Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

Christmas is coming and the birth of Jesus is a historical fact, because there was a census ordered by the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus, and Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem because people had to be counted in their cities of birth. As for the date, there is controversy because it would have been between 4-5 BC, when Quinine was Governor of Syria as described in the Bible (Lk. 2:2), but it is certain that the census was carried out and this was precisely the reason why Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem, where Jesus would be born.

There are disputes about the dates and the accuracy of the dates (not the facts), since the calendar was changed by the Roman Empire and there would have been a three-year gap.

History is also punctuated with divine interventions, in the decadence of Rome the monasteries were born, where the culture of cooking, the first guilds and trades and also an earlier phase of printed writing took place, the final period in which the black plague occurred at the end of the 14th century, caused by the Yersinia Pestis bacillus that decimated a large part of the population at the time.

This disease, however, decimated part of the Mongol army fighting the Genoese in the city of Caffa (now Theodosia) on the Crimean Peninsula, and was the beginning of the decline of the great Mongol empire (1209-1368).

We’ve entered modernity, we’ve done some occasional reading in our posts Everyone in the same boat and If Europe wakes up by Sloterdijk, where he mentions Boccaccio’s classic work Decameron as a “small community”.

In a footnote, he quotes from Henrik Siewierki’s “A Mass for the City of Arras” (translated by Brazilian editor: Estação Liberdade in 2001), which analyzes both the psychological and political consequences of the plague. Psychologist Franz Renggli, in his book Self-Destruction by Abandonment, also developed the hypothesis that the plague had an influence on modernity, as well as the degradation of the mother-child relationship, which would have caused a kind of collective, psychosomatic immune weakness that favored the plague virus.

Someone might have thought at the time: it’s the end of times, but it was a big change and also the biblical meaning is that (when you hear about wars, revolutions): “all this must happen, but it is not yet the end” (Mt 24:6).

This whole analysis is interesting, because in the midst of the recent Pandemic (the current plague), while it was undoubtedly a scourge, it can nurture a new glade over our community (a word used by Sloterdijk), that is, the idea of mutual defense and solidarity in view of a catastrophe even greater than the one that happened.

It serves to “smooth the way”, as the Bible reading says when John, the son of Zechariah and Elizabeth, proclaimed in the desert using the words of the prophet Isaiah: “This is the voice of him who cries out in the desert: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’” (Lk 3:4) and it seems appropriate for this time of scourge and desert.

It’s important to remember that the first two weeks of Christmas commemorate not the coming of Jesus, but the new coming of the Lord.