Portraits of the spiritual Seeing in Mark's Gospel. Origen ... - Redalyc

Teología y Vida, Vol. LIV (2013), 307-337
307
Jesus and the Demons: Portraits of the spiritual Seeing in Mark’s
Gospel. Origen, Bonaventure and Ignatius as hermeneutic reading
key of the Gospel
Dempsey Rosales-Acosta
UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS
HUSTON-TEXAS
1. The hermeneutic key: the Spiritual Senses
The expression «spiritual sense» is per se a paradox. The spirit by its proper
essence subsists independently from the body, and from the sensorial means
that the body needs to communicate interactively with the surrounding
world. In antiquity, already the platonic ideas conceive the entity of the
spirit as an entity that needs to liberate itself from the body and all its
functions in order to achieve its own perfection, namely to be what its
nature suppose to be, free from the trap of the corporeal human body.
Therefore where or how is it possible to justify such paradox?
The notion of the spiritual senses in Christianity connects itself
strictly to the event of the Incarnation of Christ. Such event concretizes
the notion that the invisibility of the spiritual world of God becomes a
sensory experience that emphasizes the bodily senses instead of rejecting
them.
The Logos through his Incarnation assumes the humanity, manifesting
and revealing the mystery of God without the confusing or mixing of his
two natures: divine and human. This means that the humanity of Christ
is an instrument or channel of communication of the divine mystery,
namely, his flesh is not the divinity itself since the human nature is
not absorbed by the divine nature 1 . Thus the humanity assumed by the
1
The definition of the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD) confirms this statement:
«Therefore, following the holy fathers, we all with one accord teach men to
acknowledge one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in