Abstract
[Autom. eng. transl.] According to Ricoeur, evil is not a problem that "faces" and must be solved, but rather a "challenge" that questions and involves. It is therefore not a question of finding solutions, but of trying to find answers. The rereading of some passages from the biblical book of Job allows us to enter into this dynamic and to reach a stage of thought in which, in the face of tragedy, it is still possible to philosophize, overcoming the metaphysical categories of theodicy (the "friends of Job") and arriving at a thought characterized by the decentralization of the narcissistic Cogito, by the narrative identity of a wounded self that agrees to its limit, by the role of creativity as a resource to open up new possibilities of thought. Job thus passes from a knowledge "by hearsay" to "seeing God".
It is within these perspectives that the tragic, gratuitous faith that lives on the unverifiable is placed. Metaphysical religion must give way to a faith that goes beyond the ethical / retributive vision of evil, embraces the active consent of Christ, reaches a wisdom rooted in the symbolic figure of the suffering servant who offers his life before it is taken from him.
In seeking to respond to the challenge of evil and God, the horizon opens up in broader terms and involves the statute of rationality. Since God is not just an idea, but challenges life, it is a question of putting in place a "thinking otherwise" that brings together thinking, acting and feeling, overcoming the rigidity of positivistic and formal thought, to arrive at an open rationality and integral that is not reduced to a purely theoretical-speculative level, but embraces the totality of the human in dialectical tension. Here the Kantian refusal of theodicy is combined with the opening beyond the "Euclidean thought" advanced by Dostoevsky and with the "hermeneutics of myth" of Pareyson, reader of Schelling. The scandal of evil in front of God can thus become not an invitation to think less (or to think of something else), but "a provocation to think more, even to think otherwise".
Translated title of the contribution | [Autom. eng. transl.] God and evil. With (and beyond) Ricoeur from theodicy to "integral reason" |
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Original language | Italian |
Title of host publication | Teologia dell'esperienza |
Editors | D Bertini, G Salmeri, P Trianni |
Pages | 297-323 |
Number of pages | 27 |
Publication status | Published - 2010 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Dio
- Evil
- God
- Ricoeur
- male
- teodicea