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Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 6.4 (2003) 5-13



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Preface


In Nietzsche's Joyful Wisdom, a madman carrying a lantern runs into the marketplace and encounters a crowd of people who mock his search for God: "'Where has God gone?' he cried out. 'I will tell you! We have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers!'" (125). The madman insists that those who have murdered God should confront the full consequences of their terrible deed, and a number of twentieth-century philosophers pursued the inquiry into such consequences avidly so that the corollary to the death of God became fully evident: the human person then must have died as well. Michel Foucault in 1969 acknowledged such a corollary as a kind of twentieth-century commonplace: "it is not enough to keep repeating that God and man have died a common death," and he seeks to illuminate the dynamics of power that shape us (often oppressively) within the "gaps and breaches" that open following the disappearance of God and the human person formed in God's image. 1

Could it be, however, that such inquiries ironically could guide us toward a renewed understanding of the human person in the light of our relationship to God? Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément proposes that nothing less than a "spiritual anthropology" can restore our understanding of the human person. A dialectical view of the great radical thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries enables us to see that the human powers brought to light by such thinkers derive after all from the Holy Spirit and that we are lost until we recognize this truth: "But today people who are cut off [End Page 5] from the Holy Spirit are in danger of death. Modern humanism needs to be openly acknowledged as belonging within divine humanism, thus revealing Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud to be also forerunners of this movement." 2 Once we have recognized the inner longing of cultures that have turned away from the divine and have become lost in the depths of the malleable human being that is shaped only by desires and cultural forces, we are more fully prepared to address such an inner longing:

We must hope to attract the post-industrial society of today by a rich, complex, open anthropology, which by its very openness respects the "fathomlessness" of the person and is capable of growing into a "theo-anthropology." Everyone now realizes that human beings need not only bread but friendship and beauty, not only abundance but restraint, not only the power of machines but a renewed respect for God's creation, not only education of the mind but a greater capacity for celebration. (106)

We can note that Clément's powerful observation complements the reflections of Gaudium et spes from the Second Vatican Council,each approach opening a path toward a fresh encounter with modern cultures that makes possible the articulation of the truth of the human person in relation to God in a manner that addresses the deepest needs of the contemporary person. As is well known, Gaudium et spes incorporates a Christ-centered "spiritual anthropology": "The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light" (22). It is appropriate, then, that from his Orthodox perspective Clément envisions a developing unity within Christianity in response to the deepest needs of the contemporary human person:

And at the heart of the human race as it grows into unity, there is the vision of a Church undivided once more, combining the ethical and cultural energy of the Western Church with the [End Page 6] unshakeable faith of Orthodoxy, which in turn forms a bridge to the most distant Oriental Churches. (106)

A providential understanding of the dynamics of globalization seems to be at work in this view, such that a spiritual drive toward greater Christian unity encompasses the economic drive toward cultural interdependence and provides a proper grounding for economic activity and exchange within the emerging world economy.

Olivier Cl&eacute...

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