Issue 107/2 (2026) of the magazine “Gregorianum” is available, quarterly published by the Gregorian University.

ARTICULI

Roland Meynet, S.I., La composition de l’Apocalypse

Abstract - The body of the book of Revelation is not divided into two large heterogeneous parts: the seven letters to the churches of Asia (2:1–3:22), then the set of visions (4:1–22:5). In the letters, the Churches are warned against the attacks of the enemy, Satan or the Devil. This first section is followed by the last, in which Satan is thrown into the lake of fire and the New Jerusalem descends from heaven (19:11–22:5). The centre of the book, the keystone of its architecture, the key to its interpretation, is found in chapter 12, where the Woman and her child face the Dragon who wants to devour them, but are saved. The “Revelation of Jesus Christ” is a book of hope.

Keywords: Revelation – Apocalypse of John – composition – Semitic rhetoric.

 

Ignazio Genovese, Speculum: la creazione come simbolo reale

Abstract - Starting from the theme of creation, as a founding and constitutive dimen­sion, this paper aims to present its biblical and historical-theological implica­tions, adopting the category of the speculum as an interpretative category. Me­dieval Latin exegesis presents creation as a speculum, a “mirror”, a “reflected image” in which we can grasp the true substance of divine action. From this perspective, and in light of Summa Theologiae I, q. 45, a. 3 (utrum creatio sit aliquod ens in rerum natura), we will seek to present the true substance of creation and, at the same time, its evocative dimension. Creation is a “real symbol” to the extent that it is able to testify to the relationship – understood in terms of relatio – between the Creator and the creature: «Unde relinquitur quod creatio in creatura non sit nisi relatio quaedam ad Creatorem, ut ad principium sui esse» (S. Th., I, q. 45, a. 3, resp.)

Keywords: creation – speculum – symbol – relationship – Thomas Aquinas

                                                                                

Nietzsche e l’Oltre-uomo.

Ripensare l’umano nel tempo della crisi

Summer School della Facoltà di Filosofia della PUG

 

Stefano Bancalari, La leggerezza del sacro. Nietzsche e la reinterpretazione del divino

Abstract - This article explores how Nietzsche reinterprets the divine through the con­ceptual pairing of lightness and gravity, arguing that there is a deep structural affinity between his theoretical project and the category of the ‘sacred’. Taking as its point of departure the discourse On Reading and Writing in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the article shows that Nietzsche’s critique of the metaphysical God is best understood as a ‘transcription’ into a register of sacred lightness: what is wrong with God, on this reading, is not that He does not exist, but that He is unbearably heavy. A parallel reading of the Preface and the parable of the madman in The Gay Science then traces Nietzsche’s movement from the ‘saint’ (der Heilige) to the ‘sacred’ (das Heilige) – in other words, from a moral and personal understanding of the divine towards one that is energetic and impersonal. The notion of the ‘sacred’ is examined both in its history within the phenomenology of religion (Otto, van der Leeuw, Eliade) and in the distinctive resonances it carries in the German word heilig. So understood, it emerges as a more flexible and contemporary alternative to the traditional concept of God. The author argues, however, that Nietzsche’s thought ulti­mately exposes the hidden logic underlying the sacred: its structural entangle­ment with violence, numinous ambivalence, and the inflation of the self. The lightness that the sacred promises turns out to be not a liberation from weight, but a covert seizure of the gravitational centre itself. The article concludes by proposing that the ‘weight of glory’ in the Pauline sense (2 Cor. 4:16-17) offers a genuine alternative to the logic of the sacred – and an invitation to reconsider gravity, rather than lightness, as the defining mark of the divine.

