L’artificio della grazia. Il sogno infranto della modernità

(The Artifice of Grace. The Broken Dream of Modernity)

Abstract

The essay explores grace starting with modernity, particularly through a confrontation with Schiller and Kleist. Some features of grace emerge: it is an artifact yet it is essential to nature, to which it belongs; it mixes with nature, yet it is effective in the order of the human and freedom without thereby being chosen; nor can it be repeated as natural immediacy. One arrives at the extreme feature of grace as pure artificiality, which is not convincing either. Grace functions in a series of oxymorons: rather than being, it happens; it is necessary superabundance and thus it is not redundancy; it is objectivity that does not derive from any subjectivity. The idea of grace is found to be close to the idea of nature understood in the ancient sense of coming to existence and becoming. In this way, grace escapes the clause of irrelevance to which the modern has condemned it. We come across its traces in the experiences of the good and wonder, in which we have a disclosure of what is essential and to be interpreted.