Repositório RCAAP

In the context, whether of a transcendental-semiotic model (religions as systems of signs that are created by a fundamental religious experience and that create the experiences of its members), or of the fundamental structure of the Trinitarian credo, arises the question of the reciprocal determination of the image of God and of mankind. The answer will be as follows: there is a certain anthropocentricity in Christianity to the extent that Jesus Christ is the decisive sign of the manifestation and salvation of God. But since the mystery of God and the mystery of mankind are only reciprocally accessible, what corresponds to the Trinitarian understanding of God is a complex image of mankind and vice-versa.

With the concept of agnostos theos Irenaeus of Lyons illumines the core of the gnostic conception of God. He seeks out the issues, with the fundamental conviction that God is agnostos, unknown with regard to his greatness, but not with regard to his love. Thus the Christian conviction about God knows that God becomes visible and palpable in His Son. In this article all of the texts of the Adversus Haereses related to this matter are analysed. This analysis yields a picture of the theology of Irenaeus that remains relevant to this day.

The focus of this study is to present the composition of Job 28, according to the procedures of Rhetorical Biblical Analysis as a concrete way to approach the biblical text using methodological reading and an attentive listening. Some recent attempts of classical rhetoric constitute a first step, but the results are not always very convincing, mainly in what respects the relation between the text and its interpretation. A brief looking to the results of the study of the composition of Job 28 will permit not only to emphasize the philological richness of the poem as to re-launch a greater understanding of this text (the context of) the Book of Job, and to reveal the pertinence of its thought in the singular field of Biblical Wisdom Literature, which is always woven of poetry and enigma.

Despite the differences that exist in conceptions of the exercise of power and of the narrative of successes, it is agreed that for the Egyptians, Hittites and Assyrians wars were won through divine support. The Assyrians are well known for being the first and bloodiest to practice ‘holy war’, with the gods as principal actors and beneficiaries of the wars of conquest. In innumerable passages in the so-called ‘annals’, it seems that war is this exclusive task of the gods. But the same expressions occur with the king as subject. The ‘terror of the splendour of Assur’ co-exists with the terror of the king; Assur’s arms shine in the arms of the king. With all this symbiosis of causalities and divine-human values, one must speak of a synergism between the gods and the king. The function of the annals for legitimisation and propaganda did not quash the evident intervention of human will. It is impossible to prove the existence of ‘holy war’ as distinct from ‘secular war’ and the same must be true for Israel and all of the Ancient East, if not indeed for the whole of antiquity. To distinguish between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ in the social life of those days constitutes an unsustainable anachronism.

This article is a reflection on the present-day issue of God, more precisely concerning access to God. First there is an examination of a number of reasons for a certain current agnosticism, especially in academic circles. This is followed by a discussion of the fragmentation of classical reason in a plurality of ‘reasonings’ which end up by conditioning human knowledge (horizons of comprehension) and consequently its access to the transcendent. The third part of this article argues for a greater unity between faith and reason, between theology and philosophy and seeks to recover the truth of classical negative or apophatic theology. Finally, through a Trinitarian theology of the creation and from an Augustinian perspective, the author defends an existential access to God, to which greater importance ought to be attached in theology and in pastoral work.

This study aims to further reflection on the theological and philosophical perspectives of a theme that since St. Paul has been characterised by the scientia crucis, in the context of mysticism and of St. John of the Cross. After establishing the methodological perspectives at issue, as regards the inteligibility of the spiritual experience and the indispensible mediation of Christ in a theology of perfection, which remain stimulating for the radicality of philosophical enquiry, the contributions of relational language and of its performance in terms of intelligentia fidei are considered. Then the author examines in St. John of the Cross the framework of the via mistica and of Christocentricity, comparing two almost contemporary perspectives [those of the Bergsonian philosopher Jean Baruzi in Saint Jean de la Croix et le problème de l’expérience mystique (19241;19312…) and in Jewish philosophy, the disciple of Husserl and later Carmelite, martyr and saint, Edith Stein, in Kreuzeswissenschaft (1941-42)]. This analysis parodoxically reveals that to the Carmelite spiritual figure there is a preference for an intellectual reading as knowledge of the Cross, while to the philosopher, almost agnostic in his method, what predominates is a transcendency of the mystical experience in a reading of anthropological metamorphosis. To conclude, this paradox is brought back to the indispensable incarnational dimension of Christian spirituality, further demanded by the crucial meditation of Edith Stein, not forgetting the character of apophatic mysticism and the differential prominence of an encounter with another radicality of Christian experience.

