The theologian and professor of the two Institutes of Jaca, Álvaro López Asensio, has just published a new book on metaphysics entitled: “The existing essence”; a work that addresses, from spiritual intelligence, to the existence of God, the truth of human beings and living beings, as well as the creative mystery of space-time.
Professor and theologian, Alvaro Lopez Asensio, has written “The existing essence"a metaphysical essay that helps to understand the principle of"Absolute Being”, the metaphysical anthropology of human beings, as well as the reason for the existence of all living beings.
There is only one principle of the “Be" that is God. As old as the known world around us is the "Be”. The supreme “Being” is the creator of all things, understood as the principle of movement that has generated creative existence and its historical development.
This “Being absolute” create for free: “God creates for love”. Thus the dialectic of time and eternity establishes a metaphysics of freedom for human action and a theology in which the reason for everything is found in love. But how is this love embodied?
1.- The material and spiritual reality of the Human Being
The existence of human beings consists simply in existing, having mobility, reasoning, communicating by understanding with feelings, leaving a mark, a past, making personal and social history, loving in all its forms. We are faced with a vitality of daily life that allows us to exist loving and wanting without limits.
Only love allows the harmonious development of the “Being for life”. All forms of “in love” lead to the “Being for death", a vital death of dark inner night that disharmonizes the link between the essence and existence of plural formality. This imbalance affects the emotional and vital disorder of human beings.
Greek anthropology asserts that the existence of human beings is composed of body and soul. The body is the part of the biological essence that makes up the “Be. On the contrary, the soul is the other part of the soul that vivifies the “Be”. The word body suggests to our modern Western mentality the idea of a material envelope in which the spirit, the soul, resides. The idea of the body also revolves around Cartesian anthropology, according to which people are spirit, the body being a mere extrinsic container in which the spirit is contained.
This metaphysical dualism also has its projection in the moral sphere. The body (animated by the lower soul) is intrinsically evil and is in perpetual opposition to the higher soul. The victory of the person will consist in the complete suppression of the body and in the pure, absolute and eternal preeminence of the spirit.
This concept is overcome in Judaism with the absence of dualisms between soul and body. The person is created by God as “living soul” (Gen 2, 7). This Hebrew notion of the soul should not be interpreted from the Platonic dualism (man is soul and body, two distinct realities that complement each other), a concept that the Church and Christian doctrine have inherited when defining the very nature of the “Human beings".
The Hebrew mentality considers that death is not a separation of soul and body, since the soul is not opposed to the body. If the person is a ““napa” or "living soul” and lives like ““napa” (The person not only has a soul but is a soul); he is also a body or ““nephew”, which was later translated with the Greek words: ““physis” or "“soma” (corporeity).
The biblical world does not understand that a body does not contain a soul, since a “living soul” has to live with all its body and bodily integrity. If the soul disappears, the body does not remain; nothing remains but dust. So true, it is to say: “we are bodies”, as in saying: “we are souls.Hebrew uses the terms soul or body interchangeably (to designate the person), both refer to one and the same reality: the person living in the world.
This conception is assumed by Christianity born from Judaism. In the theology of Paul of Tarsus it is evident that the body or "sum"It is not a human structure external to the real self of the person, but essentially characterizes that"Yo”, that is, to the “Be” as a whole as a personal unit. It is no longer accurate to say: the person has a “sum”, but: the person is “sum".
So how is the resurrection of the dead conceived on the day of final judgment and the end of creation? In the Christian New Testament we find the expression “resurrection of the dead” in the Greek words: anastasis, nekron.
The biblical perspective does not consider speaking of the resurrection in a dualistic system in which the soul and the body are two different substances, because the essence of the body is soul, since the body and the soul are but one: the resurrection of the bodies is the resurrection of the souls or, what is the same, the resurrection of people as soul-body.
2.- Faith as a path to spiritual intelligence
The gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke use the Greek term “pistis-pisteúo” to give continuity to the Jewish concept of “faith”: to trust, to rely on God, to experience and savour God through the senses, to know God through the eyes of the heart and not through reason. This vision is in contrast to that of the Greco-Latin world, which was more concerned with knowing God rationally.
Through faith in God, a person is a “new creature", A"new person. The wisdom that Christianity brings has nothing in common with the wisdom of the Greek philosophers. The Christian does not seek “bliss"(The eudaimonia), is not believed to be justified by the “virtue"(earring); its ultimate goal is not the “sovereign goodPagan wisdoms were always more or less an accommodation, an art of resignation to the human condition. Christianity is not an ethic, but a life project based on love and forgiveness.
When we talk about ethics, we are not referring to the behavioral aspect of the person as a philosophical principle, but rather we could speak of an existential turn. Following God, the principle of faith, does not consist in acting differently but in being differently; without a doubt, if one is different, one acts differently.
But God speaks, because his love corresponds to our love for our neighbour, understood as the most distant, even the enemy. Faith that is not active in love is not faith. And love that is not nourished by forgiveness towards one's neighbour is lost in a humanism that, as Law or morality, forgets the Word of God. Love for one's neighbour in the Bible is not based on a humanistic and altruistic ideal, but is always a consequence of the relationships between God and people, which lead to relationships between them and their neighbour.
In addition to the singular mandate of love for one's neighbor, in the Law of Biblical Holiness (collected in wisdom literature), God rejects “sow discord among brothers(Prov 6, 19), since a person must live reconciled with his brother if he wants to obtain God's blessing (Ps 133). People are destroyed if they do not overcome hatred and revenge. When we hold a grudge against someone or have resentment towards another person, we are the only ones harmed, the only ones who suffer, the only ones hurt by what we do. Lack of forgiveness is capable of making us sick, poisoning us, making us suffer and turning us evil. When one hates one's enemy, one becomes dependent on him. Even if one does not want to, one is tied to him, subject to the torture of his memory and the torment of his presence. Every person is wrong if he does not progress in overcoming hatred and revenge.
People who despise themselves, let themselves fall, debase themselves and judge their lives to be meaningless, flee from themselves. Exaggerated self-esteem and self-contempt often go hand in hand. Both are the fruit of the loneliness of autonomous people, abandoned to themselves. They are unaware that they are loved, that they are useful and responsible. There is a lack of dialogue with the Word of God and with others, our neighbor. Only those who know that they are taken seriously are capable of accepting themselves seriously. Love for our neighbor and our enemy must be our reason for being, only in this way will we achieve a more just, supportive, humane and kind society. Only love and not self-sufficiency can do this. God reaches out his hand to work together towards this goal.