Part Seven - Atheism and Salvation
Hegel
Hegel [1] has no difficulty in admitting the existence of God; indeed, he professes to be a Lutheran to provide a philosophical foundation for his Lutheran faith. However, he aligns himself with the Anselmian approach, taking it to its extreme consequences. While Saint Anselm was a realist and aimed to be realistic – preserving the validity of his concept of God and his faith in God – Hegel, who identifies thinking with being, acknowledges a God who is no longer the God that transcends human thought but is a product of thought.
For him, it is sufficient to conceive the concept of being to know that God exists. He states that "the Absolute is being"[2]. However, at the same time, "the Absolute is nothingness"[3]. Why this contradiction? Because, as is known, Hegel identifies being with non-being. Hence his nihilistic concept of God, which, in his eyes, is the God that changes and becomes, given Hegel's well-known foundation of becoming on contradiction. We can think of Leopardi's God, who comes from nothing and falls back into nothing, the Arimane God, the denier of being.
(Arimane was one of the major central themes in Giacomo Leopardi's works, representing an image of an infinite power hostile to humanity, an incarnate principle of evil, indiscriminately both creator and destroyer, without purpose or sense, at least from a human perspective, for which he envisioned a great hymn (Ed.)
On the other hand, the Hegelian being is nothing but being reduced to a concept, the being of idealists. But if there is no being that transcends thought, our reason does not conceive the absolute being – a being that transcends it, existing independently of it. It does not conceive and understand the Absolute in itself, apart from the world, becoming, time, and history but connected to self-awareness and the consciousness of the world. According to Hegel, we do not conceive the spirit unless about ourselves and the world.
Therefore, Hegel's God is not the Holy Spirit that transcends human thought, the world, humanity, becoming, time, and history, but the one whom Saint Paul calls the "Spirit of the world" (1 Corinthians 12:2), "the God of this world" (2 Corinthians 4:4), which is nothing other than the devil. Hegel thus confuses God with the devil.
Aristotle, though a pagan, is entirely free from these terrible confusions, even though, as is known, he does not come to admit a creating God but stops at an unmoved mover, the cause of motion and becoming, not of being. Plato conceives the Ideal Good, as contemplatable, lovable, participable, and imitable, but not the creator of the participant, the imitator, the contemplator, and the lover.
Aristotle could have found the inspiration for a conception of God as ipsum Esse in Parmenides, through a proper discernment distinguishing the subsistent being from being as such in Parmenidean einai. Instead, Parmenides, affirming being as eternal, unique, immutable, and necessary, identifies thinking with being, cause with effect, necessary with contingent, univocal with analogous, one with many, mutable with immutable, possible with actual, eternal with temporal. Thus, he falls into a pantheistic monism.
Even Aristotle and Thomas have not managed to trace ipsum Esse in Parmenidean einai. Aristotle never conceived God as ipsum Esse, although he came very close when he conceived Him as nòesis noèseos, absolute self-awareness. Thomas got it based on Exodus 3:14.
Hegel's vision appears monotheistic but dialectical, so Hegel's God combines being and non-being, true and false, good and evil, matter and spirit, finite and infinite, mutable and immutable, simple and compound, peaceful and conflictual, absolute and relative.
Hegel's God is simultaneously being and non-being, everything and nothing, good and evil, truthful and deceitful, just and unjust, merciful and cruel, friend and enemy, faithful and fickle, life-giving and murderous, reliable and unreliable, promoter and destroyer. It resembles the Germanic gods Thor and Odin. It is both the God of Saint Thomas and the Arimane sung by Leopardi [4].
The comparison between Hegel's God and Schelling's is interesting. Hegel's God is the Absolute Concept, containing no mysteries. Schelling's God, to put it in Hegel's words, is the "night where all cows are black," that is, the God of absolute darkness, where – under the pretext of mystery – nothing is understood, and everything is confused with everything else.
Marx's Atheism Derives from Hegel's False Theism
The main paradigm of modern atheism is Marx, while the leading figure of modern pantheism is Hegel. However, both cannot be explained without the presupposition of the biblical-Christian God. Indeed, the God to which humanity identifies is the Ipsum Esse of Exodus 3:14 in the interpretation of Saint Thomas: the Being in which essence coincides with its existence.
