Ninth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Christian theology provides some criteria for evaluating the authenticity of the inauguration of a spiritual path, and repentance seems to be the most valuable and unanimous of them among its various denominations. This is so because Christianity regards repentance (or metanoia, from the Greek) as an event of profound and potent transformation in the way by which an individual comes to direct and use his energies and potentialities, since it decentralizes and weakens the confidence he has in himself and in his natural and intellectual powers. Such distrust in self-sufficiency can disclose in the human being a wound, that can, eventually, be actualized as a request for help and a search for the encounter with the Other. The word repentance is commonly understood as the range of psychological phenomena produced by feelings of guilt and regret for mistakes made in the past. However, metanoia (literally “change of mentality”), saves greater and clearer meaning of the completeness of the phenomenon of repentance, since it is the transformation that takes place in the human consciousness after the individual has lost the confidence in itself (through suffering), setting himself in readiness for an intimate encounter with the Other (the only possibility for real constitution). Our present aim is, in dialogue with some great Christian contemporary theologians - Christos Yannaras, Sergey Horujy and John Zizioulas -, to understand the place repentance occupies in Christian theology and in its anthropology, investigating in which ways it inaugurates and sustains an individual in his spiritual path.