Abstract
Though not sufficiently appreciated in North America, there has been a rich revival of Catholic theology in Italy in the years since the Second Vatican Council. Among the best-known names, one counts Angelo Amato, Piero Coda, Severino Dianich, Bruno Forte, and Pierangelo Sequeri. Giuseppe Ruggieri, the author of the present study, holds a prominent place in their midst.
For over forty years, R. was an ordinary professor of fundamental theology and the history of theology in the theological institute in Catania in his native Sicily. Since 1978 he has also been a senior fellow of the Bologna School, and for many years edited the journal, Cristianesimo nella storia.
Among his many books one may mention La verità crocifissa, Della fede, and Chiesa sinodale. His writing style is at once dense and limpid, and his thinking both rigorous and poetic, always animated by pastoral passion. His references show an astonishing breadth of knowledge: he is as equally conversant with Origen as with Thomas, as steeped in Balthasar as in Metz.
The present work displays all these qualities. Its relatively brief length (though the publisher is rather parsimonious in the print size) belies its substantive argument and contribution. One gleans a sense of that argument and contribution through the author’s admission of his uncertainty whether to title his volume Esistenza Messianica or Esistenza apocallitica (9). He chose the former because the book’s central chapter is “Gesù il Messia,” and the follower of Christ is called to participate in his Messianic existence; but the apocalyptic perspective orients R.’s entire approach.
For R., the Christian’s apocalyptic vision is based on the conviction that “the form of this world is passing away” (1 Cor 7:31). The disorder of a fallen world, which manifests itself in injustice, oppression, and violence, stems originally from the lie that reality is what serves one’s self-interest.
Israel’s prophets discern and denounce this distortion of reality in the name of the God of compassion who grieves at the sufferings of the poor and afflicted. And they announce the advent of a Messianic age when the oppressed will hear Good News, those in bondage will be liberated, and the people restored in justice and in truth.
This prophetic hope comes to realization in Jesus Messiah, who does not merely proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, but embodies it. What most distinguishes R.’s volume and vision is his single-minded focus on the corporality of Jesus Messiah, who takes into himself, bodily, the sufferings of those he encounters. With particular focus on the Gospel of Mark, R. accents the gaze, the touch, the cry, the intensely affective, indeed “visceral” response of Jesus to concrete need, injustice, and suffering, whether physical or spiritual.
Manifestly, R. abhors Docetism, and takes with utmost seriousness Colossians’ claim that in Christ “all the fullness of divinity dwells bodily” (Col 2:9). Though the book does not present a fully elaborated Christology, it nonetheless sketches suggestive dimensions of such a Christology. Among them is the privileged place R. accords the notion of “scambio” or exchange.
Drawing upon the thought of Erich Przywara, R. extends the understanding of “exchange” beyond the liturgical celebration of the “admirabile commercium” of the Incarnation to encompass the exchange effected by Jesus Messiah in assuming the full burden of sinful flesh. For R., 2 Cor 5:21, “For our sake God made Christ, who knew no sin, to be sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God,” is “the key to open the mystery of the life of the Messiah, Jesus” (96).
Thus, the author’s “apocalyptic” reading of the mission and ministry of Jesus is one that is not merely future-oriented, but already realized in his body. In his body, Jesus Messiah takes upon himself the suffering and sin of those he encounters to heal and reconcile. Jesus’s Messianic body is constitutively “my body for you.”
R.’s “somatic Christology” extends, therefore, beyond the individual Jesus of Nazareth. “Jesus Messiah is not only an individual, but also a ‘relational space’ in which his followers are called to dwell (this is the sense of Paul’s ‘in Christ’), maturing in their own humanity and entering into the exchange that unites the Son to the Father and the Spirit, thus becoming sons in the Son” (115). This relational “space” embodies the new Messianic order in Christ, redeeming the disorder of a fallen world.
The book stresses the active participation of the Christian in Jesus’s Messianic mission. Indeed, inspired by the reflections of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, R.’s third chapter bears the provocative title, “Il Messia sono io”–“I am the Messiah.” He does not mean thereby to diminish the unique role of Jesus, but to insist that Christian existence is Messianic existence. By taking responsibility for the suffering revealed in the face of the other, the believer assumes, in his or her own flesh, “what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ, for the sake of his body, the Church” (Col 1:24). Only from this vantage does the cry of the Christian, “Abba,” take on its full resonance as performative utterance.
An intense ethical concentration characterizes R.’s theological-pastoral writings. It is accompanied by an impatience with the merely notional, with reason’s pretense to ensnare Mystery in its conceptual web. This can lead, in my view, to his scanting the ontological implications of Christian claims. So, for example, the new relational reality of being “in Christ,” besides the ethical imperative to which it gives rise, surely discloses something of the nature of reality itself. One appreciates R.’s almost Newmanian regard for the “real;” but he does not appear to appreciate as fully Newman’s concern for the “notional” as well.
R. is an exciting thinker, at once deeply traditional and boldly innovative. He very much deserves to be better known among English language theologians.