Abbiamo visto che probabilmente esiste un Dio, che probabilmente coincide con il Dio cristiano e che, anche se parliamo di un Dio d’amore, la presenza del male sulla terra è giustificato. Ora vediamo meglio come ci aspettiamo che agisca un Dio del genere.
Una persona buona condivide il dolore di chi ama. Un Dio buono farebbe lo stesso. E’ quanto afferma Richard Swinburne in “God shared our human nature”. Mi sembra ragionevole.
… How will a loving God respond to the suffering and wrongdoing of these feeble but partly rational creatures whom he has made? I will argue in this chapter that a priori we would expect God to respond to our suffering and wrongdoing by himself living a human life. God would live a human life…
L’uomo purtroppo soffre, ma è un bene che soffra: la sua libertà vale più del suo dolore.
Noi, creature di Dio, siamo un po’ come i suoi figli (tanto è vero che lo chiamiamo Padre). Ebbene, un padre a volte è tenuto a tollerare la sofferenza del figlio per giusti motivi…
… We ordinary humans sometimes rightly subject our own children to suffering for the sake of some greater good (to themselves or others); for instance (to use my earlier example) make them attend a ‘difficult’ neighbourhood school for the sake of good community relations…
Detto questo, è inevitabile che chi ama l’uomo condivida il suo dolore standogli accanto e aiutandolo finché ritiene giusto farlo.
L’ incarnazione divina rappresenta la condivisione divina del dolore umano.
La morte del Dio incarnato per i nostri peccati, poi, rappresenta l’aiuto dato all’uomo nelle giuste forme.
Ma come puo’ Dio diventare uomo visto che la sua natura non gli consente di smettere di essere Dio? Il concetto di consustanzialità entra in campo a questo punto…
… Being essentially divine, he could not cease to be divine. So a divine person could only become human by acquiring a human way of thinking and acting and a human body in addition to his divine way of thinking and acting…
Il concetto di uomo/dio ci appare contraddittorio. Dio e gli uomini hanno un modo di pensare e di vedere le cose radicalmente diverso: il pensiero umano è condizionato dall’avere un corpo…
… In contrast to animals, humans are capable of logical thought, among their beliefs are moral beliefs (beliefs about which actions are good or bad, obligatory or wrong), and they have free will. But clearly normal humans have these qualities in only a limited degree… Humans have a body when they acquire their beliefs through their bodies (from what they perceive and from what others tell them), and seek to realize their purposes through their bodies…
In realtà la nostra esperienza terrena ci consente di intuire questa strana realtà: almeno dai tempi di Freud noi sappiamo che due menti possono convivere nella stessa persona…
… So how could a divine person acquire this human way of thinking with its accompanying body in addition to but separate from his own essential divine way of thinking? It was Freud, the modern founder of psychoanalysis, who helped us to see how a person can have two systems of belief to some extent independent of each other… Freud described people who sometimes, when performing some actions, act only on one system of beliefs and are not guided by beliefs of the other system; and conversely. Although all the beliefs of such a person are accessible to him, he refuses to admit to his consciousness the beliefs of the one system when he is acting in the light of the other system of beliefs… mother may refuse to acknowledge to herself a belief that her son is dead or to allow some of her actions to be guided by it. When asked if she believes that he is dead, she says ‘No’, and this is an honest reply… The Freudian account of the divided mind was derived from analysis of cases of human self-deception, where a person does not consciously acknowledge either the beliefs of one belief system or the belief that he has kept its beliefs separated from his other system, and where the self-deception is a pathetic state from which that person needs to be rescued… Freudian account of such cases helps us to see the possibility of a person intentionally keeping a lesser belief system separate from her main belief system… a divine person could not give up his knowledge and so his beliefs… but in becoming incarnate he could allow himself to have a separate system of semi-beliefs…
La Franzoni sa di aver ucciso suo figlio ma lo nega in buona fede. Come è possibile? Semplice, due menti convivono nella stessa persona.
Questo genere di autoinganni rasenta la patologia ma noi dobbiamo limitarci ad accogliere una possibilità comprensibile anche all’intelletto umano: non dobbiamo necessariamente rinunciare ad un sistema di credenze per abbracciarne un altro, due sistemi di credenze tra loro diversi possono convivere nella stessa mente.
… We thus get a picture of a divine consciousness and a human consciousness of God Incarnate, the divine consciousness including the human consciousness, but the human consciousness not including the divine consciousness… In becoming incarnate, God would not have limited his powers, but he would have taken on an additional limited way of operating…
In noi stessi possono condividere più persone: in me c’è quella che vorrebbe mangiare il cioccolatino che sta qui davanti e quella che – per motivi dieteteici - consiglia di evitare per motivi dietetici.
Ora è più chiaro quanto sia inconsistente l’accusa fatta al Padre di sacrificare il Figlio: sarebbe come rimproverare all’ io-prudente (che consiglia di limitare il consumo di cioccolato) di essere vessatorio nei confronti dell’ io-desiderante (che vorrebbe papparselo). Si tratta della stessa persona!
Il Dio incarnato sarà sottoposto a desideri e sofferenze tipicamente umane: freddo, fame, angoscia.
