Metamorphoses of Religion and the Human in the Modern World

Abstract

The significance of the religious component of the spiritual life of man is great, but it does not lend itself to unambiguous understanding because religion and society in general undergo radical metamorphosis. The relationship of the human and the religious aspects of social life demonstrate the most complex transformations in the field of interaction of faith and reason, the meaning-giving activity of man.

Religion, traditionally ensuring the consistency of the inner world of man, uses for this purpose the potential of faith in transcendental objects as a factor of meaning-making. But, since the era of Modern times, an attempt is made to completely eliminate of transcendental absolutes from the social space and replacement them in modus of the actual reality. At the same time, the sources of meaning lose their former constancy and solidity, at the same time acquiring relational in nature and transforming into its opposite. Integrity of the spiritual world of man is destroyed, and the efforts to regain it are carried out by sacralizing of phenomena of the profane reality. The result is the generation of quasi-religious products that the unity of man’s inner world cannot recover, suggesting the need for rehabilitation of religious faith. This realization leads to a rethinking of human and religious phenomena.

The essence of man is not exhausted by reason. Initially, he is an irrational creature, which manifests itself, above all, in his ability to believe, first within mythic, and later of religious consciousnesses. And, only over time, this quality is replaced by rationality and, in the extreme, by non-religious rationality. The separation of the intellectual beginning from religious and the opposition to it leads to isolation from morality, increasing chaos and the appearance of absurd man. This is the impasse of rationalism. The impasse of irrationalism consists in the loss of the religious foundations of faith. Only “new faith” in the Highest World Order, the Highest Moral Law creates the prospect of overcoming of the impasse of rationalism and irrationalism. It may be born out of faith in man as a “new God” implicitly containing faith in the “new old” God.