The difference with Christianity lies in the fact that in both Hegel and Marx, the human-divine relationship does not involve distinction but a unity or dialectical identity in contradiction, interpreting gnostically or rationalistically the mystery of Redemption. Hegel and Marx admit the self-subsistent and self-existing absolute Being, or, as theologians say, the aseity.
The distinction lies in the fact that while Hegel recognizes religion as an approach to God and explicitly acknowledges God, even teaching Christian doctrine, he formally dialectically identifies man with God, misunderstanding the mystery of the Incarnation. On the other hand, Marx, as known, considers religion a form of alienation and formally denies God, even viewing God as the negation of man.
Hence, atheism arises to dialectically affirm man, in opposition to God. Simultaneously, following Feuerbach [5], ‘Ipsum Esse’ is acknowledged, but it is not God; instead, it is man himself or returned to himself through the overcoming of God’s opposition via the dialectic of proletarian revolution and the establishment of communist society.
Marxist atheism and Hegelian pantheistic Christianity share the fact that Hegelian theism is already implicitly atheistic when Hegel conceives God as the apex of the human and the supreme horizon of self-consciousness, originating from Cartesian experience, mediated by Luther, Kant, and Fichte. A God of this kind is nothing but the final apotheosis of the humanistic-Renaissance anthropocentrism mentioned earlier.
Throughout the preceding centuries, there was a systematic appropriation by humans of divine attributes until Hegel's time when it was ripe for humanity to replace God, taking God's place.
Hegel, therefore, calls "God" not the true God, transcendent and creator of man, reached by induction and analogy from the experience of things and illuminated by the faith of the Church. Instead, he calls it the Result of the historical-dialectical process through which Being negates itself as Nothing or Non-Being, negates its negation, and returns to itself as Becoming or as History.
However, this Being is the Subject or Spirit or Idea or Reason, namely Cartesian and Lutheran human self-consciousness as consciousness of God or God in consciousness. It is a God who is not above me but God for me, the God who appears to me, the idea I have of God, a God thought by me or according to me.
Now Marx incorporates Hegel's humanism, his conception of man as the absolute Being, a coincidence of essence and being, not as an identity like Thomistic God, but as logical-material becoming because it concerns man, made of flesh and bones. By attributing a divine being to man, Marx expropriates God of his being and attributes it to man.
But this precisely entails the denial of God's existence. Therefore, unlike the Christian Hegel, Marx gives no positive meaning to the word "God" because God, having become the rival of man, must be eliminated for man to exist. Thus, Marxist atheism, which is not the vulgar atheism of Epicureans, positivists, or empiricists but an atheism that puts the essence of God into play when denying it, could paradoxically be called a "theological" or perhaps better, diabolical atheism. Only a sharp and malicious mind like Marx's could devise such a refined, impious, and perverse atheism.
However, Marx merely makes explicit the atheism that is already implicit in Hegel due to a false conception of the mystery of the Incarnation, which, according to him, does not involve the distinction of two natures, as the Council of Chalcedon teaches, but "unity," as was already the heresy of Eutyches. It should be a cause for great scandal that today there are Catholic Christologists who foolishly and shamelessly use Hegel to interpret the mystery of the Incarnation and Redemption [6].
Now, let's examine the foundations of Marxist atheism and Hegelian pantheism in their mutual connection. As is known, Marx conceives reality according to the Hegelian dialectical movement. According to Hegel, being is not identical to itself, fixed, or immutable, but it progresses and surpasses itself by contradicting itself. It advances, ascends, elevates (Erhebung), and transcends while remaining identical to itself as Totality and Absolute.
So, the first moment: being posits itself as absolute. The second moment: it negates itself in the other (Entāusserung, alienation) or in opposition to itself (Entfremdung, estrangement)[7]. The third moment: negation negates itself, so the opposite returns to the identical, reconcile with it and with itself, and regains the initial identity. Simultaneously, it is surpassed by negation, that is, by the dialectical movement expressing being as becoming.
Therefore, the cycle begins again and never ends because it represents the becoming of the Absolute, the becoming or "history" of God, which is everything (pantheism). The symbol of this eternal becoming of life is the swastika, already present in the ancient symbolism of Indian pantheism.
