European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

298 EUROPEAN IDENTITY. INDIVIDUAL, GROUP AND SOCIETYthe sense of those social totalities. Reciprocally, the scope of humanplenitude that is projected in those structures will indicate the sensegiven to human life. That was exactly Maritain’s concern. Nowadays,debates around all of this are still going on.I understand that examining the theological scheme that underliesthis face of modernity can be useful to escape from false alternatives.Venturing slightly into it, I would say that the theological scheme thatthe concepts of “nation” and “state” reflect virtually operates indifferent ways depending on modernity’s interpretation of the momentthe communitas was founded from the standpoint of its reflexive andcritical assumption. In effect, people or nation, as the communitas whichassumes its social being and projects its political institutionalization, canbe understood as given facticity in which one is inserted —just as thetheological gift of grace which saves; so, from there, the communitasrules the fulfilling institutionalization —societas— as something that ispowerfully and instinctually imposed from within. That is how it wasunderstood at the beginning of the 19 th century in German circles, andhow it still continues to be understood today in many theorizations.However, the concept can also be understood in a more constituentactivemanner, emphasising the determination of the freedom thatprojects the fulfilling institutionalization of the communitas under thereciprocal universal recognition sustaining it. From this standpoint,every facticity of communitas in which all mankind finds itself being,looks for the ultimate possibility in the radically opened dimension ofuniversal reciprocal recognition. It is for this reason that such facticity isknow to be always historical and always in a disposition forconfiguration and open institutionalization.In both cases, the antique theological structure is deposed and itsmanagement is transferred to the new protagonist subject of politicalinstitutionalization, namely modern man acting and legitimising thesocial conformation, from freedom, under its own name and under itsown care.To my judgment, in the first case the “transfer” is —although in thenew mundane perspective of existence— a theological “repetition”,since the sense-feeling of graciously belonging (ex inarguable gratia, Imean) to a factic communitas lived as an experience of faith by thesubjects concerned and restricted to spatial-temporal limits of experiencepropitiated by that real-physical facticity, is maintained. Consequently,the conformative social praxis which is ready to be assumed andadministered will be necessarily inscribed in that sacred space.In the second case, the importance of the action —facticallyregardless of the place of the group from which it emerges— is