flaw lay in the assumption that truth about God could best be attained ‘outside the lovingness of God’s revelation.’[5]

Although he does not seem to know the work of Michael J. Buckley, on this point Sequeri closely echoes the thesis of the American scholar that theology adopted the tools of ‘modern’ reason in its justification of God, only to find itself defending deism rather than Christian faith, and thus ironically contributing to the birth of western atheism:

Astonishing in their absence – within a Christian Europe – were the two Trinitarian modes of divine disclosure and communication: the self-expression of God become an incarnate component within human history or the Spirit transforming human subjectivity in its awareness, affectivity and experience. These did not figure at all.[6]

The fact that the dominant image of truth in modernity was so coldly impersonal also had its impact on the human subject and its quest for meaning. Truth became static and self-justifying rather than rooted in witness or affective relationships. As long as the typical version of freedom was emancipation and self-construction, the self-sufficient individual of modernity remained closed to the whole adventure of transformation that is the gospel in action. Modernity in short ‘froze the divine’, ‘eroded the subject’, leaving it deprived of tools for reaching a ‘trustable truth’, and the self that tried to be proudly self-determining came to find itself more and more determined, like a prisoner within a ‘narcissistic autonomy.’[7] In a conversation of some years earlier with Gianni Vattimo, Sequeri had described the ‘absolutization of the principle of self-fulfilment as the principle of King Midas’ insofar as it turns everything it touches into a means only to end up with ‘self-destructive narcissism.’[8]

…..

Sequeri is no friend of radical postmodernism, remaining suspicious of hermeneutical, psychological or linguistic tendencies to indefinite postponement of any decision on truth. In his judgement the anti-metaphysical and anti-theological prejudice of the dominant philosophies of reason end up making ultimate meaning unreachable. Thus in a 1998 paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Italian Theological Association, he criticised contemporary thinkers who give pride of place to expressiveness, relevance and semantic codes at the expense of ‘affirming justice and witnessing to truth.’[9] He was equally wary of a certain fashionable interest in negative theology or aesthetics on the part of agnostic philosophers: in his view they are in danger of converting the definiteness of God into the vagueness of the archaic ‘sacred’ or the ‘mystical’. With typical bluntness, he argued against any language about God that overlooks the ‘form of prayer addressed to abbà-God’, especially as disclosed through ‘participation in the faith-of-Jesus-in-act.’[10] Through the earthly experience of the Son, we come to discover His Father whose truth/justice liberates and fulfils the great desires of our hearts. Hence the word ‘God’ finds its fullest sense only through the Word of God: what we mean by God is transformed and purified by the event of Jesus of Nazareth. When we recognise Jesus as the Son, we also recognise that truth is inseparable from the justice whereby we can now live a new ‘order of affects’, a living through love towards which ‘humanity was destined from its creaturely origin.’[11] This Christological emphasis will be revisited in a later section of this essay.

The ultimate target of Sequeri’s critique of modernity and postmodernity, on the level of thought and of inherited mindset, is its incapacity to acknowledge the anthropological richness of faith as knowledge. In this way it excludes from the realm of valid knowledge what in fact is a defining characteristic of human knowing. It is not only religious faith that is endangered: a shrunken image of the range of human consciousness damages our sense of ourselves.

Modern thought no longer thinks about faith. It does not ponder the high anthropological profile of believing as the primordial structure of human consciousness, the form of its inviolable dignity, the qualitative root of inter-human connections.[12]

Defending the full humanum

To sum up what we have already seen: Sequeri offers a strong critique, not only of the shrunken agenda inherited from ‘modern’ reason as automatically separated from faith, not only of the usual scapegoat of old-style apologetics, but of the relative failure of the new fundamental theology to grapple with the deeper issues or to have any recognised place in the cultural debates of today. In this whole history a basic mistake, in his view, lay in its often blind or unconscious assumption that faith could not be a real form of knowing. This prejudice was often linked with another: that truth and freedom were largely separate dimensions of philosophy and of human existence. In addition, Catholic theology suffered from a suspicion that serious attention to trust could be tainted with Lutheran fideism or with modernist immanentism. Such divorces, as will be seen in more detail, made the defence of faith an impossible mission. The shrunken agenda of modern rationality had no room for the existential logic of faith or for its encounter with the revealed logic of agape.

