Volume 4, 2011
Selected Essays from Northern Europe
Ivan Chvatík
Pages 315-325
Rethinking Christianity as a Suitable Religion for the Postmodern World
In his late essays of 1970’s, Patočka investigates the essence of European civilization—its birth in Ancient Greece, its formation in the Christianity of the Middle Ages, its success in producing modern natural science and its fall in the World Wars of the 20th century. He asks what legacy the old Europe left for humankind in the post-European, globalized world. One of the main parts of this legacy is the Christian religion. In my paper, I attempt to explicitly reconstruct how Patočka wants to formulate this religion in a very heretical way so that it may introduce a wholly new era in world history.