{77} (cont’d)

II. Promotion of man

If this is the real and objective (sit venia verbo) position of Christ with respect to humanity, one may then ask, precisely {78} the opposite: What does man have to do with respect to this reality? And, How does this reality intervene in the constitution of his own substantive being? That is the question; everything else would be nothing but a very interesting speculation.


A) Promotion of human life. Will repeat once more that man is an open essence. And this open essence, velis nolis, has as its primary function to constitute its own substantive being, which acquires an absolute characteristic because, as I will soon point out, none of the features, which man is adding to his own substantive being is ever lost at all. Because of it this substantive being has a really absolute characteristic.

Therefore, if Christ has any function to fulfill in human life is precisely in the measure in which man will constitute and configure his own substantive being. The appeal to the power of the real, and to the God that fundaments it has three dimensions. On the one hand, reality is that which is ultimate, upon which man supports himself. Reality is, in second place, possibilitating: it is the roster of possibilities that can be held in his substantive being. Reality is, finally, impelling: that which in one form or another pushes him along in order to live. Consequently, the access of man to God through Christ reassumes essentially and unitarily these three dimensions. It is necessary to affirm this most emphatically.

1) In the first place, as ultimate reality. Christ, a few hours before His crucifixion, after the Last Supper, gives thanks to His Father for having given him his apostles, and for not having lost any of those given him, except the son of perdition (cf. Jn 17:12). And He adds: “so that he may give eternal life to all” (xoén aiónion, Jn 17:2). “Now this is eternal life, that they should know you... and the one whom you {79} sent, Jesus Christ” (Jn 17:3). In other words, He presents himself precisely as that ultimateness, which must be the reference, and the support of the absolute being of man. We should notice a term here, which deserves to be interpreted correctly. The verb “to know”. What kind of knowledge? Knowledge in the Greek sense? Not at all. In knowing there are other essential dimensions. Let us recall that the one who wrote those lines was a Semite, and there he used the verb yada’, which means to know. But to know (Sp. conocer) in the sense the term has, even in Spanish, when it is said “I have met (Sp. conocido) sickness” or “I have not encountered (Sp. no he conocido) that”. It is not the case of having a theoretical knowledge, but of having a realization because of intimacy, a possession through intimacy of that which is the terminus of the knowledge. And it is the case of knowing (gignóskein) God in that sense, and not in the sense of a theologian, fortunately. “And the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ”, in other words, here Christ is presented precisely as the only way to acquire that type of knowledge, which consists in the possession of the very reality of God.

2) In the second place, Christ presents himself to us as the possibilitating reality. I will explain in what sense. Christ himself tells us in a certain way, on a previous passage under the same circumstances: “I am the vine, you are the branches” (Jn 15:5). It is the favorite example of St. John. The branches form the mystical body of Christ. And He says “because without me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5). This is precisely where the problem of possibilitation surfaces. Not only the problem of eternal life, which is the ultimate reality Christ brings to us, but the possibilitation of that access to eternal life through Him.

3) And, in third place, the impelling dimension. St. John constantly repeats, in the Gospel, and in his Epistles, his {80} famous phrase: “I give you a commandment” (cf. Jn 15:17; 1 Jn 2:8; 3:23; 2 Jn 1:6). It is precisely a command (entolé). This is not simply to assign a terminus, such as the eternal life, and a possibility. It is precisely to impel and to push. Certainly, to command does not mean to push blindly, and much less to impel stubbornly. The command is not a duty, and is not there to exert a force. But it is this primary impulse in which a love, which has not been merited, is received by the one who is the terminus of such love: “God is love” (Jn 4:8).

Precisely to have confused both dimensions of the problem, and to have believed that what the command presupposes is a decision automatically sufficient from the side of man, of attacking it or refusing it, is what centuries later constituted the great and profound error of Pelagius, i.e., to believe that the initiative, at least in its ultimate and original moment (as semi-Pelagianism said), or the supreme and primary condition of any access by man to God through Christ, is a natural decision by man. This is completely erroneous. No man will ever be found, and cannot be found in history, reduced to his natural condition. Every man is, knowingly or not, willing it or not willing it, moved by the internal love, which constitutes the metaphysical reality of God.

