{319} (cont’d)
B) How is that action realized?
There were several possibilities, and since classical theology has never presented these problems from this point of view I have no other choice but to deal with them in greater detail. One possibility was to say that Our Lord Jesus Christ on Earth, like any other man, performed numerous actions, and one of them was to found Christianity. It would just be one more act among the many that constituted the life of Christ. This would tell us that the life of Christ had two types of acts. Some would be the acts in which he lives for himself, as I mentioned above. Others, those acts through which he makes Christians out of others, instituting others as sons of God, and Christians.
Is this what Christ did? No, Christ chose a completely different way. Just as he made Christians, and not simply instituted Christianity, the actions with which he made Christians out of others were not any different from the actions {320} of his own life. He incorporated into humanity the actions of his life, and through those very actions of his life humanity was molded. The personal actions of the life of Christ were the actions that founded Christianity. The acts of configuration of Christianity were numerically identical to those acts that constituted the life of Christ.
In the first step I have shown that the founding is a personal action of Christ. Now I must point out, in the second, that this personal action of Christ is not different from the actions that constitute his own personal life. As such what those actions impress or what they configure and mold in other men is in first place something which concerns their being, and not their substantive reality. Through Christianity Christ does not confer a stomach or psychism or a will or necessary dispositions of the will to other men, but confers upon them the configuration of a being. And confers it through an incorporation to him. Incorporation to a reality, to the reality of the incarnate Word. An incorporation in which the root or one of the fundamental dimensions of the incarnation consists, as we have explained.
In order to make this clearer we shall concentrate our attention, right away, on the two supreme actions in which the personal life of Christ culminates his death and resurrection. Of course, the things I am saying are already known. The only thing man can do is to make an effort to provide a conceptual structure to apprehend, in a more or less obscure way, what the reality of Christianity is.
1) In the first place, the death of Christ. As a personal action, what was his own death for Christ? St. Paul tells us clearly, he was hupékoos (obedient) until death {321} (Phil 2:8). As I said above, obedience is not the formal reason for religation, but the other way around, obedience presupposes a religation. For the time being we must say that subsistent religation inexorably leads, in Christ, to an act of supreme obedience. An obedience to precisely acquiesce to the will of the Father being manifested to him throughout the whole of his life.
However, this death has two different aspects. In the first place, it has the aspect of being an event of his substantive reality. Then, the death of Christ, as the death of anyone else, means a de-animation of his organism or reciprocally a de-corporation of his soul1. But this is not what constitutes the profound reality of the death of Christ. The profound reality of the death of Christ does not concern his substantive reality, but his substantive being. Concerns that being Christ attains throughout his life, which is formally and precisely theandric. This formally theandric I is not an I that might be a subject of attribution or even subject of inhesion of his acts, but is the very figure of his substantive being. And in this figure is where his death is precisely inscribed, not simply the de-animation of an organism or the de-corporation of a mind, of a soul, but the configuration of his substantive being.
Let us remember then that Christ is incorporated to humanity in a biographic way, in a historic way, and also in a religious one. Incorporated to a humanity socially concretized, but in addition to a sinful humanity. What does it mean to be incorporated to a sinful humanity? We can answer quickly; Christ loaded himself with the sins of humanity. Of course, as long as we give an {322} authentic meaning to the verb “to load”. What does it mean that Christ loaded himself with our sins? We also have to explain that. We cannot say, formally speaking that it is the case of a load in the trivial sense of the term. The truth is that the answer to the question of what the incorporation to sinful humanity meant was given by Christ when he was apprehended at Gethsemane. He said to those accompanying Judas that it was, “the hour of the power of darkness” (he hóra kai he exousía toú skótous, Lk 22:53). To incarnate into a sinful humanity means, in one form or another, to live on a land, in a society, and in a world in which “the power of darkness” exists. “The darkness” here is an expression for sin, the power of sin. What do we understand by power? St. Luke uses the term exousía, which has several meanings. On one hand it means a power (Sp. potestad), for example, a juridical power. On the other, it may be equivalent to a potency (Sp. potencia), a dýnamis. Actually, the term exousía formally means a power that has a certain amount of juridical power. It is more than juridical power, but less than the physical meaning of the term dýnamis. Certainly, this exousía, this power, is not a mere value, not at all. But also it is not a cause in the sense of the efficient causality of a dýnamis. It is precisely the dominance of the real insofar as real, precisely the power2.