While the ontological foundation and the starting point (Anfang) of Hegelian dialectics are Spirit, Self-Consciousness, Idea, man as spirit and person, as ego or subject (see Fichte following Descartes), for Marx, everything originates and is based on matter. The matter is eternal and absolute, but not simple matter; rather, it is the sensory bodily man (influence of Feuerbach), not as an individual but as a collective, as the human genus (Gattungswesen), the faber man, the starting point of dialectics.
The man then posits himself, "objectifies" himself, opposes himself through praxis and labor (still influenced by Fichte), and understood – here is the second dialectical moment – as negation or opposition (religion and capitalist exploitation). This is followed by the process of liberation, the negation of negation (class struggle and atheism), through which man frees himself from alienation and returns to his initial absolute being. Here is the communist society.
It is not the idea that determines matter, as in Hegel, but matter determines spirit as the superstructure of matter. Here we find the so-called Marxist "realism" in opposition to Hegelian idealism. Marx asserts reality as the objective foundation of consciousness; he recognizes the independence of the material world from human consciousness and the dependence of the latter on reality. It seems that the Thomistic notion of truth as adaequatio intellectus ad rem is recovered, where consciousness depends on the real. However, this dependence of consciousness on the real seems more ontological than intentional; more a derivation of spirit from matter than a reference to the representation or concept that mirrors reality as it is in itself.
Indeed, the fundamental problem for Marx is not that of knowledge but of transformative praxis, so that truth itself no longer appears as the work of intellect but of will. It is no longer about what is true, but rather about what man decides, as a community, as a class, and as a party in his liberating revolutionary praxis.
This praxis-oriented orientation of thinking and acting is already present in Hegel, who takes it from Fichte, and it is an inheritance of Renaissance humanism with its sympathy for magic [8], an orientation that will then reach its peak in the 20th century in Giovanni Gentile and Nietzsche.
Hegel indeed speaks of "speculative" thought, but Hegelian speculation does not aim for the adaequatio intellectus ad rem. Instead, it seeks the construction of the system of the logic of the Absolute as the supreme apex of the phenomenology of the spirit, which dialectically and necessarily ascends from the realm of the sensible to the highest peaks of Absolute Science, Idea, and Absolute Concept.
On the other hand, the science of historical-dialectical materialism, according to Marx, does not have these pseudo-theological aims deliberately designed to intoxicate the spirit and distract it from real problems. Instead, it grasps the truth and contradictions of social, historical, and human reality as a rule for action. For Marx, Hegelian idealism is the most complete and fascinating expression of religious imposture. And to some extent, he is correct. The trouble with Marx is confusing true religion with idealistic superstition.
Nietzsche
Federico Mugnai, a scholar of Nietzsche, provides a portrait of the thinker in these terms [9]:
"For Nietzsche, Christianity, socialism, and even certain forms of rationalism have enfeebled human existence, confined it, made it believe in earthly or otherworldly paradises, and placed it as a slave rather than the arbiter of its own destiny. To affirm oneself means to say yes to life, to unleash one's passions, to realize oneself and one's dreams, to free oneself from all moral superstructures and more, which bind man, embracing the 'Dionysian' sense of life. The will to power is a positive response to nihilism. Human will, with the rise of ascetic ideals, has directed itself towards nothingness."
"For this reason," observes Mugnai, "a transvaluation of all values was necessary, a journey through the desert that Nietzsche himself considered full of obstacles and sufferings. But it was necessary to affirm once again the Dionysian yes to life, to the power of will, understood as the affirmation of the individual over life itself and not as domination over others. It was the only way to overcome the impending nihilism, of which Christianity had been, for Nietzsche, the main culprit."
A significant passage from Nietzsche, cited by Mugnai and taken from On the Genealogy of Morals, is as follows:
"I was the first to see the true contrast: on the one hand, the degenerating instinct that revolts against life with underground resentment (Christianity, Schopenhauer's philosophy, to some extent even Plato's philosophy, all idealism are typical forms of it), and on the other hand, a formula of supreme affirmation, born from fullness, from excess, an unreserved yes to pain itself, guilt itself, to everything that existence holds problematic and unknown. This latter, joyously overflowing yes to life, is not only the supreme vision but also the deepest one, confirmed and supported with the utmost rigor by truth and science."
