Every Christian today must accept living and building the city with other citizens, together, without however abandoning his own identity and tradition or resigning himself to complete assimilation: “Whoever believes, thinks; thinking while believing and believing while thinking… Faith, if it is not thought, is nothing.” Who writes this is not an intellectual who can allow himself drawing room digressions in a relaxing era for Christian life. The holy bishop Augustine of Hippo uses these words in a work, On the predestination of the saints, written two or three years before his death (430), in a city besieged by the Vandals and occupied by Arians, when every anguished appeal to close ranks would have been humanly understandable.

But what sense can that distant invitation to “think about faith” have, in our age of “post” (postmodern, posthuman, post metaphysical, post secular…), which barely masks a future that is coming towards us so impetuously?

In a book published last year by Libreria Editrice Vaticana (Christians in a world that is no longer so. Faith in modern society), Cardinal De Kesel considers Christianity’s monopoly position as a “cultural religion” to be exhausted, at a time when Western culture itself has ceased to be religious. Faced with this challenge, according to the author, we must reconcile ourselves with Christianity as a religion of foreign origin, taking on the task that falls to every migrant: integrating into the society that welcomes him, agreeing to “live and build the city with the other citizens, together”, without however “abandoning one’s own identity and tradition” or resigning oneself to complete assimilation. But if the old “cultural shell” of Christianity has become lead in the wings of faith, what is to be done? Do we need a new flight apparatus, which could quickly become obsolete, or can we lull ourselves into the pious illusion of flying without wings?

Augustine's words, rather than offering us an inconclusive diversion, can show us a path: when everything seems to be collapsing, if we want to look beyond the sunset of an era, looking for signs of a dawn that wrongly seems very far away, we need to think more, not think less. Without a long look, backwards and forwards, we become prisoners of a false dilemma: either we settle for an equivocal religion without faith, taking refuge in a devotional consumption of the sacred, made up of exclusive rituals and identity slogans, used to exorcise fear; or we settle for a faith without religion, reduced to an intimate repertoire of private and painless emotions, compatible with any form of life or of economic, political, cultural structure.

In any case, this false antinomy is the child of the same illusion: that one can believe without thinking, remaining on standby in the nostalgia of a time that no longer exists, or waiting for a time that is not yet here. Pierangelo Sequeri has pointed out the risk in his article: Lots of morality, little community, zero culture. On the other hand, with all the problems that weigh on Christian life today, isn’t rediscovering the fire of theological elaboration, anthropological reflection, cultural projects perhaps a luxury that we can no longer afford, just like keeping open churches that are too large, unnecessarily expensive? And then, what sense would there be in “thinking about faith” in a “post-metaphysical” era like ours?

The unsuspecting answer of an old secularist like Jürgen Habermas, published in 2019 in a monumental history of philosophy in three large volumes, might surprise us: in his opinion, “social modernization does not necessarily have to entail the loss of religion meaning as a contemporary form of the spirit – neither in the public political sphere and in the culture of a society nor in the personal conduct of the individual.” In such a fragmented society, within a global scenario in which the technological-financial system is too strong and politics too weak, religions can accredit themselves as global communities by going beyond their original environment of civilization and becoming healthy bearers of “discourses capable of universally accessible truths”. Here Habermas' provocation finds a singular point of contact not only with De Kesel, but even more with Francis' invitation to universalize fraternity, at the centre of the encyclical Fratelli tutti.

But how can we argue the cognitive potential of the Christian faith while announcing the Risen One, without falling into yet another "culturalization" of the kerygma or renouncing to critically illuminate the all-too-human human perimeter of our lives lived in such a hurry as we do? Rediscovering a faith that is a friend of transcendence, willing to contemplate the excess of mystery and the infinite height of the spiritual. Inside, together, beyond: only a gaze capable of ranging over the depths of the person, the breadth of brotherhood, the height of the merciful promise of new heavens and a new earth can experience the vertigo of transcendence.

A Christianity reduced to a polite spiritual etiquette, willing to bow to the dogma of “political correctness,” is the child only of evasive and shrunken glances, close relative of dead and closed hearts. A rampant eschatological aphasia is the most embarrassing confirmation of this. And let it no be said that distant horizons are an escape from the present. We should rather be afraid of a history inhabited only by earthly absolutes: the evil infinite is always the worst enemy of our finitude. No, transcendence is not the enemy of history. It can actually be its best ally, when it reminds us that we are vertical animals: raising our heads and looking at the sky almost always helps us keep our feet on the ground.

See, Cattolici e cultura. Alici: la trascendenza non può inchinarsi al politically correct