There is a part of the body that the Christian iconographic tradition has almost always neglected. Not the face, on which the light of eternity has been projected for centuries. Not the hands, full of thaumaturgical and symbolic gestures, but the feet. Those walking feet; that sink into the sand; that skim the water; which, dusty, make the Word move; who are pierced. It is from this detail, both anatomical and theological, that “A Passo d’uomo. A story of Jesus with his feet on the ground” (Marsilio Editori), the new volume by Father Antonio Spadaro, former director of Civiltà Cattolica and one of the most authoritative voices of contemporary Catholicism, begins, presented yesterday afternoon during one of the meetings of the “Consonanze” review, promoted by Entopan and Feltrinelli in Caraffa di Catanzaro.
The perspective from below
The choice to read the Gospels through the lens of the movement is not a rhetorical device. It is a precise theological choice. Spadaro reverses the perspective: instead of looking at the face of Jesus and his halo, and therefore at his divine dimension, the author proposes to start from the feet and work up. It is a change of posture that has profound consequences on the reading of the mystery of the Incarnation. True God and true man, as the Creed underlines: but Christian reflection has historically lingered a lot on the first adjective and much less on the second. Remembering that Jesus has feet that hurt, that get dirty, that stumble, means remembering that transcendence does not abolish gravity – in the physical sense of the term – but passes through it. And it means not losing sight of the human nature of the son of God.
Patti Smith and the Grünewald Polyptych
For a moment of the evening it seemed like we were in one of Gianni Minà’s famous stories, when the journalist remembered apparently incredible and irreconcilable moments and companies. Thus, Spadaro is the point of conjunction – by chance, he was keen to specify, rather than by deliberate desire – of worlds that in the collective imagination are light years apart. From Pope Francis to Martin Scorsese, from Michelangelo Pistoletto to Patti Smith. And it is the American artist who is entrusted with the preface of Antonio Spadaro’s volume. Not an editorial marketing operation, but rather a choice consistent with the structure of the book, born during a long New York breakfast. Smith focuses his reflection starting from the “Isenheim Altarpiece” by Matthias Grünewald, the pictorial masterpiece of the early sixteenth century in which a crucifixion is represented that allows nothing to idealization, which shows a Christ with torn flesh and feet twisted in a grimace of pain, «almost a “Scream” by Munch but with the feet of Christ», explains Spadaro. They are feet that have nothing of the Greco-Roman sculptural perfection, nor of the hieratic serenity of oriental icons. They are human feet, wounded, real. And it is precisely there, in that raw image, that we find the most authentic closeness of God to the human experience.
The movement as a theological category
«It is a book of action, not of spiritual reflection», says Spadaro. At the center of the essay is the movement, understood as a theological category, not just a biographical one. Spadaro returns it to the reader through a deliberately cinematic lens: Jesus’ actions in the Gospel are described without comment, as sequential shots, letting the gestures do the talking. In the Gospel Jesus is never still. He walks, crosses borders, moves from one village to another, enters houses, gets on boats, walks while talking and above all he talks while walking. This perpetual motion is not a background narrative detail: it is the very form of its revelation. Movement implies relationship, transformation, risk. Anyone who walks can fall, can trip, can hurt themselves. And it is exactly this vulnerability – so human, so far from the image of the triumphant Christ – that is the theological heart of the book. And it is also the key to understanding what makes this book capable of speaking to those who do not believe.