My comment about Julia Kristeva

This comment is focused on Julia Kristeva’s book Bisogno di credere. It is singled out in a series of conferences, taken by the writer, about why we need to believe. In particular she starts from Christian religion to find her thesis’ argumentation, even if they are atheistic.

I’ve really appreciated this conferences collection for many reasons.

First I be glad about Kristeva’s respect to the religion: she never goes against it in order to criticize or to destroy its postulates. Instead, she picks the best points evaluating them. 

Then, I agree with her theory about suffering and belief’s strictly connection. Indeed, she deems Christian religion is always remembering us the inner human characteristic of sufferance. This with the means of Jesus’ death: the crucifixion is one of the most horrible and painful deaths, involving both physics and spirit, but it gave him the maximum console by the resurrection. And during his innocent course to death, comes out the obliged pain and death’s passage in order to reach God. Therefore, the pain is life’s sense and the passion is salvation’s representation.

But, why Christ as anyone human must suffer in reaching joy? Christ is the one who’s able to think beyond the finite. On the other hand humankind is unable to do this, but can project itself on Jesus’ figure, following his actions and teachings. Nevertheless, to do this you must be a believer. And being a believer you know you’ll arrive at God.

And yet, who or what (this depends on each one’s ideas) is God? According to Julia Kristeva, he/it is the “infinite intellectual love”. Considering this idea, it’s obviously that we’ve to suffer to reach it, like Christian’s teachings. A sufferance caused by our finiteness that makes us aware of our inability to know. We are totally conscious we won’t know at least in this world, so we hope for the contrary after death. And according to Christians, what we’ll find at that moment? God.

So, Christian religious has posed the basis for whatever life’s theory:  the infinite regards sorrows and death because we’re finite and we’ve to abandon this characteristic.

For me, this has been a big revelation. Indeed many times I thought about God and post mortem without reaching a rational conclusion, now I’ve found one. Of course, as Kristeva said, I’m a human and I’m finite, so I have to believe in something. Believing is what give us a reason to live and carry on, to not let us think about our unimportant position in the world which is able to go on even without us. And even this mine and humans egocentrism is another argumentations which highlights our finiteness and ignorance: we try to be more important than what we really are, and we hope for something that probably won’t happen.

In conclusion, God, Knowledge, Allah or whatever, suffering is in our inner and we’ll always face to it. But to do it we have to believe in something, to get the strength to carry on because we’re so finite that otherwise we’ll be unable to.