F.-X. Durrwell wrote an important work on the mystery of God the Father. In it he takes up, expands on and gives a finished form to ideas that are often present in his earlier works. It would be unthinkable to attempt to present in a few pages the wealth of ‘Durrwellian’ thinking on the subject. In this article of homage, certain key ideas from the work mentioned are examined, such as the sense of the expression “essential Father”, the manner in which the Father exercises His paternity in the world, certain reflections on the place of the Father in the Trinitarian taxis, and lastly a description of two particularly significant features in the Father’s ‘visage’ that shine in the face of the incarnate Son.

The aim of this commentary on the exhortation Sacramentum caritatis is based on the thinking of Michel Henry and Emmanuel Levinas. According to the author, in the post-synodical text there is an opening for an understanding of the Eucharist through the Other, a path that appears to be much more fertile than others that enter into this mystery. The key is to be found within the building, as François-Xavier Durrwell has noted. The “more” that is the Paschal mystery of Jesus is what explains the “less” that is the sacramental gesture of the Eucharist. This text seeks to show how this change of perspective turns out to be of great interest in order to call attention to the centrality of the Eucharist in the life of the Church.

This study provides a brief presentation of the contribution of K. Rahner to a renewed understanding of the theological notion of mystery, a category fundamental in Christianity and in theology, which is, to an extent, the science of the mystery. The fundamental essence of his contribution – inspired, on the one hand, by St. Thomas Aquinas and, on the other, by a certain tendency in contemporary philosophy, with G. Marcel as one of its most significant representatives – consists in bringing about a methodological inversion, in other words instead of considering the mystery via the limits of reason, to do so via the beatific vision and the theme of the lumen gloriae. The mystery thus comes to refer directly to God, and less to propositions that outpass the limits of reason. The plurality of the mysteries may be summarised in just three: the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation and the hypostatic union, and the elevation of creatures to communion with God in grace. All of the rest amounts to a subdivision of these three fundamental mysteries. K. Rahner’s conclusion is one of an anthropological nature, showing that mankind is essentially the being of the mystery, of the infinite spiritual transcendency, open and susceptible to the excess of sense that the mystery, like the greatness of the Son, encloses within itself.

In 2006 Richard Dawkins, the well-known British biologist published The God Delusion, with the presumed intention of proving, on a scientific basis, that (it is almost certain) that God does not exist. A number of considerations arise here: in essence, the book, as well as proving nothing of what it seeks to prove, disqualifies the author both in terms of his moral attitude and in terms of the epistemological error within which he works. What is of concern about this case is that the book is a sign of a renewed atheistic militancy and of an exacerbated presence, in the world of culture, of a real scientific fundamentalism, at the service of a culture without God.

This essay was written within a broader research project on ‘new theories of religion’. Here the aim is to identify the context and specificity of mediological enquiry in the face of religious fact, testing the instruments it uses for posing questions in one of the research universes favoured by Régis Debray: the representations of ‘the One God’ and the Scriptures as a medium of their historicisation. Following discussion of this initial issue, Debray’s mediology is confronted with the hermeneutical problems resulting from the operation of reducing ‘sense’ to ‘function’.

This article analyses certain lines of thinking of St. Augustine and Spinoza, philosophers who, though their point of departure is the same desire to reach God, diverge profoundly in their interests, the themes treated and in the objectives they set themselves in their philosophical work. They do, however, come together in the value they attach to the inquietude that inhabits every man – the unquiet heart of Augustine and the conatus of Spinoza. The anthropological thinking of each of these philosophers has as a consequence a given conception of divinity. In confronting the divergences between the personal God of Augustine and the God/Nature of Spinoza, certain problems arise as to the religiosity of the latter, as well as the pertinence of his designation as an atheist philosopher.

