What there is more than ever is orphanhood. María Zambrano (Person and democracy)
There is no humanity without time, without space and without stories. The human is not an essence or an immobile, eternal and immutable substance; It is not something formed by a hard core that transcends the world and its transformations. What characterizes the human condition is neither good nor reason, but exteriority and chance. What is characteristic of the human being is to exist, to go outside of oneself, to be in situations and to establish relationships with others and with the other; To exist is to be linked, to create ties. Hence no one can exist in solitude. The bond is the condition of possibility of existence and that is the cause of uncertainty, because there are loving bonds, but also cruel ones. The other, which every human being encounters as they walk through the world, can be friendly, tender and compassionate or, on the contrary, malevolent.
Nothing in existence is, therefore, established a priori, although that does not mean that one can decide to do with one’s life whatever one wants. Existence depends on a historical trajectory, on the reception of a grammar, on the signs, on the symbols, on the gestures that have been inherited, on the library that has been read. There is no choice but to live from that grammar and from the contingencies that burst into the world. It always exists, in one way or another, at the drop of a hat. That means that in life there is no choice but to improvise, because no one is competent in the art of living. Existence does not have a protocol or an instruction manual.
No one starts empty-handed. You do not begin to write life in a blank notebook in which you can invent whatever you want, because existence does not begin with birth, on the contrary, it began before. Each newborn bursts into a world in which a story is being told, and is a guest to participate in a story that others have been telling for a long time. The human is an animal that can create its own history, provided that it takes as a point of support the encounters and disagreements with others and with the world. The story of existence, fortunately or unfortunately, is open to the unpredictability of events.
George Steiner, in his book Real Presences, addressed this question. To deprive the child of narration, Steiner wrote, “is a kind of burial in life,” “is to associate him with emptiness.” Education consists, among other things, of incorporating the child into the flow of a story. Naturally, in every narrative there are risks, because its characters can become diabolical beings and in turn transform the reader into a monstrous being. But, adds Steiner, “these risks must be taken.”
Greek epic poetry (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey) and tragic poetry (Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides), as well as biblical stories, both those found in the Old Testament and those in the New, constitute the basic library of the western Paideia. The importance of this library for the formation of the symbolic universe of the actors of the world’s great theater cannot be underestimated. Therefore, the reading of these stories, both those of the Greek world and those of the Judeo-Christian world, should become an essential element of all education in public and private schools. Today, as the German philosopher Walter Benjamin pointed out many years ago, we live in a time of decline of narration and rise of information, and something like this is very serious. It is true that we do not know where we are going, but it is necessary to remember where we come from.
It is decisive to assume, therefore, that biblical texts also shape our collective memory, our time and our space, our art and our literature. Hence the need for its study; Of course, this has nothing to do with having faith, being a believer or not, nor participating every week in the liturgy and religious rituals. It is simply a cultural and formative issue, it is about reading the classics, those “venerable texts” to say it with María Zambrano, which are essential to know what world we inhabit.
But there is more, because a venerable text is, as Italo Calvino pointed out in a well-known writing, one that never finishes saying what it wants to say. A classic work is one that always says more and in another way, it is the one that always returns, the one that constantly challenges our present. In this sense, the question is not only reduced to knowledge of the sources of our culture, but is also about elucidating how venerable texts describe structural aspects of the human condition that, as such, are repeated over time and therefore Therefore they are still valid.
Deciding which text is venerable is not a question of taste, but of time, of resistance to time, of duration. In the face of information, which once it has been written or said is no longer of interest, a venerable literary or philosophical text persists in the present. Here you have to be careful, because you cannot confuse the present with the current situation. The information refers to current events; a classic, on the other hand, lives in the present. The classics are not texts that talk about the past that is definitely past, but works that deal with the present, about what we once were, but still today continue to be, about those anthropological structures that, although they are renewed at each moment of history, They persist over time.
The canonical Gospels are four venerable narratives that have structured the Western Paideia. Scholars of the ancient world do not consider them historical accounts, although they admit that they contain historical facts. As is known, the stories of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John narrate the life, death and resurrection of a Jew from Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth. For some, that character is Christ (the Anointed One); For others, he is one of the many prophets of the time and they consider that those texts (the Gospels), which were written many years after the death of the Master, only have a religious value for those who already have faith in the new doctrine that everything was instituted with Paul of Tarsus.
However, and beyond these considerations, there is no doubt that the Gospels, as well as the rest of the New Testament stories, have represented a way of seeing the world that Western culture, explicitly or implicitly, has incorporated and which is not easy to get rid of. The way the calendar is organized, birth and marriage rituals, goodbye ceremonies, art, literature, and even the history of science, cannot be understood without a Christian cultural worldview that operates outside the religious beliefs of each.
What I propose here and now is to concentrate on reading and thinking about the Gospels not only as a reflection on the sacred or a revelation of the divine, but as a meditation on the human. Of course one does not exclude the other, but the importance of the latter is often forgotten. Let’s put it more clearly, what I intend to put on the table is a simple question with a difficult answer: what do the Gospels – and specifically the passages that refer to what we know as Holy Week – say about the human condition? What if what supposedly happened during those three days, those that go from Friday (the passion and death of Jesus) to Easter Sunday, were an expression of existence?
