“You in me and I in you:” The Rhythm of Being of/in God in Klaus Hemmerle’s Last Work

Theologie als Gespräch mit Klaus Hemmerle

Abstract

This article explores Klaus Hemmerle’s posthumous book Leben aus der Einheit, in which is collected the mature fruit of his thought as a ouverture that signals a new beginning of thinking “one in the other”, according to the Trinitarian rhythm of that love consumed in unity that is God himself living in our midst. The author briefly summarizes the intellectual path tread by Hemmerle, in the light of the themes of novelty and of beginning, so as to gather in them the invitation to an ontology that springs from the revelation of God-Trinity in Christ and in his incarnation in history. He then identifies three moments of Hemmerle’s proposal as “movements” in a symphony of unity that finds its leitmotiv in the trinitarian rhythm of a reciprocity in a “We, which doesn’t dissolve the I or the You, but constitutes them.” The first movement, which listens to the ”signs of the times”, describes the “phenomenon of our age”. The second, in a theoretical key, delineates the gift and commitment of “dilatation of the (modern) cogito”, that is, “the entry (of the I) into the space of the Trinity. The third, finally, is the practical ”journey”, which makes this novelty possible: “that which comes from Heaven, must grow on the earth.”