Catholic Modernities within an Axial Age Perspective

Eisenstadt’s development of the axial age thesis towards a conceptual vocabulary of multiple modernities has for some time now gained increasing currency in academic debates, to the point of becoming “mainstream”. As a meta-theoretical take on our global condition, it allows for an appreciation of the essential openness of the modern project and the continuous unfolding of alternative narratives of the modern, based very much on competing claims to reason and progress.  “Modernity” was never a fixed set of principles or a “cultural program”, but rested from the outset on a series of tensions. One of those tensions, alas, regards the relationship between religion and secularity.

In this paper we initially want to examine the question of modernity and its multiple pathways by addressing the relationship between secular politics and religion as it unfolded in Italy. We discuss how, from within Italian political and cultural life, Catholicism related to modernity, tracing continuities and changes in the tensions between religion and secularity in the country’s political history from national Unification (1861) onwards. The more general point we wish to stress is that the unfolding of multiple visions of the modern also took place within Europe – and that we cannot theorize the tension between religion and secularity in the unfolding of multiple modernities if we do not bring Europe itself into the discussion.