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- Herausgeber: Chorabooks
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
"[This book ]presents through Barsotti’s eyes an acute analysis of the society of his time, with sudden flashes of insight into what the Church required in order to be renewed and able to face the future. Researchers who are anxious to delve into the secret about how to continue this historical journey along the way that was opened to us by the Master know that we are often easily exposed to the temptation of discouragement. We can affirm that Divo Barsotti is one – perhaps they are only a few? - who today possesses the secret of remaining encouraged, because he was able to receive it and make it personal in a daily experience of living encounter with God. Tenaciously – indeed, "at all costs" – Barsotti kept this gift over his whole lifetime and, with a hidden ministry of great importance and extraordinary breadth, he presented it to those who have enjoyed the comforting and demanding gift of his spiritual fatherhood" (Padre Agostino Ziino, Community of the Sons and Daughters of God).
"Here the door opens to the work of Barsotti. God's word is not primarily teaching and theology but action and life: it is a creative act that is accomplished. And life is not just something “physical,” “ontological,” but free action, spiritual, self-giving gift by the eternal Spirit and with this it is Word. Christ transmits this unity of Word and life to His Church: His Word is an event in the liturgy, in the sacrament, in the Eucharist, but each of these express the sacramental character of the Church and also of the world itself, created and redeemed. The Word is God's action in Sacred Scripture. It is not a “book” but the resonating, throughout the world, of the historical presence of the Word of God" (Hans Urs von Balthasar).
"Barsotti’s “successful performance” in numerous fields of theology was recognized immediately by popes, theologians, seminarians, and laity when they heard him speak or read his works. I continue to hope for additional volumes to be translated so that the English-speaking world will discover the man who produced 160 books over his lifetime; who taught sacramental theology and spiritual theology for 30 years in Florence; who preached papal retreats and was friends with Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI; who was friends with, and often visited by, many of the most significant theologians of the 20th century (von Speyr, Danielou, Bouyer, de Lubac, Evdokimov, Beauduin, Hausherr, Merton, Ratzinger, Giussani) including, of course, von Balthasar, who for the last six months of his life served as Barsotti’s spiritual director. Barsotti’s objective works appeared under many genres: fundamental theoretical writings, liturgical theology, spiritual exegesis on the mystery of salvation, mystagogy, pastoral care, mystical writings, and poetry. He was a “successful performer,” indeed" (David W. Fagerberg), University of Notre Dame).
"I have to prepare myself, I must not become tired of this silence, of this impotence: tomorrow, - whenever the Lord wills, His Love, like an impetuous wind too long compressed, with greater force will be outpoured upon the world with greater force" (Divo Barsotti).
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Divo Barsotti
Copyright English edition © 2020 Chorabooks, a division of Choralife Publisher Ltd.
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First eBook edition: February 2020
Indice dei contenuti
Preface
Introduction
Foreword
First Part
Second Part
Third Part
Thematic Index
Index of Names of Persons
Preface
Padre Agostino Ziino
In 1957 Divo Barsotti published his spiritual diary La Fuga Immobile [The Motionless Flight] from the years 1944-1946 for the Edizioni di Comunità in Milan. Three years earlier La Lotta con l'Angelo. Diario di un’anima [The Fight with the Angel: Diary of a Soul], Barsotti’s reflections from before he was thirty years old, had been published anonymously in Florence.[1] The young Tuscan priest (born in the little village called Palaia in 1914) was already well known in ecclesiastical circles for his activities in journalism, having been involved with L'Osservatore Romano in the early 1940s and later with other journals of Christian education and formation such as Vita cristiana, Città di vita, Il Focolare, Ricerca, and Humanitas. His name became even more known for his first substantial liturgical, exegetical and spiritual works, most of which were translated within a few years into French, Spanish, German, and Polish. [2] For example, Cristianesimo Russo (Russian Christianity, Florence, 1948), Il Mistero Cristiano nell'Anno Liturgico (The Christian Mystery in the Liturgical Year, Florence, 1951), Il Dio di Abramo (The God of Abraham), L'Esperienza di Dio nella Genesi (The Experience of God in Genesis, Florence, 1952), Il Mistero Cristiano e la Parola di Dio (The Christian Mystery and the Word of God, Florence, 1954), La Rivelazione dell'Amore (The Revelation of Love, Florence, 1955), Liturgia e Teologia (Liturgy and Theology, Milan, 1956). These titles reveal the fields of theological knowledge and, more precisely, the experience of the mystery of God, on which Barsotti's attention would be increasingly focused, and in whose service he would deepen his profound and broad personal reflection, producing a vast amount of writing over the course of the the second half of the last century.
