Mariano FAZIO: Modernità e secolarizzazione da una prospettiva cristiana
In every historical period, good has existed always with evil. That is why we can not emit absolute affirmations: the medieval society was completely a Christian one, and the one of modernity was a secularized society. Starting from this general introduction, this presents modernity as an ambivalent reality: on the one hand, more “Christian” than Middle Age, because it is more aware of the relation between the natural order and the divine one, but, on the other hand, modernity is a reality reserved to transcendence, which leads gradually to nihilism. From the roots of modernity, Enlightened and Romanticism, which affirmed the humans’ autonomy, founded on reason and respectively on sentiment, raised the totalitarian ideologies and, eventually, nihilism with its two sides: God’s death and relativism. Contrasting with this sad evolution, the author presents shortly the recent positive initiatives (personalism, spiritualism, neo-thomism), which are reasons of hoping for nowadays people because they express implicitly the generous opening to transcendence.