Being a power that is the dominance of the real insofar as real it has to be founded in some characteristic faculties, which constitute reality in its capacity of founding a power, i.e., in their condition. Therefore, this dimension of reality in which the power of sin is founded is {323} precisely the will of men standing in malice3. Precisely because men stand in the will to malice there exists in the world what is called the power of sin. That Christ may have incarnated in a sinful humanity means, however, that he has incarnated in a world where the malice of men constitutes a power. What is that power? Clearly, men are not only individuals they live among each other. And they decant through their socializing and coexistence on the world, their thoughts (their noémata), and their decisions (their boulémata). They are constructing a world. The world is neither each one of the individuals nor the sum of all of them, not at all. The world is something that certainly does not exist outside the individuals living in the world, but is not identified with them. The world has precisely that impersonal characteristic (consequently different from each of the individuals) of being precisely a tópos. The reality of the world is essentially and constitutively topical.
Nevertheless, this topic weighs, of course, on the individuals living in it, and not only as some sort of current exigency. The world, in a certain sense (sociologists love stories like these) is that which composes the thoughts, the decisions, the norms, etc, that have currency at a certain particular moment. This is quite true, but there is something much more radical. The fact is that this world, as arché of the individuals living in it, is not only a world in which there are things that have exigencies for the individuals, but is something more. It is a world that makes individuals live, at least inchoatively, the way it is, the way the world is. In this sense, there is not only an exigency, but also a power, {324} the power of the world over the individuals living in it. The world as power is essential to our problem.
Humanity has been depositing its amartémata on this world, its sins. The power the world has in which these sins have been deposited is formally the power of sin. The incorporation of Christ to a sinful humanity consists, in the first place, in living in a world of sin. And to live in a world of sin is, in one form or another, to be under the power of sin. We need to ask, in what sense? Certainly Christ is not under the power of sin as a sinner, not at all. Also, the power of sin is not something that necessarily forces or impels making the individuals living in it formally sinful. The sin consists in living aversely, but before each will on its own performs a personal act of living aversely it is immersed in a world, which is a world in aversion to God, i.e., a world of sin, of the power of sin. The power of sin hovers over the person of Christ without reaching his ultimate radical intimacy. Hence, to live in a world where the power of sin exists without personally being a sinner in any way at all is what formally constituted the incorporation of Christ to sinful humanity.
This incorporation was precisely the death of Christ. The death of Christ that, on the one hand, was the result of sin, and on the other, left him unharmed in his very filial reality. But his body and soul were harmed. He was left unharmed in his condition as Son of God, and precisely in the oblation of his life, an oblation that has a triple characteristic. In the first place, the characteristic of obeying the will of the Father, it is an act of adoration. In the second place, of beseeching him for what he said on the cross, “forgive them because they do not {325} know what they are doing” (Lk 23:34). Finally, of expiating the sins of humanity where expiating concretely means that next to the power of sin he has introduced a new power, the power of God. For this reason the supreme act of religion in Christ was his death because it was the supreme act of religion as Son.
Then we have to ask, what was that death of Christ as founding action of Christianity for the rest of mankind? First, I will say that the power of sin has functioned in a different way for the rest of all men than the way it functioned for Christ. In Christ the power of sin had an internal limit. Christ did not become a sinner by living in a world of the power of sin; men, taken historically just as they are, definitely did. Needless to say, we live in a world in which the power of sin transfuses with intrinsic sinfulness the reality of all that live in it. Man is internally abandoned to the power of sin, but why? Is it because of malice in some cases? Is it because of a radical weakness of its make up in others? Be that as it may, it is a fact.
Each one of the sins that humanity performs in one way or another continues to increase the power of sin. Or, at least, if it does not increase it definitely consolidates it. All the sins of humanity are in this sense equivalent without exception. They constitute the many contributions to the power of sin, which hovers as an integral element of the world in which humans live. This is no metaphysical spinning. Sufficient to read chapter 6 of Genesis on the account of the deluge where we are told that, “all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth” (Gn 6:12). The sin of humanity had reached all of humanity. And then we find the phrase, which I will not address {326} now, “I am sorry that I made them” (Gn 6:7). Nevertheless, it is the explicit manifestation that the power of sin with all the sins of all men continues to expand like an asphyxiating wave throughout human history.