In recent years, many scholars and researchers have begun a more systematic study of Barsotti's personality, [3] highlighting various cultural and spiritual components relating to the main axis of his interior life and also his life as a man of the Church, which was both the search for God as well as the experience of God in faith. [4] There seems to be more and more renewed interest in his theological writings, and even more so in his personal spiritual experience. Anyone who encounters Padre Barsotti’s personal style, either through his writings or in direct conversation – a language that is both very personal and often paradoxical – will recognize him more and more readily as God's true and precious witness and also will discover that he is a master the Church’s entire Tradition, which he absorbed in a singular way and is still proposed by him today with the extraordinary audacity and "freshness" of a man in his nineties, [5] clear-headed in his reasoning, with an acute ability to read and decipher the tormented reality of our world. [6]
It is not my goal to present here in all its complexity the figure of this "great old man," and even less to attempt to quantify the value of his presence in this our Church, which a short time ago crossed the threshold of the new millennium. Barsotti always felt himself to be a devoted son of the Church, and had a passionate devotion to her that, at certain stages of his long life, was also dramatically tested. Others have begun to reread and arrange his earliest writings and the varied wealth of wisdom he has given not only to the Church of today but also for all time. They find his writing to be as fresh as ever today, especially in all of his youthful insights. For this reason, there are still many who continue to walk through the journey of personal knowledge of the man Divo Barsotti, personally "finding" him still today in the house of "San Sergio" among the hills of Settignano, where he has lived since the 1950s with some members of its community.
It is precisely this "Community of the Sons and Daughters of God," which he founded and guided for many years, [7] who had the idea of proposing the publication of this spiritual diary, The Motionless Flight, on the occasion of his 90th birthday . It is a fundamental text by which to enter the interior world of the mystic Barsotti, a man completely open to God and, at the same time, an acute observer of the “today” of history. We have chosen to publish the text just as it came from the author's pen, without weighing it down with notes or comments. Although such notes might have contextualized the author's discourse and intuitions about Italy and the Church immediately following the Second World War, the immediacy and the radical nature of his discourse, with its appealing and evocative ability to express what was happening around him, seem to us to be essential elements in allowing the reader to experience his particular lesson of life and faith.
We have also republished the Preface that Hans Urs von Balthasar - one of the great friends of Barsotti who accompanied him in the different phases of his spiritual journey - wrote in the 60's for the German edition of The Motionless Flight. [8] The pages of the great Swiss theologian take us to the heart of Barsotti’s meditation, tracing the contours of Barsotti’s thought in order to help us understand all that he later wrote with a precision that is still enlightening and valid today.
This new edition of his second diary is therefore a gift that the community presents to its "father." But we would not ask for the involvement of Edizioni San Paolo if we did not believe that The Motionless Flight was still a gift to all of us today, after more than 50 years have passed. It presents through Barsotti’s eyes an acute analysis of the society of his time, with sudden flashes of insight into what the Church required in order to be renewed and able to face the future. Researchers who are anxious to delve into the secret about how to continue this historical journey along the way that was opened to us by the Master know that we are often easily exposed to the temptation of discouragement. We can affirm that Divo Barsotti is one – perhaps they are only a few? - who today possesses the secret of remaining encouraged, because he was able to receive it and make it personal in a daily experience of living encounter with God. Tenaciously – indeed, "at all costs" – Barsotti kept this gift over his whole lifetime and, with a hidden ministry of great importance and extraordinary breadth, he presented it to those who have enjoyed the comforting and demanding gift of his spiritual fatherhood.
All of us in a certain way, more or less consciously, enjoy today in the Church the fruit of the battles and hardships experienced by those who, like Barsotti, became personally involved in those battles and hardships during years that were difficult and transformative for the Church. For this reason, we are convinced that rediscovering this truth, at least by means of reading through the demanding itineraries undertaken with generous strength by those who are identified as the "fathers" of our recent past, is a gift for everyone, a precious grace in order to continue to grow in the courageous faith of Christ, which is becoming increasingly the only hope for the world.
Introduction
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
Divo Barsotti was born in 1914 in Palaia (Pisa) and grew up there among seven brothers and sisters. After studying in his diocese, he was ordained as a priest on July 18, 1937, in the Cathedral of San Miniato in Pisa. During the next three years he taught theology, Church history and patrology in the Pisa seminary. Unhappy with this activity, and possessing an inquisitive search for the sense and meaning of a divine vocation, he asked to be excused from his office and returned for some years (1941-45) to his family, from where he occasionally offered to substitute for other priests. These were years spent in adhesion to the will of God and to the new way. This is the period upon which he reflects in his two later published diaries. The first and shorter diary is La lotta con l'Angelo (The Fight with the Angel: A Diary of a Soul, LEF, Florence 1954), comprising the years 1941-42, and the second and longer diary is La fuga immobile (The Motionless Flight, Edizioni di Comunità, Milan 1957) comprising the years 1944-46.
The second diary, which gathers together and clarifies the chaotic insights and judgments of the former, is here presented in German. In 1945 we find Barsotti living with some religious sisters in a suburb of Florence. In 1950 he held the chair of asceticism and mysticism at the seminary in Florence, then took the spiritual care of an association of graduates in the same city and founded an association of lay faithful approved by the bishop of Florence: the Comunità dei Figli di Dio [ Community of the Children of God], which is flourishing even now. Barsotti lived with a few companions in a kind of hermitage near Settignano (Florence); its community is characterized by being structured in various degrees of belonging, [1] from those who live in the world (such as the Tertiary Orders) to those who live fully according to the evangelical precepts, to those who live in small communities and even some who live in solitude. Barsotti's extensive literary work, which is still growing, justifies these widely varied ways of life.
