The anthropocentric term would characterize the time inaugurated by the Renaissance, as opposed to the medieval conceptualized as theocentric. That is, a shift from the centrality of God to that of the human being. New era of exaltation of humanism, the monopoly of reason and scientific-technical progress.
Coexisting in the beginning, although reluctant later, with the recognition of God, anthropocentrism progressively tended towards the exclusion of the genuinely transcendent in the interpretation and handling of history, evolving towards an anthropolatry (divinizing cult of man). Such was the dynamic of the Enlightenment and its derivatives in a time of absolutization also of freedom. Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, to which Comte is integrated, are the flag in this current.
The international conflagrations of the 20th century and experiences such as the Holocaust, the Gulags and Hiroshima-Nagasaki, came to deflate many illusions about human power, to the point of reaching pessimistic existentialism and nihilistic despair. Man came to be conceptualized as a “useless passion”. The so-called modernity and its enthusiastic self-perception gave way to a fragmenting, unstable and relativistic postmodernism, which, by its very nature, has favored a radical and extravagant subjectivism, as a tournament of absurdities and self-destruction. It can be said that radical anthropocentrism is generating anthropocide (cidio comes from the Latin fallen, cut, kill). Recognizing and lamenting it does not mean, in any way, forgetting the transcendent origin and destiny of the human being, underlined, respectively, by the couple of chapters that Genesis opens and Revelation closes.
anthropocide? Nothing else is the ongoing deconstruction and volatilization of the human being. The dynamics of gender ideology and the multiple woke, queer consanguineous currents -developed within the framework of a globalist culture of “political correctness” and historical cancellation- have turned anthropology and, in general, philosophical reflection, into a Babel Tower; in this communication is pulverized in an endless number of words to personal taste, which revive and accentuate the nominalism of past times. In the sexual, biology is compelled to give way to psychology and psychology to fantasy. The human being is dismembered and recomposed to end up evaporating it. The “brave new world” of Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) and his bioscientist dystopia become a reality. And people like Judith Butler can no longer find what to destructure and disidentify. Of course, in between the family is annihilated, marriage is diluted and education is instrumentalized, particularly children’s, with its guinea pigs managed by the father State and powerful chrematistic and communication magnates. Dissidence in the face of these ravings is condemned as hate and the cancellation methodology is applied to what has been inherited annoying. It seems to return to the initial chaos, before God formed the cosmos.
In times of anthropocide, it is urgent to affirm a straight and integral philosophy of the human. Quite illuminating in this regard is that which, with peculiar language, is offered by the initial chapters of Genesis. There, certain fundamental features of man appear clear: creaturely and corporeal-spiritual condition, sociality and ethical responsibility, sexual binary and family nature, friendly ecological relationship and vocation to one’s own integral development. But also, that we are not only limited and fragile, but also subject to temptation and sin; This is shown from the beginning of history as a rupture of the human-divine, interhuman and ecological communion (harmony, union) willed by God; and that rupture is a source of damage and destruction for the human being. The Christian confesses Christ precisely as liberator from sin and death.
To the current anthropocidal cultural challenge, it is necessary to respond from reason and faith with an integral anthropology.
