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Arquivo para May 25th, 2021

Trinitarian thinking in non-Christian authors

25 May

Understanding the mystery of being three people, but one God, it is clear that it penetrates into the Christian mystique in its depth, however if we imagine that there may be the key of the human relationship where two people put themselves in a symmetrical relationship, that is, of mutual respect and love, one is inseparable from the other, it can be understood that it is possible for a non-Christian author to understand the issue.

We will go through three authors, Giorgio Agamben, Peter Sloterdijk (together with his disciple Byung Chul Han) both non-Christians and how could not help being a Christian, Piero Coda, who introduces us in a new way in this mystery, typical of a charism of the 20th century, which proposes the unity of the human family, what seems difficult and in a certain way tragic (the author himself affirms it), is in fact a new theological opening.

To understand Agamben, it is necessary to understand that part of a very interesting hypothesis, but in our view not enough, that the history of Western culture results from a paradigm resulting from Christian theology, which sees the continuous history of separations and crossings between these two paradigms: the political and economic, forming a bipolar system.

This is described in two of his works: “State of exception” (2003), which in fact always surrounds the West between auctoritas and potestas and, in the work O Reino e a Glória (2011), which can take the formula: Kingdom, Glory and Oikonomia.

Because Agamben’s work is indeed valid, because Oikonomia, which has its origin in classical antiquity, which means organization of the house can and would even be interesting if it were in fact the “organization” of household goods, but the Greek origin itself means no longer Christian.

Where they are confused, in Greek, oikos (house) and nomos (law, rule, norm), were used by Xenophon and Aristotle (in ancient polytheistic Greece) this term designated “the sets of precepts that govern, or should govern, the activity of the ‘lord of the house’ in obtaining the necessary resources for the life of the family ”, and in Christian theology all being brothers, we are in the same “house”, but there, because the argument that Agamben will use of monotheism does not it is valid for the Greeks.

Although Agamben understands that in the book L of Aristotle’s Metaphysics there is already a marked distinction between Kingdom and government, the same book that another critic of monotheism Erick Peterson wrote against political theology.

There God appears as the immobile engine of all things that would ultimately mean a Christian “category”, which in fact could be for some authors, but it is certainly not the Christian God. However, this is not the Christian God, there is no real Trinitarian interpretation in Agamben, but an adaptation of the Aristotelian, dualistic view, being is and non-being is not, for the view of the Trinitarian.

Agamben’s great contribution is in his great work: Homo sacer: sovereign power and naked life, where he addresses the concept of naked life, like that which is found in a gray area of political life, between zoé and bios, the Aristotle’s concept of man as a political animal explained, deepened and updated. 

AGAMBEN, Giorgio, (2007) Homo sacer. O poder soberano e a vida nua I. Trad.: Henrique Burigo. Brazil, Belo Horizonte: UFMG.