If one restricts the question of faith to the sphere of conceptual truth, one remains condemned to a superficial and ultimately inadequate wavelength. But if the fundamental anthropological process of faithing (one can usefully coin a verb for both the interpersonal and the religious areas) can develop a richer spiritual and psychological phenomenology, we are on the way to an ‘idea of faith’ more worthy both of our human drama and of Christian revelation. Faith can retrieve its anthropological foundation and also do justice both to the lived quality of the Christian adventure and to the ground of religious faith in the faith of Christ himself. As will be explored later, Sequeri’s study of the originality of ‘believing consciousness’ (using the term ‘original’ to mean at the root or origin of human awareness) is a major contribution towards rescuing fundamental theology from its long obsession with argumentative ‘credibility’ and from ‘modern’ categories that remain incapable of mediating between today’s culture and the core of revelation in Christ. If we substitute ‘credibility’ with ‘trustworthiness’ and if we explore the drama of our trusting in all its complexity, then, according to Sequeri, we will have a creative fundamental theology able to confront the challenges of today….

Towards an anthropology of trust

From what has been said so far, it is clear that Sequeri, like many other theologians ranging from Newman to Balthasar or from Lonergan to Ratzinger, seeks to reveal the impoverishment of human rationality if it is reduced to a merely pragmatic function. Just as Newman defended the intuitive potential of the ‘illative sense’, and Balthasar retrieved the aesthetic dimension for theology, and Lonergan came to focus on affective conversion, so too Sequeri wants to enlarge the agenda from the empirical in order to account for richer dimensions of symbolic meaning. Just as Joseph Ratzinger, before and after becoming Pope, has often pointed to the detrimental impact of a merely instrumental or functional epistemology, so Sequeri sees the dominance of merely technical reasoning as unworthy of the great human questions. He seeks to broaden the debate from the epistemological to the anthropological: if the interpersonal capacity for trust (which he likes to call fides) is not recognised as the key to human identity and to a deeper human knowing, our culture can all too easily dismiss not just religious faith but all forms of faith. When fides is left out of the zone of ratio, our horizon of knowledge loses its existential capacity and, as Newman would say, become unreal. A language of external data and abstract concepts is a prison-house with no space for mystery. Similarly a cultural life-style of external and frenetic movement can make both (human) faith and (religious) Faith impossible.

Our crisis of religious belief cannot be separated, in Sequeri’s view, from a more hidden crisis of human self-interpretation. Insofar as our culture is shaped by a powerful bias in favour of agnostic and pragmatic horizons, we are endangering our basic assumptions about ourselves. More generally, insofar as our culture assumes that non-belief (or better non-faith) is a neutral and even natural humanistic stance, this implies a fatal blind-spot on the level of anthropology. Only if our roads towards truth can find room again for the aesthetic, the symbolic and the affective will we be able to do justice to the range of who we are and thus be ready for the recognition of God.

What Sequeri aims to develop is a phenomenology of faith grounded in an anthropology that recognises the centrality of affective trust in human knowing. In this way he wants to overcome a series of damaging dualisms that have polarised our thinking: faith and reason; affectivity and logos; and, perhaps most crucial of all, truth and freedom. As Newman saw in a previous century, the discovery of any truth beyond the observable involves the disposition of the person who seeks truth. Religious truth, like any existential or relational recognition, is inevitably self-involving. In other words freedom enters into the core of our consent to truth (a better term, insists Sequeri, than assent). Here we are in the realm of meaning and not simply of facts, but too often we have frustrated ourselves by seeking an impossible road to faith within an epistemology that can only deal with facts.

If the typical ‘modern’ view of consciousness was self-referential, the richer anthropology that Sequeri wants to retrieve from a pre-modern sapiential tradition (but interpreted in the light of contemporary human sciences) understands consciousness as open, dynamic, and above all trusting. Truth, in this view, is trustworthy rather than simply rationally credible, and human consciousness has a native capacity for this kind of truth. Religious truth, in particular, cannot be reached without recognising consciousness-as-trusting. Modernity broke with religion but more significantly it broke the link between truth and trust. It did not see that for existential realities, such as religious faith or ethical justice, one cannot banish this fiducial foundation of human consciousness. In its narrowness of focus modernity forgot ‘the form of fides in the original act of openness of ratio towards being,’ and this removal of the faith dimension of anthropology caused in turn a ‘mortal misunderstanding of the divine as non-affective.’[13] The reduced version of rationality that dominated thinking for so long, and unfortunately was imitated in theology and in church discourse, had no place for ‘the anthropological quality of affective, ethical or religious relationships which consciousness recognises.’[14] It is therefore no surprise if loss of the full range of trusting and desiring consciousness led to ‘loss of faith’, not only on the religious level but also in the collapse of social solidarity…

