The ethos who loves

When reason searches to the end, it finds in its own root the affection expressed by love and, above it, the spirit that is manifested through spirituality. And at the end of its search, it finds mystery. Mystery is not the limit of reason but the unlimited of reason. That is why, mystery continues being mystery in all knowledge that feels challenged to always know more. Scientific reason ratifies for us this journey. It began with matter, reached the atoms, descended even more, to the subatomic elements, to energy and to the magnetic fields, to the field of Higgs, origin of all the fields, to the big-ban, some 15 billion years back.... to end in the quantum vacuum, that is the state of energy in the depts of the universe, that source that feeds all that exists, mysterious, that can not be named, that which well known cosmologist Brian Swimme identifies as the presence of God.

Specifically, mystery is the other. No matter how much we want to know it, to frame it, to define it, it always retreats even more. It is the defying mystery that moves us to step out of ourselves and to place us before him. When the other bursts in front of me, ethic is born. Because the other demands from me a practical attitude of welcoming, or of indifference, or of rejection. The other signifies a proposition that asks for a res-ponse with res-ponsibility.

The fatal flaw of the ethos that seeks is having left almost no room for the other. The paradigm of Western Civilization has always had difficulties with the other. This is why the other is incorporated, subjugated, or destroyed by the West. Denying the other, the West lost the possibility of alliance, dialogue and of mutual learning with the other. Triumphed the paradigm of sameness without difference, in line with Parmenides, the presocratic Greek philosopher .

The other brings up the ethos who loves. Paradigm of this ethos is Christianity in its beginnings, paleo-Christianity. This paradigm is different from official Christianity and its churches, because official Christianity is more influenced in its ethics by Greek teachers than by the message and witness of Jesus. Paleo-Christianity, on the other hand, gives absolute centrality to the love of the other, which to Jesus is identical to the love of God. Love is so central that he who has love has everything. He witnesses to the sacred conviction that God is love (1Jn 4,8), that love will never die (1 Cor 13,8). And that love is unconditional and universal, because it also includes the enemy (Lc 6, 35). The ethos who loves expresses itself in the golden rule, lived by all the traditions of humanity: "love thy neighbor as thyself", "do unto others as you would have others do unto you."

The ethos who loves sets the foundation for a new way of living. To love the other is to give him a reason for being. To exist is pure gratuity. There is no reason to exist. To love the other is to want him to exist because love makes the other important. Gabriel Marcel says: “To love a human being is to say to that person: you will never die, you must exist, you cannot die." When somebody or a cause becomes important to the other, a value is born that mobilizes all vital energies. This is why when someone loves rejuvenates and has the sensation of starting life anew. Love is an everlasting source of values.

Only the ethos who loves can meet the present challenges because it includes everyone. It makes the distant, nearer, and the nearer brothers and sisters. We take care of all that we love. This is how we enter to the ethos who cares.