Tongue, World and Injustice

A Commentary on the expression: “ἡ γλῶσσα πύρ, ὁ κόσμος τῆς ἀδικίας” (St, 3:6)

Abstract

As a commentary on a fragment from the Letter of James (3:6, where it is said: “the tongue is fire, a world of injustice”) I argue what are the minimal conditions which made possible the transmission of faith inside a community. Just as the faith should be made culture, in Saint John Paul II words, also it must be transmitted from generation to generation and spread all over the world. It is true that, as Aristotle says, there are a lot of forms in which the human sociability could be carried out, but there are also, some characters that are invariable and common to all of them. All of these characters have its source, first, on the essential categories of the human essence (faculties, capacities, or powers for Aristotle, existentials for Heidegger in Being and Time), and second, from the specific forms in which what is known (beliefs, opinions, evidence, etc.) could be transmitted inside a group. The minimal conditions that must be fulfilled to be possible the communication of the faith inside the community are two: 1) the assumption that the human being is capable of truth (capax veritatis), but also of falsity; and 2) the statement that falsity is an evil which destroys the community, because it makes impossible to share any form of knowledge. To sum up, this paper shows a way to think how the possibility of the communication of truth and faith is based on human rationality, sociability, and morality.