As against any shrunken model of epistemology, what Sequeri prefers to call fides (to indicate a human capacity at the same time anthropological and theological) highlights dimensions such as recognition and choice in the quest for truth. As will be seen later, in Christ we recognise truth and justice united in their fullness. Religious faith, in its Christian form, brings about a liberation or healing of consciousness: it is accompanied by ‘the surprise of having been in some way already disposed and oriented’ towards this revelation and gift.[15]

Retrieval of affectivity and aesthetics

Sequeri is a highly intellectual theologian who remains deeply suspicious of a merely intellectual approach in theology. In his judgement the so-called death of God ‘has to do with affectivity, not with ideas. The core of this experience lies in the fact that we no longer feel God… what has died in the feeling of a presence’.[16] In this light he argues that inattention to religious experience in theology gave the impression of faith as a mere theory rather than as an ‘affective conversion’ (to borrow a phrase from Lonergan), or as a transformation of our way of living in practice. Sequeri remains a courageous voice protesting against the ‘cultural obviousness of non-belief’, rejecting the commonly held position that unbelief is neutral and natural, and that faith, often in the eyes of the elite, sacrifices the mind on the altar of personal security or institutional passivity. His ambition is to deepen the agenda of this tired debate, by reflecting on the anthropological status of affective trust, and on that basis, to give reasons for the specifically Christian form of trust in the God of Jesus.

Before Pope Benedict XVI highlighted the relationship between eros and agape in his first encyclical, Sequeri had written of the ‘happy connection between eros and agape’ as a form of reconciliation.[17] Elsewhere he commented that ‘the form of faith, as an event of an affective relationship with God’ shows ‘God’s desire to ‘restore to eros its original quality’,[18] capable of agape. When imagination encounters the promise embodied in beauty, we become ready for the surprise of God’s love, because all beauty allows us to experience the spiritual in the sensible. It transforms us through a tenderness and a passionate welcome that liberates us from self-centred dispositions. These neglected dimensions – of affectivity, recognition, imagination, desire, aesthetics, spiritual sensibility and the body – flesh out the crucial experience of trust that our cognitive tradition had for so long ignored or feared. Through a sophisticated phenomenology of these horizons Sequeri’s goal is to make the encounter between desire and gift, between eros and agape, more central both for a contemporary anthropology and a contemporary theology of faith. It is in tune with a new self-assurance in theology to confront trans-rational aspects of faith, and to speak more of faith as a process or experience and less as an ‘act’:

The current emphasis given to the field of affectivity is an encouragement to regain confidence in order to understand spiritual experience better. But one can also identify a second task for theology . . to develop a challenge to the contemporary sensibility concerning feelings. Christian faith reveals a principle and a structure of feelings that offers a strong critique to the usual way in which these are usually understood.[19] …..

Sequeri develops Balthasar’s insistence that we need a Christian theory of perception in order to escape from an excessively intellectualist theology. This will involve a felt appreciation of ‘truth that shows itself in the form of symbolic evidence.’[20] A genuine theology of faith has to attend to the link between reason and feeling, and therefore it needs to ‘visit the realm of aesthetics in order to appropriate again areas that are fundamental.’[21] By reflection on the encounter with various forms of art, theology can discover another approach to truth: a form of persuasion which ‘is always mediated aesthetically’, which offers a ‘spirituality of the senses’, and which fascinates with the promise embodied in its beauty.[22] Obviously this version of aesthetics has nothing to do with art as mere decoration. Rather it is a reminder of a quality of receptivity that is analogous to that needed for faith and which many theologies have overlooked.

Without the mediation of the imagination . . . the spirit is blind and mute on the great questions of meaning. Without the symbolic mediation of the world of the senses, interiority cannot come alive for people or arrive at knowledge on its own.[23]

The experience of beauty, with the perception of its native capacity to hint at a free reign of meaning, able to transcend the limits of informational or instrumental reason, casts light on the greatest possible depth of human experience concerning truth and justice.[24]

The beauty of God, glimpsed in Christ, places us at the convergence point of eros and agape, liberates us from any self-centred aesthetics, inviting us into a space of surprise where ‘we are able to appreciate a greater joy’ of pure affectivity.[25] Indeed Sequeri is hopeful that reflection on such fundamental themes as ‘aesthetic, ethical and religious experience’ could offer common ground for dialogue between believers and non-believers, since such horizons belong to the ‘spiritual depth of the human.’[26] Thus his ambitious proposal is to explore these neglected dimensions as scaffolding towards a renewed theological anthropology….

