A secularização da utopia: as raízes do pensamento igualitário na cultura judaico-cristã

Abstract

The research will try to comprehend the roots of the concepts which we know as equalitarian thinking or egalitarianism, originally being tied to the millenary Judeo-Christian culture, based on the history of ancient Israel and on the social concern and activism of the social, political and religious leaders, known as prophets. These concepts were appropriated and expanded by primitive Christianity, especially by the theology of Paul from Tarsis, passing through the Middle Ages apart from the feudal system and arriving at Modernity with the due adaptations and transformations in a process of secularization, within a historiographic perspective of permanences and long duration. The research also will seek to identify the social and political view inherent in the Judeo-Christian culture, developed based on the social perspective of ancient Israel, going through the Pauline theology and crossing through the Middle Ages without being absorbed by the rigorousness of the feudal system and in which such critical paradigms can have contributed to the political criticism of Modernity. Based on the comprehension of a continuity between the Middle Ages and Modernity, not on a rupture, one observes a secularization and an immanentization of concepts whose roots are found in the medieval period, such as the ascendant theory of power, where power emanates from the people, the characterization of the concept of a modern State based on theological concepts and the separation itself between Church and State. This leads to the questioning that egalitarianism and criticism may not be mere paradigms developed by the Enlightenment but may have yet older origins. However, being that the Middle Ages were a theocentric culture, the foundations sought after by the medieval people remit back to the Christian religious culture and its Hebrew roots, having as its basis the Judeo-Christian sacred texts, including the old and the new testaments to give foundation to the political relations of the period. Stemming from the bourgeois Revolutions, one observes an effort of the Western legislations in the sense of promoting a legal egalitarianism and of different ideological nuances in order to promote a type of social egalitarianism. We investigate here if such egalitarianism or equalitarian thought is a fruit of Modernity or if the Judeo-Christian culture is at its center.