Summaries
Daniela Caldiroli - Paths to wisdom
Wisdom takes a significant position in P. Beauchamp's work and thought, which are characterized by a truly original approach. A concept which designates the unity across the world, Wisdom is characterised by its relation to life and time: every day wisdom, ageless wisdom, Biblical wisdom which spans and shares the realities common to living creatures from the dawn of time. Through this Wisdom the specific meets the universal; Israel meets nations, a meeting which happens neither under the sign of adaptation nor the sign of confrontation. But what is Wisdom? Its riddle is that it propounds itself as a riddle. Stemming from God and returning to Him, it plays a role in the mediation between God and the World, between God and men. Without ever leaving human experience which goes through life, the body, the meeting between man and woman and the ultimate challenge: death. Between the origin and the end, between the first and last texts from the Old Testament, Wisdom draws a path and is a path itself.
André Wénin - From primeval comfort to comfort conquered over death - Violence, law and justice in P. Beauchamp's writings
From primeval comfort to comfort conquered over death - Violence, law and justice in P. Beauchamp's writings. Violence is a question often raised throughout P. Beauchamps writings. Even though he himself has supplied no synthesis like those he proposed on law or the connection between both the old and new Testaments. Starting from the way this author shows that the question of violence arises right from the first pages of the Bible where it inserts itself on the mission to control the universe that the Creator assigned to Mankind, this paper endeavours to identify the structure type in which P. Beauchamp sets the position of violence. Connected to the question of idols and God's image, violence derives from an anthropological error that the law attempts to contain while at the same time giving it some space to the point of feeding it occasionally. Furthermore according to the Bible, God himself is not without violence. To begin with, He assumes this violence to avoid the worst, destruction, but also in the hope that by joining Man even up to his own violence He will be able to save him from it. Jesus takes a foremost role in the process: through what P. Beauchamp calls His law He proposes a hereafter in which He invites each person to freedom; and in His singular adventure as a man crushed by hate, He converts destructive violence into the violence of love.
Bertrand Pinçon - Creation according to night and day Psalms
In the first part of his book night and day Psalms, Paul Beauchamp brings up creation as can be observed through large extracts from the Psalter. Creation taken as all that is not God is not sung for itself but from a prayer, that of the man who experiences it through his being-in-the-world. This point of view, so called point of Creation in this case fits him into a triple relation to creation: a close creation in which the psalmist is personally involved in a relation between divine and animal, which is controlled by a law; a distant creation which pledges him into the collective experience of a people whose account is the living memory of a creation which is still incomplete; a creation which, wishing to accomplish itself, does not fear confronting the test of evil to allow salvation ever aspired for. By night or by day, on feast days as on ordinary days of life, psalm songs are a witness to this salvation which is still expected and already offered by God for all his creation since time began. In this way, praise sung through psalms upholds all its promises: it is positive memory of the blessings of a creation from the dawn of time and the hope of a creation in the making. Under these conditions it is no concern of the past. It is for today and forever in a longing born by prayer.
Isabelle Chareire - Wisdom, the Cross and the Spirit with Paul Beauchamp
A pneumatology and a narrative approach of Trinitarian symbolics are an echo to the central character of the theme of Wisdom in Beauchamp's work. The passage from one Testament to the other is that of the dyad of the One and the Wisdom towards the triad: through God's decision to take flesh in the weakness and singularity of the child in the manger, Wisdom is split into a new dyad: the Word and the Spirit. Then the way in which Beauchamp deals with this new dyad is scrutinized: in order to speak of the Word, he concentrates on the Passion narrative and on the sign of the cross and to evoke the Spirit, he uses the figure of Mary and the metaphors of feminine character. In the end, the article stresses the proximity of Beauchamp with some aspects of Boulgakov's thinking.
Philippe Abadie - Paul Beauchamp: a hermeneutics of Testaments' unity
This short bio-bibliographical essay wonders about what unifies Paul Beauchamp's biblical work and finds this centre in a hermeneutics of the unity of the Old and New Testament. Above all a reader of the Scriptures, Beauchamp looks for side roads beyond the exegesis of this or that pericope. This gives his work a particular aesthetics and tonality the proceedings of which have patristic reading in common. It draws from Wisdom a principle of theological reading. The essay also brings to light a second paradigm that Beauchamp names as deuterosis and which is the folding of the discourse upon itself, this quest for a vital center going from one Testament to the other.
Pascal Marin - Paul Beauchamp philosopher or Universal scholar at the Bible school
The article pursues the philosophical side of Paul Beauchamp's work, this philosophical inspiration of biblical matters, where the exegete moves forward as an explorer. It appears to us that this work is in no way marginal. Beauchamp the philosopher can substantiate his opinion upon the reflection on the present condition of western man as this condition has entered an era of uncertainty. From antiquity to the present day, in our western world where natural philosophers' reason prevails, the face of Man brought to light by the bible specialist is often unappreciated.