Dialogue: agreeing to disagree or sharing our humanity?

Tom, the President of the Christopher Dawson Society for Philosophy and Culture wrote a piece on how the public square would benefit from approaching dialogue from the point of view of Monsignor Luigi Giussani.

27.10.2024Tom Gourlay*

It is increasingly commonplace to bemoan the current state of public debate on almost any topic. In the interminable cycle of news and commentary, it is obvious that there is no real exchange of ideas taking place and no common project. What we see is a collapse of our capacity to speak with one another in a commonly understood language. The edifice of internet communications technology looks more like a digital tower of babel than the birth of a new harmony-inducing lingua franca.

Critiques of social media range from the refusal to acknowledge any good whatsoever, to recognition of their diverse potential and of the ways in which algorithms shape users. The sheer viciousness of public discourse is something unthinkable before “social” media. The presidential debates in the Unites States or the recent reporting of whatever Pope Francis may or may not have said, are sad indicators of where things are at.

The words of Italian Catholic priest and educator Fr Luigi Giussani (1922-2005) come as a challenge and a promise. In The Journey to Truth is an Experience, Giussani speaks of dialogue as ‘the instrument of co-existence with the whole of human reality made by God’.

For many people, “dialogue” is a buzz-word or, according to Australian cultural commentator Don Watson, a “weasel word”. It stands for “compromise”, activities that result in a banal, lowest-common-denominator agreement to disagree. Many words spoken, much ink spilled, very little achieved, and a great deal of time (and often money) wasted.

But dialogue, for Giussani, is enriching. It is of vital importance for the Church’s Catholicity. ‘Each one of us, because of our particular temperament, tends to stress certain things; contact with others reminds us of other things and of other aspects of the same thing. Dialogue is thus a function of those horizons of universality and totality to which man is destined.’



Dialogue takes as its starting point the human condition – not primarily its brokenness and sinfulness (though not negating that), but its desire for the infinite. This is what we have in common, despite our socio-economic-political backgrounds, our family upbringings and worldviews, our particular sinfulness. Giussani asks us to start dialogue from what we have in common:

• To take what we have in common with the other as a starting point does not at all mean saying the same thing, even if we use the same words: what is justice for another is not justice for a Christian, what is freedom for another is not freedom for a Christian; education in someone else’s conception is not education as the Church conceives it… What we have in common with the other is to be sought not so much in ideology as in the other’s native structure, in those human needs, in those original criteria, in which he or she is human like us.

Starting from our original or native structure we can verify the various proposals that are offered as responses to the malady of our present context. This becomes an opportunity for us to verify the faith that we have been gifted with, as an opportunity for our own growth and maturity. The revealed contents of our faith should stand up to scrutiny, even the most strident. The Gospel, says a friend of mine, is pretty robust.

This method of dialogue is, in its turn, an instrument of mission and evangelisation – not because it provides knock-down arguments for God’s existence or whatever doctrine we might be seeking to provide an apologetic for – but because it begins with the questions to which both an other’s ideology and our Christianity proposes solutions. Giussani quoted the American protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘nothing is more incredible [i.e. impossible to believe] than answers to questions that have not been asked.’ Dialogue is the means by which we can get at those questions of ultimate meaning. Side-by-side with those for whom life seems to be so very different, we can move beyond our preconceived ideologies and approach the Truth.

In this sense, and undertaken in this way, dialogue can be said to mimic the tender method of God that we see in the Incarnation. As Benedict XVI said in his book Jesus of Nazareth:

• It is part of the mystery of God that He acts so gently, that He only gradually builds up His history within the great history of mankind; that He becomes man and so can be overlooked by His contemporaries and by the decisive forces within history; that He suffers and dies, and, having risen again, He chooses to come to mankind only through the faith of the disciples to whom He reveals himself; that He continues to knock gently at the doors of our hearts and slowly opens our eyes if we open our doors to Him. […] And yet–is not this the truly divine way? Not to overwhelm with external power, but to give freedom, to offer and elicit love.

*A group of friends couldn’t see a space in Perth, Australia for sharing ideas, freely and openly, within a Catholic context. So they created one. Since 2012 the Christopher Dawson Society for Philosophy and Culture has been a forum for talks, short courses and now a popular blog.