The Wellspring of Life or The Conformism of Power?

"God revealed the person’s destiny by revealing himself; he made known the name of human destiny through his presence; he intervened in order to remind us that he is the destiny of each one, the unum capable of making our life more human. And history is the long story of the reshaping of human pride, which tends to make its own image of its destiny, which tends to base the constitutive factors of its physiognomy on its total autonomy."

Human pride has asserted itself as the measure of meaning and the autonomous fabricator of the self, of the value of things, of relationships, of destiny. But "when God is eliminated as the wellspring and the law of life, reality becomes incomprehensible, elusive, precisely at the point which should be the center of awareness: the I. And so, with such confusion, the only energy that allows the natural propensity of people to come together and communicate seems to be that which is guaranteed by power, in its double modes of conformism and instrumentalization."

~Luigi Giussani