Ebook: Theology of Potentia Dei and History of European Normativity

At the threshold of modernity, the programs of politics and the justifications of law assume new forms: analyzing them, the best historians of the last century dismissed the idea that the second millennium AD was one integrated bloc. Today, their counter-interpretation in the sign of discontinuity is being summoned. Rather than to any «revolutionary programme», what the tumultuous innovations of the age of the rising State system might respond to are the unintended collateral effects of unrehearsed and makeshift repair interventions imposed by a chain reaction of newly emerging interdependent problem situations. In this view, the laboratory of the innovations that we call modernity might be the legacy, rather than the victim, of pre-modern conceptions. The late mediaeval distinction of two powers in God (potentia absoluta, potentia ordinata) has made a wide career in the new culture of earthly Power. Ordered power refers to an «ethically» acceptable or legitimate use of power, absolute power closes an otherwise «ungovernable» horizon by proclaiming an unfailing mastery even over the contingent. Their oscillation gives rise to a dynamics to which we are still subject.