The incarnation and education as acts of weaving: Towards a comprehensive approach to schooling from a Christian perspective

Abstract

This article proposes the Incarnation as a theological principle that illuminates the educational task, especially for Christian-oriented schools. Initially, I develop keys to understanding the Incarnation as an integrating event that can help us understand education as a comprehensive phenomenon. Then, I explore implications: First, based on the symbolism of the Incarnation as act of weaving, I consider education as a set of processes that allows the emergence of the divine-human vocation; second, studying can be conceived as a tool for a comprehensive weaving of a person’s true self. I discuss the validity of the implications of this perspective.

Keywords

incarnation comprehensive education school ecumenism

Introduction

This article explores the Incarnation as a theological principle that illuminates and enriches the educational task as a comprehensive phenomenon, which refers to the notion of an integral education of the human being as a whole. The article is a theological–philosophical exercise that seeks to show the Incarnation event’s implications for the practical sphere of Christian education and schooling. It is theological because it is linked to both an event and a principle of Christianity, therefore it draws on reflections rooted in the Christian tradition. In this way, it is an exercise of dialogue with the theology of education (Francis, 1990; Hodgson, 1999; Hull, 1977; Pirner et al., 2020; Ramsey, 1976; Watts, 2009). It is also philosophical because, in a specific section of the paper, I draw on the reflections of Simone Weil, whose arguments are nurtured by Platonic philosophy (Morgan, 2020; Roberts, 2021). My attempt will be to take Weil’s philosophical arguments and show their validity for a Christian comprehensive approach to education founded on Incarnation.

In educational literature, there is a discussion about “a hunger for education that fosters a more comprehensive development” (Wortham et al., 2020: 407). This hunger for comprehensiveness leads to a set of approaches in education in order to develop a well-being-focused education: “moral education” (Halstead, 2010), “character education” (Kristjánsson, 2015), “whole child education” (Miller, 2010), “social and emotional learning” (Weissberg, 2019), “civic education” (Hahn, 2010), “flourishing education” (Kristjánsson, 2016, 2017), and education for “21st century skills” (Care et al., 2018). However, to evaluate how comprehensive these approaches are for a well-being-focused education, their assumptions about human nature and human development must be examined. I take the following statement as a key point for my exploration: “It is crucial to attend to multiple aspects of young people’s development, holistic approaches argue, but not as a set of discrete competencies disconnected from each other. Our emotions, politics, morals, and relationships connect with and depend on each other. A comprehensive approach to well-being asks educators to help young people integrate these aspects of themselves” (Wortham et al., 2020: 410). As the quote suggests, the human being is conceived as an integrated whole.

In the context of this discussion, my article aims to contribute to the search for the foundations of a more comprehensive and integral approach to education from a Christian perspective. My claim is that the event of a God becoming human flesh allows us to understand and illuminate the profound interrelationship between education, cultural preparation, the development of wisdom, and the knowledge of what makes us human. I will develop this claim by proposing Incarnation as the guiding principle for Christian-inspired educational institutions. As I will show, the Incarnation covers and embraces the human phenomenon of education—if God embraces humanity as his way of being, he also embraces education as a human act. In this manner, the Incarnation reconfigures education as a specific way to make each person’s divine image emerge (including corporeality). Then, due to the Incarnation, educational conditions and processes imply a way of life that prepares us to live as this divine-human¹, both given and shown by the Incarnation.

The focus is on the event of the Incarnation for two reasons: First, because it is a very specific event of the Christian faith, this distinguishes it from other theological-religious proposals. In Christianity, God radically takes the human form. God becomes an actual human being and maintains his divine nature (this theological statement is critically discussed in Hick, 1993; I have found most convincing and useful the approach developed in Sigurdson, 2016, even if, as I will show in the next section, my position is more aligned with the wider Christian tradition).

The second reason is linked to the first. As Tertullian (1960) concisely and forcefully said, “caro cardo salutis est,” which means “flesh is the foundation of salvation.” This phrase expresses the radical implications of the Incarnation. If God takes a human form in his very nature and being, it means that the definitive fullness of human beings (and of all creation) includes human flesh. God’s Incarnation itself is an embrace of human reality in its complexity, plurality, and in all its facets: Jean Baptiste Metz (1962) has made these implications explicit and so have more recent studies on the subject (Otten, 2013a, 2013b).

