Luigi Pareyson Quotes on God
Luigi Pareyson (1918–1991), the Italian existentialist philosopher whose Existence and the Person (1950), the long Aesthetics: Theory of Formativity (1954), and the late Ontology of Freedom (1995, posthumous) supplied twentieth-century Italian Catholic thought with one of its most ambitious philosophical theologies, defended the case that the divine freedom is itself constitutively tragic. The framework — developed through close readings of Schelling, Kierkegaard, and Dostoyevsky — treats God's relation to evil as a problem internal to the divine life rather than as a difficulty for Christian apologetic, with the consequent philosophical theology in which the abyss (Ungrund) of divine freedom is the dramatic ground of both creation and redemption. Pareyson taught Umberto Eco and Gianni Vattimo at Turin.
Quotes
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Attributed to Luigi Pareyson:
“Tragic ontology grasps that being itself is given as gift.”
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“God wants to exist and wants to be what he is, which means that he is free not only with regard to being in general, but above all with regard to his own being, in short, he is not bound either to his own existence or to his own essence.”
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“God himself, as absolute freedom and original will, contains, indeed is, the answer to the “fundamental question” [What is his name? (Ex. 3:13)], but he does not state it in explicit terms: he merely says “I am who I am, I am who I want to be”, which is a definitive statement. There is nothing more to say: it is an absolute act of will and freedom, by which God makes himself and declares himself master of his own being and of being in general.”
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“God is master of his own essence, because in him act and essence, essence and will are one and the same.”
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“God is being, goodness, truth, or the positive in general, but insofar as it is willed and chosen, victory over possible nothingness.”
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“The primacy of reality is in itself a victory over nothingness, and the choice of good is always a judgement on evil, so that God has two aspects in himself: that by which “ab aeterno” good has been chosen by an irreversible act and evil is rejected as a rejected possibility; and that by which evil, as a discarded alternative, subsists forever as the backdrop of possibility and as a hidden but available possibility.”
Wikiquote -
“Evil must be distinguished as possible and real: in God it is present as possible, and there man finds it and realises it in history.”
Ontologia della libertà -
“Even those who do not believe in God cannot cease to be interested in what God represents for a believer, and only philosophy can show this.”
Ontologia della libertà -
“Only the awareness that God shares human suffering can prevent suffering from increasing human negativity.”
Ontologia della libertà -
“It is not without reason that religious experience focuses above all on the suffering and redeeming God, which confirms that the ultimate recourse to the problem of evil is religion, certainly not morality.”
Ontologia della libertà -
“Man awakens on the cosmic stage the evil that was dormant in God.”
Ontologia della libertà