Keywords: Nietzsche – the sacred – lightness – gravity – the death of God – phenomenology of religion – heilig – Rudolf Otto – Paul of Tarsus

 

Costantino Esposito, Dare nome, dare forma: Nietzsche e le Parole per rinominare l’uomo

Abstract - This article investigates the relationship between naming and creation in Nietzsche’s work, taking as its point of departure the thesis advanced in The Gay Science: the names we give to things are unspeakably more important than the things themselves. The essay traces a double movement running through Nietzsche’s major writings, from On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense to Ecce Homo. The first is that of genealogical deconstruction: “sub­stances” are shown to emerge from linguistic constructions rooted in the physiological-perceptual substrate of human life; truth is unmasked as an­thropomorphic fiction; and metaphysics is revealed as the great forge of the “fundamental errors” of human history. The critique of Christianity – under­stood as Platonism for the masses and as a doctrine of pure moral submission – brings this movement to its culmination: with the death of God, the modern subject inevitably goes down with it, the self as autonomous and foundation­al substance dissolving along with its ground. The second movement is one of linguistic and ontological re-creation: Zarathustra’s words inaugurate a new dimension in which being seeks to become language, meaning resurfac­es from the immanence of the earth, and great suffering converts into joyful science. The Übermensch emerges from the very act of the revaluation of all values as radical self-creation – a will that wills itself in the eternal recurrence of the same, unburdened by any final end. The essay closes by interrogating the relationship between this creative naming and the Christian tradition: in Nietzsche’s anti-Christian intent there shines, paradoxically, the betrayed in­tention of the Word made flesh.

Keywords: Nietzsche – language – naming – truth and lies – genealogy – death of God – Übermensch – eternal recurrence – Zarathustra

 

Antonio Spadaro, S.I., «Come può essere importante un libro che non sappia neppure condurci oltre tutti i libri?» Sette immagini dell’esperienza letteraria

Abstract - This article takes as its starting point a question Nietzsche poses in The Gay Science – “How could a book be worth anything if it cannot even carry us beyond all books?” – and develops from it a phenomenology of liter­ature’s transformative power. The central thesis is that a genuine book is valued for what it does rather than for what it contains: it sets things in motion, unsettles the reader, and re-animates life rather than substituting itself for it. Nietzsche’s question thus becomes a criterion of both aesthetic and existential discernment: a book truly matters if, once read, it becomes impossible to read – or to live – in quite the same way as before. The article unfolds this thesis through seven images. The darkroom (Proust): literature as an optical instrument that develops the latent images of life, rescuing it from opacity. Hydraulics (Du Bos): literature captures and channels what life, reduced to its bare literal surface, would otherwise leave to overflow and go to waste. Digestion (de Certeau, Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, Surin, Tondelli, Nietzsche): reading as a form of metabolism that transforms the rhythm of thought and reshapes one’s interior bearing. Explosion (Williams, Cattafi, Hopkins, Montale): the poetic word as an explosion of the hidden power latent within reality. Fire (Cattafi, Luzi, Sedakova, Carver, Merini, Takano): the word that burns without consuming, strengthening those who receive it. The mountain (Stevens, Rahner): literature as a straining towards an “exact rock” that gives orientation to existence. The shell (Rahner): those symbolic words in which the infinity of the real resounds, illuminating the reader more than the reader illuminates them.

Keywords: literature – aesthetic experience – Nietzsche – transformation – the poetic word – Proust – Rahner – image – discernment

 

Andrea Cavallini, Dalla nemesis alla cura dell’anima. Platone e la rifondazione del nesso colpa-pena

Abstract - This article examines Plato’s critique of tragedy starting from his rejection, in Republic II, of a line from Aeschylus’ lost Niobe. It argues that Plato does not merely reject the idea of a divinity causing evil, but more radically breaks the tragic nexus between human guilt, divine punishment, and the pitiable unhappiness of the punished wrongdoer. Although he does not preserve the hybris-nemesis pattern in its original form, Plato refounds one of its essential cores: the necessary retribution of guilt. Yet this necessity is removed from the tragic register of ruin and relocated within the ethical-political register of care, correction, and paideia. Through the Apology, Gorgias, Protagoras, Republic, Phaedo, Theaetetus, and Laws, the article shows how punishment becomes, in Plato, therapy of the soul, an educational practice of the city, and a principle of moral government.

