We publish a previously unpublished article of Klaus Hemmerle. In it, he unveils the ontological horizon underlying some notes of Chiara Lubich from the summer of 1949 in which she narrates the mystical experience of God lived by her in unity with Igino Giordani and the group of her first companions. The article explores the foundations which found the cardinal points of the charism of unity and are expressed as a new ontology.

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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.”

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The world keeps showing a rich variety of religious traditions, movements and communities: this situation would have amazed many of the observers which – all the way back since the modern turning point and particularly in the West – saw religion as an element condemned to gradually disappearing from the social agenda and from the public debate. The article here presented, enriched by a trans-disciplinary analytical method, aims to offer a first introductive study of the role that religions are assuming in our time. The goal is evaluating some crucial points that mark the impact of religions into the Society today.

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The work intends to focus on one of the main authors of medieval philosophy, Peter Abelard, and re-propose the importance of moral themes in his work, that involve not only aspects of anthropology, but also of ontology which have not yet been thoroughly investigated. In the light of this revaluation and re-proposal of Abelard’s work, the study intends to take as its formal object an ethic of relationship based on two measures: one objective (God and his will), and one subjective (man and his conscience). Studies of Abelard’s moral thought have often insisted on only one of these two measures conceiving so his reflection as “suspended” between two poles, which are contradictory if taken separately: the pole of a subjectivist morality, and the pole of a totally religious morality. Only the category of relation, conceived in the light of Trinitarian revelation – which unceasingly exercises Abelard’s thought – can avoid this risk and open to a hermeneutic that is, at the same time, faithful to the text and attentive to the deeper concerns of Abelard’s thought.

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As the title makes clear («Towards a Monotheism of Communion»), this text offers a very brief account of how, in the people of Israel, God made himself known, also through mystical experiences (of, for example, Moses and Elijah), in his transcendence and immanence. In a time, however, when monotheism was affirmed absolutely in Israel, the Christ event revealed to faith a God who opened to humanity his very own communional intimacy. A rapid consideration of very ancient texts such as 1 Cor 8:6, Phil 2:6ff and Mk 15:39 opens to the reader the Mystery that theology would later develop. In conclusion, a response to the question: Was Jesus a man divinized by the Church?

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We reproduce here lessons held by Dr. Bennie Callebaut and Dr. Alessandro Clemenzia on occasion of the third theological seminar, held at the Sophia University Institute (13–14 June 2013), entitled “Two Charisms in Communion in the Church Today”, where the relationship between the charism of “most high poverty” of Francis and Chiara of Assisi and the charism of unity of Chiara Lubich was explored. This event was organized at the conclusion of a course entitled “The Holy Spirit and charisms”, and represents a step towards further research.

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