Some contributions about the Incarnation and education have already sought to shed light on pedagogical activity (Iselin and Meteyard, 2010; Smith, 1997; Wineland, 2005). In addition, an article taking a practical theology approach has explored the visualization of the Incarnation in an educational environment and context (Kells, 2020)². Quite recently there have been contributions regarding the task of integration of faith and pedagogical activity (Cairney, 2020, 2018; Galioto and Marini, 2021) that attend to the unity between faith and pedagogy. This set of literature opens a path for the development of new theological and philosophical reflections that establish more explicit links between theology and schooling, in search of a more comprehensive and integrated approach from a Christian perspective. The Incarnation shows a novel meaning in the Revelation, but it does not dismiss the integrating and restoring roles of creation, the passion (cross and resurrection), and the eschatological dimension. It has been proposed that in the divine Revelation, the Incarnation, Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ represent the definitive pedagogical act of Jesus Christ (Renczes, 2008). From this viewpoint, I want to emphasize how “in the Incarnation, God displayed the full potential of the human being and emphasized his being capax dei. On the other hand, with death and resurrection, he condemned and destroyed the sin that had invaded his beloved creature” (Renczes, 2008: 256). Based on this, for a comprehensive education to exist, integration is key. Integration refers to the educational task of considering the whole human being as the structuring axis of any kind of educational proposal.

Now let me show how integration in education is understood from a Catholic background. The document Educating Together in Catholic Schools states that,

[i]ndeed, the school, faithful to its vocation, presents itself ‘as a place for the integral education of the human person through a clear educational project that has its foundation in Christ,’ aimed at creating a synthesis between faith, culture, and life. (p. 4)

As the quotation indicates, integration is the core of the Catholic school’s educational proposal (Galioto and Marini, 2021; Grace, 2002, 2016; Schuttloffel, 1998). I think that (and it will be my attempt to demonstrate in this paper) this integration can be better understood from Christianity’s fundamental integrating event: the Incarnation. Exploring the educational implications of this revelatory event provides a fruitful framework for understanding Catholic education’s integrating tasks which can be extended to all Christian-oriented schools. That is, the argument unfolds a Christian and ecumenical potential.

The article’s structure is as follows: The first section discusses how the Incarnation offers a theological assumption about human nature, as a beloved and restored whole. Then I address two implications of using the Incarnation as a theological event to understand the comprehensive educational task. The first implication, based on weaving imagery used to represent the Incarnation in the primitive Church, is that education generates conditions and processes so that the humanity of each one of us, knitted and reconfigured by the Incarnation, truly manifests itself. This reconsideration contributes to enriching two contemporary theoretical-practical proposals for a comprehensive education with a specifically Christian vision. One of these is the concept of “flourishing” as a purpose for educational activity. Flourishing presumes “that students already possess in nascent forms [which help] them continue to develop the character qualities that are intrinsically related to (i.e. constitutive of) ‘eudaimonia’” (Kristjánsson, 2017: 88). The other is character education. Character education is a pedagogical framework that poses a set of means in order to reach flourishing (see Jubilee Center, 2017 and an extended exploration of the approach in Arthur, 2020).

The second implication is the contribution of the Incarnation for rethinking the activity of studying at school more comprehensively. In a dialogue with some of Simone Weil’s reflections, I show that the act of studying is a way to carry out the educational task by weaving divine humanity in students. In the conclusion, I briefly discuss why this proposed framework of understanding, together with its practical implications, is a stimulus to reflect on education as a comprehensive and integrating phenomenon in Christian schools.

The event of the incarnation as a framework for understanding “integration” and “comprehensive” in education

The characterization of the integrative and comprehensive dimensions from a Christian perspective supposes a theological approach to integration. I suggest that such integration is founded upon and emerges from Incarnation.

