Problemi e figure della cristologia filosofica italiana nelle lezioni di Giovanni Moretto

Abstract

Problems and Figures of Italian Philosophical Christology in the Lectures of Giovanni Moretto 

On November 14, 1989, Giovanni Moretto (1939-2006) gives a course entitled “Problems and figures of philosophical Christology” at the University of Genoa, where he is for one year Professor of Theoretical Philosophy. In this course, essential for his own philosophy and here reconstructed through the notes of two of his hearers, we firstly identify a very close link between the Platonic logon didonai and the Christian justification of Pauline origin. The true Church is summoned by a free word and is called to account (even in front of God) for the meaning of life and the suffering of the just man. The great philosophical Christologies, where the search for sense is filtered through the human experience of Jesus Christ, are essentially forms of theodicy: in the vicarious expiation of Christ finds its fulfillment the ethical need of salvation not only of the individual, but of the world and of the whole humanity. Even if the Italian philosophers, at least according to the known thesis of Father Tilliette, had not in general developed a real philosophical Christology because of their inability to keep separate the Christ of faith and theology from the Jesus of history and philosophy, Moretto believes, on the contrary, that an authentically philosophical Christology can be found in four authors: Piero Martinetti, Giuseppe Capograssi, Pietro Piovani, and Alberto Caracciolo. In Martinetti, Jesus is not the son of God, but a revealer that accedes to the truth by direct intuition; in Capograssi, the passivity of the rejected and abandoned Christ becomes supreme activity and ethical resistance when, in the agony of the cross, the son voluntarily places his spirit in the hands of his father; in Piovani, the Cross reveals itself as ontological and ethical place of the manifestation of the philosophical salvation – i.e. of an universal salvation, which is announced by a Christ sharing his agony with man until the end of time; in Caracciolo, the Cross stands in the disturbing shadow of nihilism and malum mundi, thus giving voice to an universal search for meaning in front of a phenomenally useless suffering and of the ontologically most radical, atrocious and absurd evil.