Nietzsche proclaims to possess the "supreme vision" and the "supreme affirmation, but also the deepest," which would consist of a "joyously overflowing yes to life." But what life is he referring to? Eternal life? Divine life? Not at all. This is an 'unreserved affirmation, yes to pain itself, to guilt itself, to everything that existence holds of problematic and unknown.' Therefore, we are facing a rather dismal exaltation of life: life mixed with doubt, pain, sin, and death.
Conversely, Nietzsche directs all his hatred and invective against the true and ultimate exaltation of life, which is Christianity, completely misunderstanding its ascetic aspect. If Christianity speaks of mortification, renunciation, and sacrifice, it does so precisely to remove brakes, impediments, and obstacles to the highest and joyous affirmation and enjoyment of life, which is eternal life given to us by Christ through His redeeming sacrifice. He sees nihilism and death where eternal bliss triumphs and "fullness and excess" where there is sin, pain, death, pride, impiety, the indulgence of passions, the disdain for the weak, cruelty, the unleashing of violence, and war.
Indeed, Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo about Christianity:
"This hatred against the human, even more against the animal, even more against the bodily, this aversion to the senses, to reason itself, the fear of happiness and beauty, this desire to escape from everything that is appearance, transformation, becoming, death, desire, from desire itself—all this means, let us dare to comprehend it, a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a revolt against the fundamental presuppositions of life; man still prefers to will nothingness rather than not will at all."
He further writes in "Beyond Good and Evil":
"Christian faith is from the beginning a sacrifice: the sacrifice of every freedom, every pride, every self-consciousness of the spirit, and simultaneously subservience and mockery of oneself, self-mutilation."
The Overman
In Nietzsche's thought, man replaces God. This is the man who, surpassing himself, determines two levels of humanity, which presupposes a division within itself, an internal opposition, similar to Fichtean opposition of ego-non-ego: the positive polarity is the overman or superman; it is the healthy and strong man, self-existing and self-sufficient, overflowing with life, even though mortal, a people of lords, will to power, eternal recurrence of the same, although subject to Fate. The negative polarity is weak, frustrated, theistic, pain-oriented, corrupted, masochistic, self-harming humanity, despising the body and pleasure, nihilistic, in one word: Christian humanism.
As Heidegger notes in his comprehensive study of Nietzsche [10]:
"Nietzsche assigns the name 'predatory animal' to the highest form of man and sees the supreme man as the 'magnificent blond beast' – an obvious reference to the Germans - 'that roams desiring prey and victory.'"
Nietzsche is by no means ignorant of the existence and power of the spirit. This is evidenced by the very concept of the will to power. It is known that the will is a spiritual power along with intellect. Nietzsche himself is well aware of the spiritual influence he exerts on his readers, and if he did not believe in the power of the spirit, he would not have engaged in questioning and passing judgments on the problems of existence, humanity, and morality.
Heidegger goes so far as to say that Nietzsche's will to power would be Nietzsche's ontology [11] itself, so that his conception of being would coincide with willing and doing, in the manner of Fichte and Schelling. It seems to me a daring thesis, although it is true that the concept of the will to power is certainly fundamental for him. But equally important are the eternal recurrence and the Übermensch (overman), which can hardly be reduced to an ontology and are rather connected with ancient pagan mythologies of the wheel of life and the physical and passionate power of the worldly god.
Nietzsche shows great disdain for metaphysics, which he rightly associates with theology, equally despised by him. It is certain, however, that Nietzsche does not admit the existence of a pure spirit, separated from matter or the body, like the separate spiritual soul, angel, and God.
For this reason, his anthropology sympathizes with the positivist and Darwinian conception. Spirit or soul, for him, is not understood as the substantial form of the body but as sublimation, transformation, and perfection of the body, derived from the body. It is a fundamentally materialistic conception of man, consistent with atheism. It is indeed difficult to imagine an atheist spiritualism. Of idealism, one can make every critique, but it is undeniable that the idealist can form a concept of God, even if they cannot prove the existence of God.
It is clear that Nietzsche's Übermensch is a parody of Christian supernatural humanism, the man elevated to the life of grace, the son of God moved by the Holy Spirit. The Nietzschean Übermensch, with its egocentrism, its antics, its boundless pride, cruelty, and megalomania, seems to be moved rather by the devil.
