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After Christianity

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Vattimo's "After Christianity" could be titled "After Blumenberg". Of course I am referring to Hans Blumenberg's "The Legitimacy of the Modern Age". Blumenberg's thesis, as I found it relevant for the philosophy of relgion, is that the secularization that occurs in Modern philosophy is a direct result of William of Ockhams'emphasis upon radical divine omnipotence combined with a form of realist skepticism. Hence, secularization is the result of Christianity's internal incoherence. The modern age is hence a legitimate construct independent of Christian theology.

Vattimo argues almost the exact opposite. The secularization of European culture, YES! European Culture, is the result of the kenotic emptying of the Christian God in Christ. The increased generalization, abstraction, and emptying the concept of God that characterizes Modernity is not the result of Christianity's internal incoherence. Just the opposite, not only is Modernity's secularization and its emptying all the content from the concept of God coherent with Christianity, but also the "postmodern" (here Vattimo means nihilism) condition is a coherent development of the workings of Christianity's kenotic God.

I'll leave you to "After Christianity" to figure out how Vattimo pulls this off and what he thinks its implications are. The signficance of Vattimo for contemporary philosophy of religion cannot be overrated. Certainly his works raises major questions about theological movements like "Radical Orthodoxy" and the theology of John Milbank.

Gianni Vattimo, who was raised as a Roman Catholic and still "believes that he believes", doesn't spare his criticisms toward the Catholic Church. Although he acknowledges the decisive role that Pope John Paul II has played in the collapse of communism, he considers that the official teachings of the Catholic Church are marked by authoritarianism and a refusal to engage the pluralist modern world.

He is not happy with the positions the Church maintains on several contemporary issues. The sexual morality preached by priests, which forbids the use of condoms in the epoch of the spread of AIDS and condemns homosexuality as going against nature, appears to him as running counter to the Christian values of love and charity. Provocatively, he points out that this vision of sexuality considered mainly, or exclusively, as a means of reproduction, "involves considerably less respect and attention for the other than the ludic, seductive, and aesthetic sexuality of Don Juan." Likewise, he notes that "what did lead Jesus to choose men as apostles, and still leads to the interdiction of women's ordination in the Catholic Church, is women's social condition of inferiority. At the time of Christ this inferiority was widespread and taken for granted. Today it is just a vestige of the past that is assumed by the Catholic Church to be an eternal norm of nature consecrated by the actual choices of Jesus".

More generally, it seems to him that the Catholic Church's rejection of secular values and its affirmation as a polemical alternative to modernity, which characterize neo-fundamentalist and communitarian trends in the Church, are ultimately untenable. If Christians, or rather Catholics in Europe, present themselves as "strong identities" and insist on their distinctiveness, then they can only generate a backlash from liberal societies that will further limit the visibility of all religious symbols in civic life, as was recently illustrated by the interdiction to wear headscarves and other ostentatious religious signs in French public schools. In the end, notes the author, "this would ultimately force us to close most Western museums and to renounce the very cultural traditions of the West, which are so thick with--and inseparable from--religious symbols."

Instead, according to Vattimo, Christians should espouse secularization enthusiastically as the paradoxical realization of Christianity's messianic mission. He advances two basic arguments to sustain this claim. First, in practical terms, the notion of secularity, like liberal capitalism or the idea of human rights, has a distinct religious origin. As the author justly notes, "European society is on average lay and secularized, but in terms of an explicit Christian heritage. This becomes clear when confronting persons or groups rooted in different traditions, who perceive our secularity as deeply marked by a specific religious origin."

This Christian heritage should be recognized as such, not to emphasize Europe' specificity, but to engage other cultures in a spirit of hospitality. For all the critics who denounce Eurocentrism and colonialism in the missionary zeal, Christianity should not forget that among the features of its heritage there is also universalism, namely the awareness of a plurality of cultures and of a lay space where these can confront one another. This precious heritage, born out of the terrifying experience of the European religious wars, brings an invaluable contribution in today's world marked by intolerance and conflicting identities.

Second, and more fundamentally, Vattimo sees a family resemblance (Max Weber would have said: an elective affinity) between the biblical message of God's incarnation and the dissolution of the sacred that characterizes the modern process of civilization. The emptying out of divine power and the abasement God undergoes by incarnating as Christ echoes what the Italian philosopher characterizes as the end of metaphysics and the move "from a conception of Being as structure to one of Being as event characterized by a tendency toward weakening." It is under such ontological weakening that a return to Christianity is made possible. If God can no longer be upheld as an ultimate foundation, as the absolute metaphysical structure of the real, it is possible, once again, to believe in God.

Vattimo's readable and likable (and short) work provides a dynamic philosophical argument for a new post-metaphysical authentic Christianity. After the age of metanarratives and metaphysics, Vattimo claims, the space is cleared for the Biblical God, a God of creativity and peace that contradicts the violence of grand philosophical and political claims. We are now residing in Joachim of Fiore's Age of the Spirit, an age of creative interpretation and ongoing discernment in the moment where authority rests in the peaceful dialogue of the community of faith, not the Ground of Being or the Magisterium of the Church.

Of course, the Anabaptists have known this all along.