Like Hugo Ball, he is not afraid of the word "flight" and finds his starting point and orientation in radical separation from the world, in the abandonment of everything, and then, from this place with God, is able once again to embrace everything, even the extreme manifestations of secular life. In view of this absolute distance from the world, Barsotti recovers the universality of divine salvation and sees that it is not necessary to build small institutions of salvation either in the world or alongside it, but rather it is necessary to save the whole world. The means of this is and always remains the Cross, the Death and Resurrection of Jesus: hidden life with Christ in God, participation in the " mysterium salutis" that is performed in an indivisible and Trinitarian way in the truly unique act of salvation of Christ. This act fills the history of the Church and the history of the world, and is the perennial present that gives consistency and validity to every fleeting moment of human time, to every fallen human work.
Action in the world makes sense only if it makes present this one act; only by participating in this one event, according to which God is in the world and for the world, can something happen in the world. The "God in the world" event, that is, Jesus Christ, is inseparably Word and life (and in this is the proof of his divinity). Word as life and life as Word: this is formally the mysterium.
Here the door opens to the work of Barsotti. God's word is not primarily teaching and theology but action and life: it is a creative act that is accomplished. And life is not just something “physical,” “ontological,” but free action, spiritual, self-giving gift by the eternal Spirit and with this it is Word. Christ transmits this unity of Word and life to His Church: His Word is an event in the liturgy, in the sacrament, in the Eucharist, but each of these express the sacramental character of the Church and also of the world itself, created and redeemed. The Word is God's action in Sacred Scripture. It is not a “book” but the resonating, throughout the world, of the historical presence of the Word of God.
From this starting point we can divide Barsotti's literary work into four groups, whose intimate connection is evident from this premise.
1) The fundamental theoretical writings, especially two that complement each other: Il mistero cristiano nell'anno liturgico (The Christian Mystery in the Liturgical Year, LEF 1950, French Cerf 1954) and Il mistero cristiano e la parola di Dio (The Christian Mystery and the Word of God, LEF 1953, Extended Edition in French, Cerf 1954; in German Christliches Mysterium und Wort Gottes, Benziger 1957). Both see k to integrate each other, totally: the mystery of the liturgy would like to resume its ancient and universal amplitude, surpassing Casel, [2] whose work is assimilated.
There is only one unique mysterium: God in Christ for us, which becomes real to us in the fact that the Church is an act that arises and is made concrete as a sacrament. Part of this aspect is addressed in the small book Teologia e liturgia (Theology and Liturgy (Corsia dei Servi, Milan 1956).
The main work, Il mistero cristiano e la parola di Dio, describes the act as word and makes a bridge between the spiritual exegesis of the Church Fathers and modern scientific exegesis. It is heavily indebted to French theology, especially Louis Bouyer and his significant work La Bible et l'Evangile (The Bible and the Gospel), but also to Henri de Lubac and his interpretation of Origen in Histoire et Esprit, as well as the numerous inspired exegetes of France at present. The great merit of these two works is to have once again made the whole concrete and historical salvation mystery present and practicable, in particular for having restored to the Old Testament its strength as being current event. It has focused theology around the interpretative function of this historical reality and so filled the liturgy with this immense content, thereby enlarging and strengthening Christian awareness in an awe-inspiring manner. One can easily imagine how much this was necessary in Barsotti’s homeland, where the liturgical movement had almost no impact and where exegesis and theology have so much to recover in many areas.
To these principal works that provide us with the key to reading all the other Barsottian works, we must add a further, which only apparently stands apart: Cristianesimo russo (Russian Christianity, LEF 1948). Like the first published book, this is a fundamental one.
The Barsotti hermitage is named Casa San Sergio. The whole enterprise of Barsotti is contained in the sign of Russian piety, from its Byzantine and Greek-patristic origins to Sergius, Seraphim of Sarov, Theophane the hermit, John of Kronstadt and Chomjakov, Dostoevsky, Leontev, Soloviev, Berdjajev. It is a piety that is born of the paradoxical clash between flight from the world and the embrace of the world, between absolute contemplation and salvific action that springs from it. According to Barsotti, Russian piety is missing from lived-out Catholicism (although the shortcomings of Russian piety do not escape him at all), and only in Christ, from whom both rivers originate, is there hope that the East and the West will meet again. Culture alone will never provide a basis for reunion: “Culture is only an intermediate value in the service of politics or religion; it can help to divide or to unite, but in itself it is not dividing or uniting.” No other book has been written with such affection, since, for Barsotti, Russian piety is both an affair of the heart and a strategic position between East and West, between God and the world, between liturgical contemplation and industrial secularism.
2) The second group of works expounds on the mystery of salvation: it brings theology back to spiritual exegesis. Here the great stages of the history of salvation are interpreted in a theological way, theology is filled out by salvific event, and the fullness of the mystery is proven in the historical fact. With precision we find that “the spiritual exegesis of Scripture is not added as a second interpretation to the literal and historical one, but it is nothing more than the deepening of historical-literal interpretation. Every event in Scripture, and especially in Jesus' life is eternal, pre-existent before it is accomplished; and once it is accomplished, it lasts forever."
