In India Christians are celebrating their faith in Christ during Christmas. It is for them a time to think of their faith as being born in the culture and language of India. It is everybody’s knowledge that Christianity is written very much in the Greek language. Hans Uers Balthasser has written that Greeks gave a language to speak of the incarnation and also the Greek tragedians gave a language to speak of Christ’s Golgotha. Christianity took so much from Greek philosophy, drama and poetry. Here is a concrete example of how the early Christians were eager to accept whatever is holy and truthful around them. Saint Basil the Great, who was the bishop of Caesarea, gave a homily on ‘Give Heed to Thyself.’ It was simply a sermon on Deut. 15:9. This biblical sentence does not directly imply the ascribed meaning, it rather gives a protracted interpretation.It is determined by protreptic literature, notably by the First Alcibiades, which is a Socratic dialogue supposed to be of Plato. In the dialogue, there is repeated assertion by Socrates of the Delphic maxim ‘know thyself’. The Father of the church is saying something about a culture they knew very well. “If you remember your nature, you will never yield to vanity and you will be mindful of yourself if you give heed to yourself.” St Basil evidently considers it as a biblical counterpart of the Delphic maxim, although there’s nothing in the text of Deuteronomy that might provoke such an interpretation. Strangely, “Give heed to thyself” is interpreted as giving heed to your soul. Why soul? Because for Plato salvation is liberation of the soul from the body, which was nothing but a shell in which like an oyster we are imprisoned. Today, the body-prison perspective is no more realistic, and clearly would not denote the truth of incarnation where “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Flesh was compromised for Plato only to make the faith rooted in the culture.
Today we live in a different world of flesh and blood. The famous Theologian Karl Rahner says, “The actual concrete activity of the church in its relation to the world outside of Europe was in fact the activity of an export firm which exported a European religion as a commodity it did not really want to change but sent throughout the considered superior.” As many local translations of the Bible emerged, the ordinary people were able to grasp the real message of the Gospel. There is also a wider translation of the message by expressing it in artistic, dramatic, liturgical and above all in relational terms that are appropriate to convey the authentically indigenous, often through the theologically tested use of the symbols and concepts of a particular community. An unhealthy practise of the overemphasis of the Greek soul at the risk of negation of flesh and eros existed in Christianity, which is the result of their inculturation. The incarnation is the inculturation of God. Thus, inculturation is the incarnation of Christian life and of the Christian message in a particular cultural context. We can see that the very origin of the church begins with inculturation. This was continued through the apostles and the other disciples. The faith was lived in the different cultural context of the world like Palestinian, Aramaic, Diaspora and Hellenistic etc.
The Word revealed Himself as Son of God in the very moment He found Himself as human, because all nations could see His flesh. In Luc Marion’s account, the body does not identify necessarily with the soul but with the flesh, because the body appears and the flesh remains invisible. Knowing oneself is conversion of the flesh to relations of the word. The word is nothing but communication and love. “The more I love to the point of loss,” Marion writes, “the more I simply love.” Love creates a culture of gift of the self. Love cannot be separated from the flesh of eros. The truth of the flesh is the logos. ‘The know thyself is knowledge’ is interiority of the flesh in eros, which is transubstantiated to logos of understanding and relating. Indian Kama (eros), which is more egoistic, within the grammar of Christ becomes sneha (love), which entirely forgets the self in its concern for the other. “The knowledge of the self and the Supreme Self is very confidential and mysterious’ (Bhagavad gita 3.41). The urge for self within the divine hold can become realisation of the Other of the Self.