From Barbarism to Freedom: Religious Discourse as Mediation between Theology and Philosophy

Abstract

Speaking about barbarism is probably a cliché. Man, once expelled from Paradise, fell prey to his biological instincts, forgetting the condition he had before eating the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The expulsion from Eden, following the violation of God’s Word, marked the beginning of all the sufferings that man would endure throughout his life, until he returns to the earth from which he was made: “by the sweat of your face you will eat your bread, until you return to the earth from which you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Patriarhia Română, 2018, Facerea 3, 19). This loss of the Edenic status was not merely a divine punishment, but rather a fundamental rupture between man and the sacred order of creation. Since then, human existence has unfolded in a tense plane between memory and forgetfulness, between the need for transcendence and the fall into the biological, between the aspiration toward good and the recurrence of evil. Barbarism is no longer defined solely by violent acts, but by the continual reactivation of a fallen nature that ignores the spiritual and moral-ontological coordinates of being. In this sense, the barbaric human is not a figure external to civilization, but one that dwells in the very heart of the human condition, ready to manifest itself whenever reason is overshadowed by instinct and conscience is reduced to mere reaction. Thus, the fall from Paradise is not a concluded event, but a repeatable paradigm in the history of humanity.