The organizing Übermensch of the State
The political concretization of Nietzsche's project of the superman thirsting for the will to power is the mythologization of the German people as a race of lords destined to dominate Europe, which was later attempted by Hitler with the unleashing of World War II. Nietzsche writes in the Genealogy of Morals:
"The profound, cold distrust that the German still arouses even today is still a repercussion of that unquenchable terror with which Europe, over centuries, regarded the fury of the blond Germanic beast. One may even have every right not to get rid of the fear of the blond beast that lies at the bottom of all aristocratic races and to be on guard: but who would not prefer a hundred times to fear, without being able to free oneself from the disgusting sight of the unsuccessful, the mean, the sad and intoxicated?"
This concept of the German people as the excellent, totally and supremely healthy people with the task of liberating humanity from unhealthy people corrupting it was adopted by Hitler, as we can see from these words expressing his political program:
"From a principled standpoint, instead of the concept of the individual or the concept of humanity, we place the idea of a people, of the people born from the blood that flows in our veins and the soil that saw us born. For the first time, perhaps, in the history of mankind, it has been proclaimed in this country that of all the duties incumbent upon man, the noblest, the highest consists in maintaining the race that comes from God. Legally, the following conclusions can be drawn:
1) The conception that the right as such finds its justification in itself is false.
2) Equally false is the conception that the right aims to ensure and maintain the protection of the individual and his possessions. The National Socialist Revolution has given the law and legal science an unambiguous starting point. The true task of justice is to preserve and defend the people against any element that shirks its obligations towards the community or prejudices its interests." [12]
In these words, we see Hitler's concept of God: God is the God of the German people who have destined them to be the lords and rulers of all peoples, purifying and liberating them from those peoples who, due to their corruption, infect, pollute, and compromise the physical and spiritual purity of the German people.
These are exactly Nietzsche's ideas, with the difference that Nietzsche replaces God with the Übermensch, which is implied in Hitler's own words. After all, can God physically favor one person over others, assigning them the duty to exterminate corrupt people? Wouldn't that be a monstrous god, a Thor or an Odin, coinciding with the people themselves who invented him, a people who thus deifies themselves, placing themselves in the position of the true Creator God of heaven and earth? So why shouldn't these deified people be Nietzsche's Übermensch?
Considering Heidegger's turning point (Kehre) in the 1930s from an intellectual-idealist conception of being in the Parmenidean sense to a voluntarist-pragmatic conception, mediated by Heraclitus, and already prepared by Fichte but emerging from Nietzsche, it is understood how Heidegger embraced the Hitlerian program, which was nothing more than translating Nietzsche's project of the Übermensch and the German will power into the political, social, and state arena.
Thus, the following enthusiastic statements of Heidegger on May 27, 1933, in his inaugural speech as rector of the University of Freiburg, just after Hitler came to power, can be explained:
"It is a matter of the inexorability of that spiritual mission that commands the destiny of the German people to connect with the imprint of its own history. The people recognize themselves in their State" (obviously Nazi) "and their spiritual world coincides with the deepest safeguarding of their blood and soil forces." [13]
Andrea Colombo reports:
"To better understand the significance of the rector's speech, it is necessary to turn to the Black Notebooks, the philosopher's notes outlining the most important steps of his intellectual journey. In the notes written in 1933, after praising Hitler for "awakening a new reality that puts our thinking on the right path and gives it impact force," Heidegger identifies the need to promote "a new constitution of the University," which "will be effective only if it assumes its task in the education of a new lineage." The "awakening" indicates a "return to the ground to prepare a readiness for action." The University thus becomes an "instrument of revolutionary struggle." There is an urgent need to create "a true spiritual nobility, strong enough to shape the tradition of the German-based on a great future." To achieve this goal, one must "stay in motion." "The prerequisite for this is that National Socialism remains in struggle." [14]
Colombo further reports:
"In 1943, speaking of Heraclitus, Heidegger launches a final desperate longing for patriotism: 'The planet is in flames. The nature of man is unhinged. The sense of universal history can only come from the Germans, provided that they find and preserve what is German. The true ultimate test for the Germans is yet to come, if they agree with the truth of being [15], if beyond the readiness to die, they are strong enough to save the primordial [16] against the pettiness of the modern world in its stripped ornament.' In 1944, he yet dares to call the Germans 'saviors of the West, for now, and presumably for a long time alone.'" [17]
It is worth recalling that according to biblical Revelation, there is indeed among all peoples a people superior to others, not to oppress them but to guide them to eternal life. And this is the people of Israel, from which Christ emerged. Maritain rightly asserts that Nietzsche's anti-Christian hatred led to hatred for the people of Israel, a hatred that forms the basis of the Nazi political program (if it can be called "political" or rather criminal)[17].
