Introduction

We republish a fine article, The pact with the Serpent, by Massimo Borghesi from February 2003, in the wake of events in the national and international sphere in which one is struck not only by the perversity of the actions, but also by what seems almost the over-exceeding of human freedom and the odious link made with the Christian religion. As the Church’s ancient and recent history teaches, what has always produced hatred of the Christian faith, within and without the Church, has been an anguish and a frenzy nourished by religious symbols and beliefs.

What comes to mind here is one of the last private discussions that Don Giussani had with Pope John Paul II in the early ‘nineties, which he himself recounted as follows: the Pope told him that agnosticism, summarized in the formula “God, even if He exists, has nothing to do with life”, was the greatest danger to the faith – a notion that Don Giussani had himself lectured on several times. Giussani responded with the freedom of the sons of God (which is one of the humanly most fascinating expressions of the faith): “No, Your Holiness, not agnosticism, but Gnosticism is the danger for the Christian faith!”.

A couple of decades later we can now see how provident that shift of Don Giussani was. A shift that can also be documented by the interview, given in April 1992, in which Don Giussani speaks of the persecution against those “who act within the simplicity of the Tradition”. To the interviewer’s question: “A real persecution?”, Don Giussani replied, “Just so. The world’s wrath doesn’t arise today at the word Church, it also stays quiet at the idea that someone should define himself Catholic, or at the person of the Pope viewed as a moral authority. Indeed there is formal, even sincere, deference. The hatred is unleashed – barely contained, but soon it will overflow – on those Catholics who take a stance as such, Catholics who act within the simplicity of Tradition” (Luigi Giussani, Un avvenimento di vita, cioè una storia [An event of life: that is, a story], introduction by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, published by Edit - Il Sabato, Roma 1993, p. 104).

In one of his last works before being elected successor of Peter (Truth and Tolerance, Christian Belief and World Religions a revised collection published in 2004 of his earlier articles on the subject), in the newly added linking pages, Joseph Ratzinger noted: “Evil is not in fact – as Hegel claimed, and Goethe wants to show us in Faust– a part of the whole which we need, but rather the destruction of Being. It cannot be represented, as Mephistopheles does in Faust with the words: ‘I am part of that force that continually wills evil and continually creates good’”.

Despite being very learned and rich in quotations, Borghesi’s article can be read in one go. In fact it has a very simple structure, underlined by brief headings to the paragraphs that show first of all the growth of the beguilement of evil in the contemporary age, something increasingly perceived as the energy that liberates mankind; then its Promethean opposition to the good and merciful God; and finally, its being conceived not in opposition to but as a principle internal to God himself, exactly in line with the most subtle and perverse Gnostic tales.