Questo significa che il Dio incarnato potrà fare anche il male?…
… Wrong is of two kinds: objective and subjective… Subjective wrong, the more serious kind of wrong, is doing (or trying to do) an action which you believe involves failing in your obligations to someone, for example, taking money which you believe to belong to someone else; and for that you are blameworthy or culpable… Now it would, I suggest, have been wrong of a divine person to allow himself to become incarnate in such a way as to open the possibility of his doing objective or subjective wrong… That is why it is wrong to drive a car when you have drunk too much alcohol… It follows from God’s essential perfect freedom and omniscience that he would not put himself in a position where he could have chosen to do wrong…
Ma il Dio incarnato è (anche) un uomo perfetto, per cui non sbaglia nei suoi giudizi: perché mai dovrebbe commettere un male soggettivo? No, il suo comportamento è esemplare e l’imitazione di Cristo è una strada sicura per la perfezione.
Detto questo, il Dio incarnato è affetto dai limiti della sua condizione per cui una decisione difficile, per quanto alla fine necessariamente corretta, sarà pur sempre fonte di angoscia e tribolazioni.
… Even though God Incarnate could not do wrong, he may, however, through not allowing himself to be aware of his divine beliefs, have been inclined to believe that he might succumb to temptation to do wrong and thus, in the situation of temptation, he could have felt as we do… It might be that in his human thinking God Incarnate was not always conscious of his own divinity…
Riassuntino:
… In summary, then, in becoming incarnate a divine person must remain omniscient, but he could allow his human actions to be guided only by his humanly acquired inclinations to belief. He must remain omnipotent, but there is a limit to what he could do in a human way and, when he acts in a human way, he need not always be fully aware of having more power than that. Being divine, he must remain perfectly free, but he could, in perfect freedom and because of the perfect goodness of doing so, allow himself to make a choice under the influence of a desire to do a lesser good. God Incarnate could not do wrong. He could, nevertheless, feel as we do when we are tempted to do wrong…
Fin qui il ragionamento a tavolino su come ci attendiamo che Dio reagisca di fronte alla “caduta” dell’uomo. Ora veniamo alla dottrina cristiana dell’incarnazione…
… The Nicene Creed affirms that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, ‘came down from the heavens, and was incarnate…. and became human’… ‘came down’ must be read metaphorically as ‘acquired a lower status’… It taught that God the Son continued throughout his earthly life and thereafter to have a divine nature… He was (after his conception) a single individual (hypostasis) with two distinct natures. This ‘Chalcedonian definition’, as it is called, was accepted…
Ci sono dunque le due nature in un unico individuo. Non che la cosa sia stata esente da disaccordi…
… The form of words, ‘two physes’, ‘one hypostasis’, which the Council adopted was, however, rejected by two groups: the monophysites and the ‘Nestorians’. The monophysites (today’s Copts and some other quite large Middle Eastern groups) held that Jesus had only one physis, while the ‘Nestorians’ (today’s Church of the East, a small Middle Eastern group) held that in Jesus there were two hypostases… at any rate today, there is no substantial disagreement…
Ma perché acquisire un corpo? Per Platone l’essenza dell’uomo è la sua anima, non il suo corpo. Diciamo allora che con il cristianesimo uscito da Calcedonia vince Aristotele…
… the Chalcedonian definition claims, God the Son also acquired at his conception in the womb of Mary a human nature. This nature is therefore a contingent nature; Jesus did not need to have it in order to exist… The Council of Chalcedon spelled out having a human nature as having ‘a rational soul and a body’… For Plato the soul is the essential part of a person… a part which can be separated from the person’s body… For Aristotle a soul is not a part of a person; but is a way of thinking and acting possessed by a person… The Council bishops must be understood to be using the term ‘soul’ in Aristotle’s sense, for God the Son could not acquire a new soul of Plato’s kind since a soul of that kind is what makes the individual who has it the person he is, and the Son was already constituted as the person he is by his divine properties. Rather, the Council must be understood as saying that God the Son acquired a new way of thinking and acting…
Gesù è uno di noi, tranne che per il fatto che non puo’ sbagliare: è infallibile! La sua vita è perfetta. Fu perseguitato, crocifisso e sepolto: tutto questo ha comportato una grande sofferenza per lui.
Gesù nacque da Maria. Perché non ebbe due genitori come tutti noi?
… he presumably had a full set of chromosomes… But it would not have taken a very large miracle for God to turn some of the material of Mary’s egg into a second half-set…
Avere come madre Maria e come padre Dio (e non Giuseppe) è un simbolo potente che rinvia alla natura dell’uomo/Dio…
… partly by the normal process by which all humans come into existence, and partly as a result of a quite abnormal process. It would thus be a historical event symbolizing the doctrine of the Incarnation…
Anche per questo, forse, Dio è di solito immaginato come maschio.
Gesù non muore ma ascende al cielo. Perché? Anche qui c’è un simbolo potente: come era disceso acquisendo anche una natura umana, così ascende tornando alla sua natura divina.
Gesù ascende al cielo collocandosi alla destra del padre. Anche qui l’espressione presa alla lettera non ha senso poiché Dio non ha una dimensione spaziale, va intesa piuttosto nel senso che Gesù si colloca sul versante della giustizia e della salvezza.