End of Part Seven (7/10)
Fr. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, November 3, 2023
https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/ateismo-e-salvezza-settima-parte-710.html
[1] An insightful analysis of the Hegelian conception of God can be found in Maritain's "La filosofia morale. Esame storico e critico dei grandi sistemi" (Moral Philosophy: Historical and Critical Examination of Great Systems), Morcelliana, Brescia 1972, pp.215-248. Many theologians today are influenced by Hegel, for example, Küng, Rahner, Kasper, Forte, and Bordoni. See my book "Il mistero della redenzione" (The Mystery of Redemption), ESD, Bologna 2004, and "Rahner e Küng. Il trabocchetto di Hegel" (Rahner and Küng: The Pitfall of Hegel), Edizioni Chorabooks, Hong Kong 2021.
[2] "Enciclopedia delle scienze filosofiche in compendio" (Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences in Compendium), Editori Laterza, Bari 1963, p.91. Note the confusion of being as being (‘ens ut ens’) with the divine being, a confusion with a long history, as Werner Beierwaltes tells us in his book "Platonismo e idealismo, c.I – Deus est esse, esse est Deus" (Platonism and Idealism, c.I - God is to be, to be is God), Società editrice il Mulino, Bologna 1987.
[3] "Enciclopedia”, op.cit., p.92.
[4] This horrendous concept of God is well illustrated by Maritain in "La filosofia morale. Esame storico-critico dei grandi sistemi" (Moral Philosophy: Historical and Critical Examination of Great Systems), Morcelliana, Brescia 1971, c.IX – l’idealismo hegeliano. Il Dio di Hegel.
[5] L.A. Feuerbach, "Opere" (Works), Editori Laterza, Bari 1965.
[6] See my books "Il mistero dell'Incarnazione del Verbo" (The Mystery of the Incarnation of the Word), ESD, Bologna 2003, and "Il mistero della Redenzione" (The Mystery of Redemption), ESD, Bologna 2004.
[7] See the analysis of these concepts in the work of G.M.-M. Cottier, OP, "L'athéisme du jeune Marx et ses origines hégéliennes" (The Atheism of Young Marx and Its Hegelian Origins), Vrin, Paris 1959.
[8] Cf Giordano Bruno, "De magia. De vinculis in genere" (On Magic. On Bonds in General), Edizioni Biblioteca dell'Immagine, Pordenone 1991; this sympathy, as Julius Evola astutely noted, persists in modern idealism. See his book "Saggio sull'idealismo magico" (Essay on Magical Idealism), Edizioni Mediterranee, Rome 2006.
[9] From Google, under the heading "NIETZSCHE E IL NAZISMO."
[10] Edizioni Adelphi, Milan 2013, p.428.
[11] He asserts this in his work on Nietzsche.
[12] Quoted by Maritain, "Il mistero di Israele ed altri saggi" (The Mystery of Israel and Other Essays), Morcelliana, Brescia 1964, p.127.
[13] Quoted by Andrea Colombo, "I maledetti. Dalla parte sbagliata della storia" (The Damned: On the Wrong Side of History), Edizioni Lindau, Turin 2017, p.64.
[14] Ibid., pp.65-66.
[15] Probably, Heidegger is thinking of a future success of his thought, which has indeed been realized, even in his epigones who are not historicists but eternalists, like Severino, or even in Catholic theologians like Rahner. But at the root of Heidegger, there is nothing but Luther. In the end, we are always facing the enduring conflict between Catholics and Lutherans, which has not yet ceased, despite the wise indications of the Second Vatican Council.
[16] What does Heidegger mean by "primordiale"? The foundation, the original, the phenomenological being, the experience and truth of being, the being of Anaximander, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Nietzsche.
[17] Ibid., p.71.
[18] Cf. Maritain, "Il mistero di Israele" (The Mystery of Israel), op.cit., p.139.