The article illustrates the fading away of faith as a binding guidance for individual and collective life. It also sketches a typology of the more significant reactions to this phenomenon. The author sets the attitude of consciously keeping in the void against the attempt to mitigate the consequences of modern disenchantment by creating new sects or reviving communitarian and chiliastic ideals. Such is the attitude of the "convinced sceptic" or intellectual desperado, of the "man of the short-circuit" and, at least, of "those who wait", who are able to resist easy consolations without renouncing, however, to the possibility of attaining to the absolute, some day.