Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

The period of Lent is the 40 days after Carnival, as it was already part of the early church, coming from the Easter of the Jews, it is before Carnival, it recalls the Jewish Easter (Pesach), which has the meaning of passage or liberation, remembering the period when they were slaves in Egypt.

Christian Easter is a renewal, it recalls the death and resurrection of Jesus. We are reading and remembering the book by Byung-Chul Han (who is not a Christian) where he talks about the ontological meaning of pain and its current erasure, clarifying: “we live in a society with increasing loneliness and isolation” (Han, 2021, p. 59).

The author quotes Viktor von Weizsäcker in his essay “The Pains”, where he characterizes pain as a “truth that has become flesh”, as a “becoming flesh of truth” (p. 61), and also “Everything that is true is painful” (idem).

Society without truths, says the author in the following passage, is “an unparalleled hell”, and “pain can only arise where true belonging is threatened. Without pain, then, we are blind, incapable of truth and knowledge” (p. 62).

So in Christianity and Judaism, the ashes and Passover as a way of of 40 days, appear to remind us of the dust we are and the path of salvation and belonging we must follow: “pain is distinction [Unterschied]. It articulates life” (pg. 63), ‘it marks boundaries’.

“Pain is reality. It has a reality effect. We first perceive reality in the resistance that hurts. The permanent anaesthesia of the palliative society derealizes [entwirklicht] the world” (p. 64) and ‘reality returns in the form of a viral counter-body’ (p. 65) wrote the author because it was the period of the pandemic.

So the ashes and the period of Lent for Christians is to renew the period of Jesus’ passion as its apex in Holy Week, where there is the apex of the pain of crucifixion and the apex of renewal that is his resurrection, Christians or not, this is the true and real logic of life.

If we don’t understand this, we become paralyzed by the pain of hatred, wars, indifference, various types of injustice, the exclusion of the Other, in short, the non-life that all this senselessness of pain causes, and so it is necessary to remember the dust of ashes, everything that passes and that only makes sense if we understand pain not as an end, but as a passage to life.

Han, B. C. (2021) Paliative Society: pain today. Transl. Lucas Machado, Brazil, Petrópolis: Ed. Vozes.