“Modernisti” in rivolta. Anarchia ed eresia di Giovanni Boine

This paper explores the torments and conflicts experienced by the poet and essayist Giovanni Boine, who found himself at the centre of the religious and ecclesiastical debates of his time, and the political implications of those same religious debates. Moreover, Boine’s work reveals powerfully the painful spiritual transition from a religious view of the world to modernity and secularisation, and Modernism, all of which he experienced intimately as a spiritual anguish, incomparable to any other kind of human pain. Boine’s conviction that religion ultimately has a social obligation also is located within the conflict between Reason and the Transcendent, between the need for moral and logical equilibrium, while at the same time receptive to the demands of the spirit.