St. John was emphatically saying to us that God is love (agápe). And that is why the command, i.e., the impulse God gives for life is precisely the command and the impulse of love. Love, in this sense, is not a mere sentiment, but a real and effective donation, in a certain way physical, just as the donation of Christ to men is physical particularly on the cross. But it is a donation not only to others, but towards himself. Towards himself, because man is a reality that has to configure his own substantive being, and the substantive being cannot be configured (or at least it is not sufficient for configuration) with just {81} the occurrence of the real actions, which man is performing in his life. Man has (regardless of whether he wants it or not, and even if he is totally unconcerned with it) the imperative of moral effort. Man has to make himself with a certain effort. And precisely that effort is inscribed in that supreme instance, which happens to be the love with which God impels man through Christ.

Impels him, in the first place, with respect to others. Love is just that, an agápe of love for our neighbor. St. John repeats this constantly. Once more I will say that this is not a sentiment of compassion, but is precisely the effusion of our being, which consists in giving oneself. And the authentic and real giving of oneself consists above all in giving to God in Christ through oneself. All the rest is mere sentimentalism, which serves no purpose at all. At best, to be able to shore oneself up, in case someone wishes to do this for sentimental reasons. However, what is essential and formal consists in the act of giving oneself in God. St. Paul puts it graphically in the first Epistle to the Corinthians: “And if I should distribute all my goods, and deliver my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing” (1 Cor 13:3). They are different things. And the same should be said about the effort towards moral perfection.

Of course, one might say that all this is somewhat abstract. After all, man has to live his own life, and do whatever life demands of him. But then, At what moment does Christ intervene? The question surfaces easily. A question, with respect to Christ, similar to what Laplace said to Napoleon referring to God: “I have never felt the need to build a hypothesis of this type to explain celestial mechanics”. Yes, it is obvious. To ask a person why do bodies fall, and receive an answer because God commands it, is not that it is not true, but that it is not a theory of {82} gravitation. On the other hand, conversely, a theory of gravitation demands that in some way there be a volition by God with respect to the very structure of gravitation. Then, one asks: Where is the real and effective place for this access to God through Christ as impelling, possibilitating, and ultimate?

One would not appeal to Christ if life were only constituted by the things man performs. In life there is another subtle ingredient, which however forms part of its content, as subtle as it may be, but happens to be precisely the sense, which life has. This is something essential. Things are not done the same way under one sense of life or another. I prescind from the case in which one would or would not do certain things in virtue of the sense life has. Be that as it may, the sense life has is the radical perimeter, which profiles the figure of my own substantive being, of my absolute being. And this sense is precisely what Christ provides. Christ provides it because life as a complete set of actions does not rest upon itself. The only thing that can rest upon itself, in the sense that it does not need any ulterior appeal but existence, is precisely the substantive being itself.

Due to this fact, because life does not rest on itself, the appeal to Christ as sense of life is not, as it has been said numerous times, the opiate of the people. Even communists already say it is not true, so, I shall not insist upon this. It is not the opiate of the people, because it is not only the case that we may do or not do certain things. Unfortunately, there have been numerous appeals made to Christ to cover up human conveniences. There is no doubt about it. But, conversely, an appeal has been made often to the state of indigence to invoke certain things, which are {83} far from the spirit of poverty. When the Gospel talks about the “poor in spirit” (Mt 5:3), it is not referring only to the wealthy, it refers also to the poor. One can be poor and miserable, and have no spirit of poverty, which is an extra reason for not remaining in misery. And to lift him out of it.

In the end we are all travelers. Travelers on the way to a permanent configuration of our own substantive being. Because of this, the intervention of Christ in each life is nothing but the incorporation to Him, which becomes better each time by virtue of the internal effort, riding precisely upon a sense of life, which can only be provided by Him¹. To live precisely the way He lived, to give himself to others and to give himself to history. It is not the case that Christ does not make life incompatible, but that He positively demands a greater activation of life. The contrary would be a false interpretation, a static interpretation of Christianity.

