“That there be a beginning, man was created” (“Initium ergo ut esset, creatus est homo”). These are words of Augustine, from The City of God. Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die, but to begin. The final accent is on Augustine’s irreducibly Christian sense of the meaning of history. H. Arendt maintains an emphatically secular perspective from the start and has cast her lot with the Enlightenment project of “modern man’s coming of age.” In an era in which mass deportations, police terror, and concentration camps had darkened the fate of humanity, she calls upon her contemporaries to establish “a new law on earth,” to affirm and uphold human dignity – in none but humanity’s name. “It is that from now on man is the only possible creator of his own laws and the only possible maker of his own history.” Is the “modern man has come to resent everything given, even his own existence – to resent the very fact that he is not the creator of the universe and himself?” It is man’s attempt to usurp the position of God, and coming to grief when he finds he cannot: “The more accomplished the world it has produced, the more at home men feel within the human artifice – the more they will resent everything they have not produced, everything that is merely and mysteriously given to them.”
Arendt and Jesus’ views on forgiveness as a “miracle-working ability” that frees both the forgiver and the forgiven from the past and the cycle of revenge. This is linked to the idea of “generativity” – each new birth offers the possibility of a new beginning and a new capacity for action, which is the ultimate “miracle that saves the world.”
All of this constitutes an unwelcome reminder that no man is truly self-made. There are spheres where men cannot act at and change at will, i.e., the limitations of the human artifice. The “alien” is a frightening reminder of difference as such, of individuality as such, and indicates those realms in which man cannot change and cannot act, and therefore has a distinct tendency to destroy. There is deep resentment against the disturbing miracle contained in the fact that each of us is made as he is – single, unique, unchangeable. The great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, “Volo ut sis (I want you to be),” without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation. Man’s “nature,” is sufficient for the establishment of a new law on earth, for rights spring from human plurality, and divine command or natural law would be true even if there existed only a single human being. This “would be true even if there existed only a single human being.” “The more people know about one another,” Arendt says, “the less they want to recognize other peoples as their equals, the more they recoil from the ideal of humanity.”
Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die, but to begin. It is that from now on man is the only possible creator of his own laws and the only possible maker of his own history. The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. But one bishop had the capability to initiate the miracle of beginning that saves all.
According to Jewish-Christian tradition, another equality, expressed in the concept of one common origin beyond human history, human nature, and human purpose – the common origin in the mythical, unidentifiable Man who alone is God’s creation. She goes so far as to call this capacity for human initiative as “the one miracle-working faculty in man.” “Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever.” If the party receiving forgiveness is spared any blot on his name, the party forgiving, too, is freed from the past, obtaining what Arendt calls “freedom from vengeance.” “The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs,” Arendt now writes, “was Jesus of Nazareth”. From the very beginning of our existence in this body, “there is not a moment when death is not at work in us” – so wrote Augustine in The City of God. “The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted”. The miracle that saves the world. We can no more answer that question of the nature of man than jump over our shadows; those who make the attempt almost invariably end with some construction of a deity of domination, which is ego’s idol.
The Syro-Malabar church had a small problem created out of repeated lies by the church leaders and with total lack of readiness to dialogue. There was dissent and protest which was simply left without concern and with disdain. Some clever people invented a schism out of a ritual issue in order to mete out a lethal punishment! All men in the silk garb of leadership believed in imposition to defend their power structure. But one bishop had the capability to initiate the miracle of beginning that saves all.
