Displaying items by tag: Faust

The big questions of our time are about the future of the man on planet Earth. That is coloured by actions of sensibility and generous solidarity, maturing people’s consciences and moving societies forward. But the same planet is also greatly harmed by an obtuse and iresponsible selfishsness: that gets sometimes devastating because of scientific and technological progress, though it was hypothesized to be able to unlock the human potential towards boundless horizons.

Moreover, if as an alternative to the Posthuman we explore the world of the Human-Plus, we realize that it indicates today the ways to the technological enhancement that appears to be a poor surrogate of the human fullness: from the research of the elixir of life to the achievements of plastic surgery and bionic prosthetics, or – even more boldly – to a cryopreservation, man by his nature doesn’t want to “disappear from the existence”– as it declares one of the candidates for hibernation – and doesn’t want to lose the heritage of the affections that he or she has experimented in a lifetime. Foscolo’s “joy” of the sepulchres (“only the one who leaves no heritage of love sees little joy in the urn”) seems to be a solace which is absolutely inadequate in front of the potential that man bears.

But to live doesn’t mean to persevere, not even to prolong into infinity the time which is, by its nature, precarious and inconsistent.

As a young man, Goethe’s Faust was convinced that there wasn’t any moment in man’s life that would have been as beautiful to want it to transform into an eternal present; but becoming an old man, blind and suffering from depression, Faust dreams about a world all in happiness thanks to human genius, an ideal world where you could say: «Linger on fair moment, you are beautiful!» without being afraid that this moment would become past. God doesn’t deny this desire, because it is Him who has set eternity (i.e. the duration of the times) in the human heart (Qo 3:11) and, therefore, the aspiration to free themselves from the sequence of time. In a Greek myth, Chronos consumes his children, but man by his nature aspires to enter in eternity, which is the dimension of present that lasts, and is immune from temporal changes: He who «has made everything beautiful in its time» and therefore in its fragility, has created man so he could participate in His own life: «this is what He promised us – eternal life» (1Jn 2:25).

This is the “transhumanise” which for Dante (Par. 1:70) constitutes the horizon of the very human nature: an overstep of human without destroying it into post-human. For «life in man is the glory of God; the life of man is the vision of God» (Irenaeus of Lyon 4,20,7). But as far as the gift of the passionate and generous friendship, all this goes far over the human ingenuity, in spite of its value for being set in time.

So, Easter leaves us in our chaotic and disorganized days, a call of our awareness of ourselves, from the very bottom layers of our perception. To not silence.