Christ’s Abbà-faith: our recognition of God’s love

If a phenomenology of intersubjective trusting gives us a key to the basic structure of human consciousness, this human universal finds its fullness through the person of Christ as founding event and as continuing revelatory encounter. Although Sequeri has much to say about ‘believing consciousness’, affectivity, and other themes that could, at first, seem preparatory to faith, his ultimate goal is to rethink and replace the drama of the recognition of Christ at the heart of fundamental theology. In a text published in 2007 he summed up his position in these words:

The truth of Jesus is understood with reference to his specific and singular relationship to abbà-God… When Christian faith confesses the Christological truth of Jesus, it confesses the incomparable religious dimension and the insuperable historical dimension of this revelation, through recognising an exclusive identity of the Son with God.[27]

In his view when we recognise Jesus Christ as subject-actor of revelation, and not only as its historical object, we arrive a) at a sense of the divine, otherwise unimaginable, b) at an experience of this event, otherwise non-evident, and c) at affirming a truth that remains otherwise beyond all our daring. Such an emphasis takes theology beyond all the old ‘doctrinal frozenness of revelation’, a tendency which for too long separated theology of faith from the drama of its recognition.[28] It also liberates us from an excessive concentration on responding to Enlightenment rationality, and, as has been mentioned, allows us to take on board the Romantic challenge in culture, reopening the theme of de vera religione in terms of affective experience.

In this context Sequeri has often commented on the connections and differences between three realms: the sacred, the religious, and Christian faith. The sacred is the zone of encounter of human desire with the enigma of existence and with the sense of mysterious forces at work. Religion can be seen as legislating for, or as spiritually controlling, the somewhat anarchic field of the sacred. Faith, in its strict sense, has to do with recognising a promised covenant of love, above all in the event-word that is Christ, who liberates us from the burdens of the sacred. As opposed to humanity’s superstitious fear before the sacred, a response not always avoided by religion, faith has to do with a healing relationship with God grounded in new trust – or in a primordial trust now saved from the serpent of suspicion:

the revelation of Jesus clearly shows the redemptive character … of the passage of faith beyond the accumulated ambiguities of the sacred and the contradictory religious use of the absolutes of God.[29]

Sequeri, however, does not opt for a Barthian polarity of religion and faith. On the one hand he stresses the risks of religion: it can produce clericalism, fundamentalism, and ‘contaminations of every kind.’[30] On the other hand, the purification of religion, not a purity beyond religion, remains a permanent test and challenge for Christians. In the light of the Incarnation, religion remains necessary, as ‘the existential space, bodily and spiritual, cultural and social’, where faith has to be lived out and witnessed. In this sense, religion involves ‘the language and the memory, the affects and the practices, within which the relationship with God makes itself felt.’[31]

The revelation of the relation of Jesus to the Father is the core and criterion of Christian faith. In more conversational style Sequeri voiced his basic theme in this regard:

I see Jesus as electrified by an intuition or perception, one could even say by a faith in regard to God, as Father (I am not afraid of this term, since the Letter to the Hebrews speaks of the faith of Jesus, not in an intellectualist sense but as a relationship).[32]

Entering through grace into this space of Christ’s mystery and prayer, we come to recognise who God is and who we can be. Here all our longings for truth and justice come together on a new foundation. Here we realise that Jesus was guided by a ‘dazzling certainty about the absolute devotion of God concerning mankind.’[33] From this perspective we realise that any knowing that does not offer hope, harmony and a sense of rightness to our desiring hearts is not real knowledge (almost in Newman’s sense of ‘real’ as distinct from ‘notional’). Sequeri remains somewhat sceptical of a Rahnerian emphasis on self-transcendence from below. He admits that a certain openness of the spirit is essential as liberation and receptivity for revelation, but we need ‘a theory of the inflaming of conscience as fides – and not simply the dynamism of the spirit.’[34] What is at stake in Christian faith is not any generic openness to the absolute but a zone where incarnate affectivity recognises and, overwhelmed by wonder, decides about the God whose justice fulfils all our hopes. This is the core of Christian experience, as truth, as freedom and as a logic of affectivity….

