EN
According to Hannah Arendt, the victory of eternity - prepared by Plato and accomplished by Christianity - over the desired and glorified in the pre-socratic Greece immortality has inverted the prevailing measure of man and human perfection: diminished the value of the individual and exceptional in man (resulting from his mortality) for the sake of what is common and the same in each human being (and, in this case, immediately related to eternity). This paper examines the process and consequences of this revolutionary reversal. The importance is stressed of the two Christian conceptions - the one of the absolute value of each individual human being and the other of the essential equality of all men - which today, though primarily strictly connected to the faith in the eternal, are still quite fundamental to our morality and politics.