O conceito de pessoa em Lima Vaz e Von Balthasar: uma contribuição para o ensino de teologia

Abstract

This dissertation discusses the Christian concept of Person as a transcendental statute universally valid for academic teaching of theology. Through the mediation of the genealogical method in Lima Vaz, the concept of Person is manifest in a veiled way in the Greek Form. Lima Vaz is considered the greatest Brazilian philosopher of the XX century. We use his hermeneutic tradition in the beginning chapters where we will discuss the objective requirement of form. The semantic tradition, which is proximate, will be demonstrated in the final chapters of the theological philosophical positions of von Balthasar. The Person will appear veiled among the Greeks. The art of learning one’s own identity – education – is itself the path in the direction of the Form. The formation of the Greek man is the formation of Himself. Even if in a veiled way! In Christianity the Greek abstraction receives the statute of history from the Trinitarian relation. Time is privileged in the creation. The human being recognizes himself to the extent that he perceives himself known by God’s reasoning. There is a specific face and rationality in order to recognize Him and the veil be removed. The identity of man is to recognize himself as the Imago Dei. An image that is rationality that is common to all human beings – Church. The Church is the identity of man and getting to know it is to see oneself in the mirror. In the Vazian Thomasian reading of Saint Thomas the church is the divine analogical presence in which the human being can recognize himself as a participant in being Person. Participation is paradoxical in that the extreme fragility of the participating beings becomes the objective condition for the validity of the discourse of the universal being. Person is uniquity – a unique measure, irreplaceable and unrepeatable in time according to the definition in Von Balthasar. Eternity is not outside of time, but propitiates more time to time. A fragile and weak reed of the human condition which receives more time and with it the dramatic condition of the always paradoxical life. Not even the Gnostic eternity nor the absurd experience of the materialism of the negation of lived time. But, more time for time. It is important to consider that the paradox will define the terms. It will seem sometimes confusing, but it will be this contrast which is not contradiction which will permit the emergence of the image which we seek. Time which is this forgotten perception with the Consoler, of the objective and rational view of the universal in the most particular, of beauty in fragility, of joy in pain! The literary-esthetic statute which fulfills the requirements of a rigorous phenomenology, but finds in the Person the symptomatic rational knowledge of the world of life, its deformity and emptiness. Paradoxically it also recognizes the realness of the Truth, its tenderness and consolation. This knowledge is recognition – education as the form of forming the human being proper.