Aesthetics and Hermeneutics of Religion: paradigms for a new morphology of the sacred

The increasing autonomy of the idea of the sacred throughout the XXth century, with regard to the traditional religious discourses, creates the need to carry out a research about its different transformations, based on the studies of Aesthetics and Hermeneutics, as the main fields which receive that idea. However, these transformations, which had its fundamental origin with the first secularization movements of the modern Europe, should also provide us with a new concept of religion from a philosophical perspective, in which both Aesthetics and Hermeneutics are inscribed. The history of the research of the religious phenomenon has brought about very important contributions from a wide range of perspectives: historical-phenomenological, comparative, linguistic, anthropological, psychological, etc... Nevertheless, until now, there are, especially in the field of Humanities, just few studies about the religious phenomenon which assume the non-religious transformations of the sacred and which are regulated by the aesthetical and hermeneutical discourse, as long as they can explain the sense and presence of the sacred on the artistic and creative manifestations of the human spirit on the secularised modern societies. This is the reason why the study of the documents, both the written and the plastic ones, in a profane context should provide us with encouraging results about one idea of the sacred as non-manifested or explicit. Since, as it is true that in the modernity the sacred has not disappeared but is hidden behind the profane, as it has been shown by the most prominent researchers of the last decades, as time goes on the study of these materials is becoming a more important need, as it will help to build and develop a new grammar of the sacred which is able to explain the undergone transformations.

The main aims of this project are 1. A "new morphology of the sacred" based on the documents offered by the different discourses of the Humanities (Philosophy, Art, Literature, Cinema) in the XXth century; 2. This criteriology ought to provide us with the philosophical foundations of a certain aesthetics and a new way of regarding these materials in order to obtain; 3. A Hermeneutics of the religion in the modernity.