The Old Testament is just as much Mysterium Christi as Christ Himself is and also as the Age of the Church is. “Spiritual Exegesis is based on a typology that is essential; it is Christological if you consider salvation in the Old Testament; it is sacramental if you look at Christian life; it is eschatological, if one searches for the sense of mystery oriented to eternity.” At the service of this theological exegesis is an interpretation of Genesis ( Il Dio di Abramo, l'esperienza di Dio nella Genesi (The God of Abraham: The Experience of God in Genesis) LEF 1952), in which the themes of creation as theophany and as God's covenant with men are developed in a deeply, richly, and boldly; then a spiritual interpretation of the Exodus, [3] dealing with the theme, ubiquitous in Scripture, of leaving a foreign country, of walking through the sea and the desert to the Promised Land. In addition, there is the great work La rivelazione dell'amore (The Revelation of Love, LEF 1955; published in French by Alsatia, 1958), in which the Old Covenant is interpreted as an ever more luminous manifestation of the mystery of love, more like the preparation for the incarnation of Jesus and not as a "law" that places itself as an obstacle on the road. An interpretation of the Apocalypse is also in preparation. [4]
3) The third group of works, which we will not consider individually here, translates fundamental thoughts into texts that are easier to understand, intended for pastoral use in the care of souls. These are conferences, retreats, and spiritual exercises that interpret the content of the Christian mystery in a number of ways for practical life: Loquere Domine (LEF 1953, published in French by Orante 1953), Nella presenza di Dio (In the Presence of God, LEF 1954), La via del ritorno (The Way of Return LEF 1957), Dalla grazia alla gloria (From Grace to Glory, LEF 1957) and numerous small contributions in magazines.
4) The last group is made up of diaries, along with a brief description of a trip to the Holy Land ( Pellegrino in Terra Santa - Pilgrim in the Holy Land, Locusta, Vicenza, 1958). The diaries, especially La fuga immobile, were written before Cristianesimo Russo and show the origins of this Christian vision of the world. We are therefore grateful for the publication of this diary, because Barsotti’s theoretical works reveal many literary influences that are not immediately obvious, since they derive from Barsotti’s own primordial experience, and also from his many subsequent cultural experiences. The diary reveals his primordial experience.
The fact that Barsotti has abandoned his regular career to pursue a future that is not seen as very desirable in the clerical world - and not without dangers - reveals his intolerance of regimented ecclesiastical realities and his will - which may be recognized as a will obedient to a call - to renew Christianity at its most fundamental stages. Unlike La Pira, Carlo Bo, Danilo Dolci and others, he seeks this renewal not in the social sphere, but, as we have seen, within the original mystery.
Returning to the "desert" to experience God, and God alone, he is similar to Charles de Foucauld, to whom he frequently and willingly appeals. More active and more gifted than de Foucauld in the literary field, Barsotti must again and again formulate this experience, analyze it by means of concentric circles, and, beginning from the initial oppositions and paradoxes, gradually approach the center of the mystery and illuminate it. In his diary there appears unfiltered the original vehemence and disruptive force of his thought, an elemental force of love, of the will in self-giving which for the moment is exercised and expands as if in a void: it is a Christian radicalism which is supernatural and pure.
Three radicalisms can be distinguished which, by blending with each other, act as driving forces. The first is the experience of being as activity or act; therefore the Aristotelian-Thomistic teaching of the actus is radicalized in the direction of Eckhart and Fichte and approaches the understanding in the thought of the young Karl Barth. It is only on the basis of what is fully realized that we can explain what is still in tension and potentiality: in the Christian sense, God is the fullness in the void of all creatures, and Jesus Christ Incarnate is the fullness of God who assumes in Himself all that is unfinished, vain, and fallen in the world - He heals it and brings it to the Father. And if God wants to be all in all – not only in Himself but also in the "emptiness" of the creature – then indeed (as Barsotti rightly dares to affirm) He wants to be so by means of the loving creature, and thus the maternal virginity of Mary becomes an active principle in which each creature is called to participate.
Already from this we can see the radicality of Barsotti's theological thought: its mystical spirituality is always fed (like that of Eckhart) from the deepest and boldest perspectives of Biblical revelation and dogmatic meditation. But when the disruptive force of the first explosion makes its own energy felt, it immediately makes any compromising equilibrium impossible. From this point of departure, every now and then there is doubt about the validity and dominance of certain institutions in the face of the breakthrough event, or in the face of what is only impersonal in the face of desiring greater dialogue, or in the face of the intrinsic value of what is potency in favor of a sort of absolute domain of the actus purus. The creature and the world exist in so far as they are part of this act (in the Platonic sense), otherwise they do not exist – they are empty, vanity, not-me. This radicalism leads, as in the above-mentioned thinkers, to an absolute primacy of the supernatural; as in Eckhart, the act of creation appears inserted in the act of the generation of the Word and the Incarnate Son is the only cause of all created natures: the world finds in Christ its reason to be and to exist.
This can be expressed in a second radicalism whose discussion is the most precious part of this book, and perhaps no Christian has ever lived it so deeply as Divo Barsotti: God is not just "Unus" in the sense of the Platonists; He is also the " Unicus." God's uniqueness entails, as a consequence for every person created by God according to his image and likeness, the uniqueness of each one in his species (what Thomas affirms about the angels). This uniqueness of every person develops in participating ever more fully in the uniqueness of God. Therefore, not only all that is potential transcends toward the act of God, but every created subjectivity, that is, being itself, exists only to the extent that it actively transcends itself towards the “I” of God.
