4. Meaning of life, 'salvation' to be rediscovered and bolstered
To achieve all that we have mentioned above, it is essential that the potential the young are gifted with be re-awakened and brought into action. This potential can be reduced to three types:
1. The knowing faculties: sense and intellectual knowledge, particularly the reasoning ability which, as we have seen, prevents a young man from behaving like a horse and mule without intelligence: sicut equus et mulus quibus non est intellectus.
2. Affections in all their diversity: desires, passions and the heart.
3. The will: as daring freedom seasoned with reason, faith and inflamed by charity.
The human organism is already marvellously composed at the level of creation, but is immeasurably more splendid since it has been elevated to the supernatural order, thanks to the Redemption wrought by Jesus Christ Our Savior. The awareness of human dignity in the order of nature and grace stands as the foundation of an appropriate vision of the goals of authentic education. Don Bosco writes about this in his very well-known Month of May series.
Here Don Bosco emphasises the “wonders of divine grace”841 but does not exclude, rather presupposes and appreciates as something evident, taken for granted, a natural basis which is no less wonderful:
By the expression 'dignity of man', I do not only intend to refer to human corporal goods,
not even to the precious qualities of the human soul, created after the image and likeness of
the Creator himself; I mean to refer only to your dignity, o man, which comes from the fact
that you have become a Christian through Baptism, and have been received into the bosom
of Holy Mother Church.
Before you were regenerated through the waters of Baptism, you were slave of the devil and an enemy of God and locked out of paradise for ever. But at that the very moment when this august Sacrament opened the door of the true Church, the chains with which the enemy of your soul kept you bound, were broken. The gates of Hell were locked up for you, and Paradise was opened for you. At the same time, you have become an object of a special love of God, and the virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity were infused into you. Once you had become a Christian, you were able to raise your eyes toward Heaven and say: God is the Creator of Heaven and Earth, and He is also my Creator. He is my Father and he loves me, and He bids me call him by this name: Our Father who art in Heaven. Jesus, the Saviour,calls me Brother and as a brother I belong to him. I share his merits, passion, death, glory and his dignity.842
The one who edited the dialogue between Don Bosco and Francis Bodrato at Mornese, in October
1864, imagines that Don Bosco, already well -known as an educator, has already spelled out to the
town's teacher the youth anthropology underlying his system of education, based on religion and
reason. “Young people are rational beings created to know love and serve God and enjoy him in Paradise”. The educator should be convinced that all or almost all of these dear youngsters have a natural intelligence by which they can know the good being done to them and a sensitive heart easily open to gratitude”.843
In his 1877 work on the preventive system, Don Bosco would continue: If the educator, with the method of reason and loving kindness “succeeds in getting his pupil to reason” and in winning over his
841As we know this is the title of a masterpiece, published in 1863, by the young German theologian Matthias Joseph
Scheeben (1835-1888).
842G. Bosco, Il mese di maggio..., pp. 60-61, OE X 354-355
843A. Da Silva Ferreira, Il dialogo tra don Bosco e il maestro Francesco Bodrato – 1864, RSS 3 (1984) 385.