From affect to action: towards a spirituality for today

If one were only to read Sequeri’s major books and his many specialist articles in theology, one might have the initial impression of a very sophisticated but pastorally untranslatable set of explorations. Yet in those decidedly difficult texts there is a flow of energy that wants to make theology a source of healing for the wounds of our culture and the weakness of our theology of faith. He is convinced that postmodernity, in spite of its tendency to prize spirituality, is handicapped for lack of a ‘decent theory about that constitutive dimension of the human which is the life of the spirit’; indeed he proposes his in-depth study of ‘believing consciousness’ as exploring our primordial ‘structure of entry into the spiritual life.’[35] At the same time he has argued that

Christian faith possesses unique potentials to foster a culture of the human that would be able to rescue both religion and culture from the worrying and strange collusion between a despotism of the sacred and a narcissism of the self.[36]

Thus in some of his less academic writings, ranging from reflections on today’s spiritual climate to meditations and homilies, Sequeri has given much attention to what he calls the spiritual dignity of humanity, seeing this dimension as under threat from various trivializing forces, ranging from the external life-style imposed by the postmodern city to the quest for a self-fulfilling interiority without faith. He notes that perhaps today’s only ‘universally shared consciousness of spiritual experience’ has to do with the individual emotion of love.[37] If this is so, he argues, then in spite of all its pitfalls or shrunken forms, we have to take this sensibility seriously as a threshold for a language of faith. Certainly the heritage of romanticism can often be narcissistic or self-indulgent but it would be irresponsible for theology to judge this powerful influence too hastily and too negatively. Once again we return to a central Sequeri theme of the affectus fidei, his insistence on recognition of affectivity as a key dimension for Christian faith. In many of his pages he was prophetic of Pope Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, in the desire to see the fullness of agape as not necessarily discontinuous with human eros. In Sequeri’s words, ultimately the form of faith involved an obedient and ‘affective surrender of eros itself to the agape which only God is’.[38] Even though he constantly proposes a recovery of the importance of affectivity in theology, he is far from starry eyed about the ambiguity of this human dimension. On the one hand there has always been a gnostic temptation to despise emotion and physicality. On the other hand there is current of degenerate romanticism that stunts desire into immanent self-seeking and produces only an ‘irresponsible surrender to the feeling of love’.[39] What is needed therefore is a discerning retrieval of the drama of the heart as part of the adventure of faith.

Our life of feelings is the great river in which we learn to appreciate what is truly decisive for us: what touches and convinces us, what calls forth our commitment and challenges us to respond.[40]

On this phenomenological basis we can move towards a crucial threshold of discovery for any theology of faith. We come to see that ‘human affections catch fire in the light of the revelation of God, just as they becomes stifled in the shadow of any distortion that takes the place of God’.[41] Indeed, it is only within the lived connection between ‘the aesthetic and the ethical that one begins to appreciate the spiritual dignity and the theological quality of existence. It is in this way that we come to God and to faith.’[42] Without some such spiritual quality faith is unlikely to survive in today’s complex culture: ‘in fact God considers as immoral any faith that lacks intimate persuasion’, in the sense of spiritual appropriation of the love of God.[43] In her recent book on Sequeri (the first such book devoted exclusively to his work), Daniela Ricotta rightly argues that a central aim of his theology is to serve a ‘reconciliation between doctrinal faith and spiritual experience’ and that he does this especially through his exploration of ‘affective faith’ as ‘believing consciousness’.[44] …

Ultimately a pastoral and spiritual vision

As an epigraph to this article I put two intriguingly beautiful lines from Seamus Heaney, lines that suggest a wavelength that transcends the limited horizon of easy certainties. They come from a short poem evoking a childhood experience of joy sliding down an ice-slope, letting go into another dimension. Sequeri’s theology of faith can be seen as an extended and complex invitation towards a similar freedom. He seeks to explore a worthy anthropology that connects us with the surprise of faith. In his view ‘the care of Abbà is beyond all geometrical demonstration’ and he adds:

The certainty of such a revelation lives from the trust that we are disposed to give it. . . It is always a communication which discloses through symbols the depth in which I want to be reached and identified. In short a true revelation.[45]

It is not mistaken to look upwards when we think of God. But the unique aspect of Christianity explodes when Mary’s Child cries for the first time, as we do. . . We learn an ocean of things about God simply gazing at the Child.[46]