The logos became flesh (Jn 1,14). This is the proposition that best expresses Incarnation in a way that shows the implications of this proposition in the educational field. On the one hand, the pre-Socratics characterize logos by its intelligibility. This means that logos is something that can be understood by human beings. In the Bible, this idea is indicated by the association of logos with wisdom. Logos is wisdom that creates the world; therefore, the world is something knowable. On the other hand, if the logos, that dimension or principle that combines life and all things, becomes flesh, it means God himself makes a radical adherence to everyday life explicit (Ravasi, 2019). The logos is expressed, not as a theoretical-rational or merely linguistic word, but as flesh, as the reality of the world, of the here and now, becoming the body of Christ. As Rupnik (2019) points out, the incarnated logos will unite with the body forever and remain corporeal. These characteristics have implications for a more comprehensive education: at this stage, we can see that Incarnation includes reason and the body.

John’s Gospel continues to speak of the Incarnation in the following way: the logos became flesh and came to dwell in our midst. The logos, God himself, who dwells in the flesh of the world as a concrete person, puts up a tent among us and camps with us. This means that a divine act enhances the human act of inhabiting the world by inserting everyday life into God’s life. This nuance of the Incarnation has consequences for the understanding of education: Everyday life is emotional, affective, practical, social, reasonable, aesthetic, and physical. In light of these arguments, I propose that the Incarnation is the manifestation from God that knowledge, and therefore education, can be integrated into all aspects of life, comprehensive, and holistic.³ Specifically, the Incarnation shows and reveals the divine-human vocation (Rupnik, 2014) of the human being; it is an event that opens a process responding to this divine-human vocation: it is a gift to accept and at the same time a process of becoming, an embodied task.

This offers an important background for the aforementioned issue of how human nature is conceived in the educational field, as approaches for a comprehensive education “vary widely in their views of human nature, their visions of a good life, and their prescriptions for educational practice” (Wortham et al., 2020: 406). I propose that the Incarnation implies a holistic and unified view of the human being: through the Incarnation, the corporal, aesthetic, emotional, and rational dimensions are spiritual as well, yet the Incarnation event does not exclude any dimension of humanity; on the contrary, it exalts our humanity. In fact, all these human dimensions are aspects of the divine image in each one of us, as persons called to be in relation to each other. In this way, the Incarnation offers a specific key understanding for a comprehensive education. Through the Incarnation, education as a human phenomenon becomes a personal event that encompasses the flesh of the world and of each person too. My claim takes as a fundamental point of reference the conception by which the act/event of the Incarnation is the beginning of the restoration of the original divine project for the human being before sin. With this act, the Father, once again, makes humanity noble in each of his sons and daughters.

I think that this event has a double value: on one hand, it has an anthropological implication, because it shows that the human being’s structure as a whole has a divine dignity and has been enabled to know God. With the union with human nature, God, the Father has communicated to the human being the possibility of finding him through the entirety of his anthropological structure. I pick up here the classical vision that the logos, by incarnating, opens itself up to rational knowledge by the human being (Renczes, 2008). I complement this approach, arguing that the entire human corporeal, sensible and rational structure can be educated and divinely woven in its integrality. This statement is based in the aisthesis theia approach of the Byzantine theologian Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) (Cacciari, 2015). This approach values sensitivity as a way to know God. Therefore, since the Incarnation, God has also embraced education itself.

On the other hand, there is a more specific Christian and personalistic implication: Incarnation is an act that reveals to us that human beings are God’s sons and daughters. Since each one has been created as image and likeness to the Father and that is typical of each person,⁴ the Incarnation shows that every individual human being is created in the image of God in body and soul. That is why Saint Irenaeus can affirm: “the glory of God is the living human being.” I understand this sentence in this way: the human being is restored in a new life through the Incarnation as body and soul, I mean as an integrated personal whole. This argument appears highly pertinent to presenting the incarnation as a focal point for a holistic understanding of education. The universalistic side of the argument requires a path of discovery and recognition throughout life, which can be characterized as educational. The specifically Christian side of the argument implies faith in a human subject (which is theologically celebrated in baptism) and pedagogical processes too. Now, in the following section, I will discuss some practical implications of Incarnation for a comprehensive and holistic understanding of educational practice.

Incarnation and education: Implications for a comprehensive approach

Incarnation and education: Considering both as an act of weaving

This section discusses some implications of assuming the Incarnation as the guiding principle of an integral and comprehensive education from a Christian perspective.

