A Phenomenological Approach to Incarnation

Abstract

The Incarnation of the Divine is not accepted by all the religions, more than that for some of them it is scandalous to admit it, in fact between the human and the divine there is a dissimilarity so great that it is impossible to consider any similarity. To afford such a question in the essay I start from the phenomenological anthropology in order to explain the sense of the religious experience and at the same time I consider the history of the religions from the archaic ones as far as the last interpretations of Christianity. Visiting once again the contribution of Gerardus van der Leeuw I join the results of his historical research with the anthropological analyses of Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein. The two ways, the anthropological one and the historical one, are linked up in one subject, so that is possible to propose a new perspective in the field of the "phenomenology of religion". I examine the contrast between "God near us", that is the faith in His Incarnation in Christianity and "God far from us", that is the refusal of His Incarnation, particularly in Judaism, trying to prove the accomplishment and the value of Incarnation.