It is also crucial to the understanding of Sequeri’s proposal to underline the mutuality of our faith and the faith of Jesus. It is not a question of starting with the human capacity for trust, first awoken as Balthasar insists (and Sequeri echoes) by the mother’s smile, and of then saying that Christian faith is like that: we are invited beyond a comparative parable. Nor is it a question of starting with the singularity of Christ and realising that within his unique Abbà relationship we find ourselves invited to trust God. Rather it is a question of mutual revelation of the power and fittingness of faith, because it is both human and divine. This mutual recognition is central for Sequeri: we recognise our range of faith because we are recognised by others and by Another. The core gift is a joyful recognition of being recognised. This happens through receptivity but awakens the drama of our freedom to trust, respond and to live in the light of the truth-trust discovered. Hence what seems passive becomes creatively active. What seems a truth about trust becomes a freedom to live that trust.

Before concluding it would seem in the spirit of Sequeri’s work to attempt a more spiritual and pastoral summary of his vision of faith and in somewhat simpler or evocative language. He holds that we discover our true identity – the original language of trusting of the other instead of living with fear or suspicion – by finding a contemplative entry into the faith of Jesus. Christ’s core identity and daily food was in his space of prayer-trust with the Father. And our capacity for trust, which represents the deepest dimension of our humanity, when it is saved from its wounds, is where we can best imagine that space of the mystery of Jesus. Indeed faith in God and human faith are twins. Humanly, we first encounter that maternal or liberating smile, but in fact that awakening human smile, the affective origin of our recognition of love and our response of love, has its origin in God’s outpouring love. Thus although anthropology is our gateway, theology is already the background music to our discovery of truth and freedom together. What happens when you trust or believe someone is deeper and more significant than when you examine data analytically or work out some empirical conclusion. What happens when you allow a work of art to reach your feelings or awaken your imagination, indicates a richer and more personal road to meaning than the colder paths of rationality.

In fact, what our privileged moments of friendship reveal – the beauty and power of our capacity for trust – is how we glimpse Christ’s relational core, embodied most of all in the gospel moments of his prayer. In the interaction between the two levels of our trusting, human trust is healed of its various forms of ambiguity: its tendency to slide into suspicion or doubt, its inclination to narcissism or eros without agape, its immanence within the human. When we recognise our fullest call in the Trust of Jesus, the anthropological becomes theological, and equally the theological becomes rooted in the drama of our history. In becoming theological, the anthropological discovers a promised fullness beyond its imagining. In the mystery of the prayer of Jesus we discover the eternal and historical completion of our human adventure in Trinitarian mutual love. Here we heal the virus of distrust implanted by the Serpent, the original ‘master of suspicion.’[47] Here also, through Christ’s revelation of Abbà-God, we gradually emerge from ‘images of blackmail and slavery.’[48]

Culturally, we have suffered for too long from lonely and unbalanced forms of thinking. If what we call reason is identified with empirical verification, it may be a major triumph in science, but a distortion in things human. This inherited narrowness has produced a shrunken image of who we are and of how we encounter the question of truth. If what we call freedom is identified with isolated self-determination, what is a glorious gift of every human being shrinks into a dangerously small space. Truth gets separated from freedom. When that happens, we cannot arrive at any truth in existential questions because that field needs the whole person, with his or her story, affectivity, options, disposition and belonging to others.

Again, if our capacity to feel becomes our exclusive guide, then another deep zone of our humanity may become exalted but in a way that cuts it off from its natural companions. It can become sentimental or narcissistic or merely romantic. Instead what most richly marks our human adventure is our call towards exodus in relationships, which happens mainly through affective trust.

So our culture needs to heal and integrate those three key dimensions of ourselves: our thought, our freedom and our affectivity. The best place to start is with a description in depth of the human capacity for trusting. The act of trusting another person is by its nature relational, and therefore not lonely. It is rooted in a gradual recognition of someone as worthy of our confidence. It is an act that unites thinking, deciding and feeling. In fact it is a universal characteristic shared by all humanity and where it is damaged or reduced, something tragic happens to people. Where such trust flourishes, it means being drawn into fidelity to the relationship that is coming to birth. This is the mystery of friendship as it heads on to the possibility of love and commitment.

