Speaking of God in post-modem Europe

Abstract

In autumn of 1799 a poet and thinker, Georg Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known under the pseudonym Novalis, Wrote an essay entitled "Christianity or Europe" (Christenheit oder Europa), published first in the edition of the Schriften of 1826. The context, in which the work had been written, was the crisis of the European consciousness connected to the French Revolution and, more precisely, the uneasy transition to the time of Restoration. Novalis intended to sketch a messianic - spiritualistic perspective, to foster a solution of the problems and contradictions produced by Protestantism and by the secularization of the Enlightenment. The key idea, stressed by Novalis, is the primacy of religion, which alone can rea wake Europe and give it security and unity in the midst of the current risks of disgregation: only the order of Christianity, only a reestablished respublica christiana - evoking the Medieval World - could save the old Continent. This process, however, is not conceived as a return to the past, but as a utopic revolution, oriented to the creation of a "new Christianity", that Novalis imagines as the reconstruction of the visible universal Church, without boundaries, embracing all the souls thirsting after the Divine.