In this sense, it should be taken into account that, in the case at hand, the least important thing is whether the events happened as they have been told to us. The truth (or not) has nothing to do with the truth of the facts. This is another question here. What we have to ask ourselves is whether what is narrated has a symbolic or existential truth, that is, whether it expresses in some way structural aspects of our life and our way of inhabiting the world, and, if so, what are they?
For better or worse, today Holy Week is for many an opportunity to go on vacation and, therefore, it has lost much of its religious dimension. Of course, everyone has the right to live it as they wish. It would be missing more. But what should be noted is the fact that, in the biblical stories, as in every venerable text, there is an anthropology. Any reader of Homer or Sophocles knows that, as happens for example in the Iliad, the Odyssey or the Greek tragedies, a classic expresses a conception of what is human. It is, in the strict sense, a determining anthropology to understand our existence. Something like this does not mean that you have to think in accordance with it, but it does mean that you have to do it from it. What happens with the Greeks also happens (or should happen) with the biblical stories. A venerable text demands a respect that consists of not being able to do without it, even if it is to deny what it says.
The philosophical thesis that I try to present below is the following: the three central days of Holy Week (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) express three aspects of the human in relation to the divine, aspects that refer to the way that the narrative animal has. of being in the world. The Gospels, then, can be read not only as theological writings, but also as ethical ones, and, in that sense, Friday, Saturday and Sunday are three ways of being that have the existence of settling (good or bad) in everyday life.
Let’s think, first of all, about Friday. It is the day that shows humiliation, suffering, passion and death. “God is dead,” exclaims the mad man in the well-known fragment of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. “God has died and we have killed him,” those are his words. But something important must not be forgotten, the fact that the crazy man who proclaims the death of God is not happy about this event, on the contrary, he is horrified: “How could we empty the sea? Who gave us the sponge to erase the horizon? Can we live without gods, or will we have to invent new ones?
The death of God, as Nietzsche proclaims it, implies at the same time the death of the human being, at least of a certain type of human being, that is, of a man who is a servant of God, a slave of God, who is the faithful follower of his will and his designs. But the most serious and urgent thing will be to answer this question: how to continue living after that death? Or better yet: how to inhabit a world in which death has the last word? That is the most serious thing about the matter: Friday offers a look at life from death. Some philosophies have highlighted this anthropological perspective: we are beings relatively to death, because it is death, which structures the human condition. And there is no more to talk; The anticipation of death is what is characteristic of existence, what distinguishes the human from the animal and the vegetal. These do not die, in the strict sense, they simply pass away, they come to an end, but they do not die. I have to confess that, for a long time, this vision of the world seduced me.
The day radically opposite to Friday is, of course, Glory Sunday. Christians know that their religion is built around faith in the resurrection of Christ. Paul of Tarsus emphasized this with emphasis in his epistles. Without resurrection there is no Christianity, “if Christ has not been raised, our faith is in vain” (1 Cor 15:14). From a religious or theological perspective this is the great mystery. How can we imagine the resurrection today? It is not easy, because it is not a question of survival after death, much less of a separation of the immortal soul from a mortal body in the manner of the proofs of the immortality of the soul that we can read in the Platonic Phaedo. The resurrection passes through death, it assumes death, passion and pain, but what it affirms is the overcoming of death, the triumph of life. From Sunday’s perspective, death does not and cannot have the last word, neither in the case of God nor in that of men. Death is not the end, but for there to be life, there must be death.
Between Good Friday (the day of death) and Glory Sunday (the day of resurrection), Saturday occupies an intermediate place. It is still curious to see that the Gospels give us almost no information about what happened on Saturday. It is a day that remains hidden, hidden, as if it had no importance. The German theologian Johann Baptist Metz stressed the value of that day. In his writing entitled Memoria passionis, Metz maintains that Christology has highlighted the path that leads from Friday to Sunday, but, Metz says, the atmosphere of Saturday must also be narrated. What is that atmosphere? What does it mean from a philosophical and anthropological perspective? What sense does it have?
Faced with death, on the one hand, and the triumph of life, on the other, Saturday expresses the emptiness, the question that cannot be resolved, the absence. This is a fundamental structure of the human condition: we are beings in need. Saturday is the day on which man asks himself a terrible question that finds no answer: where is God? Friday’s answer to this question is “God is dead” or “God is hanging on a cross”; Sunday’s is “God is alive” or “God is risen.” But where is God on Saturday? And, at the same time, where is man in that void of God? How to inhabit a world in which the place of God is ignored?
The most radical faith is that which arises in the absence of God, and Saturday is the day that expresses that absence, that silence. Silence is an omnipresent response in the Gospels. Remember that of the Nazarene before Pilate or before Herod, as well as the way of underlining that silence offered by some of the greatest literary recreations of the figure of Jesus. Perhaps the most shocking is what we read in The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky: the legend of the Grand Inquisitor. The Sabbath refers to the question of whether one can live in that silence, in that emptiness, if one can inhabit that silence without falling into despair, if one can exist in doubt about God. Is God dead or alive? And if he is alive, where can we find him? What if in the end there was nothing? What if there was nothing but death?
We have no choice but to also live the ethical experience of Saturday because there is no existence without doubts, without uncertainties, without mysteries that cannot be resolved. It is not easy at all to live in orphanhood. To live on the Sabbath is to reside in a wait similar to that of the wanderers who await the arrival of Godot in Beckett’s tragicomedy. Saturday is the desire for the impossible, because despite everything there is no choice but to continue waiting, because waiting is the place that gives meaning to the meaninglessness of existence.