Keywords: Plato – Greek tragedy – hybris – nemesis – punishment – care of the soul

 

Vivetta Vivarelli, Apollo e Dioniso, il tocco della Luce e la discesa nell’Abisso. La condizione umana come teatro di forze primordiali in Nietzsche

Abstract - This essay explores the fundamental polarity in Nietzsche’s philosophy through the figures of Apollo and Dionysus, understood as primordial forc­es shaping the human condition. Taking The Birth of Tragedy as its point of departure, it reconstructs Nietzsche’s unconventional hermeneutic approach – driven by his aim to influence the present – wherein he revives Greek an­tiquity by deliberately combining it with Schopenhauerian metaphysics and Wagnerian ideals. On the Apollonian side, the essay reveals how Nietzsche’s depiction of the god draws from Winckelmann’s ekphrasis of the Apollo Bel­vedere, balancing Olympian serenity and suppressed fury, “noble simplicity” and the depths of the abyss. Nietzsche also draws on Anselm Feuerbach’s Vatican Apollo, Winckelmann’s and Schopenhauer’s marine imagery, meta­phors from Goethe’s Faust, and Raphael’s Transfiguration. On the Dionysi­an side, the essay traces influences from Horace through Hölderlin, Novalis, and Eichendorff, enriching Nietzsche’s portrayal of intoxication, rapture, and the dissolution of the principium individuationis. In his later works, with the Apollonian fading, the Dionysian transcends aesthetics to become a broad philosophical symbol, encompassing the themes of eternal recurrence and creative destruction. The essay concludes by tracing the partial convergence – foreshadowed by Hölderlin and Heine – between Dionysus and the Crucified in Nietzsche’s final notes amid madness: tragic suffering forms the hidden bond uniting these figures in Nietzsche’s ultimate vision.

Keywords: Nietzsche – Apollonian – Dionysian – The Birth of Tragedy – Winckelmann – Feuerbach – principium individuationis – eternal recurrence – Dionysus and the Crucified – German Romanticism – dissonance

 

Stefano Chiarolla, La verità tra dissolvimento e rivelazione. Luigi Pareyson interprete di Nietzsche

Abstract - The article examines the presence of Nietzsche’s thought in Pareyson’s con­ception of truth (anticipating a consequent study on the concept of freedom). Nietzsche argued for a “personal conditionality” of philosophy—in opposi­tion to the absoluteness of Hegelian thought—which Pareyson incorporates into an “ontological hermeneutics” capable of guaranteeing the revelation of truth in interpretation. This gnoseological theory also draws on the “ideolog­ical conditionality” of thought, as evidenced by Nietzsche’s critique of good conscience, historicism, and the mystification of reason. Pareyson’s accept­ance of these elements underscores a radical demand for truth in Nietzsche’s philosophy, manifested in his call for mistrust, his questioning of the “why,” and his return to the origin. Pareyson’s theory thus attests to Nietzsche’s unex­pected coherence with a “strong,” non-nihilistic concept of truth.

Keywords: Pareyson – Nietzsche – hermeneutics – truth

 

Emanuele Scarpino, La metafora (im)possibile: dire il cambiamento con Nietzsche e Heidegger

Abstract - Turning to new interpretive frameworks for understanding anthropological change makes it necessary to reassess how far language can help us to know and explain things better. In this respect the contributions offered by Nietzsche and Heidegger are particularly relevant. The former (Nietzsche) probes into the potentials of language although he is fully aware of the impossibility of reaching a definition of truth through language, but he highlights the sense of beyond made possible by intuitive metaphor. The latter (Heidegger) identifies in the expressive forms of poetry a founding power through which language becomes a tool of knowledge. Thus, poetry offers the possibility of “naming the gods”; a prerogative that Heidegger believes is denied in common lan­guage usage. The paths traced by the two philosophers point to the need to break past the limits of rigid categories, reopening space for metaphor and poetic language as vital tools for thinking about change, tools able to capture the vibrant and ever-changing nature of reality, moving past the false sense of precision created by endlessly multiplying categories.

