Staying young today: Vito Mancuso’s Hegelian theology through the lens of Vasil Gluchman’s ethics of social consequences

Abstract

Abstract This paper is an attempt to present the Hegelian theology of Vito Mancuso, a radical lay Catholic theologian, from the perspective of the ethics of social consequences, as primarily promoted by Vasil Gluchman. Mancuso is a keen observer of today’s society and he identifies a serious flaw among contemporary people in what he calls the idol of our time. This so-called idol is a human desire which seems to have been promoted more aggressively within contemporary society through various publicity channels, so it has developed into a mass phenomenon in today’s world. According to Mancuso, this desire is man’s longing to stay young despite the natural process of aging, a fact which has individual, spiritual, as well as social implications. He also introduces the necessity for the cultivation of one’s soul for the personal benefit of individuals but also for the prosperity of society in general. In other words, Mancuso borrows, from Hegel, the necessity that the human spirit should develop to the point of positively accepting the materiality of its natural constitution for the wellbeing of all individuals living in the same society which very much resembles Gluchman’s focus on human reasoning and moral action aimed at the promotion of positive consequences and moral duty as means to educate the human spirit towards tolerance and responsibility, all key concepts in Gluchman’s ethics of social consequences.