Ancient Christian iconography, in the 5th century A.D. in Rome and in the primitive eastern Church (Govekar, 2016; Jensen, 2015; Kitzinger, 1977; Spain, 1979; Vuong, 2020) metaphorically represents the Incarnation as a fabric. The early Christian iconographic representations show how in the Incarnation, the logos changes from a scroll (or the wisdom of the logos, not yet incarnate) to a skein of wool, a symbol of woven flesh. This imagery is also seen in the phrase “You have woven me in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 138), in which the figure of the tissue expresses a life that assumes human flesh. The symbol of a skein allows us to think of education as weaving. In the Early Christian iconography that portrays the progenitors after the original sin (Kitzinger, 1977; Moffitt, 1993; Volbach, 1961; see also Govekar, 2016 and especially Rupnik, 2019), the skein is also present, which recalls Mary’s skein in other paintings of Annunciation (Kitzinger, 1990: 174).⁵ Even Eve, then, is represented in the act of weaving. Eve too, like Mary, is a weaver! This connection between Mary and Eve shows us that there are two different ways of “weaving,” and this is paramount from an educational point of view. In the first, there is an autonomous weave to “become someone,” while the second one lets the Holy Ghost weave, like Mary, who, by weaving the body of the Son of God, wove her sanctification (not coincidentally the skein is red, and red in ancient iconography is the color of divinity, see Kitzinger, 1977; Volbach, 1961).⁶ In the educational field, especially in Christian schools, this raises the question of how much we open the educational act to the action of the Spirit. In addition, this kind of statement invites us to reflect on how educational proposals can be focused only on the autonomous human self.

A homily by James from Sarug (451–521, a Syrian bishop, theologian and one of the most important Syriac authors, called “Flute of the Spirit and Harp of the believing Church”) on Christmas (Brock, 1982) can be particularly enlightening for understanding the role of an education with a Christian imprint as opposed to self-referential educational proposals. He references Adam and Eve, who dressed in the “robe of glory (or light)” but were stripped of it because of their sin and clothed themselves with leaves. In his Incarnation, then, the Son clothes human nature with the robe of glory. In baptism, Christians become dressed in Christ’s clothes, in anticipation of the final resurrection before the mantle of glory proper to the eschatological Paradise. In fact, the theme of weaving related to the Incarnation in the Eastern Church is associated with the Incarnation as the starting point of the renewal of humanity and of creation that culminates in the resurrection (Brock, 1992).

Given the above, it is possible to think of education as weaving. Education is a human way of accompanying the student from their biological birth to an integral, spiritual, and cultural birth. Education with a Christian imprint strives to weave the entire “costume” of the person, the dress in its entirety, not by parts or pieces, which requires the free collaboration of the people involved. The pedagogical reflection of the Church Fathers regarding the notion of habitus goes in this direction too. For example, Diadoco from Fotica (an author of the patristic age, contemporary of Saint Leo the Great and the Council of Chalcedon) calls the habitus “clothing of divine love” (Renczes, 2008: 263) confirming the link between incarnation as an act of love and education as a weaving of the human being in accordance with the act of incarnation. The habitus is an Aristotelic notion that was widely used and resignified by Church Fathers such as Massimo the confessor, Evagrio Pontico, Clemente from Alexandria. This notion points to an acquired and habitual disposition that opens up to virtue and, in the Christian interpretation, to the action of Grace (Renczes, 2008).

In this sense, approaches to character education (Kristjánsson, 2013) and flourishing (Kristjánsson, 2017; Wolbert et al., 2015) could be discussed and enriched using the Incarnation as a starting point. In this approach based on the Incarnation, education offers conditions and processes so that the authentic fabric of our human nature can emerge, and it collaborates with the weaving that begins with God’s initiative. Education cooperates and collaborates with a beloved work for the manifestation of the person that is divine-human. In this sense, character education does not mean shaping someone as if we had a model of values and behaviors towards which to tend and strive; rather, it involves working and being together to manifest this new garment that the Incarnation has begun to weave in us.

Although the above may be perceived as a criticism of the Character education and Flourishing approaches, it should be noted that this is not intended as such. The Incarnation event simply provides the opportunity to look at these approaches exclusively from a Christian perspective. It offers a starting point, which springs from the Christian event itself, for understanding what character formation and transformation mean and how to carry these out. In addition, my approach can contribute to the positioning of the flourishing approach as a non-ideal theory (Wolbert et al., 2019), that is, a theory that highlights the importance of considering specific people and specific contexts in which one seeks to advance towards the purpose of flourishing. In other words, if the Incarnation manifests a continuous dynamism that configures us as persons, the issue of the purpose in of education is raised for us by this event. This purpose is linked to the relational character that does not close in on itself, but rather gives itself to others in a manner akin to the Incarnation.

