This contribution looks at the different architectures for the institutions of the European Union in Brussels. Based on the ideas of the sociologist Max Weber, and later the theologian Harvey Cox, of an increasingly secularized, disenchanted urban society, the author first analyzes the earlier buildings for the European Community as an expression of a rationalist, even ‘disenchanted’ architectural strategy. This contrasts with the efforts of the European Union in the 21st century, which attempts to strengthen identification with the European Union by various means. One of these strategies—as the author points out—is to increasingly charge architecture with auratic meaning, in other words, to re-enchant it. Nevertheless, both architectural solutions do not offer a nation-like master narrative but are intended—each in its own manner—to represent a network of many individual parts.

In their different languages, codes of expression, practices and worldviews, art and religion share a reflexive intention to symbolize the chaos, suffering and ambivalence of the real. In particular, the aesthetic programme of Christianity has sought to combine the opposites of divine revelation attested in Scripture: chaos and cosmos, earth and heaven, betrayal and reconciliation, wounding and transfiguration, cross and resurrection, sin and forgiveness. This paper aims to explore this compositional dialectic, which over the centuries has oscillated between idealization and realism, despair and aestheticization, the ideology of pain and the mythology of redemption. In order to better understand this aesthetic religious programme in all its ambivalences and polarizations, reference will be made to two emblematic contemporary artists, Alberto Burri and Anselm Kiefer. Their aesthetic programme revolves around the memory of the suffering and wounds of history and in seeking to understand these develops a compassionate perspective on them. In their works, the artistic gesture is what saves reality from its horror and reveals a ‘wounded beauty’ that does not remove the signs of its struggle and contingency.

John Locke (1632–1704) wird an mehreren Stellen von Rawls ausdrücklich als Referenzautor hervorgehoben. Insbesondere für die Theorie der Gerechtigkeit wird die „Idee des Gesellschaftsvertrags, wie wir sie bei Locke, Rousseau und Kant finden“ als Ausgangspunkt genannt. Allerdings kann Lockes politische Philosophie gerade im Hinblick auf die Architektur der Vertragstheorie nur in einem sehr allgemeinen Verständnis als Vorbild für den neokontraktualistischen Ansatz von Rawls gelten.