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Contemporary Ideas and the Crisis of Modernity

• Secularisation refers to the diminishing presence and influence of Christianity on people and institutions in Western culture.

• The process of secularisation is a set of changes in Western culture that distinguish the natural and supernatural orders and acknowledge the relative autonomy of worldly affairs.

• Modernity is often associated with secularisation, but it is not completely secularised, and the Middle Ages were not entirely Christian.

• The natural order refers to human nature or potentialities, while the supernatural order refers to God's help or grace to people.

• There are two versions of secularisation: declericalisation, which distinguishes the natural and supernatural orders, and affirmation of the absolute autonomy of man, leading to a closure with regard to transcendence.

• Modernity is ambivalent, presenting both a more Christian version and a closed version to transcendence, which leads to contemporary nihilism.

• Enlightenment and Romanticism are the ideological matrices of contemporary culture, both based on the autonomy of man.

• The Enlightenment values reason and progress, rejects tradition, and created a colder, less habitable world.

• Romanticism replaces reason with unregulated feeling and places love, art, life, and suffering at the center of man's attention.

• Ideologies, such as liberalism, nationalism, socialism, and positivism, are based on central notions for a comprehensive understanding of human nature.

• Ideologies have marked the last two centuries and occupy an emblematic place in the process of secularisation and the mechanism of absolutisation of the relative.

• The crisis of faith in modernity manifests in the demystification and rationalisation of the world, leading to the sacralisation of earthly elements that provide the basis for substitute religions.The Crisis of Modernity and the Rise of Ideologies

• Marxism represents reductionism, the sacralisation of the human, and the divinisation of man, which led to totalitarianism.

• Positivism is the heir of enlightened reason and claims that experimental sciences have the last word on the world, leading to a rational faith in a happy and just future for all.

• Ideologies promise the happiness of the heavenly paradise on earth by letting the laws of the market work spontaneously, by making the communist revolution, or by cultivating the sciences.

• The culture of modernity led to a war on an unprecedented scale and a crisis of culture that was interpreted diversely.

• The crisis of culture is either solved by pushing ideologies to the bottom, abandoning the pretension of knowing the truth, or looking for new meaning by thinking open to transcendence in different ways.

• Contemporary relativism has two facets: a crisis of meaning and a radical skepticism towards the possibility of knowing the truth.

• Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud conceive the human subject as a necessary derivation of irrational forces that lie behind every human manifestation, leading to the loss of the real consistency of the person.

• Freud's psychoanalysis and its influence will be present in the social movements of the 20th century despite the discredit in which many of the conclusions of Freudian psychology find themselves today.

• The cultural environment generated by relativism and the perspective of absolute autonomy of man has been the breeding ground for a new generation of ideologies, including radical feminism, gender ideology, deep ecology, and transhumanism.

• Some Western intellectuals converted to Catholicism or other Christian denominations, while others proposed spiritualism, personalism, the philosophy of action, neothomism, or "philosophies of values" to contain the social and spiritual decomposition after the Great War.

• The crisis of modernity calls for a new understanding of the human person, the recovery of the notion of human nature, and the recognition of the unique dignity of each person.

• The crisis of modernity also calls for a new understanding of the relationship between man and nature, the recovery of the sense of the sacred in creation, and the recognition of the limits of technological development.