What does it mean to be a child? What is the meaning of birth in time and eternity? What would change if modern man stopped defining himself as if he had forgotten he is God’s beloved child? The International Symposium will explore these fundamental questions in relation to theology, philosophical anthropology, and metaphysics. Despite the modern emphasis on childhood as a crucial stage of psychosocial development, modernity has been built on a philosophical rejection of childhood as a category of heteronomous dependence and undeveloped rationality. Faced with the aporia of modern philosophy, the German Catholic philosopher Ferdinand Ulrich (1931-2020) proposed to understand human existence not as subject or Dasein, but as a child within the relationality of God’s and parents’ gift of love. This course will show how fundamental this transformation is by considering from this perspective the theological foundations of philosophical anthropology in Gregory of Nyssa or Augustine, and tracing their refinement in later Christological debates. The early modern Christian metaphysics of John Amos Comenius reveals that the Trinitarian meaning of childhood need not have been lost, as it was in the mainstream of modern philosophy, such as in Descartes, Locke, or Kant. But as later phenomenological explorations of childhood or play reopen the way to a Trinitarian metaphysics of childhood, the child can once again be a child of God, and the image can once again be an image of primordial reality, taking shape in artistic expressions and narratives, and testifying to the mystical reality of the virginal fertility of Mary, who gives created form to the Creator Himself.