Within the analogia entis, as its extreme application, especially for spiritual beings, is the analogia personalitatis that Barsotti takes seriously to its full implication. God is present for us in Christ, and here the author inserts the traditional thought of the Corpus mysticum - Sponsa mystica: the Church (and in her all believers and finally all mankind) is participation in the “I”, in consciousness, in the attitude of Jesus Christ towards the Father within the Holy Spirit. But the experience of God's uniqueness has another, negative aspect: it is not possible to participate in the One, the Unique, according to being. If there was such multiplicity, the Unique would be divided; it differs precisely from this multiplicity thanks to its uniqueness.
The thought of Christian philosophy, scandalous for today's Christians, according to which God does not have a real relationship with the world, becomes in Barsotti – perhaps for the first time – a religious-theological experience that requires immediate transposition in Christian praxis. At this point he flows into Mount Athos and again into the most advanced forms of Russian contemplation, whether they are Aeropagic or Evagrian.
This might seem like a modern form of Schelerian personalism, but actually this implies even more. It reopens, in pure primitivity, original Christian and Biblical modes of thought, which have been blocked for a long time and perhaps were always totally inaccessible. It is understandable that the statements in this area are easily misleading; but you cannot talk about them differently without diluting them. If grace is truly to inhabit the fullness and uniqueness of Christ, then this fullness and uniqueness really lives in man, or he lives in it. Grace (and hence its free responsibility) is not divisible. Counterweights can be found everywhere.
Finally, the reader of this book will be amazed by the continuous repetition of a word: life. God is life. He is life so much that all that is not divine dies before his being more-than-alive. God, inasmuch as he gives death, gives his life. Here appears the pathos of the philosophy of Bergson, Nietzsche and Simmel, but always connected with theological-mystical experience, without being compromised by contemporary thinking. Life is the keenness and ardor of love. All that is only static and formal is lifeless, abstract; the abstract corresponds to concepts, but what corresponds to concrete living is the “experience” or, as is often said, to “feel.” One who has never experienced the vitality of God does not know what he is saying as a theologian, as a Christian, and as a man. Concepts can only bear witness to an experience, and so everything that is institution and organization in the Church can only be an expression of a true supernatural vitality. When concept and institution are not favorable to vitality, they only damage it.
It belongs to the pathos of philosophy “breaking up” shells and scraps that even in the Diary they are continually “blown away.” This is one of the ways Barsotti was led from eremitism (parallel to Foucauld or his followers) to the idea of a community of people: the Church has to overflow beyond the delimiting forms of the world in order to correspond to the meaning of its unlimited form. Starting from “life,” the author finds new access to his principle of being as act: life is actualized existence. Of course, this does not intend anything immanent and natural, but rather the mystical participation of created being in the uncreated life that flows to us through Christ. In Him we have life.
With these three radicalisms, which in Barsotti are primordial personal experiences and not cultural acquisitions, three dangerous forms of philosophical unilateralism are overcome, placing each of them in their proper field of origin: the supernatural and theology. By doing so, he gives to Christian spirituality, which is often inadequately called “mystical ascesis,” an unheard-of-splendor, a fresh and springing force. Anyone who participates in his experience is forced to re-create ab initio what has been known for long time but which has faded, even if he does not express it with the same concepts as the author. In Barsotti, the force of impulse is decisive, not the single formulation. This often remains unilateral, since Barsotti does not “reflect” but continuously draws his claims from fundamental experience; he often puts one sentence next to another (and often against the other), leaving the reader to do the dialectical mediation.
But the role of philosophy is maintained in Barsotti thanks to the experience of the beautiful. This was rightly called to our attention by Mario Gozzini in his book about Barsotti, which is full of good insights, Pazienza della verità (Patience of Truth, Vallecchi, 1950). [5]
Divo Barsotti has also gained great merit in recovering the reality of the beautiful for Christian spirituality. What a loss that it was overlooked for so long! How little Catholic writers have been able to seize of Solovyev! In Barsotti, beauty can only mean shekinah: the irradiation of the Holy Spirit on the world, overcoming in the luminous uniqueness of God of all the inconsistencies and earthly contradictions, flashes – now and always – of His glory.
Beauty is either supernatural or it does not exist. But beauty is also shaped by truth: among all peoples myth exists, and myth is the shadow and prefiguration of revelation and Incarnation. Barsotti's religious experience is, using his own word, “mystical,” in the sense given to the word by the Fathers of the Church as something that gives a glimpse into the mystery. It is intuitive, and everything that is genuinely intuitive strikes a similar chord in him. The path from any great poetry to theology seems to him much shorter and quick than that from philosophy to theology. Those who do not start from authentic philosophia perennis, but from the second and third hand pseudo-philosophies of small seminars, are destined to have similar experiences.
