Luoghi e modalità della riflessione filosofica nei Moralia in Iob di Gregorio Magno

The aim of the thesis is to propose a philosophical reading of Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Iob. With the exception of a volume published in the early 2000s which mainly highlights its Christological-ecclesiological character, the work has never been studied in its entirety, but rather analyzed in single aspects (e.g. the Gregorian interpretation of precise verses), rarely considered from the philosophical point of view. The study of the Gregorian text is divided into four parts, corresponding to as many chapters. The first section of the work is dedicated to the genesis and structure of the Moralia in Iob, considered particularly significant for the construction of the hypothesis of attributing a philosophical value to the work; specifically, the interweaving of the author's account of the personal crisis, the narration of the crisis of the sixth century and that of the salvific role of the lectio comunitaria, analyzed starting from the dedicatory epistle of the Moralia, provides the coordinates for understanding the link between the work and the context in which it is written, which justifies the manifestation, in the writing, of an extreme sensitivity to the suffering of the human condition. This element contributes, together with the stratified structure of the work that makes it an articulated reflection on human existence and its relationship with the divine, to the legitimacy of a philosophical reading of the writing, which is specifically proposed starting from the identification, in the text of the Moralia, of passages in which Gregorian reflection is centered on issues that are now normally considered philosophical: language, soul, body, knowledge, the mandivine relationship, ordo, time, being, will, the relationship between grace and free will, the problem of evil and sin, research, the reason-faith relationship, the relationship with otherness. An analysis of the text of the Moralia conducted in this sense occupies the entire second section of the work, in which the content of the Gregorian writing is divided on the basis of the structure commonly associated with the book of Job. For the analysis of each passage considered significant, due to the complexity that emerged from the first section of the work, its relationship with the verse or verses commented is taken into account. This is useful to establish to what extent Gregorian reflections depend on the commented text and, in some specific cases, at what level of interpretation (literal, allegorical or moral) they are placed. The overall consideration of the results of this survey makes it possible, in the third section of the work, to reconstruct the positions taken by Gregory on the issues in question and to highlight the peculiarities: specifically, it is deemed appropriate first of all to establish those that in the course of the examination have been repeatedly considered the most general 'frames' within which Gregory has almost always inserted his reflection, that is to say the relationship between the interior and exterior dimensions, the relationship between creator and creature and the relationship with otherness. The issues, organized into sections on the basis of mutual affinities, are subsequently associated with the relevant macro-area (or macro-areas) and analyzed both from the point of view of the contents of Gregorian reflection and from that of the methodology used. In the last section of the work the point is made on the actual role attributable to philosophy in relation to the Gregorian experience: first of all it is considered appropriate to provide a brief excursus on the status of philosophy in the Early Middle Ages, certainly less defined than the value that the discipline will acquire with the birth of universities; secondly, a terminological investigation into the presence of the terms philosophi and philosophia in Gregorian production reveals the dominant presence of a certain type of condemnation of philosophy (common to other medieval authors) and a single occurrence of vera philosophia expression, praised as an exemplary behavior assumed by Job and for which a value linked to the correct use of language is hypothesized; thirdly, the emphasis is placed on the fact that the idea of philosophy which, in the analysis of the Moralia proposed, constitutes the criterion for the selection and juxtaposition of passages judged to be philosophical, does not in any case correspond to the conception that the author had of philosophia, which makes it necessary, in the last part of the thesis, to establish to what extent Gregorian reflection was judged philosophical in the following medieval centuries, up to the approach reserved for Gregory's writings in the context of contemporary historiography, in particular in some textbooks of the history of medieval philosophy. Finally, an investigation into the presence (or absence) of Gregory in them makes it possible to define the reading of the Moralia proposed as an 'extension' of an attempt already started but not in-depth, for which reference to the studies on Gregory already remains unavoidable. They are collected, together with the sources, in the final section dedicated to the bibliography. [edited by Author]