0 likes

   0 likes

Would you be interested in trading links or maybe guest writing a blog article or vice-versa?
My blog discusses a lot of the same topics as yours and I believe we could greatly benefit from each other.

If you might be interested feel free to send me an email. I look forward
to hearing from you! Wonderful blog by the way!

   0 likes

   0 likes

   1 likes

   0 likes

Catholic religion and catholicism as a doctrine and everyday practice are tightly related with guilt. Considering the symbolism which is essential to it – wood of crucifixion, martyr of its saints, its most important and peculiar [rituals] sacraments [such as baptism, confession and last rites of anointment] – it is plain, almost self-evident that the very lever of this religious feeling is blame and its atonement. Even more generally at its roots, Christendom as “Doctrine of Christ” may be redirect to guilt – either as a feeling and as a concept: the descent on earth of God in Christ for “cleansing of every sin” until the original sin of Adam, death on the cross and resurrection, extrema ratio of a total redemption path that goes from the comfort of the poor and the last – which are not to blame for being this way on earth, and if they were they would anyway be forgiven in heaven – to the compassion of rich and powerful, ’cause death strikes them down too, after all: that is why the human kind has been forgiven of its imperfections with the perfection of a god-like man who can die, the only act that is not proper of an infinite deity, and then resurrect, the only act that is not proper of a mortal and finite being.

This is dogma. Christian, Catholic, Christologic and eschatologic [1], that is “religious in western sense”. Not a single christian – surely not a catholic! – can refuse this as a matter of fact: his religion is centered on guilt. Some might say “Christ is love!” but message means “an individual who has taken upon his shoulder the weight of a whole generation, his own generation, and together with that the weight of man-kind as a whole (because an individual can act only in the span of a century) decided to sacrifice himself for others, not for a personal payback [say only moral] – like often volunteers do – but because all this is part of a [transcendental] master plan, greater than the will of individuals… dying on the cross he became the scapegoat of every sin: great and small, original (the mere fact that one is born) and every-day ones (the two thieves beside Christ are there to remind just that)”.

Well, that is “love” for sure… but if that model of love is the one all of us must conform to, the feeling of guilt that overwhelms everyone who fails (and not everyone is willing to die on a cross for the whole human-kind!) is unavoidable! Unless the tale and the mission of every Leben Jesu still infers to a mediate atonement: you don’t have to do it yourself, dear believer, because He already thought about it! Then is self-evident the meaning of the guilty feeling: the giving of oneself life is unmeasurable, and nothing can fill this gap. The Christian is lost: if the Catholic can still confess his blame to a priest, the guilty feeling remains in the soul of the non-catholic (christian protestant of any kind) since it is established from a divine master plan whose soul is saved and whose is doomed. This lack of a sin-forgiveness “mechanism” – which only the role of a confessor priest can ignite and solve – proper of the protestant non-catholic has a peer in the lack of “free will”, which is the active counterpart of guilt: after all, everything has started with the original sin, Adam “decides” that the tree of knowledge can be violated and that makes him free and guilty at the same time. Free to know the difference between good and bad (which God’s Will might have left in the background) but guilty of being free.

However, there’s something else. Let’s put it in this way, pretending this thesis is flawless: Catholicism is a religion of guilt. More and better than protestantism: his “freedom bounded by a divine masterplan” set him free from the mechanism sin-forgiveness, which the catholic has a strong need of. Something escapes from critic: Christ is not christendom. Not even his teachings and predications, according to the four canonic gospels, can be considered as a whole unity, despite the canon itself!

Lucky enough, Herr Luther set us free from this identity Christ = Scriptures: the canon which Catholic Church has thrusted. The principle of sola scriptura as the only source of authority has been used to reaffirm the primacy of catholicism over the predication of Christ’s word. Of course, the role of Church is fundamental. It is part of a dialectic in which the word of the predicator find its system: without the boundaries of the four Gospels, the Father of the Church and their thoughts, Scholastic, the form of Christ as we know it would not have the same meaning [2], and we should refuse any “enlightened dullness” that take for granted just everything it is found in the Bible! If it were possible, christians should worship Saint Jerome and he only, because he translated the Bible from greek to latin, and any other language apart from this should be considered heretic, blasphemous or simply barbarian. The extreme consequences of reflection (and predication) of Martin Luther are the greatest freedom of [biblical] hermeneutics, but also the trendy [3] interpretation according to which Christendom is a product of a mythical melting-pot, made of rituals and celebration belonging to different cultures: Zoroaster, Isis-Horus, Mitra, Dionysus-Apollo would be the ancestors of the only true God; their followers fought for the primacy during an age of spiritual decay; the preaching of Christ were not the only one, although it arose among others and rooted in the hellenic-roman philosophical ground, weakening (or enriching) the concurrent doctrines.

The debate is far from any peaceful ending: among the hardest, the defenders of Absolute Originality, back up by those humanists tutors which are strongly persuaded that the whole history, from Alexander the Great and Aristotle, to Augustus and Virgil, is nothing but a preparation of the field for the upcoming buona novella: Christ dies and borns again, the cross is the tangible symbol of the beginning of a new age; in opposition, and fiercely sustained by the most unbreakable materialists, the debunker of the Christian “truffle”: the preaching of Christ has been bent by a particular lobby of thinkers and clericals that was able to influence the choices of Kings… Step by step, the original message has been modified, for it had to match habits and beliefs of greater bands of empire’s population, so that – ”plagiarizing” here and there dogmas, beliefs, and rituals from different cults – it has been conceived a complex articulated structure from the starting point of few simple words of a jewish predicator.

The story of the life of Jesus has caught many men and women. Either was he a man who lived on earth, or a fictional character, “son of the man”, created on purpose by a group of jewish anti-romans rebels; either he was the son of God – yet a logical contradiction, since it is illogic that a perfect infinite being extends itself furthermore and inhabits temporary something finite without prejudicing his own perfection – or some of his logical emanations, a special creature of him, an evolutionary stage… Interpretations are many, maybe infinite.

[img src="http://wp.me/a1K0P4-8u"]
Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, 1601-1602.

[img src="http://wp.me/a1K0P4-8u"]
Andrej Rublev, Christ as Saviour, about 1420.

[img src="http://wp.me/a1K0P4-8u"]
Caravaggio, The Taking of Christ, 1602.

[img src="http://wp.me/a1K0P4-8u"]
Andrej Rublev, Crucifixion, about XV century.

[1] escatòn logos: discourse about afterlife. The term refers almost exclusively to those religious (rarely philosohical) doctrine which are about existence of life after death: since “western” means also “proper of something mortal” (from latin “occido”, “morire”, related to the death of Sun in the West) I believe is coherent to connect christian eschatology to the profound meaning of every religion meant in a western sense.

   0 likes

   2 likes

   2 likes