Along with the emphasis on the past, there is the similar need for the sanctity of the “theologian,” that is, of “the-one-who-pronounces-God.” Only the saint is fully authorized to speak of the mystery; only he can do so convincingly, giving testimony to what he has experienced. This idea is an indispensable part of Barsotti's thought; he himself speaks as someone convinced of a divine mission, which he obeyed with his Motionless Flight. His affirmation of missionary life is not inhibited by any human respect or by any timidity. Here, truly, what is subjective is objective; it is a kind of anatomy of the sent man. The purpose is more important than any possible objections against the publication of the journal. The fact that the author has to follow his own path for long stretches may appear shocking to us in his diary. It does not surprise us if he goes groping around, if only with further attempts is balance restored. No wonder, then, that he speaks with gestures drawn from all of his existence, as Kierkegaard says of John Chrysostom. Existence is for him only material for the experience of God, which he needs to be able to announce.
There are several paths in the Church; some use their own existence as a substance to obtain what is essentially Christian. Others leave their experience in the shadows, to make public only the results they derive from it, as Barsotti once mentions about Thomas Aquinas. With others God allows it that only after they die are the personal assumptions of their preaching revealed.
Gozzini strongly emphasized that “for spiritual exegesis to be true, it must present itself as a sort of autobiographical confession, so that true spiritual interpretation, before appearing in the form of a commentary on Sacred Scripture, is recognized in one’s own life.” This is certainly correct, even if the opposite is also true, that is, that the spiritual understanding of one's own existence leads to the objectivity of the Word of God, as in the case of Barsotti. So this dramatic book about the evolving of his calling should be read as an introduction to his objective works; it is like a glimpse behind the scenes, a glimpse that is not indispensable for understanding the work as such, but which makes the spectator understand what tremendous labor precedes a successful performance.
It is true: how much effort is needed to build without blemishes the form of a missionary Christian existence, starting from so many existential impossibilities that are apparently inexplicable! What does it really mean, in the words of Christ, to abandon everything? How shall we do it? What does it really mean (and not just figuratively or roughly) to find everything – father, mother, children, home and property – a hundredfold, “along with persecutions,” as Mark adds? What does it really mean to uphold the primacy of Mary's contemplation in the face of all the Catholic activism of Martha (not just as a programmatic point, but as a matter of fact)? What does it really mean, starting from this primacy of contemplation experienced and firmly held onto, to move the things of this world?
Barsotti does not speak here of success (which Martin Buber says is not one of God's names), nor of merit, but very evangelically he speaks of “bearing fruit.” He also knows, however, that the fruit, to be true, does not necessarily have to appear before the eyes of men. What does it mean to choose God alone, Christ alone, and, nevertheless, to love men without pretense and without instrumentalization? Since these are radical choices, why not put all our eggs in the basket of death, of martyrdom, as Ignatius of Antioch did, but yet, even in the radicalism of martyrdom, still love and even favor earthly things? The incipient mission is exercised amidst all these difficulties, which in the end can only be resolved through a spiritual death and never with simple philosophical syntheses that would reveal themselves in everyday life as compromises and half-measures. The one thing necessary is not robbed of its uniqueness and absolute primacy, when, while remaining firmly in the place we have recognized as correct, we are also forced to walk forward.
Here then is the meaning of the strange title, The Motionless Flight. Yes, there is a flight - Barsotti is not afraid at all of those words that the cultural Christian deliberately avoids, or whose meaning is changed into something harmless - there is a single soul’s flight towards the One God; but would not it be too simplistic to represent it in the manner of the ancient Desert Fathers?
Barsotti is more than willing to follow Charles de Foucauld's path, but by fleeing he is forced to remain: he cannot take even one step away from his place, he must remain motionless, within the family, then in the diocese, in the small daily duties, in a vacuum that becomes even more void because it is packed with all the mundane things of daily life. By this means he is introduced into Christian existence, and particularly to the existence of those people whom he will guide, and who live the evangelical precepts in the footsteps of Christ without abandoning the world. This is why Barsotti always clings to the experience of Francis of Assisi, whose singular mission has its roots in the mystery of Christ, the Incarnate and Crucified One, beyond any flight from the world or any consensus with the world.
Barsotti's diary is the opposite of a manual. It is only a prelude; it is the taking on of uniforms and weapons; it is the march towards the battle. There are no definite formulas.
This diary remains a unique document of how a Christian can exercise clarity in waiting; words that are too often used (such as penance, asceticism, experience, and many others) are totally stripped of their habitual meaning, and so they resonate for us in ways they have not for a long time; these things are immersed in a fountain that restores their youth, and they resurface with a splendor of mystery and also with that burning appeal that makes them credible once again: first for ourselves and then, consequently, for non-Christians and for the world. Could we be Christians today in any other way?
Foreword
David W. Fagerberg
It is humbling to add my feeble words to the powerful introduction Hans Urs von Balthasar gives to his friend Divo Barsotti. In it, the reader will detect the fondness and respect he had for Barsotti the theologian and mystic. In it, the reader will further find biographical details and bibliographic context, so I will not repeat any of that. I will, however, take my start from an observation von Balthasar makes. He writes, “There are several paths in the Church; some use their own existence as a substance to obtain what is essentially Christian. Others leave their experience in the shadows, to make public only the results they derive from it … This dramatic book about the evolving of [Barsotti’s] calling should be read as an introduction to his objective works; it is like a glimpse behind the scenes, a glimpse that is not indispensable for understanding the work as such, but which makes the spectator understand what tremendous labor precedes a successful performance.”
