Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

108 BRUNO HIDBERThere is still another banalization also caused by the fragmentationwhich the world of images transmits into the spaceof postmodern reality. The mass media creates the impressionthat only the evil transmitted in their images actually exists.The terrible crime of September eleventh was transmitted thousandsof times and so it was stamped in the memory of peopleeverywhere as a frightful evil. The equally frightful massacreswhich occurred in the same period in Algeria, in Burundi, inthe Congo, and elsewhere, did not find anything like the samerecognition in the world of media images. These evils thenappear as remote, marginal and trivial.Friedrich Nietzsche, with his prophetic genius and hisaffinity for the absurd, had prophesized this tendency to banalizationand indifference with the image of the last man:Behold! I show you the last man. What is love? What is creation?What is longing? What is a star? – so asked the last manand blinked. The earth had then become small and on it therehopped the last man who made everything small. His species isineradicable, like that of the ground-flea; the last man livedlongest. We have discovered happiness – say the last men andblink thereby... They have their little pleasures for the day, andtheir little pleasures for the night: but they have a regard for theirhealth. We have discovered happiness, – say the last men andblink thereby. 375. The Temptation and the Challenge for TheologyWhen it comes to speaking about this evil in an explicitlytheological way, the situation appears paradoxical. The problemof evil as such, without a doubt, should have a place in theologicalconcerns and reflections. It raises – perhaps more than anyother topic – the question of the ultimate meaning of humanexistence and thus it inevitably raises the question of God, Hisexistence and His action in human history. Walter Kasper isright in observing that “whereas modern theology’s partner in37Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. ThomasCommon (New York: Carlton House, 1905), 32-33.