The consequences of this event in education are closely linked to what life we manifest from the novelty of the Incarnation, according to the specific person that we are. It is not a question of reaching a theoretically elaborated ideal, but of responding to an event that has transformed us and given us back what we are; however, our character is waiting for its ultimate manifestation. The formation of the personality and the transformation of each one of us through education is a path for putting on the Lord Jesus (Rom 13:14; Gal 3:27; Eph 4:24) not from a rationalistic perspective, but as cooperators with a relational event and a vital gift that precedes us and opens a process of reception and response.

This new creation that we are, and which begins with the Incarnation, finds itself in the situation described clearly by Paul in Romans: “For the eagerly awaiting creation waits for the revealing of the sons and daughters of God” (Romans 8:19). Educational processes are inserted in this eagerly awaiting: educational choices should offer the conditions that best help and sustain our awaiting as sons and daughters of God. The link between “putting on the Lord Jesus” and the Incarnation thus contributes to a comprehensive view of education from a Christian perspective.

This implies the relevance in a Christian context of an education in which spiritual and cultural formation are integrated, as Pope Francis has argued: “We cannot separate the spiritual formation from the cultural formation. The Church has always wanted to develop spaces for the best culture for young people. You should not give up doing it because young people have the right to it. And today, above all, the right to culture means protecting wisdom, that is, human knowledge that humanizes” (Pope Francis, 2019: N.223).

The Incarnation, from a Christian theological perspective, is the very source that feeds and justifies the integration of spiritual and cultural formation, character formation, and flourishing. This allows the human being to show in himself the face of God that has been given to him and restored in Jesus Christ; it is a process that we can call divine-humanization. Therefore, every decision in the educational process supports the divine-humanization process for all aspects of the person. Incarnation covers and embraces the human phenomenon of education as a specific way to let the divine image that inhabits each human person emerge. On the other hand, educational conditions and processes imply a way of life that prepares us to live as renewed men and women.

The incarnation as an act of weaving and school studies

In this section, I will refer to another implication of the Incarnation as the foundation for an integral and comprehensive education in Christian-oriented schools. This implication refers to the meaning of studying in the school experience. If studying is one of the main educational activities in a school, in what sense does the Incarnation illuminate studying with an integrating mantle, especially for Christian educational institutions?

To answer this question, I will refer to the considerations developed by the philosopher Simone Weil in her text Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies. According to Weil, school studies allow students to develop their intellectual faculties and attention spans. Weil raises the development of “attention,” both in its spiritual dimension (attention to God’s action) and in its cognitive dimension (attention and concentration): “If however, we consider the occupations in themselves, studies are nearer to God because of the attention which is their soul. Whoever goes through years of study without developing this attention within himself has lost a great measure” (Weil, 1951: 74–75). Besides these dimensions, Weil adds attention to others and their suffering. Weil writes, “the capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness and pity are not enough” (Weil, 1951: 75). This sentence could be interpreted from a highly embodied and integrating perspective in the following way: the Incarnation implies that nothing is impossible for God and shows God’s attention to his beloved creature. Similarly, humans are called to attend carefully to others. However, Weil reminds us that “this kind of attention is rare and that it is not to be confused with impulsiveness, piety, or an empathetic heart. Attention is forged as a habit of being, and it is indispensable to know how to really look at each person. This way of looking is first of all attentive. […] Only he who is capable of attention can do it” (Weil, 1951: 75).

In keeping with this article’s theme, I interpret the act of attention as linked to the act of weaving the divine into the human that begins to work with the Incarnation. Studying is a privileged way to learn to embody God’s gaze towards human beings and the world. If through the Incarnation the logos can be heard, seen, and perceived with the other senses, studies can contribute to shape our exterior and interior senses to see and recognize the incarnate God of Jesus Christ.

