European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

THE ETHICAL DIMENSION IN EUROPEAN IDENTITY 297reason that it was repeatedly remembered —and I believe this is animportant truth— that the concepts of nation and/or state are indeedcategories of sacred measures, references assumed by mankind inEurope as a reaction to the loss or weakening of other referenceswhich institutionalised the sense of the humane as ‘salvation’ throughfaith (let us think of the idea of Christianity, institutionalised in theChurch, the perfecta societas).In effect, within the social perspective of Christendom, thecommunity of believers —communitas— recognised its perfect legalconformation in the Church (in spite of the variety, or of the obstacleswhich emerged on the course of the realization of that perfectasocietas).In any case, as modernity advanced, the faith that was initiallysocially identified with the Church was gradually transferred to thenew belief of nation/people, a communitas which, from the freedomof its members, aims at —although not necessarily always— its legalconfiguration within the State as the new perfecta societas. Thischange carried with it a chain of problems and theoretical and practicalconflicts, such as the opposition between the social/public and theprivate; the individual and the personal; the dimensions of individualidentity and social identity, or of individuals and citizens.(Maritain, for example, instrumentalised a philosophical distinction,which joined Aristotelian roots and ideas from the Christian scholastictradition —a subtle distinction between individual and person— inorder to organise the goals of social human life into a hierarchy: theindividual for the State, the State for the person and the person forGod, supplying philosophical-anthropological bases to Christiandemocracies, thus trying to elaborate the tension that goes from thepursuable and doable plenitude in the profane order, to what isirreducibly transcendent-religious-sacred.)This indicates us that the way the singular human life, the individual,the person, is determined in those structures is absolutely decisive formeaning of the rise of “Christianity” in human life. The theme of “Christianity =salvation” provokes an immediate interpretation of modern secularization as rebellionagainst God, something that deep down is hard to believe, unless we confuse rebellionagainst God with anticlericalism, which are neither always nor necessarily unequivocalsigns of secularisation. Zubiri has clearly outlined the primacy of the meaning ofChristianity as “deification” and the merely consequential character of its sense as“salvation” in in work El problema teologal del hombre: Cristianismo. Madrid, Alianza:1997 (work published after his manuscripts courses).In any case, what I write under this title is only trying to briefly, and insufficiently,point at the modern destiny of a specific concept: perfecta societas.