Suchergebnisse

"In his first book composed in English, Rémi Brague maintains that there is a fundamental problem with modernity: we no longer consider the created world and humanity as intrinsically valuable. Curing Mad Truths, based on a number of Brague's lectures to English-speaking audiences, explores the idea that humanity must return to the Middle Ages. Not the Middle Ages of purported backwardness and barbarism, but rather a Middle Ages that understood creation--including human beings--as the product of an intelligent and benevolent God. The positive developments that have come about due to the modern project, be they health, knowledge, freedom, or peace, are not grounded in a rational project because human existence itself is no longer the good that it once was. Brague turns to our intellectual forebears of the medieval world to present a reasoned argument as to why humanity and civilizations are goods worth promoting and preserving"--

- The paper is focused on the connections between secularization and modernity, and calls into question an almost unanimously accepted and largely undisputed thesis, according to which it would be possible to explain one term (secularization) through the other (modernity). Drawing from medieval history and philosophy, the author challenges the validity of such a connection between secularization and modernity. While the term "secularization" is a modern coinage and has unfolded its effects only in the modern era, the circumstances that made the process of secularization possible took shape in the Middle Ages. The epicentre of the modern earthquake is located in the Middle Ages. More precisely, the author underscores the secularizing role of the Medieval Church and proves the counter-intuitive thesis that the defence of secularization was not promoted by the Empire, nor was the defence of the sacred championed by the Church. Things went exactly the other way around.Keywords: secularization, saeculum, catholic church, state, middle ages