The Christmas Hedgehog

The hedgehog is a creature that naturally tends to curl up into itself and make its navel the sole object of its interest. It finds nothing external more appealing. For this reason, Saint Augustine saw in the hedgehog the sad image of narcissistic man, incapable of loving anything that doesn't reflect his own image. This man loves reflexively. incurvatus in se...curled up in self-indulgence. Such love, says Saint Augustine, betrays the true nature of love, which is altruistic. The essence of love is to love the image of the beloved in myself, not my own image in the beloved. Love is the self-transcendence of the lover in the beloved. To love is, in a certain way, to become the one who loves. It is necessary, therefore, to look at what we love, because that is what we are.

Obviously, none of this applies to small things. Small things can be known without loving them; but human affairs, if not loved, are not included in our field of interest, and remain unknown.

For Saint Augustine, the self-reinforcing curve of the hedgehog's love is the truest meaning of sin. Anyone who perverts love by making it selfish is a sinner.

This image of the hunched hedgehog has a long tradition within Christianity. Many medieval and Renaissance theologians maintained that the path of love is precisely the path of knowledge. Thus, an emotionally detached intellect would be incapable of knowing the truth of humanity. Perhaps it would possess integrity, but lack charity.

Saint Bonaventure maintains that we were created to enjoy our own gaze, but if we bend inward, we reduce our visual capacity to the point of blocking the very light. The person turned inward is incapable of contemplating and loving the world. Only the person who steps outside themselves can glimpse the external horizons and question the cause of what they see. The person confined within the cloister of their ego is, like the pig, an animal incapable of lifting its head. Saint Bonaventure thus distinguishes between thehomo incurvatus in terram (whose soul is closed and mute) and theHomo erectus in coelum (who raises his eyes to heaven). This distinction, which becomes a common theme among theologians, is taken up by Luther, who also sees the sinner as a man "bent over himself." His sin is having chosen to be solitary and not communal. Sin, from this perspective, would be the voluntary poverty of ties with others.

Upon leaving himself, theHomo erectus It opens itself to the experience of verticality and light (is there anything more beautiful in this world?) and behaves —the image comes from Plato— like an inverted tree, because its roots do not sink into the darkness of the earth, but rise towards the sky, seeking wisdom in the direction of the ideas.

Life has found in the upright human being a way to free itself from the temporal circumstances that erode all things in this world and to rise above itself in search of a light of which all other light is but a substitute. In this way, we, so fragile, so finite, so mediocre, can contemplate—or at least glimpse—our own lives in the light of meaning. Our feet are on the ground, subject to our poverty that each morning invites us to begin again with a promise of change that each night we feel betrayed, but standing tall, we can lift our heads and intuit some sliver of eternity. Although it may seem paradoxical, thanks to us—inhabitants of a planet that, in the words of Carl Sagan, is a mote of dust suspended in a ray of cosmic sunlight—nature is coming to know itself, following the voracious yearning that it has placed in our hearts and that tirelessly pushes us to look beyond, toward it.

Without a man who has overcome the hedgehog's temptation, nature would know nothing about itself.

This is what we celebrate at Christmas: the exceptional nature of what we can become if we dare to look so high, so high that it is possible to see a star placed above a manger.

We often say that love is blind. It's not true. It's clairvoyant, as the shepherds of Bethlehem discovered. The most relevant aspects of the people around us only become visible when we illuminate them with a loving gaze. It happens then that we feel that at that precise moment we have begun to have eyes and that until then we had been blind. For this reason, education is, fundamentally, a habituation of seeing.

This, my friends, is my way of saying "Merry Christmas!"