Barsotti’s “successful performance” in numerous fields of theology was recognized immediately by popes, theologians, seminarians, and laity when they heard him speak or read his works. I continue to hope for additional volumes to be translated so that the English-speaking world will discover the man who produced 160 books over his lifetime; who taught sacramental theology and spiritual theology for 30 years in Florence; who preached papal retreats and was friends with Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI; who was friends with, and often visited by, many of the most significant theologians of the 20 th century (von Speyr, Danielou, Bouyer, de Lubac, Evdokimov, Beauduin, Hausherr, Merton, Ratzinger, Giussani) including, of course, von Balthasar, who for the last six months of his life served as Barsotti’s spiritual director. Barsotti’s objective works appeared under many genres: fundamental theoretical writings, liturgical theology, spiritual exegesis on the mystery of salvation, mystagogy, pastoral care, mystical writings, and poetry. He was a “successful performer,” indeed.
So why read the diary of the man? Are we being nosy? Are we amateur psychologists searching for explanatory causes? Are we cynics expecting to find the clay feet of a great man? Are we disinterested observers of the course of a life? None of these approaches would allow us to value what The Motionless Flight has to offer us. We must instead approach this diary through the door that von Balthasar has pointed out. Barsotti could have left his experience in the shadows, and the Community which loves him could have done the same and kept this diary private. But then we would only admire the outer Barsotti and would not yet touched the central subject that occupied his heart. That central subject is God’s work in a person, the work of deification, the work of forming and bringing a person to holiness. Without a glimpse behind the scenes, as von Balthasar so aptly puts it, we would not understand the tremendous labor Barsotti underwent, and the tremendous labor God spent on him, which make his other writings such penetrating revelations of God’s mystical work.
Why read the diary of this man? Because he uses his own existence as a substance to obtain what is essentially Christian. What is essentially Christian was described by nearly every Church father as the process of becoming Christoform. The central Christian mystery is to become gracefully (by grace) what Christ is naturally (by nature). Christianity is not a creed or a philosophy or a politic, it is a historical event with an ongoing repercussion. It is the event of God becoming man with the ongoing possibility for man to become divine. No incarnation, no mystical body called the Church, no Christianity. The Church is the pathway paved across the halls of history that leads to beatitude, which is a share in the life of the Trinity. The essence of the Christian life is to make a pilgrimage to God the Father, hand-in-hand with God the Son, by the illumination of God the Holy Spirit. In order to bring us home to himself, God the Father did more than provide us directions. God the Son incarnated himself to be our marching companion, and God the Holy Spirit nerves our feet.
Why read the diary of this man? His story is not our story… and yet it is. Christianity presents the antinomy of universal and particular, singular and plural, humanity and persons. By the latter term, no two journeys are the same because no two persons are the same; the individual substance out of which we each obtain the essentially Christian for ourselves is unique; the particularity and plurality of persons means that God never tells one person another person’s story. But by the former term, all journeys correspond because they are directed to the same end; the essentially Christian hypostasizes uniquely (hypostasis means “person”), but it is one Lord, one faith, one hope, one baptism, one resurrection; and because of the human nature I share with all human beings, their story connects to mine with a familiarity. So when Barsotti describes his sorrows and joys, his doubts and confidence, his discouragement and hope, he is offering himself in koinonia to us, the sort of koinonia-love that the three persons of the Trinity have with each other. We walk, each of us, our own path, alone on parallel individual tracks, but we are not walking in the dark. If we are willing to reveal ourselves, then we can see other pilgrims at our side, and remarkably enough, you, today, have beside you anyone in the Church militant or triumphant. Augustine’s mother Monica is as close to your side as your own mother.
We do not reveal ourselves to one another more readily because of our vanity. In order to reveal ourselves to a nearby pilgrim, we would have to also reveal our faults and failures, and this shames us. We only grow less ashamed as we put less confidence in ourselves, and we only lessen our self-esteem as we increase our reliance upon Christ. That is why Barsotti can show anything, everything about himself. His great purity of heart conquers any hesitation he feels. Even in moments of intellectual darkness he senses Christ’s propinquity; even in his doubts he is not disturbed; even when his soul is suspended “in impotent sorrow,” as he admits, and no longer knows how to pray, his soul continues forward in prayer. Prayer is praise to and reliance upon God, and what better state for prayer is there than when we feel the stirrings of doxology precisely because we realize that we can do nothing more for ourselves.