All sins, in this sense, are included in this power. Clearly, Christ died for all the sins of mankind not just one. It is said that there was a first sin. I already referred to original sin when dealing with creation. However, in what does the original sin consist, and its originating characteristic? Certainly it is not an inherited sin. The idea of an inherited sin is something completely alien even to St. Paul. When St. Paul describes the situation of man he begins with Christ not with Adam. This is essential, he sees Adam from Christ, he does not see Christ from Adam. He tells us that just as Christ has brought to us redemption from sin by the unique action of his life, which his death was (at least it culminated in his death), in the same way, “through one person sin entered the world” (Rom 5:12). It does not say that men inherited that sin. It is not the case of a hereditary epidemic. Original sin has its originating characteristic by being the first sin of humanity, i.e., the sin that established on Earth, on the world, the power of sin. If Adam had not sinned any other sin of those committed in humanity would be in the same condition. The original sin established the power of sin upon Earth. And the seat of this sin is precisely the world as such. The domination of the power of sin consists in the fact that all individuals born immersed in a world of sin find themselves in the moral impossibility of being subtracted from it. Original sin is a reality of the moral order; {327} it is not a kind of chromosomal ingredient we are always inheriting.
We find ourselves in the moral impossibility of subtracing ourselves from that sin. And this happens with the sin of Adam, and with the rest of the sins of humanity. There are no differences between the sin of Adam, and all the other sins of men. The sin of Adam was the first. It is the one that brought the power of sin, which in that sense facilitated the entry of all the other sins. However, essentially, all the sins of humanity are on the same plane. The whole of humanity continues sinning, most of the time increasing (at other times consolidating) the power of sin, and the power of evil. Nevertheless, this does not mean that if we find ourselves in the moral impossibility to avoid having sin, whose power is present in the world, from hovering over us we are sinners. It is not the case that we are committing sin, but that we are in a sinful condition that may lead to sin (Sp. empecatados), which is a different thing. To be in a situation leading to sin simply consists in belonging to a world where the power of sin exists confronting which, when the time comes, each one of the individuals that perform acts subject to responsibility will not be able to subtract himself from the power of sin. Before living aversely in a personal sin man lives subject to sin in a world where the power of sin resides hovering over each individual, a power by virtue of which each man lives deprived of God.
This is the reason why man, in his deepest reality (regardless of what may be thought), is intrinsically subject to the power of sin, and therefore, intrinsically and formally in need of a redemption or a salvation. Man is in need of salvation, and of redemption. Of a redemption that for him means not only the moral forgiveness of sins. {328} Clearly, this is true, but we have the right, and the obligation to ask what is true forgiveness. To forgive is not simply to forget or to think, “well, he has done it, but as if he had not done it”, absolutely not. In order for forgiveness to have a real and effective sense it must produce an internal transformation in the one that is forgiven. Probably because of this, forgiveness (in the strict sense of the term) is an exclusive attribute of the divinity. The rest of us can forgive in a very wide sense; even help the transformation of the other. Only Christ is capable of intrinsically transforming humanity, and to transform it, not in its substantive reality, but in its being. That transformation consists in the fact that the power of sin has been subjected to the power of God. That is in what redemption consists.
The power of sin is nothing but a situation leading to sin, which will produce personal sins when its time comes. The power of God also is a power radically conferred to the being of man, which will not produce its effects except when that man performs personal acts. Because of this the death of Christ (that is the first act we had to consider) for him was that numerical identity between the personal life of Christ and the transformation of man. Man has been molded as a reality in the power of God precisely and formally by the very act with which Christ gave his life on the cross numerically for each one of us. In that supreme act of religion that for him was his death Christ molds the substantive being of all other humans. And he molds it not symbolically, but really and effectively. He places really and effectively the being of man within the orbit of the power of God. And in this sense placed under the orbit of God we are liberated of the power of sin at least as a subjugating power. We always have in our own being the intrinsic possibility by our {329} incorporation to Christ of being realities that are more under the power of God than under the power of sin.
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1 On the opinion of Zubiri about death please refer to his article “El hombre y su cuerpo” (Man and his body), Asclepio, no. XXV (1973), p. 8.
2 On the power of the real in Zubiri please refer to El hombre y Dios (Man and God), op. cit., pp. 84-91; Inteligencia sentiente. Inteligencia y realidad (Sentient Intelligence. Intelligence and Reality), op.cit., 195-200.
3 On the concept of malice in Zubiri please refer to Sobre el sentimiento y la volición (On sentiment and volition), op. cit., pp. 262-277.