The clash between Catholic Theology and Modernity

Abstract

This article deals with the answer given by Catholic theology to modernity. It is a study of the actual crisis of modernity and how the post modernity era emerged. Although the conflict between Christianity and modernity has being long and sharp, modernity has good Christian roots. For instance, Christianity assumes the voluntarism born from the nominalism of Occam, which dominated the European universities during the 14th and 15th centuries and also the emergence of Protestantism and the humanism of the Renaissance. But modernity bares also the secularization of basic Christian concepts, in particular, the biblical eschaton, which became the utopia of progress, thanks to the liberal ideology and to the Marxist way of thinking. This article deals also with the critics formulated by Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Hellenist Europeans who advocated for the return to the Greek cultural archetype and for the return to the ancestral pagan roots of Europe. The crisis of modernity is linked to the “sunset of the idols” proclaimed by Nietzsche, namely, reason and progress. By the end, the author deals with theological currents presented by the Church as an answer to modernity: Pascal, Newman, the New theology.