However, I shall repeat that life is not just a thing man is doing and passes away. What is radical and fundamental in life remains in the form of a feature man is acquiring in his substantive being. It remains there. And precisely because it remains, what we call the end of life in Christianity is not that life ends; what ends is precisely the configuration of the substantive being. Death does not formally consist in his organic life escaping from the hold of man. This would also have happened to man even without an original sin; there would have been organic death, but not as a punishment. Yet, there is something that would have existed exactly the same way under original sin, precisely the fact that life remains. One remains fixed in the figure of the {84} substantive being, which has been acquired. And this fixation is what constitutes death. Organic death removes the capacity for any further elaboration of the substantive being. Consequently, it leaves that being fixed as it is. Death, strictly speaking, is not a transition to another way of being, but is primarily and radically the fixation in the being one is, insofar as substantive being. Of course, it remains fixed in a problematic manner. Actually, man can be turned towards divinity conversively or aversively. But to die means to remain fixed in the conversive or aversive figure, which man has acquired in the course of his existence.


B) Promotion of history. Nevertheless, Christ is not only a promotion of the life of the individual. He is also a promotion of the structure of history. Christ has an essential function in the historical development of humanity.

One tends to glance upon history in the great libraries, and in the great museums, and believe or gather the impression that history is a kind of museum of historical forms. Particularly at the beginning of the XX century a lot was written about how the Oriental, the Egyptian, the Greek, etc., viewed life. But history is not a museum of human forms. History is something more. Also, it is not a kind of gigantic man who continues to grow throughout time, as Dilthey maintained. That is not the case. It is not a museum, and it is not a growing; it is something else. It is the system of possibilities of being man, which is being illuminated throughout time, in the interaction of man with things.

Therefore, Christ demands the formation of this historical system of possibilities, but in addition demands it historically. For that reason Christ does not replace history. It goes without saying. But Christ is the possibilitation of the access to God in every historical situation, {85} and in any historical form. This access to God is not something added, but a constitutive formality of man. Consequently, that this access is made possible by Christ indicates that Christ does not belong to history extrinsically, but rather in a formal and constitutive way. Christianity does not have as a mission (regardless of what may be said) to create new forms of culture and civilization. That is absurd. All of them are perishable and just as perishable as the man who has engendered them. The mission of Christianity is something else, namely, to bring all civilizations to God, something quite different.

One might think right away that history has not begun with Christ. After all, the event of Christ happened twenty centuries ago, and history began about two million years ago. Yes, but let us not forget what we mean by that small word “history”. History, as I was saying, is the system of possibilities of being man, which humanity is weaving, all men together, all along their lives, and throughout historical time. Therefore, that Christ may have appeared at a particular moment of history, relatively recent, only means that it was just kairós, the right time (we cannot be the judge of this), for the appearance of Christ. The dynamism of all the other historical situations has been a converging dynamism towards this possibility, and to take its start from it. For example, if we consider in a merely historical manner the history of Israel and Christianity taken as a whole, there is no doubt that even with all the criticisms that could and should be made, and with all the accurate precisions one must make when discovering in the religion of Israel or in Christianity itself aberrant situations (not everything that has happened in history is laudable), however, that history from Abraham to our present days represents a phenomenon of historical transcendence, historically undeniable. There is an overall progress.

{86} But this history, even though woven and intermixed this way, critically centered on Christ and moved towards Him, is still not quite absolute. One always has the impression that men die, but history continues. History will finish some day. History does not stand on itself. The life of man ends with death, and history will end some day in whatever form it may take. It is a reality sub judice. And here again eschatology makes an appearance. Eschatology is not a kind of reward or punishment, in the arbitrary sense of the term, which comes after the life of the individual or the life of history. It is the result in perpetuity, and for all eternity of what man and history have decided, and have wished to be in the course of their existence. Not even heaven represents anything but the grace in act, which man has had upon earth. Likewise, hell represents nothing but the fixation on that which man has really wished to fix his will in his aversion to God. Eschatology, therefore, does not represent a system of rewards and punishments. It simply represents the supreme respect, which God grants to what He has wished to create when He has created man, precisely his liberty. God has judged that there is no greater good possible in creation than liberty. And that it is preferable that one may condemn himself freely, than not allowing it by destroying his freedom.

In the reasoned option for Christ, which Christianity makes, man encounters the reality of God this way, in a form just as accessible through individual or historical life. Obviously, one may ask more concretely, What is this God? What is this incorporation to Christ? What is this internal movement of history? In order to answer these questions I will have to avail myself of the revealed text, and in addition conceptualize it theologically.

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¹ Zubiri writes on the margin: “metánoia”.