In limine: percorsi di pneumatologia politica

The essay presents a brief historical and conceptual overview of what is, and when we can speak of, “political pneumatology”, a concept that is rooted in the dialectical processes of secularization of the theology of history, and which is best exemplified in the opposition between universalism and particularism , or between Spirit and Letter. Whether one conceives of the dynamism of history (following the cyclic model of the Greeks), or whether one prefers to understand it as a movement with a “terminus a quo” and a “terminus ad quem” (according to the creationist and eschatological model of the Christian theology of history), the concept of “political pneumatology” seems appropriate—based on authors such as Gioacchino da Fiore, Leibniz, Fichte, Hegel, Troeltsch, Taubes, and Voegelin, among others—to prefigure the utopia of a reconciled community of men, which translates into political terms the ancient theological concept of “ecclesia invisibilis”.