Why read the diary of this man? We have not yet touched on what makes it especially worthwhile to us Christians in the modern world. We know that we are supposed to surrender, commanded to be weak so he can be strong, expected to admit our failings. We know it so well, that we are almost proud when we can admit it. Ironically, we almost boast of our sins so we can brag of our humility in confessing them. Barsotti’s diary is especially worthwhile because it strips this away. It is the behind the scenes story of a victory of patience, patience over a temptation that uniquely afflicts modern Christians. He, like us, gave his life over to Christ. We, like him, claim to be ready to make any sacrifice for Christ. And then we are met with silence. That silence is a healing splinter of the cross that gets under our skin, and the inoculation is painful. Repeatedly in this diary you will read statements like “I am perfectly useless to Him” (June 9); “I no longer belong to anybody – I’m thrown away in a corner like a useless being” (October 1); “Many times man deceives himself that he has a purpose in his work. God also took this illusion away from me” (October 5). We live in an age of laborious Christianity: we are happy to be busy, rewarded by production, and believe we are called to do long and hard work. We profess willingness to serve if only God will keep us constantly occupied. Barsotti says he once prayed, “Lord make my life useless, so that I do not have any purpose, no mission, but only to live for you,” and for years that prayer was granted. We can almost hear him mumbling under his breath, as we would under ours, “Out of the many prayers I have offered, this is the one you chose to answer?!” One is rewarded by the drama of being with Christ for one night in Gethsemane, but one feels wearied by the patience required to be quiet with Christ for thirty years in Nazareth. Barsotti invites the reader into that mystical patience. “What do you care if God has thrown you as a useless tool into a corner?” (November 27).
Why, finally, read the diary of this man? Because he says the solitude of the Son with the Father is his own solitude. It sounds self-contradictory: solitude is being alone, secluded and remote from others, yet he says he is in solitude with someone. It is like a Trinitarian secret: three but one. It is a mystical secret: alone but together. And then he further shares his solitude with us. The solitude is getting more crowded all the time. That is the antinomy again of hesychasm and koinonia. His diary is written as though it could be ours, because the way God’s providence works on his substance to obtain for him what is essentially Christian is the way God’s providence will sometimes work on our substance to obtain the same for us. Barsotti is finally the priest he wanted to become when he offered himself to God. A priest is a mediator, and he mediates by becoming our companion after having made himself a companion of Christ.
First Part
1944
25 May – The mother's life is in her son: the whole life of the world and of the soul is in Christ. All of life is an eternal transfusion into Christ, who is the Only Begotten of the Father.
"He who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and indeed will do even greater works because I go to the Father." The power of the Master lives in the disciple: the Christian lives the life of the Risen Jesus. - Your tepidity, inability to act, indecision of will are not an obstacle to divine grace: even the apostles were like you, but the Holy Spirit transformed them. The effect of the Spirit for each soul is this absolute power in the fulfillment of the divine will - a force that works with such simplicity that it is left ignored by the soul itself: in the soul lives only the freedom of the Spirit, and the soul no longer knows any obstacles, but everything goes forward without anything to hold it and stop it, because nothing touches it anymore. – God lives in the soul and the soul is, as it were, outside of any confinement; it is above all things, its life transcends every experience, every life, because the will of the soul is fixed in the omnipotent Will of God who works in nothingness: it participates in independence and divine absoluteness.
27 May – Even in the most sublime mystical experience, faith remains. Faith is the highest experience.
28 May – To be Jesus. To recollect oneself outside of time and space in God - not to be crushed, not to live a life, but Unity, absolute fullness. It is necessary that I remain in the face of the Father and that in love I adhere to God: that is, that in me only Charity will prevail: love that has no beginning and no reason, preemptive, infinite love – in sum, a love that conquers all the measures and conditions of the created being.
29 May – I cannot "adhere" to God except in the "holiness" of a purity and detachment that is absolute.
The sanctity of Jesus! In Him is made incarnate the Will of the Father. So also in you: holiness is not imitation of divine life, a sort of multiplication of God that would lead to idolatry, but it is God Himself, who lives in you.
The action of the “holy” manifests itself above all in the miracle: this is why the miracle is for the Church the sign, the proof of holiness. In the miracle it is God Himself who works in man, through man.
30 May – Immersion in the Glory of God. The soul is lost in Him. The very living feeling of a pure Fullness: Light in front of which and in which all other light is as if it does not exist: One, absolute strength, that sustains and creates everything. God's Transcendence.
Silence and Abyss that in you become a "word," a form.
It is as if God lived for you.
31 May – I do not see anything other than Jesus: the whole life of men is the generation of Christ. Christ reveals himself to me as the Splendor of Creation that in Him possesses His life, His reason, His being. We do not live except in Him. Just as if the sky would suddenly open and be filled with a great light, so I saw Jesus. He alone: every human act, every voice is gathered in Him: one life only, one Word only.
In the Most Holy Mary I have contemplated an immense spiritual maternity that exhausted all the fertility of creation: the mystery of her divine maternity seemed to me something that somehow justifies the doctrine of Sophianism [a school of Russian Orthodox thought that teaches that Wisdom (Sophia) is to identical to God’s essence, which is expressed in the world as “creaturely” wisdom].
It is a mistake to conceive of the Church as a “totality” of which each soul would be only a part – but then again it is not a mistake. Each soul is in some way the entire Church, not a part of a whole. The Most Holy Mary is identified in her universal maternity with the Church: hence the parallel between Mary and the Church, as we see in the writings of the Fathers.
1 June – My “unity” in God is an eternal secret, incommunicable. The life of each soul is in God, totally excluded from the interference of the world. No one can ever take part in “your” dialogue with the Father – and your more profound and true life remains a mystery to all except for Christ, because your life is Him (the Most Holy Mary who carries each one of us all at her breast also knows us). Our solitude is won only in God.
