Európa – világi és vallási érdekeink és eszményeink tere

The present study aims at delivering some crucial aspects of thinking about Europe, this subcontinent with vague geographical profiles. The starting point of my considerations is a deep contemporary sense of crisis concerning the future of our inherited world, faced with other cultural and material elements carried by migration processes. Firstly, based on Max Weber’s distinction between worldly and religious, the specific modern European culture is outlined in its differentiation of several spheres of interests and ideas (such as economy, politics, science, religion). The ideal-typical reconstruction of the modern European relation to the world, called world-dominance, reveals not only a specifically active and forming attitude but also clear signs of the presence of religion. In a second step, the main cultural and material roots of Europe are developed in their heterogenities, conflicts and combinations. Ancient Greek and Biblical traditions are prolonged, renewed and partly replaced by Enlightenment projects of freedom and sovereignty. Europe seems to be a historically singular stress-field of material and ideal factors. The self-exploring freedom, the creative productivity and the self-critical criticism of man, bound up with respectful reciprocity in the order of interdependence: these fundaments of recent European humanity cannot be harmonized with any other vision of the world.