Keywords: language – change – metaphor – poetry

 

Alessandro Giosso, Un dittico per il disincanto. Nietzsche interprete di Raffaello in Umano, troppo umano

Abstract - This article examines the transformation of Nietzsche’s aesthetic paradigm in Human, All Too Human (1878-1879) through a synoptic reading of the diptych Das Jenseits in der Kunst (MA I, §220) and Ehrliches Malerthum (MA II, §73). Frequently treated in isolation by scholars (notably Vattimo on §220 and Shapiro on §73), these two aphorisms generate an aporia that is only legible through their reciprocal tension. On the one hand, Nietzsche argues that great “metaphysical” art requires a shared framework of belief and, following the decline of that hori­zon, survives only as “legend”; on the other hand, he offers a secularised interpre­tation of the Sistine Madonna that remains accessible even to “young people with­out faith” thanks to the painter’s Ehrlichkeit and the interpretive work of believers (deuten/hineinlegen). The result is a “double coding” – an asymmetrical cohabita­tion of religious destination and secular reception – that preserves aesthetic access but signals an irreversible cultural cost: the loss of the “common world” in which the image served as a shared horizon. A verification of the Posthumous Fragments (1884-1888) confirms, by way of negation, the singularity of this diptych; after 1879, the question regarding the reception of sacred images under the conditions of disenchantment shifts radically. Consequently, this diptych remains the only locus in Nietzsche’s oeuvre where this issue is framed as a cohabitation of codes. Engaging with Heidegger and Belting, the essay situates Nietzsche’s diagnosis within the broader transition from “cult image” to “art image”, demonstrating that the crisis impacts the public conditions of visibility rather than merely abandoned theological propositions.

Keywords: Nietzsche – Human, All Too Human – Raphael – Sistine Ma­donna – Burckhardt – disenchantment – secularization of images – regimes of the visible – Belting – Wirkungsgeschichte – Ehrlichkeit – double coding – Unpublished Fragments

 

RECENSIONES

Biblia: I. Knohl, La disputa messianica. Farisei, sadducei e la morte di Gesù (P. Di Luccio), 527-530; G. Lori – F. G. Voltaggio, Paolo. Apostolo e maestro della Torah compiuta. Introduzione alle lettere paoline (G. De Virgilio), 530-534; K. R. Snodgrass, Le parabole di Gesù. Contesto e intenti 1, 2, 3 (L. Gasparro), 534-536.

Theologia: C. de Belloy ­– G. de Longcamp, La Révélation aujourd'hui. Foi et raison en dialogue (N. Steeves), 536-538; R. Bischer – A. Toniolo, ed., Ripensare la penitenza. La terza forma del rito: eccezione o risorsa? (A. Lusvardi), 538-540; E. Cattaneo, Apollinare di Laodicea. Tre omelie sulla Pasqua. Introduzione, testo greco, traduzione e commento (H. Pietras), 540-542; M. Guida – D. Solvi, ed., Bonaventura autore spirituale (F. J. Moreno Salán), 543-545; U. H. J. Körtner, Gott verstehen. Aufgaben und Grenzen theologischer Hermeneutik (F. Patsch), 545-546; R. Maiolini, Fede e dubbio. Un viaggio intorno all’uomo, alla sua conoscenza e alla sua relazione con Dio (N. Steeves), 546-548.

Ius Canonicum: C. Morán Bustos, El proceso de nulidad matrimonial. La búsqueda de la verdad y la celeridad procesal (J. L. Sánchez-Girón), 548-550; J. A. Renken, The Penal Law of the Roman Catholic Church. Substantive Law (D. G. Astigueta), 550-551.

Philosophia: C. Martin – M. Tritschler, Verstand und Sinnlichkeit in der klassischen deutschen Philosophie (J. Stoffers), 551-553.

Historia Ecclesiae: C. Bianchi – A. Melloni – M. Proietti, ed., Il Concilio e il Credo 325-2025. Storia e trasmissione dei simboli di Nicea e di Costantinopoli (H. Pietras), 553-556; P. Ribot, L'Institution des premiers moines. Vol. 1; Traité sur les quatre sens de l’Ecriture. Traité sur l’Hérésie et l’incrédulité des infideles. Vol. 2 (G. Grosso), 556-559; I. N. Wood, Europe in Late Antiquity (D. Garribba), 559-561.

 

LIBRI NOSTRI

N. Calduch-Benages – F. Ficco, ed., Il rotolo e il libro. Miscellanea in onore di Jean-Pierre Sonnet in occasione del suo settantesimo compleanno, 563; L. Salviucci Insolera, Il significato cristiano di un’opera d’arte. Rinascimento e Barocco, 563-564.

 

OPERA ACCEPTA

(565-566)