Volviendo a los orígenes

El cristianismo como acontecimiento emocional

Abstract

In connection with the recently published book, Así vivían los primeros cristianos. Evolución de las prácticas y de las creencias en el cristianismo de los orígenes, a collection of critical articles edited by Rafael Aguirre, this essay reflects on the historical conditions that enabled the novelty of Christian origins. From the watchtower that offers history as a discipline, the challenge is to think about the emergence of an extraordinary, disruptive experience in the historical becoming. The thesis is that Christianity as a religious movement is born as an expression of an intense subjectivism, alien in its origin to a supposed concern for the universality of God’s experience. An understanding of it may amount to an emotional event. The idea of the event points to the radical historicity of the constitution of a new subjectivity, constructed by the followers of Jesus, the Christ, as an instant of originality and unrepeatable self-reflexivity, of the emergence of a new way of living and of inhabiting the relationship with God and with the world. The emotional nature of the event displaces the field in which the meaning and the
social and religious consciousness are produced. The affective turn as a cognitive form points towards openness to the indeterminacy of what is going to happen, to the modalities of overflow of what has not yet been written or indicated by writing or by the already crystallized meanings of culture.