Four thinkers have been chosen to guide us in this study: Jacques Monod, Max Weber, Marcel Gauchet and Peter Berger. Through them and the intersection of their respective ideas, we enter a scenario that is dense, confused, multiconceptual and ambiguous, which straight away defies any attempt at descriptive rigor and unanimous reading. From the outset we see a rough track that follows an unclear and uncertain line, through which we will try to enter into the movement of ideas and of representations of the world, with the objective of describing a point of view of this movement: “the disenchantment of the world” as a referential of modernity. This is an audacious endeavour but not an arrogant one. We will try to enter into the conjunction of multiple concepts, in the hope of reaching a point of intersection that gives us access to a renewed vision. The conceptual hotchpotch – animism, desenchantment with the world, theocracy, secularisation, democracy, modernity desecularisation – makes the dynamic of the miscigenation of the elements appear in incessant combinations and recompositions; it is not concerned with the algorithm of a laboratory experiment; it is concerned with the history of our life and with the history of the ideas that make us live. Ideas and ideas which, by coming into touch with one another, forge a new earth and a new heaven in the image of the Moderns, where it is possible to live and to believe.

The relationship between Christianity and culture is an integral part of a much greater issue between religions and culture(s). At a time when various religious fundamentalisms are appearing, at a moment in which Europe is questioning its Christian roots, the present relevance of the theme seems evident. This article seeks firstly to verify the kinds of relationship that have existed between Christianity and culture in the course of history; following this, certain conditions for a positive relationship between the two are put forward; finally, there is a statement of the presence of Christianity within culture, particularly in a West that has already undergone a profound process of secularisation and rationality.

Silence at the same time contemplative and affective cultivated in Western monastic circles seems to have been born among the Cluniacs (specifically with Abbot Odo, 927-942), and to have followed a tradition that was transmitted through William of St. Thierry and of Aelred of Rievaulx (both connected with Cistercian spirituality), through the second or third generation of Carthusians, and finally through Meister Eckhart and his disciple Johann Tauler. In the origins of Eastern and Western monasticism it was particularly its ascetic form that was highly regarded. The mystical tradition derived from apophatic theology inspired in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite led to a great many mystical works, particularly from the authors of St. Victor of Paris and their successors, but it was considered too speculative by more accessible monastic authors such as that of The Cloud of Unknowing and Tauler himself.

This article discusses reactions from primarily German New Testament scholars to Pope Benedict XVI’s book “Jesus of Nazareth,” focusing less on controversial exegetical details but more so on the ‘great questions’ which too often lurk unaddressed in the background. It defends the Pope’s book as an important, necessary attempt to reconcile faith and history under the proposition of the biblical God actually acting in history. The reality of Jesus of Nazareth as God’s incarnate son is therefore missed and misrepresented not only theologically, but also historically if he is understood solely within the parameters allowed by ‘secular positivism’. Against Benedict’s project, the majority of reviews of “Jesus of Nazareth” by New Testament scholars defend an approach to the historical Jesus based on a secular methodology as the only one that is academically viable. The transempirical realities in the life of the earthly Jesus are therein not denied but relegated to the realm of personal beliefs.

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A translation of the Hebrew expression in 1 K 19,12, “still small voice of calm” (qôl demãmãh daqqãh), and the application to the text of 1 K 19,11-13 of the rhetorical formula “three things I say, four I declare” (cf. Pr 30,15ss.; Am 1-2) enable us to gather the inner and spiritual dimension of Elijah’s experience on Mount Horeb, through a rereading from a symbolic point of view of the “theophanic” atmospheric phenomena: wind, earthquake and fire. This spiritual interpretation, which we can find in hesicast monastical contexts, reveals silence as the voice through which God makes himself present to the prophet by speaking to the depths of his body. Thus emerges the spiritual value that the body has in the Bible and the certainty that listening to God is not done without listening through the body, the true place of the Spirit.

“The ways of getting around things are infinite”, said Pascal. Thus are the forms of silence that appear to us as faces to decipher within enunciative practices so varied as prayer, meditation, literature and music. This text examines the form that silence takes in literature (M.G. Llansol, E. de Andrade, E. de Jesus, Celan) and in the biblical text Mark 14,3, parting from a semiotic viewpoint.

The question concerning the decline of language and the silence of God cannot avoid the complex issues in contemporary philosophy concerning the possibility that language offers to speak of the divine. Analytical philosophers, reflecting the Linguistic Turn of thought in the 20th Century, have delved into the problematic. But it is hermeneutical philosophy and its concern to overcome the forgetting of the ontological that the problem of the decline of language is directly conjugated with the poetics reflecting the emergence of beings and its potential religious meaning. However, the greatest obstacle in breaking through to a fuller sense of the divine resides in the nominalism that implicitly dominates modern and contemporary philosophy. Relearning to think analogically will imply the discerning of the more original theological expression of Being and the rehabilitation of a realist metaphysics based on participation and the contiguous relation between the real and the Logos.