Christliches Abendland? Personalität und Sakralität als europäische Grundwerte

Abstract

This article traces the constitutive significance of Christian ethics for the question of Europe‘s fundamental values, based on Augustinian theology of history and the principle of personality. The specific Christian understanding of personality, based on faith in the three-person God, is further interpreted in the following with Hans Joas as sacrality of the human person against the background of the desacralization of world and state, which is pre-determined in the Augustinian distinction between civitas Dei and civitas terrena and unfolds in modernity. The final meaning of law, natural law and morality and the human striving for happiness, which is identified with the striving for love according to Christian faith, is theologically expelled and justified as the spelling out of the sacrality of God by the human person.