Page - 80 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

81 | www.limina-graz.eu Isabella Guanzini | Ideas of Freedom the reason why an authentically free action – which is tantamount to say a deeply political action – is an action that is capable of starting something new, of generating a new beginning, of interrupting the spontaneously de- generative course of human and natural events by deviating trajectories that are bound towards a deadly automatism. What characterizes word and deed is the power of interruption and “inauguration”, which is able to open up new horizons of meaning, break the nihilistic cycle of violence and in- justice, and revive what has gone lost. “If left to themselves, human affairs can only follow the law of mortal- ity, which is the most certain and the only reliable law of a life spent between birth and death. It is the faculty of action that interferes with this law because it interrupts the inexorable automatic course of daily life, which in its turn, as we saw, interrupted and interfered with the cy- cle of the biological life process. The life span of man running toward death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new, a faculty which is inherent in action like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin. […] Action is, in fact, the one miracle-working faculty of man, as Jesus of Nazareth, whose insights into this faculty can be compared in their originality and unprecedentedness with Socrates’ insights into the possibilities of thought, must have known very well when he likened the power to forgive to the more general power of performing miracles, put- ting both on the same level and within the reach of man” (Arendt 1998, 246–247). The miraculous feature capable of short-circuiting the predictability of existence and making something unexpected happen lives first and fore- most in the biblical taste of an act, which is typical of the free human: for- giveness. If we could not forgive and be forgiven, freeing ourselves and the others from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity of action would remain confined within a single deed. By being forgiven, we are released from the consequences of what we have done, whereby we are given the possibility of a new beginning, as if we were reborn in a new existence , in the fundamental human condition of “plurality” and free- dom. The moral code resulting from the faculty of forgiveness is not con- structed upon a set of relationships each one maintains with oneself but “Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.”