Sacred futility: (the sacred in Heidegger and Hölderlin)

Abstract

At the gates of the second millennium of the Christian era, that is, of the time that has taken the theandric image of Jesus Christ as the flag behind which the joint interests of liberal economy hide, the so-called «representative democracy» of mass society and technoscience spread across the planet and increasingly focused on news communication and the entertainment industry, a ghost seems to haunt this desolate world: the ghost of the sacred. Witnesses of this spectral return are the rise of occultism, the proliferation of religious sects, the supposed entry into the New Age, presided over by the constellation of Aquarius and, last but not least, the effort of the «scholars», of the Religionswissenschaftler to find «scientifically» a unitary essence of the different religious phenomena that can unite the men of the planet in a common hope. But, except for the fear of fanaticism or the ennui towards the «science of religions» that all these movements can produce, it seems unquestionable that the warm water of this temperate zone that the earth is becoming is not going to turn into streams of living water that allow precisely what is lacking to flourish.