{35} (cont’d)
III. The theological logos
What is the theological logos? Let us proceed step by step.
A) Divine revelation, I was saying, is inscribed in the co-living of Christ with men; it has, then, a fundamentally human structure. In addition, man is, above all, a personal reality because he is an intellective reality. Because of this, his acts constitute a series of occurrences in time whose ultimate characteristic consists in the fact that, in them, the person possesses itself in the figure of what we call “I”. Therefore, all acts constitutively make “sense”, the sense of being configurators of the “I”. Finally, every person co-lives with the rest, and therefore, the course of its life is constitutively a process towards the others: due to this, co-living is not the principle, but the consequence of the very condition of the human person, of what I have called historicity. Thus, the acts of each person have, in a strict and radical unity, an intellective, vital, and historical characteristic: they are the three characteristics of human reality. And with that, I refer not only to acts insofar as I have performed them, but also to the terminus expressed in them.
It follows that every apprehension of a life from another is inexorably a conceptive, historical, and hermeneutical apprehension, i.e., the human logos, which proposes to understand another, unitarily has these three characteristics, precisely and formally, for being the logos of a human personal life. Because the life of the other is not apprehended as a mere “object”, but as something “co-lived” with the one who apprehends. If this were not so, {36} knowledge of the other would be nothing but mere information or a science extrinsic to the known. The logos of the one who apprehends is only possible through “co-living”. And this “co-” is then what imprints the apprehending logos with the unitary intellective, vital, and historical characteristic of the apprehended logos.
B) It then follows that revelation, as a co-living of Christ with others, possesses in itself those three characteristics, and its apprehension by these “others” is a conceptive, hermeneutic, and historical logos. This logos possesses these three characteristics not because it reveals or can be apprehended, but because it is human. The logos that reveals rests on the personal human logos, and occurs in it.
C) Conversely, the personal human logos is the dimension through which man insofar as human is, from himself and as a human, turned towards the theós. This is what in a topical sense I have called the theological dimension of man1. Something anterior to any revealing and theological logos.
In order to demonstrate that this is no mere subtlety it will be sufficient to remember just one example. When he asks if the existence of God is a truth known by itself by the mere fact of being human, with no need for demonstration, St. Thomas, even conceding that in a vague and general way we all have some form of understanding of what we call God, however, he denies that this understanding is a knowledge of God, similar to the case of knowing that someone is coming, which is not a knowledge of Peter, even though Peter is the one coming. Therefore, for St. Thomas, as well as for those of his own time, it was only a question of knowing who is coming, because it was obvious to them that “someone was coming”. But for {37} modern man the radical question is precisely if someone is coming, i.e., if in the mere fact of being a man (I might say) there is some dimension in which it is apprehended that someone is coming. This is precisely a pre-scientific problem and concerns the theological dimension of man.
The theological dimension of man is not proper to this or that aspect of man or his life, but concerns the totality of his very being. Because of this, it affects human life in its formal plenitude, and not in its fissures or cracks.
D) By virtue of this, what revelation confers to man in his theological dimension is the manifestation of the theological conformation of his entire being. That is what, to my way of thinking, must be understood by the Pauline expression mórphosis, which better than deification I will call deiformity (Sp. deiformidad), because, as we shall see, only the just is deified, but every man, even the condemned one is deiformed. This noted, let us remember the phrase of St. Irenæus: “we must ceaselessly work on our deification”2. It is in this unity of the being of man insofar as man, and the deiformation conferred to every one by Christ, where the unity of the theological dimension of man consists, and therefore, it is the precise point where the dialog with modern man must be attempted. However, there is another point we must clarify.
E) This theological dimension is not an elimination of the logos that reveals or of the theologic logos. The first is obvious, because what occurs in that dimension is the possibility of the revelation of Christ. This revelation adopted the characteristics mentioned above neither arbitrarily nor by a concession to accommodate men, but by the formal type of His revelation {38} as the co-living of Christ with men. The revelation is, in this respect, what Christ gives men as a reason for their being: the deiformity. That is why St. Peter exhorts everyone to “always be ready to give reason (the text says logos) for the hope in you” (1 Pt 3:15), where “hope” has the sense of “that which is awaited”, i.e., the content of the Christian religion. Therefore, it is clear that the mórphosis of St. Paul acquires the characteristic of a theologic logos. This logos, actually, does not refer to deiformity as an “object”, because of the fact that the ostensive effort and the demonstrative display, i.e., the theologic logos, by being an intellection of what man “is” in his theological dimension, manifests eo ipso that it is nothing but the intellectual reactivation of the deiformity of the human being. It is not a logos “about the” object called God and logos that reveals, but is actually the intellective mobilization of the very mórphosis, it is the logos, not of something we have, but of something we are, of our own theological dimension. Consequently, the theological dimension insofar as religious fundament of the theologic logos is what I call theological reason or, if you will, theological logos. And because it is the logos of something we are, the theologic logos founded thus on theological reason is not only not useless, but necessary, and in addition, at one and the same time, is necessarily hermeneutical, historical, and conceptive.
In conclusion, by being deiformed man can possess a faith that lives as a religious sense in an effort, which encompasses his whole ambit, and deploys itself in a conceptual intellection, i.e., in a theology. Faith in the logos that reveals3, ostensible presentation of the body of its truth, and theological conceptiveness of its system are the three moments of one single mobilization of that deiformed reality, which man is.
{39} Hence, precisely because of this, deiformity is the precise and formal point in which this logos is going to dialog with modern man. Therefore, the dialog should be called, and actually is “the theological problem of man”. It is not the case, from my modest point of view, of a question upon which we are going to think, but to show that what we call the theological problem is the problem of what the being of man is, constitutively. It is not a question about man on the one hand, and about God on the other, but is the intellection of man himself as intrinsic manifestation of God; therefore, it is not an anthropocentric question, but theocentric, of a theós whose manifestation is the very being of man. And thus, where God manifests Himself is in the formal fullness of life, not in its fissures. It is necessary to have the energy of lifting our eyes to God precisely when life is going well, and not only supplicate Him when it is going poorly.
The form of the dialog, I was saying at the beginning, depends on the characteristic of the logos. And, as we have just seen, the primary and radical logos is the theological one. Therefore, we must discuss everything along the lines of theological reason.
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1 But the theological dimension must not be confused with the theological logos, cf. infra (note by X. Zubiri).
2 Irenæus of Lyon, Démonstration de la prédication apostolique, ch. 3, in R. Graffin and F. Nau, Patrologia orientalis, vol. 12, op. cit., p. 758.
3 The kerygmatic logos is missing (note by X. Zubiri).