And all this, on the human level, is like a parable of what can happen in the religious dimension of life. Insofar as our culture is living with shrunken self-images, it can disregard and despise not just religious faith but all forms of faith. If we restrict the question of faith to the sphere of merely intellectual truth, we remain condemned to a superficial wavelength. But if the activity of faith, on various levels, is central to who we are, then it is a waking up to a relation, a trust, a presence and a promise. It is most of all a recognition of a recognition. I recognise that I am recognised by the other person. I recognise that I am recognised by God. I recognise that the God of total love that Jesus trusted as His Father-Abbà, is the only God worth believing in, and in fact the ground of my adventure of life. What our privileged moments of friendship reveal – the beauty of our sometimes eclipsed power to trust – is what we glimpse as Christ’s secret relational core. Ultimately this reality of God-as-love is discernible not as a verified fact but as a trust encounter. Here we need to liberate our languages of life, so that our roads towards truth can find room again for the aesthetic, the symbolic and the affective. Only then will we be able to do justice to the range of who we are and also be ready for the strangeness of God. And in this way we also discover the concrete and infallible fruits of faith: that ‘to give life to the other is the symbolic repetition of the care of God.’[49]

[1] Pierangelo Sequeri, Il Dio Affidabile: Saggio di Teologia Fondamentale (Brescia: Queriniana, 1996), 15. All translations from Sequeri’s works are my own.

[2] Pierangelo Sequeri, Sensibili allo Spirito: Umanesimo religioso e ordine degli affetti (Milan: Glossa, 2001), ix.

[3] Pierangelo Sequeri, L’umano alla prova: soggetto, identità, limite (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2002), 42.

[4] Pierangelo Sequeri, ‘L’identità incerta: la conoscenza di sé nell’epoca della morte di Dio,’ in Giuseppe Angelini et al, Conoscersi in Dio, (Milano, Glossa, 2007), 66.

[6] Michael J. Buckley, Denying and Disclosing God: The Ambiguous Progress of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 123. See also his earlier At the Roots of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

[8] Gianni Vattimo, Pierangelo Sequeri, Giovanni Ruggeri, Interrogazioni sul Cristianesimo (Rome: Edizioni Lavoro, 2000), 126-127.

[9] Pierangelo Sequeri, ‘Affidabilità di Dio e inaffidabilità del linguaggio?’ in Parlare di Dio: Possibilità, percorsi, fraintendimenti, ed. Giovanni Mazzillo (Milan: San Paolo, 2002), 65.

[12] Pierangelo Sequeri, L’Idea della Fede: Trattato di teologia fondamentale (Milan: Glossa, 2002), 201.

[18] Pierangelo Sequeri, Non Ultima è la Morte: La libertà di credere nel Risorto (Milan: Glossa, 2006), 26-27.

[19] Davide D’Alessio, ‘La fede e gli affetti: compiti e opportunità della teologia,’ La Scuola Cattolica 133 (2005): 689-709, at 697. This article is an impressive development of Sequeri’s thought.

[27] Pierangelo Sequeri, ‘La Specificità della fede cristiana: singolarità e universalità del suo evento fondatore’ in La Verità della Religione, ed. G. Tanzella-Nitti and G. Maspero (Siena: Cantagali, 2007), 158.

[34] Pierangelo Sequeri, ‘Ragione teologica e analysis fidei,’ La Scuola Cattolica 125 (1997), 514.

[35] Pierangelo Sequeri, Sensibili allo Spirito: Umanesimo religioso e ordine degli affetti (Milan: Glossa, 2001), 5.

[36] Pierangelo Sequeri, ‘Il sentimento del sacro: una nuova sapienza psicoreligiosa?’ in La religione postmoderna, ed. G. Angelini (Milan: Glossa, 2003), 95.

[41] Ibid., 42. (Similarly, in Il Dio Affidabile p.400, Sequeri comments that ‘desire is the rose and the cross of subjective experience.’)

[44] Daniela Ricotta, Il Logos, in Verità, è Amore: introduzione filosofica alla teologia di Pierangelo Sequeri (Milan: Ancora, 2007), 81, 85. An ambitious book, largely but not so exclusively devoted to Sequeri, is Raffaele Maiolini, Tra fiducia esistenziale e fede in Dio: L’originaria struttura affettivo-simbolica della coscienza credente (Milan: Glossa, 2005).

[46] Pierangelo Sequeri, L’ombra di Pietro: legami buoni e altre beatitudini (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2006), 78.

[48] Pierangelo Sequeri, L’Oro e la Paglia (Milan: Glossa, 1989), 25.