Catechesis of Desire: Lessons from Monsignor Giussani, Bill W., and Rene Girard

Anyone who reads the Magnificat liturgical prayer journal on a daily basis, especially the short, introductory mediations, is being gradually, systematically catechized into the spirituality of the Communion and Liberation movement, which might be called a catechesis of desire. The key insight of their founder, Monsignor Luigi Giussani, is that the human heart is a desire for God, a longing for infinite and eternal Love.

This is, of course, a classic Catholic intuition: St. Augustine famously said “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You O Lord” and St. Thomas Aquinas held that all human desire is implicitly, even when erroneously, a movement towards the good, or towards God. Perhaps no one, until Monsignor Giussani, has developed and expanded this insight into a comprehensive path to God. In sharp contrast to residual Jansenism, which developed Augustine’s more negative evaluation of human desire, Giussani celebrated desire with an exultant positivism. The tone of his writing is unrestrainedly euphoric with the good news: our desires, even in their often-deformed state, are fundamentally good and destined for fulfillment in the person of Jesus Christ. In contrast to the negativity of moralism, he exults in the Beauty and Joy of life in Christ. Monsignor Albacete, his friend and American protégé, recounts the story of when Giussani came upon two young lovers in a passionate, erotic embrace on a starry night. They were embarrassed but he only asked: “What does what you are doing have to do with all these stars in the sky?” The disciple Albacete explains: the tender mutual longing the lovers have for each other is reflective of the even deeper human desire for a Love that is Eternal and Infinite. Far from being upset or judgmental about the lovers’ embrace, the Monsignor is in awe of it.

We encounter here an extravagant positivity about human desire as fundamentally good, as essentially a longing for God and as destined to be more than fulfilled. This excessive affirmation seems incongruous, however, with what we experience as the irrationality, toxicity and destructiveness of so much of human desire. This approach might well be complemented by two different, contemporary evaluations of human desire: that of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and the mimetic theory of Rene Girard.

The AA of Bill W and Doctor Bob unveiled the dynamics of addictive desire as compulsive, self-destructive, and insatiable. This might be called “false desire.” By definition, addictive desire is beyond the control of the person who is enslaved and powerless. Much of the practice and insight generated by the 12-step programs is a retrieval or re-statement of traditional understandings of sin. The passage to freedom and interior peace includes a series of quite specific steps and practices, mostly involving regular meetings and personal sponsorship, and an underlying spiritual attitude of confession of wrongdoing and surrender of one’s will and life to God. These steps are, then, a journey of liberation from false desire into genuine desire, desire for God.

A third dimension of human desire has been thoroughly explored in the mimetic theory of Rene Girard. According to this, human longing is incessant and insatiable but has a vague, undefined nature, in contrast to the structured instincts of animals. We desire but don’t know what we desire so we are ceaselessly looking to and imitating others. We are made to image or mirror another, starting with the smile of our mother. Each of us, in everything we do, is always a reflection of the desire we see in another. Desire as mimetic is neither good nor evil but is a possibility for either. When we look mimetically upon evil we ourselves emulate and become that evil and so associate ourselves with greed, violence, and covetousness in all its forms. By contrast, when we look into the face of genuine Love, we ourselves are moved inexorably (one might say, efficaciously) to reflect that love.

Our behavior, then, springs not from an autonomous, self-directing will, but out of the mimetic, emulating, unitive gaze to the other, the other as Godly or ungodly, the other as gracious or vicious, the other as generosity or as covetousness.

These three approaches move in a shared direction: decisively, they reject a moralism that locates the springs of human agency in an independent, autonomous, self-directing will. They all see human desire as infinite, incessant, and itself more deeply constitutive of the human person than the intellect, the will and the emotions. Combined with an understanding of sexual desire as outlined by Pope John Paul the Great, these complementary visions of human longing promise a most rich anthropology of the person as infinite desire.