In this framework of understanding, the activity of school studies, in addition to being a way of exploring the world as created, visited, and inhabited by God, contains a theological dimension of a more existential nature. Studying is a way of collaborating with the divine human fabric that the Incarnation sets in motion. In this sense, studying becomes an integral part of character education and contributes to flourishing. Understood as such, studying contributes to an attentive and open character so as to experience a flourishing far from selfishness and self-referentiality. This interpretation considers studying per se as one of those valuable habits that shapes the kind of attention described by Weil; so, studying, linked strictly to the attention as Weil thinks it, contains and unfolds an integrative potentiality. That said, this perspective poses a responsibility to those who invite students to study. Teachers, especially, are called to propose a conception and some study topics that contribute in this sense. Education policies also have a degree of responsibility in this regard, through curricular design. However, studying as habitus implies a relationship between teacher and student with an integrative potential. Policies or teacher choices can help or hinder studying with this integrative potential. Principals and teachers have to remember that through study he is not contributing to the formation only a head, but an integrated whole with its varied capacities and freedom. The latter can also be understood as the integration of the head, the heart, and the hands.⁷ Simone Weil describes this dimension in this way:

So, it comes about that, paradoxically as it may seem, a Latin prose or a geometry problem, even though they are done wrong, may be of great service one day, provided we devote the right kind to effort to them. Should the occasion arise, they can one day make us better able to give someone in affliction exactly the help required to save him, at the supreme moment of his need. (pp. 75–76).

This vision of studies also has implications in the curricular design of a Christian-inspired college. For example, Jamison (2013) reports an experiment carried out in the United Kingdom with a specific objective: “create a Catholic curriculum that has one simple vision as its core aim: a Catholic curriculum that enables all students to respond to the call of Christ throughout their lives” (Jamison, 2013: 15; see also Torevell (2020) for a development of the connection between curricular choices and the theological dimension). From an ecumenical perspective, a Christian-oriented school offers a curriculum and a viewpoint on studying that does not only aim at educating the head, but most importantly, at manifesting the divine humanity that the Incarnation has revealed to us.

In summary, this section has presented a conception of school studies that is an opportunity for the manifestation of our true self as human-divine persons (as I have shown in the preceding section). Being human-divine persons finds its unique and fascinating foundation in a God who exercises an act of radical attention towards each person and is incarnated as a human being to embrace his creature again.

Conclusions

In this article, I have presented the Incarnation as a principle that considers Christian education from a theological perspective and a unitary and integrating vision of reality. In the contemporary educational field, the above contributes a set of fundamental assumptions in order to enrich the debate about how to best develop a comprehensive education. All of the above contributes to understanding comprehensiveness in education by also including the spiritual and religious dimensions of the human being from a Christian perspective.

Furthermore, the previous synthesis shows the ecumenical potential of the Incarnation as a theological principle that illuminates and enriches the educational task as a comprehensive phenomenon. I argue that the educational and spiritual effects of a Christian school are better understood through the Incarnation. In this sense, it is an ecumenical proposal that explores the connection between the Incarnation of the God of Jesus Christ and education in schools with a Christian imprint. This proposal offers a range of keys, which this article has just begun to show. In addition, it can generate implications for future investigation or reflections in schools about teacher’s attitudes, curricular options, and pedagogical experimentations linked to a specific conception of studying; as Simone Weil argues: “for an adolescent, capable of grasping this truth and generous enough to desire this fruit above all others, studies could have their fullest spiritual effect, quite apart from any particular religious belief” (Weil, 1951: 76). My interpretation of this reflection is that if a Christian school and its leaders are aware of the integral dimension of the educational and studying activity, it can support the evangelization goal through and within the school activity. In addition, Weil’s phrase “quite apart from any religious belief” suggests implications for all kinds of schools could be explored further (Morgan, 2020). Taking this into account, we can hope that this comprehensive approach for education, rooted in the Incarnation, sheds light for Christian schools in its constitutive dimension as school.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Natasha Govekar for her kind response to my inquiry about Incarnation and iconography. I want to thank Sonia Guerini (SMSD) who helped me with an email exchange about Eastern patristic literature on the Incarnation and its multiple meanings and symbolism. I am grateful to Cristobal Madero SJ for his comments on the draft and to the anonymous reviewers whose criticism of an earlier draft was exceptionally helpful. The English proofreading has been supported by Universidad de O’Higgins’ post-doctoral programme.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Carmelo Galioto

Notes

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