A brief introduction to Existential Personalistic Anthropology*
Existential Personalistic Anthropology is a science of human beings (Anthropology) , seen as Persons¸ as active and creative subjects (Personalistic) that are completely open and connected to the existence of all of reality (Existential), formulated by Prof. Antonio Mercurio and developed by him, along with his students and associates in the Institutes affiliated to the Sophia University of Rome since 1970 throughout Italy and Europe, and more recently in Russia, Asia and the United States.
Existential Personalistic Anthropology proposes to fuse the four perspectives that humanity has always used to observe reality: Religion, Philosophy, Science and Art.
Existential Personalistic Anthropology encourages the creation of a dialectical relationship between these disciplines, to produce, through reciprocal enrichment and mutual correction, the truth-wisdom-joy that humanity needs to live.
Its goal is to use each of these forces as partial and complimentary elements to produce the super-force of unified thinking. In fact, linear thinking, that pertains to the principle of non-contradiction (either something is true or it is false), which Western civilization is founded upon, no longer seems sufficient to allow for a complete understanding of humanity. To the contrary, it can easily transform itself into a schizophrenic way of thinking.
The entire body of Existential Personalistic Anthropology has been absorbed and enriched by Sophia-Analysis, Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art, through a succession of stages. Today Antonio Mercurio refers to the wealth of the whole journey as “Cosmoartistic Anthropology”.
* Excerpted from a text written by Emanuele Chimienti, director of The Ulysseans Institute in Lecce, Italy
Sophia-Analysis
By Prof. Antonio Mercurio
Sophia-Analysis is a school of life based on wisdom. The word Sophia means wisdom in Greek. Sophia-Analysis, therefore, means analysis of wisdom; the wisdom behind the art of thinking and the art of living.
Sophia-Analysis is also an experiential laboratory, whose goal is to attempt to unify in a single energy field the four fundamental forces that have been important throughout human history: religion, art, philosophy and science. The origins of this attempt can be found in Renaissance thinking and it corresponds to the current historical effort of nuclear physicists to unify the four fundamental forces found in nature: the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force, the electromagnetic force and gravity. A unified energy field is not created in our imagination and our thoughts, it is created in concrete reality, with well defined spaces and times.
Sophia-Analysis is an individual and group method that helps human beings to be born and to grow as Persons. According to Existential Personalistic Anthropology, the science behind Sophia-Analysis, a Person is someone who is capable of freely loving him or herself, of loving others and of receiving love. Persons at the highest level are those who have become capable of being artists of their life and of making their life a work of art that creates joy and beauty for themselves and others.
Group Sophia-Analysis is an existential and choral group project that aims at reproducing in a group of human beings, through the years, the same processes (in both a figurative and a real sense) that occur during the birth of a star: condensation, collapse, thermonuclear reaction and transformation of one element of matter into another, with the consequential production of atomic energy and the creation of a star. In the beginning, a star is only a chaotic and shapeless cloud; once it has formed, it is a work of art that emanates light and beauty.
Sophia-Art
By Prof. Antonio Mercurio
How can we accomplish a harmonious synthesis between life and death in our daily lives? There are three historical ways we have defended ourselves from the fear of death: meditating on death, giving death to others, denying death. Anyone who uses these ways will never become an artist of their life. Anyone who is too worried about death will never be able to truly deal with their life.
Sophia-Art proposes to study death like a bull fighter studies a bull, first to tame it and then to defeat it artistically before the applause and enthusiasm of the crowd. The bull stands before the bull fighter, but death does not stand before us: it is within us, and it threatens every instant of our life. Here I am not speaking of biological death, but rather of death that is a castration of life.
Death that is a refusal to love oneself, a refusal to transform oneself, a refusal to give of oneself, a refusal to forgive oneself, a refusal to free oneself and to take flight beyond any type of trauma, any type of conditioning or any type of narcissistic wound, which carries with it a drive for revenge. Humanity’s main problem is not biological death, it is existential death. It is life that is consumed by death without generating any type of perennial life, perennial like any work of art is.
Every artist studies death and faces it, so as to overcome it.
Sophiartists train to do the same thing, taking as their medium not a canvas or marble etc., but the daily experiences that are a part of their own lives in their relationships with themselves, with others, and with life. No one expects us to become a bull fighter, but Life asks us to become artists of our own lives. Not to escape hell nor to escape death, but to bend death and pull out of it the energy it holds within, and with it create new life.
Everything is energy: life is energy, and we all know this. Matter is also energy, and before Einstein we didn’t know this. Death, too, is energy, and artists have known this forever; now, however, Sophia-Art has understood their secret and can teach it to anyone.
Cosmo-Art
By Emanuele Chimienti
Sophia-Art could not stop at the destiny of humanity without asking about the meaning of the universe, which generated it and continues to nourishes it. With Cosmo-Art, the former Artistic I in Sophia-Art realizes that it is called to create a work of art not only of its own life, but also of the life of the entire universe.
This goal can be glimpsed and accomplished only if human beings begin to truly face the two major opposites that they encounter along their journey: pain and death. These are two realities that collide with the concepts of wellbeing and vitality, but if they are faced with art and wisdom, they cease to appear as elements that are anti-life and they begin to reveal themselves as portions of life itself.
Pain and death in this context no longer appear as two realities that are external to and inimical to life, the first one something to be fought against and the second to endure. Instead, they are seen as two parts of life itself.
Cosmo-Art considers the journey of humanity as a part of a greater whole, which is the global purpose of the universe itself. Just like in an orchestra, where a violin is an instrument that is already complete, while it is also a partial element of the orchestra, human beings are both a unified whole in themselves, and an essential part of the universe. With Cosmo-Art, humanity discovers that its ability to create beauty is not only useful to its own life, but is useful to the life of the entire universe, and that such beauty cannot be produced without the cooperative action of the universe as well.
In this viewpoint, human beings are not only artists of their own lives, but they are artists of the life of the universe. Together they intend to create a new type of beauty that is superior to all other types of existing beauty, both in terms of content and of strength. Antonio Mercurio has given the name immortal secondary beauty to this type of beauty, to distinguish it from primary beauty, which is mortal.
All texts were translated from the Italian and adapted by Martha S. Bache-Wiig, Existential Personalistic Anthropologist and founder of the Center for the Development of the Person LLC in Waukesha, WI , USA.
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