In modern thought
by Ezio Aceti, developmental psychologist
Post-modern society is characterized by a basic problem: the crisis of the father.
In just a few years, a system characterized by paternal authority and rules lived in an exasperated manner has collapsed.
a habit has been shattered, a way of doing things that, for better or worse, was functional for social coexistence and was in some way shared by everyone.
This crisis, however, did not arrive suddenly, it did not emerge like the sun from one day to the next, but had already been announced, predicted by some thinkers sensitive to the historical path, to the trends hidden in social changes.
I am referring in particular to some philosophers, who with their writings had indicated the collapse that would subsequently occur.
Let us think of Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) when in The Gay Science, he makes the mad man say: «You have heard of that mad man who lit a lantern in the clear morning light, ran to the market and began to shout incessantly: “I seek God ! I seek God!”. And since many of those who did not believe in God were gathered there, he aroused great laughter. “Is it perhaps lost?” said one. “He lost himself like a child?” said another. “Or is he well hidden? Is he afraid of us? Did he board? Did he emigrate? – they shouted and laughed in great confusion. The mad man leapt among them and pierced them with his gaze: “Where has God gone? – He shouted – I want to tell you! We were the ones who killed him: you and me! We are all his killers!
If God is dead, and with him, everything that concerned God, such as authority, norms, morality, everything seems dead, we see that in reality, we are the guilty ones.
this is the decadence to which the German philosopher was referring.
Naturally for Nietzsche this was the testimony that God does not exist, while in reality a false idea of God collapsed, a God for whom we had constructed an image relegated to the social order and temporal power.
In fact we cannot deny that today God is no longer in the thoughts of people or of the majority of people.
In fact, the Middle Ages cannot be understood without referring to God.
Let's just think about the painting, sculpture and literature of that period (5th-15th century) which would be incomprehensible without a believer, as they depict the world, the thought, the feeling in the face of the mystery of God, as well as the pain and death as human realities destined to be looked at and judged by God.
Today, if we remove God, the world goes on anyway.
Painting, sculpture, literature live as if by themselves.
They constantly revolve around man, his feelings, his emotions and often his frivolities, doing without God.
Today, above all, man exists... a man who is simultaneously omnipotent and fragile, always contradictory.
But only the man!
Another great philosopher who predicted what would happen without God was Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), when, faced with the chaos that was happening, he went so far as to say "we will even need a God to come and save us". For Heidegger, God must come to save us from existential anguish.
An anguish that is not so much the result of pain or desperation, but of the fact that one must die.
Therefore, excluding God from the world is certainly fraught with consequences.
One last thinker I want to mention (but there are many who should be mentioned) is Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), a great French philosopher who in some of his books prefigured what would happen to morality and ethics by prophesying the absence of good and evil and the consequent confusion in recognizing what is right or what is not.
This crisis of the father then brings with it the "crisis of God", which, in turn, leads to the root of the phenomenon, namely the "crisis of man".
In fact, man, with his science and technology, is not able to solve all problems and above all, to fill the existential void that society generates.
it is then necessary to take back the true face of the father.
it is a face that hides behind the figure of the "merciful Father, of the father who lives entirely for his son and gives everything".
Moreover, even Saint Joseph, who seems absent in the Gospel, generates love by welcoming his son into his home.
It will then be necessary to "seize" in the loving mystery of the Father and in the silent concern of Saint Joseph, the way to build the true figure of the father, who goes beyond what is known and experienced, to open up to novelty and mystery.