Secularity is a historical product of modern ages that signaled a diminishing role of transcendence in public as well as individual life, changing effectively the common understanding of key social institutions: economy, state, knowledge, the family, religion. It may take on the form of a neutral lack of transcendence in public life and personal orientation (secularization); it can also appear as an active ideological presence – an ambitious project to remove any reference to transcendence from public life in view of creating “a religion free zone” (secularism). In the first case secularity comes about as a result of a civilization process of subtraction, in which religion melts under the pressure of modern technology, science, economy, a new philosophical orientation, and political frameworks. In the second one, it assumes the form of a bellicose ideology which implies a specific agenda of actions against religion. Secularity came into being as an outcome of philosophical, cultural and political shifts that strived to free individuals from being subjects of the old moral order, and make them inde-pendent autonomous agents that live in the unprecedented conditions of novus ordo seculorum and secular, ordinary time.

The article presents a new interpretation of the concept of a Russian thinker that emerged at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was fanned by Nikolai Fyodorov, who is now considered one of the forerunners of Western transhumanism. The concept of the religion of technology, taken from David Noble, is a thread that unites the unsystematic, incomprehensible, even irrational thought of the Russian philosopher. The article is written in the form of a polemic with the generally accepted interpretation of this idea, which was proposed by the Polish historian of philosophy Andrzej Walicki. The issue of the opposition of the ideas of secularism and postsecularism is crucial to this polemics.

This paper not only clarifies the concepts of secularism and secularization, but also analyzes them, and in its final part it evaluates them. The phenomenon of secu-larism is defined as an ideological and active attitude of hostility toward everything that is Christian. In turn, secularism, quite strongly associated with the current form of culture of societies and their development, is seeking autonomy and freedom. Rad-ical (sometimes irresponsible) secularization thesis of the Protestant (R. Bultmann, K. Barth, D. Bonhoeffer, E. Fuchs, F. Gogarten, G. Vahanian, P. van Buren, W. Ham-ilton, Th . J. Alitzer, J.A.T. Robinson, D. Sölle, W. Pannenberg) mind has been adopted by most Catholic theologians with a reasonable reserve. Catholic doctrine accepts the autonomy of temporal realities and a specifically understood process of profanation of the world (constructio mundi and consecratio mundi). However, the fact that different sectors of earthly life are governed by their own relevant laws, does not mean that the created things are totally independent of God, or that man can dispose of them freely and without any relation to the Creator (K. Rahner, J. B. Metz, P. Teilhard de Chardin, M. D. Chenu, J. Danielou, G. Thils, Ch. Duquoc, J. Maritain, H. de Lubac, Y. Congar, Cz. Bartnik, A. Skowronek, A. Nossol, J. Mariański). The position of the Catholic Church on this matter is contained in the conciliar Constitution Gaudium et Spes.

The presented paper describes the phenomenon of secularisation and secularism in the culture of Western Europe, and attempts to identify its sources. The first point of the paper, The meaning of secularization and secularism, explains secularisation as a social process in which religion or, more strictly, religious institutes, religious behaviour, and religiously inspired conscience, are gradually losing their control over many fields of social activity such like education, arts or politics. Secularisation can be labelled as a philosophy of life “as if there were no God”, or a kind of ideology that tries to justify not only the very fact of secularisation but declares it a source and norm for human progress and demands the proclamation of man’s absolute autonomy in shaping his own destination. Among many philosophers who have influenced development of secularisation and secularism two stand out: R. Descartes (second point) and F. Nietzsche (third point). In the philosophy of Descartes one can identify at least four sources of modern secularism. These are: his concept of philosophy, theory of cognition with the resulting departure from classical concepts of truth and rationality and development of alternative ones, Cartesian metaphysics and the arguments for the existence of God and his concept of the nature of God evolving from those arguments. The last part of the article presents Nietzsche’s move away from the faith in Christian God and his turn to atheism. At least three fundamental causes for Nietzsche’s radical autosecularisation can be discerned: the emotional religion of his home, his disbelief in the authenticity of the Bible and his growing familiarity with the philosophy of Schopenhauer.